Judgement Day

What do a pen and a children’s playground have in common?

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Copenhagen with a Danish consultancy, Valcon. It’s an unusual firm, employing mechanical engineers and product designers alongside more traditional management consultants. “A lot of consulting is about process,” said one of the directors, “checking off that all the stages in manufacturing your pen have been done correctly. It doesn’t ask – but it should – whether your pen is a good pen.” Of course, processes are intended to ensure that people with varying degrees of skill can produce the same outputs. But seen in a more negative light, they’re also a way to avoid training people properly: if they can follow the process, they don’t need to question the quality or function of the final result. This is as true in manufacturing as it is in consulting: we don’t expect people to judge.

In fact, I think it’s true in quite a profound way across many societies. Go to an American playground and the phrase you’re mostly likely to hear is “good job”; go to a European one, and you’ll hear variants of “no”. I’m generalising wildly, I know, but parenting in the US strikes me as being more focused around positive reinforcement than in Europe where we’re still telling our toddlers what we don’t want them to do. That makes sense: studies among children show that those who are praised for getting the process of solving a maths problem, even if the answer is wrong, are more likely to try new things than those who are simply told whether their answer is correct or not.

Consulting is essentially an American business: although there are many European firms, the industry first spread out from Chicago, Boston and New York in the 1950s. It’s therefore much more in the “good job” than the “no” camp. Criticism is constructive at worst. That too makes sense: as with children, we’re more likely to end up with people who are prepared to experiment. But it shouldn’t be the only way consultants approach situations: if we’re experts in our field, then we can – just sometimes – say no, that’s simply not good enough. And, if we can’t, doesn’t that devalue the praise we give? Surely something is good partly because other things are worse.

Consultants are afraid of offending people because people who are offended are unlikely to hire us in the future. Many consultants, trained to think about processes, may lack the experience, confidence and/or knowledge to voice an opinion. But, crucially, we’re not judgemental because we’re not asked to be. Clients are just as fixated on process as consultants are. And it’s self-reinforcing: clients don’t ask us to judge, so we don’t and, because we don’t, we don’t get asked to. We all work together in order to improve the manufacture of the pen, not the pen itself.

This was all brought close to home recently when we published our latest ratings of consulting firms’ thought leadership. How could we, a couple of firms asked, criticise them? It was tempting to give a blow-by-blow account of our methodology, but the real answer is much simpler. A piece of thought leadership is like a pen: it either works or it doesn’t, and no amount of constructive feedback should obscure that.