Management Professor Notes II

can you ever trust a consultant?

I came across a great excerpt from a speech by Bob Sutton recently, at the AlwaysOn Network: it's called "Use Common Sense, Not Crystal Balls". In it Professor Sutton (a U of M alum like me) provides four questions for managers to ask themselves when thinking about whether to take the advice offered by consultants. First, is the practice that is being advised time-tested? Second, who benefits? Third, what are the risks? And fourth, what evidence is there that this practice is connected with effectiveness?

I would argue that a consultant who can engage in an honest dialogue with a manager about these questions is a consultant who can be trusted. The rest --

the ones who insist that managers should do A', because A' is the totally new, revolutionary practice, and if the managers commit to A', there is no downside -- those are the consultants who are charlatans, selling snake oil for the 21st century. I wonder, though, how much consulting is really about designing solutions in collaboration with clients, and how much is about selling pre-packaged structural redesigns or HR retention programs with a thin veneer of customization?

Take appreciative inquiry, for example. We spent a lot of time over the last two years working NEOBEAN through an AI approach -- doing appreciative interviews with community members, trying to surface their ideas about how we could work collaboratively to raise breastfeeding rates in Cuyahoga and the surrounding counties. We pretended to be humble, and not to have answers to the questions we were asking. We invited people to a summit to try to get them to participate in designing answers to our questions. Very few people signed up. Oh, and no one at the university understood the connection between funding that summit and advancing research about how to build collaborative partnerships. If the summit had been held, we had many questions about how we would motivate others to keep the momentum going, so that we would not see all the good ideas drift away into file folders or the ether of the internet, like other similarly well-intentioned efforts.

To be fair, we had no consultant selling us on using AI as the foundation for NEOBEAN. It was simply in the air we breathed in the OB department at Case. And yet clearly, we were missing something. What were we missing, when we adopted AI as the hottest, newest, most revolutionary technique that can transform any social space?

We were missing the importance of valuing the old, standard model -- founding a nonprofit organization, defining its mission clearly in terms of solving a social problem, and then requesting donations to support its work. We were missing the importance of not reinventing the wheel -- much of what needs to be done to raise breastfeeding rates is already known, based on research evaluating interventions in other similar cities. We were missing the importance of our own voices -- not just listening to others as they wrestled with how to address the welter of issues that need to be addressed in order to raise breastfeeding rates, but also speaking our own truths.

What would Bob Sutton say about all this? He'd probably tell us not to cry over spilled milk, but to design the next prototype as quickly as possible. I look forward to reading his newest book and seeing if there's anything else I can glean about how to become and teach better managers.

Stay tuned, because we are soon going to be announcing the next iteration of NEOBEAN's prototyping, and I'm excited that this one will generate more action.