Consultation
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Consultation
/ˌkɒnsəlˈteɪʃən/ (n.)
To defeat an idea you don’t like by listening to it, nodding sympathetically, maintaining eye contact and then just ignoring it.
Management “consultation” works — “works” as in “functions”, as opposed to “arrives at the desired outcome” — by harnessing the power of constructively ignoring.
Management forms a plan, and by way of execution, selects a focus group of subject matter experts hand-picked out of the most compliant and disinterested staff available to “workshop” the idea. Once the workshop phase is completed, management carries on with the original plan.
If the focus group has been well-chosen, its feedback — if it even has any — will be somewhere on a continuum between idiotic and sycophantic. So management can ignore it.
If by oversight, the focus group contains imaginative but incautious enough to tell you how stupid the plan is, you can ignore that too, and make a note to bear this person in mind for the next redundancy round. After all, it is not the done thing to call bullshit in a professional setting.
Of course, this works both ways: however well thought-out your plan is — unlikely, but let’s allow for the moment that it is “well thought-out” — you can be sure the workforce will ignore your change program, just as you ignored their feedback on it. They will just carry on with what they have always done, how they have always done it, until they are riffed. Those remaining after the riff will adjust their habits so that they can carry on, as nearly as possible, with that they were doing before.
Meantime, high in the Gods, an opco will present a weekly dashboard to a steerco, the RAGs will all be green lights, the steerco will be happy, the project will be completed, everyone moves on, and nothing will have changed.
In 18 months time, under new management, a new enquiry will be launched into why this particular business is so inefficient, expensive and unproductive.