What a consultant is good for (from The Local Economy Revolution)

This is a selection from the book, The Local Economy Revolution: What’s Changed and How You Can Help. If you like this, then you may find that book useful. Learn more at localeconomyrevolutionbook.com

Um, Della. You keep beating up on consultants. You’ve been a consultant for close to 20 years. You still make money consulting.

You like to eat, don’t you?

Hm.

I’m starting to understand why I might not be the biggest money maker among consultants.

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Traditional consulting relies on the expectation of the know-it-all expert. The glossy genius in the sweeping cape who tells you exactly what your town needs and withers you with his glare if you dare to question him.

The Guy With The Answers. The Oracle. The Fixer. The Big Name.

But here’s the problem: we all know how many times the people we (or our predecessors) thought were Experts in the past turned out to be… wrong. Sometimes badly wrong. Sometimes painfully, decades-long wrong. The kind of wrong that we spend generations trying to dig out of.

And yet we buy the next set of promises. The next expert. The next promised easy answer, wrapped in a flowing aristocratic cape.

Naveen Jain laid the basic problem out in a previous chapter. It’s essentially a problem of methodology: traditional experts rely on historical trends, on what worked in the past, on their own, often unexamined assumptions.

That’s how we define an “expert,” after all. How many years have you been doing this? How many projects have you done that were just like ours?

The problem is this: if much of what has been done in our consultants’ lifetimes hasn’t worked, if much of it didn’t really do what we hoped for, and if the challenges we’re facing are wicked and complex and new and interrelated, then what makes us think that a past book of experience alone counts very much?

Part of what gets me so mad is that neither the consultants nor the people who hire consultants admit or face up to these limitations. Both sides keep pretending- one that it has all the answers, the other that there are simple answers to be had.

In their guts both sides have to know that neither charade is true.

Or maybe they don’t know that. Maybe they know but don’t want to know. Do they?

Now I’m not sure what to get madder about.

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Years ago, I managed comprehensive planning projects for a consulting firm. When you start one of those, you get to review pretty much every plan that town has ever done. And sometimes what you find yourself reviewing is a case history in delusion.

One community, struggling to find a bright future for a run-down suburban strip, spent a huge sum on a beautiful drawing of lovely new buildings lining the streets. They also bought a rudimentary market analysis that indicated nothing about whether the lovely buildings could ever be funded through the private investment that the drawing promised. And then the community threw significant sums of money and effort into finding the people who would build that grand vision.

Thirteen years later, the corridor hasn’t changed, except for continuing to fall apart. I drove down it last week.

If you’re a former client of mine, and you think I’m talking about your town, it’s probably not. I can tell that same story about 15 different communities.

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So, Consultant as Wizard doesn’t work. Should you ditch them entirely, rely just on yourselves, figure out all out the best you can? Are the non-experts enough?

No. Chances are you definitely need outside help. You just need a different type of help than many consultants have been giving.

In this era, I think an intellectually truthful, community-benefitting consultant has to hang up the cape, drop the all-knowing charade, and take on jobs like these:

1. Guide through the Unknown. Adventurers like Robert Peary, who trekked to places people had never been, took people with them who had experience in that type of environment, although not in that exact situation. Chances are that you, Ms. Consultant, don’t know the path any better than they do, but you’ve at least moved through an environment somewhat like this before. So we don’t charge into the underbrush, pretending that you know where all the rocks and rattlesnakes lie, but we walk with them and help them figure out how to best navigate.
2. Framework builder. When we can’t plug and play easy solutions, when we have to find our way through unknown territory, building mental frameworks gives us a way to evaluate options, think through the potential impacts of our choices and plan ahead for risks. A consultant’ s experience can help build intelligent and flexible frameworks. But a framework is not a blueprint, and it’s not a Magic Solution. It recognizes that it might be wrong and that it might have to shift and evolve over time. It’s an exercise in managing uncertainty with the best intelligence we can bring to the table. And since the framework is designed to enable shifting and evolving, it might actually continue to fit more than three weeks after the consultant’s last bill gets paid.
3. Tough question-asker. People who lead communities often fail to ask hard questions — you know, the unpleasant ones where we suspect the answers are not what we want to hear, or where the answers aren’t clear at all. In far, far too many cases, communities get into deep trouble because no one asked the hard questions — either because no one knew what to ask, or because no one summoned the bravery to ask it.

By rights, and as a matter of integrity, the consultant should be the one to ask the hard questions when no one else can or will do it. After all, the consultant is the one who gets to go home to Somewhere Else when the meeting is over. More importantly, thought, the consultant can draw on that expertise, that guiding capability, to call out and articulate the questions that no one from the community can or wants to own.

But too many consultants never ask the tough questions — because they don’t want to piss off the client, they don’t want to knock themselves out of consideration for the next project.

Mostly because, at the end of the day, consultants really, deeply want you to like them.

So we let the client believe what they want to believe, and avoid the problems they don’t want to face. After all, the consultant is the one who gets to go home to Somewhere Else when the meeting is over. And there’s always another one, some town somewhere else where we can proclaim that this project was Fantastic!! somewhere around the bend.

4. Decision pusher. Communities often don’t ask tough questions, and lots of them try to avoid making decisions. That’s where the laundry list plan failure that I’ve talked about before comes from, as well as a lot of other problems ranging from underfunded pensions to crumbling water lines. Decisions are hard, you know… they mean saying yes to some things and no to others. And we won’t even talk about setting priorities. Ow.

The consultant’s job has to include guiding, structuring, pushing and cajoling a community to make a decision. It just has to. It has to be done, and I don’t know an honest consultant who hasn’t been around the block enough times to know that in their guts. If the community doesn’t make important decisions, if we haven’t done everything in your power to get them to do it, I don’t think we’ve earned our fee. If they flat out refuse, so be it. But too often we who have the experience and framework to make out the rocks in the water ahead are too timid to tell the captains that they need to change course.

Consultants don’t want to push people to make decisions, either, for all of the same reasons as above. But unless they do, the effort is probably wasted.

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Communities definitely need consultants. The difference I see is this:

The consultant that communities need is a collaborator, a fellow-seeker who brings a new set of expertise, a new collection of tools, to the work of improving your community.

We who do consulting work for communities have to deeply rethink what we provide as consultants, and we who work for communities have to deeply rethink what we demand from our consultants. Settling for a pretty picture of an imagined future, or a kum-ba-yah list of all the happy things everyone in town said they wanted, is worse than a waste of money.

It’s setting up the community for a future crushing of hope, a long-term trend of growing cynicism and tuning out. And it’s setting up the community for painful opportunity costs — wasted resources chasing unachievable pipe dreams.

Letting a community persist in mistaken optimism or pessimism or inertia is not morally, ethically or fiscally acceptable, for consultants or for community professionals. We simply don’t have that much slack in the system anymore. Consultants should — and must — help a community fill the gaps in its capacity to make wise choices and tough decisions possible.

This is a selection from The Local Economy Revolution: What’s Changed and How You Can Help. If you like this, you might like the rest. Check out the book at http://localeconomyrevolutionbook.com

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