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Typically, there's some issue that management has found intractable by their usual methods. Not the usual methods, but their usual methods. This is always loc

Typically, there's some issue that management has found intractable by their usual methods. Not the usual methods, but their usual methods. This is always local. They do not trust the peons. Management beyond them does not want to change anything. The consultants come in, talk to everyone, get a list of what needs to be done from the peons, reframes that list and presents it to the middle managers, essentially laundering the peon's opinions. "Wow! Great!" Middle management says to their boss, "Well, the consultant said ..." It's essentially a ritual in which time is consumed and a sacrifice of cash is made to purify the unclean words of the lowers so that the high priests might hear them.

cbsmith 3y ago
> essentially laundering the peon's opinions That's more than a bit unfair. They're generally taking in information from the entire workforce, including management, and they're analyzing the whole picture. Trivializing it by describing it as "purify the unclean words of the lowers so that the high priests might hear them" is not accurate. What they're ostensibly providing is unbiased and potentially more competent judgement/analysis of information that the company already has (and really, it'd be weird if the company didn't already have the information, right?). Sure, in practice the bias and competence aspects deserve an asterisk (by virtue of being compensated by an organization, consultants have many of the same biases of the people who are also compensated by said organization, and there's a Dunning-Kreuger problem with hiring either employees or consultants to compensate for competence), but consultants are absolutely in a position to provide the value they are paid for.
- at_a_remove 3y ago
  In a long ago job, we had a consultant come in and start talking to us plebs. I later provided a sealed envelope to my peers of my predictions as to what the consultant would recommend. It's been a while, but something like eight out of my nine items listed were in his recommendations, and not much else. All of the items were things I had said before. I am sticking with laundering, plus a dash of sunk cost fallacy ("we paid money to hear this advice so we must take it").

cbsmith 3y ago

> essentially laundering the peon's opinions That's more than a bit unfair. They're generally taking in information from the entire workforce, including management, and they're analyzing the whole picture. Trivializing it by describing it as "purify the unclean words of the lowers so that the high priests might hear them" is not accurate. What they're ostensibly providing is unbiased and potentially more competent judgement/analysis of information that the company already has (and really, it'd be weird if the company didn't already have the information, right?). Sure, in practice the bias and competence aspects deserve an asterisk (by virtue of being compensated by an organization, consultants have many of the same biases of the people who are also compensated by said organization, and there's a Dunning-Kreuger problem with hiring either employees or consultants to compensate for competence), but consultants are absolutely in a position to provide the value they are paid for.

at_a_remove 3y ago
In a long ago job, we had a consultant come in and start talking to us plebs. I later provided a sealed envelope to my peers of my predictions as to what the consultant would recommend. It's been a while, but something like eight out of my nine items listed were in his recommendations, and not much else. All of the items were things I had said before. I am sticking with laundering, plus a dash of sunk cost fallacy ("we paid money to hear this advice so we must take it").