Are consultants made or born?

We were working through a deliverable the other day, just two of us on the phone, trying to work out what the storyline should be. One of the things we were grappling with was whether and how to present a recommendation to the client which would challenge his previously held beliefs. We were working toward a set of principles that, on the face of it, would conflict with a set of principles that they already had. In this case the existing set of principles painted an ERP nirvana where all HR functionality would be delivered by the single ERP, and all data would be managed by that ERP.

Coincidentally, I had submitted a report and some recommendations to another client just a day or so before. This report described an Information Management (IM) Strategy. The client had made some comments on the report. One comment about data management suggested that data should be stored once and used many times. It occurred to me that this mantra was no different than the nirvana of the ERP.

It would be really cool if all functionality fitted within a single application or set of applications. If you are an application architect then that is your nirvana; life, in this case, becomes paradisiac!! But the user doesn’t care; what he wants is a consistent interface. In an IM context, the user often knows perfectly well that the data she is going to use will come from many different sources. In the world of big data and unstructured information “store once, use often” is just not realistic. What she needs today is a way of assessing the reliability of data rather (necessarily) than its veracity.

As consultants, we can often fall into the trap of supposing that a rigorous approach to solving a problem will lead to an unassailable set of logically justifiable recommendations. We try to recommend principles that are logical, sound and consistent. Unfortunately, life isn’t like that. How many of us have returned to a client a year or so down the track and found our recommendations working as we envisaged? Few indeed, I think.

I like mathematical analogies, probably because I am a mathematician. Euclid’s axioms held sway over geometry for 2,000 years. But then these axioms were questioned; did they always have to be true? Building partly on some work by Persian mathematicians in the 12^th century (driven by doubt about the parallel postulate), the Hungarian mathematician János Bolyai and the Russian mathematician Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky separately discovered hyperbolic geometry. Elliptic and finite geometries followed. So there are other geometries than Euclid!! And, with Einstein, we now know that space is curved not flat!! The angles in a triangle do not always add to 180 degrees.

Similarly, in 1900 the famous mathematician David Hilbert published 10 problems whose solution (he thought) would lead to significant further developments in mathematics. The second of these problems concerned the compatibility of the arithmetical axioms; that is to show that there exists a set of basic rules that would enable the consistent construction of arithmetic. Unfortunately for Hilbert (who thought that there did indeed exist a consistent set of arithmetical axioms), Kurt Gödel proved in 1933 that for any given system based on consistent axioms, there are some truths in that system that could not be proved. Once again the world is not the perfect place that we would wish it to be. And unfortunately, for me as a mathematician, we never prove the Goldbach conjecture (that every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes) because it is not capable of proof in our arithmetical system.

So, here are two instances in science where the rules were not, after all, rules. There were other realities available. We know this from our own experience of life.

And that brings me back to the question I asked in the title of this piece: are consultants made or are they born?

The reason for posing the question relates to the ERP gig I referred to above. The fact is that the client’s principles pointed to nirvana but then so did the set that we were developing. Neither was right but then neither could really be said to be wrong. The way around this is to describe a set of recommendations that enables the client to make decisions. The purpose of consulting is not to say exactly how things must be but to paint a picture that is internally consistent that will work. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we tell the client what he wants to hear. Certainly not; we must always provide advice that the client needs to hear, but sometimes we need to massage things in a way that makes our recommendations capable of acceptance rather than just being acceptable.

In the same way that we can ask whether painters or composers are made or born we must ask whether consultants are made or born. Is consulting an art or a science? Do we need left brain (detailed, logical thinking) or right brain (imaginative, conceptual thinking) people in consulting?

Of course, we know that the answer is that we need both. Whenever we write a proposal for a piece of work we start with an approach. An approach is a broad set of steps that, in sequence, should lead to a statement of a problem and its solution. We underpin this with tools and techniques that constitute a method. The concepts behind the approach help us to sell the gig; the precision of the method means that we can deliver profitably. And, of course, while we are delivering we need both conceptual analysis and rigorous assessment. We need all personality types: the conceptual thinker often thinks by speaking and the analytical thinks by listening. Of course, that’s a massive generalisation but I am old enough to make massive generalisations.

Years ago when I was with Coopers in London we did a Myers Briggs test on all our consultants. There are 16 personality type indicators or psychological preferences in the Myers Briggs theory. We all agreed to share the results anonymously. We found that of a practice of about thirty consultants, two were clustered around one (as it happened left brain) type and the rest around another right brain type. We had fallen into the trap of hiring in our own image. We had fallen into the trap of thinking that good ideas, loudly and robustly expressed would mean that we would always be OK. We were trading on intellectual arrogance.

The fact of consulting is that we need all types of personality. We need the left brain and the right brain. We need the scientist and we need the artist. We should not care whether we are born or made.

We just need to be good at what we do and to be honest enough to recognise that, when all is said and done, it is less important that our recommendations are right than it is that our recommendations will work.