Dietary Warning: Consultants may damage your health
John Atkinson is a co-curator of Heart of the Art
“The implication is that, generally, management consultants are not only failing to improve the efficiency of NHS hospitals, but, in most cases, are making the situation worse, especially considering the fees paid.” - recent research by Bristol, Warwick and Seville Universities.
(http://www.bristol.ac.uk/policybristol/policy-briefings/management-consultancy-inefficiency-in-nhs/)
I’ve been close to some pretty serious athletes over the years. I raced a handful of internationals in the sport of slalom kayak, I’ve coached some good racers too, as well as some good young rugby players. One of the things you notice about many elite athletes is they eat well. They pay attention to what they eat and they eat lots. As an adventure racer, it was calculated I needed to consume around 10,000 calories per day on a multi-day race. More than I could possibly hope to carry alongside all my safety and technical equipment.
An interesting but clearly wrong conclusion would be that if you eat a lot, you too can be an elite athlete. It's the old conundrum between correlation and causality. This one is pretty easy to unravel. Clearly the usual effect of that sort of calorific intake is obesity. Without the energy expenditure and metabolism that supports it, the extra food goes to waste and soon starts to have a negative effect on athletic performance. A little simplistic maybe, but I’m sure you get the point.
We understand this example at once because we have mental models that explain it. We can recognise the athletic performance and the propensity to obesity. We are not locked in a simple and singular frame that says eat lots, go faster. We recognise that eating lots can be a good thing, and also not so good for the human body.
So the recent research from Bristol, Warwick and Seville Universities that shows that management consultants make NHS Hospitals more inefficient despite the huge fees should be viewed in this light. Nobody should suggest that you embark on an un-costed, poorly analysed process of change. At the same time, nobody also should suggest that a high consumption of analytics and business cases and target operating models and key lines of enquiry and governance frameworks constitutes a suitable diet for an organisation to change. It is not that these are bad things per se, its that the financial models for large consultancies are driven by the need to sell large numbers of hours of bright young staff. Such staff are really good at producing those sorts of outputs.
Increasingly refined and processed products like these are addictive. You stop paying much attention to other less sugary inputs and pretty soon you’re dependent. You cannot embark on change without another business case, a visioning workshop, a strategy review, all backed up with high fat slide decks of analysis, graphs with trajectories of doom or success and spreadsheets full of numbers.
Except this isn’t where change takes place is it? One of Myron Roger’s maxims for change is that ‘the people who do the work, do the change’. All the time you’re employing a small army of very capable young consultants to trawl through your data and conduct their market analyses, your people are surrendering their control over making things different. They don’t own the change process as they didn’t help to create it. They become passive and powerless as the work is taken away from them, your organisation becomes flabby in its ability to adapt and make things different.
Change is ultimately a people process not an analytic one. If people keep relating to each other in the same way, they’ll keep making the same sense of their environment and things will remain largely the same. All this is why, despite the huge sums paid to the big consultants, even if their business cases and analyses are correct, they are rarely if ever achieved. The large consultancy business model can only satisfy one small element of a change programme and in dominating the approach reduces the capacity of your teams to make the change that's really necessary.
So sure, consultancy support can provide valuable supplements to your intake, but its not an alternative to a well-balanced diet.