Cut the consultancy scams

If ever there was a leech industry – this is it.

Today’s Herald (1st March) has an article criticising the Scottish Futures Trust (SFT) for spending an average of around £2,000 of consultancy fees. The SFT was set up by the Scottish Government as an alternative to the grossly expensive Public Finance Initiative (PFI) route to financing public sector capital projects.

The SFT is no more than one in a morass of public bodies who hire consultants as the lazy man’s hands-off road to doing the job they’re supposed to be doing.

Consultancy is the Yukon of the 21st century. Early prospecting and territorial claims were increasingly established in the last decade of the last century and now they’re sitting down to coin it.

Respect for ‘consultants’ is born of one of the most pervasive British cultural sicknesses – accepting rank, without question, as proof of merit and capability.

There are occasions when all three coincide but they are much more rare than people think.

The broad truth of consultants and their clients is that they are an un-virtuous circle perpetuating a continuing fraud upon the general public – who pay.

This is how it works

The Client: A public body – like a local authority, a Quango or a Government department – has a job to do. They’re not confident they’re up to the job and sometimes they really don’t want to be bothered anyway because the job is complex and demanding. If they make a mess of it, their heads are directly on the block.

The Win-Win solution is … hire consultants.

This means that the commissioning body doesn’t then have to do the job itself, just preside over the brief and the reception of the report. It also means that if a mess is made of the job, it’s not its mess and there’s a ready scapegoat at the end of the fat cheque already paid.

Moreover, if there’s a serious mess (which does happen – think of all of the public sector IT contracts that are failing in intensive care), there can be an enquiry – which will take years (by which time it will be a historical rather than a live issue – much less potent) and the taxpayer will pay for the enquiry too.

The Consultant: a group of people who have worked for headline companies or agencies – or who have been ‘advisers’ or ‘spin doctors’ to politicians – decide to farm their collective contacts and sit back and watch the consultancy fees roll in. They don’t want to work. They want to get rich.

There are two major groups who hail this gravy train:

• the old – but suave – lags, tired of the pressure of scrutiny in business life and longing for the golf course;
• the relatively recent-entry operatives who want to move from the frying an to the bain-marie before they get found 0ut.

In the first case, their expertise is already some distance from the cutting edge and they have no interest in keeping up. In the second, they’ve only had time to skim. There’s no depth to their knowledge and neither they nor anyone else has had time to find out if they ever had the capacity to go deep. Once in the embrace of the world of consultancy, they’ll never have to try. Skimming is the modus operandi.

From the consultants’ point of view, their almost exclusively public sector client portfolio is ideal. The clients are not interested in the results, just the apparently authoritative  reassurances to be made public – that action is being taken, a picture is in the pipeline and all is well. (Oh yes? Remember Enron?)

The client will also be humble, unchallenging, welcoming of the panjandrum’s expertise, impressed by the jargon and respectful of the polish.

Which public sector body hiring consultants does anything muscular to monitor the procedures and interrogate the results of the eventual report? Few. If they knew enough to do that, they could do the work themselves.

The headline consultants – the gilt the client pays the big fees for – are not those who do the work, although the rate they charge will be calibrated on their, often once-upon-a-time, expertise. They employ bottom dredgers, often young graduates with theoretical knowledge but no or little on-the-ground experience.This leaves them short of the calibre of insight that informs the best research.

This is the stratum that does the legwork and is given little time to do it. Consultancy is a time and motion study in creaming off as much as possible, for as little as possible, as fast as possible. This does not mean that results are delivered in short order. That would give the game away. No. These jobs take time – apparently – and it is the apparent time you pay for.

The bottom dredgers throw their results higher up the food chain and finally a detached partner tears herself or himself off the golf course or out of the bar, scans what has been done, picks out a few headline points, doesn’t check the evidence behind them but uses them to construct a set of conclusions.

Then other minions flesh this out by scooping up chunks of the base notes and results and plastering them on the chicken-wire frame handed down to them.

By the time this is translated into the language of such exercises, the results are all but unintelligible anyway – that’s the point. The outcome most desired by client and consultant is an elegant smokescreen of urbanity and insiderness, ooozing with confidence in its own poorly secured authority. This deters questioning.

Then it’s off to the corporate communications department or the external media agency (the client pays) who transform the result into a glossy document (with a copious print run) and a ‘presentation’ – all designed to overwhelm and impress the client – and even more importantly, the client’s reporting authority.

Cheque signed. Job done. This never was about getting to understand anything or to identify a course of action to be taken.

The soft underbelly – consulting for community organisations

This market sector is so consciously ‘soft’ for ‘consultants’ that taking the easy money is like sliding a toy out of a new born’s feeble grasp – and tickling it to make it smile while robbing it.

Community initiatives are in the business of applying for funding. That’s their core raison d’etre. They distrust their own capacities and often genuinely need external help to prove their case.

There is an unpleasant little area of ‘consultancy’ growing up which is cynically designed to milk this market. It doesn’t present as particularly high-powered – that might frighten such clients, so there’s no need even to hire people with a track record. Just hang the enterprise on a known and reassuring brand.

Step forward the university sector, where much of this species is bred. Let no-one imagine that universities are temples of integrity.They are as expedient as the next in their own battle for survival.

Selling ‘research services’ is one of their earners.

Such services are high level, skilled, cutting edge and high net worth work in areas, for example, like medicine, pharmaceuticals, armaments, engineering and information technology.

It is a very different picture when it comes to the ‘soft’ side of the house, the social sciences.

Universities farm some post-graduate students in these subject genres into ‘research services’ which they flog to the soft community market. The studnets are often inexperienced and poorly supervised by academics who have their own research to do.

Their main tool is what they see as the community cure-all – the ubiquitous survey.

We have seen some of these in action and they have been seriously underinformed and poorly skilled in preparation, production administration and analysis.

It takes trained and high level skills to design a survey questionnaire; to frame the questions to focus, enable and not lead; to administer the survey, whether in person or remotely; and,  to name but one factor, to employ cross-comparison in analysis.

We have seen little if any evidence of such skills in the conduct of surveys carried out by such services for community associations. To be fair, we have similarly seen little evidence of such awareness and skills in surveys carried out for public agencies by commercial research firms. But two wrongs don’t make a right.

Unlike public sector consultancy,  the business context of community consultancy is a one-sided scam – because the community groups are interested in learning, do want to make something happen and want it to be right.

So?

Community associations need good advice and support.

There is no reason why this should not come from the University sector. There is much to be said for this – but it must be handled with an intellectual rigour and an integrity of process that has, to date, often been less than evident.

Government departments, quangos, public sector agencies and local authorities need to have a high-level, in-house, perpetually up-to-speed  research capability available to them.

It should be paid for by government but be rigorously independent of it. It would have to be Caesar’s wife pure, so that it was trusted without question. It would cost less than the stratospheric totals paid annually from the public purse to the consultancy industry.

In short – do not be impressed by consultants. Reach for the shot gun and engage both barrels.

Consultancy is an utterly parasitical industry that needs to be culled to virtual extinction.