Consultation

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.

Office anthropology™ →Go uptown Sorry, Are You Listening To A Word I Am Saying? (von Sachsen-Rampton, 1932) The JC puts on his pith-helmet, grabs his butterfly net and a rucksack full of marmalade sandwiches, and heads into the concrete jungleIndex: Click ᐅ to expand: Work anthropology Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

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 from the most compliant and disinterested staff available — staff like that are always available — to “workshop” the idea.

Once the workshop phase is completed, management carries on with the original plan, regardless of the outcome of the workshop.

If the focus group was well-chosen, its feedback — if it has any — will be somewhere between idiotic and sycophantic. So management can ignore it.

If by oversight, the focus group contains those imaginative but incautious enough to tell you how stupid the plan is, you can ignore them too, and make a note to bear them 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 RIF 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 will move on to the next change project — and, magically, nothing will have changed. Those who were doing what they were doing before the consultation can continue doing it, however pointless or counterproductive it was, as if nothing has happened, because nothing has happened. The management consulting satellite has bounced off the outer atmosphere — not before collecting its fee — and carried on into deep space of new opportunity.

In 18 months’ time, under new management, a new enquiry will be launched into why this particular business is so inefficient, expensive and unproductive.

See also

• Subject matter expert
• Thought leader
• Self-perpetuating autocracy
• Reduction in force