The Big Fix

Reflecting on consulting and practice

Over the years I have trained hundreds of engagement practitioners inside our public service. I have also worked with hundreds of outside consultants. Sometimes I don’t even know what I am, inside or outside. As I reflect on this relationship between consultants and practitioners, I am left with more questions than answers.

This essay is a snapshot of that reflection.

I would like to dedicate this piece to Richard Rochefort. Richard is the epitome of a great consultant and a great practitioner. He taught me a lot, and gave me the support I needed to build my own engagement practice. Thank you, Richard.

---

It’s an old joke but I am an old man, so chill.

Young hotshot in a BMW pulls into a field full of sheep and their experienced shepherd. The young man proposes to the shepherd that he could tell him the exact number of animals he has, if the shepherd agrees to give him one. Agreed. The hotshot fires up his laptop, gps and such and comes up with, you have 342 sheep.

I do, says the shepherd, here is my payment and he loads a beast.

The shepherd then proposes, if I guess your profession can I have my animal back?

Sure, says the young fellow.

You are a management consultant. How do you know? asks the impressed dandy.

Well, says the old shepherd, you came here uninvited, asked me to pay for info I already knew and clearly you know nothing about my business.

Now give me back my dog.

I was a front line public servant for close to fifty years and I watched the consultants come and go. I remember the light in our senior managers’ eyes as they announced that there would be a consulting company in the building for the next while and please give them your full support.

Fair enough. We knew that inviting guests into the organization was mostly done out of a sincere desire to make things better.

So we gave them full support, at least I did. I recall many interviews where I was asked what I felt was working, not working or how it could be made better. The consultant took notes, thanked us and came up with a hefty report, PowerPoint slides and even some fancy posters to put around the room when we got called in to learn our fate.

So, over the years I have been…

Focused grouped

Surveyed

Visioned

Re-organized

Sensitivity trained

PowerPointed

Downsized

Given a colour

…and of course, built a few towers out of dry spaghetti and marshmallows.

These were just the basic ordinary events. But, there were some real crazies like the fellow that put the room in slow, moving, concentric circles. When you passed by someone you had some issue with, you were to pinch them. I have often wondered how much we paid him for that bit of Socratic folk wisdom.

Don’t get me wrong, the consulting world was sort of our in-house Cirque de Soleil. We had the opportunity to get out of the cubicles for a while and some of these characters were pretty entertaining.

But the bigger promise of transformations, greater effectiveness and the actual promise of change management was often a bit ephemeral.

We were generally unaware of the healing.

We knew the reports were somewhere in the building but we were often never really given the magic seven things that if we did them tomorrow, things would get better. However, we knew there would be more decks, synergy, critical paths, deliverables, buy ins and takeaways to come.

We felt that we, on the floor, were probably the ones who could actually help to change things. But the changes we just paid for, those classified documents, were often kept somewhat secret in the boardroom, rather than on the wall in the team room.

So I did some work and study on my own.

Turns out there is another very successful way to make a change, a difference. Not to oversimplify, but I discovered that you can turn your employees into pretty effective and enthusiastic internal consultants or practitioners, as I prefer to call them.

First you must re-imagine a few things…

• You must believe that the critical people who can really implement the fixes in an organization, are the people who have to do the daily work. As an ICU nurse once asked me in a conversation about the number of consultants she encountered in health care, “Why don’t they ask me to help fix the problems here instead of just asking the outside guys in suits with flip charts?” Full disclosure. I like flip charts, allergic to PowerPoint, but she had a point. Her bosses expected the expensive outsiders to bring the fix, not fully engage her and her front line colleagues to be the fix. Many consultants over the years have brought good ideas, good energy and good fixes. However we may have over relied on the experts and under relied on the front lines. If we could rebalance, the best could yet come. The consultant and the nurse practitioners, if you will.

• Secondly, you have to acknowledge that leadership can move sideways. Vertical leadership works for power and authority but there is not a lot of room or real engagement on a vertical ladder. When you encourage thousands of workers to raise their hands and volunteer to set up a small corner of their desk, voluntary leadership practice such as facilitation, coaching, wellness, diversity, event management, engagement or a hundred other things that can make an office more productive, you move them into a “teach a person to fish” style of leadership. It becomes a horizontal or sideways form of leadership that can spread throughout the organization, rather than getting stopped cold on the way to the top. This will accomplish two things. It suggests that a file clerk, of course, does ninety percent of their day in the file room. But what if the other ten percent of time, has them facilitating meetings on the sixth floor? This brings a whole new meaning to volunteerism inside the workplace and giving back to the organization that gives you money for the job. You get money for doing a good job and in return you give some voluntary time to make the workplace better for free.

