Are You a Dirty Consultant? She Was!

Are You a Dirty Consultant?

She Was! 

Are you a dirty consultant? She was.

When she was the consultant two decades ago, she refused to advise until she knew what she was advising on. She would do a night with the night-shift, spend a day with the truckers, work the warehouse, visit different branches and speak to white and blue collar workers about their experiences. She never assumed she could make a good call without knowing how it would impact jobs across the company.

But she couldn’t do it anymore.

The consultants the company now employs don’t do that. They are suited and booted, equipped with shiny laptops and digital tools, promising high-tech solutions for all her woes. But never, ever, doing the dirty work of finding out what was going on in the messy organisational reality.

Instead, they produced engagement platforms, driven by cutting-edge technologies running on pumped up algorithms aimed at discovering who was disengaged and providing real-time data on what they were doing and how they were feeling.

They would then proffer solutions on how to sort it out. But these solutions had no context. They were drawn from best practice models about behaviour that had no relationship with the work the people were actually doing or the contextual complexities of the issues.

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