• The third big idea is to take workplace and citizen engagement more seriously. We need to take aim at bad meetings, the prosaic committees and those popular self help workshops. Our engagement toolkit needs a Home Hardware makeover. For a start, let’s look inside for inspiration rather than always looking outside of our own workplaces. The guy who climbed a big mountain has a good story about mountains but there may be a janitor on a paediatric ward who has a really good story about engaging the children in a “morning drawing’ program about the importance of cleanliness in hospital. For a start, maybe put front line stories in the workshop and motivational slots. I remember a keynote by a public service doctor about finding body parts after an airline crash and what they had to do to learn how to serve recovery efforts even better. Now, that is the stuff that would really motivate a roomful of public servants.

Good work, as they say, has a long tail. You leave something behind. If you, as an outside consultant, just go in and do your contract, you leave nothing behind. If you just go in and do the contract without building any sustainable capacity inside, you have not earned the check. If you go in and build enough capacity to have good work done after you leave, you deserve the check.

So to sum up.

The consultant is a pro, the practitioner is an amateur. Both are good words.

The consultant is hired, the practitioner volunteers.

The consultant looks in and asks for knowledge and information, the practitioner is already in with knowledge and information.

The consultant can only recommend change, the practitioner can begin the change.

The consultant leaves, the practitioner stays, executes and lives with the change work.

A quick story.

I was well retired and quite rightly, not expecting the phone to ring, but one day it did. A very important department of our federal government decided they might want to upgrade their existing practices on workplace engagement and they called me.

I agreed and we set a date for a two day session.

I was happy to have another opportunity to ply my craft and they were looking forward to some practical engagement tools. All good until two days before my flight. I am sorry says the caller, but I have been advised that we will be cutting you back for the first morning and giving that time to a consulting company.

So, I was benched for most of the opening day. They were bringing the million dollar big league hitter.

My first reaction was, nice, I am going to get a front row seat with the big boys and girls. There could be some very big learning here. I took a seat and the show began.

My enthusiasm started to wane the in the first five minutes when the PowerPoint was switched on. Of course there had to be a PowerPoint and of course it was full of the same old bullet points, the triangles and circles and digital art. There was I believe a prerequisite Dilbert cartoon as well.

There were five consultants on that team. My hopes to steal some great pro tips was dashed as I soon realized there was not a lot of new charcuterie on the board. Their presentation was pretty basic. The only engagement tool they used all morning was the standard table talk exercise.

By the end, of course, all I was thinking about was how much I wished I was cashing their check for the morning, instead of mine.

I was looking forward to them clearing out and letting me get to work when to my horror, I realized that two of them were camping out in the back of the room to observe me for the duration. I have often wondered about the ethics of this. I did think they might have just wanted to learn something from the old practitioner, but I believe they may have just needed intel to take back to the office about the federal department who hired local instead of pro.

I was curious when I saw some recruitment ads for a big firm and they were focused on young graduates. It seems to me that the best consultant hires could be experienced practitioners with a track record of good work and innovation. So I asked a very well regarded senior public servant executive about that. He laughed. Oh yes, he said, we get the calls from these companies, but they are not interested in what we did or could do. We are like blurbs on a dust jacket. They want our names on the list as they apply for contracts but they don’t want us actually working there.

So hey, new government.

Both of your parties have used professional consultants a lot. Fair enough, this will continue and some good work will get done. But you generally use outside resources for most of the work. Consider a balanced approach of fifty percent outside pros and fifty percent insider practice. You have also said we should support small business, and that would be small Canadian business, of course.

Along with the many corporate consultants, there are wonderful small business consultants available to you. If we were to adopt the notion of internal corner of the desk practice, the potential of thousands of internal practitioners working with consultants, could be huge.

Quality consultants and passionate practitioners both have a place in making our organizations more effective, and hopefully out of the sights of any of those scary southern Musk rats, who have a pretty hairy view of how to make a public service more efficient.