Beware of consultant’s myopia

When you engage a consultant, you want them to focus on your issues and not get distracted by things around them that would get in the way of their successfully completing their assignment.

However, there are limits to just how focused you want them to be. Sometimes, there are important – even urgent – things the consultant should be able to recognize while he or she is focusing on the task at hand.

News reports from Bedford Falls, New York (I don’t really think it’s THAT Bedford Falls) describe how a computer consultant, who was driving a rental car, was so focused on following the directions on the car’s GPS system that he neglected to notice that he was crossing a set of railroad tracks THAT CONTAINED A TRAIN HEADING RAPIDLY TOWARD HIM!

Apparently, after the car got stuck on the tracks, he realized his error and got out and tried to flag down the train's engineer. Reportedly, he jumped out of the way just in time and the train slammed into the car at 60 mph; pushing it more than 100 feet down the track in a spectacular and fiery crash

It seems the driver was issued a minor summons and that he and his rental car company would be liable for resultant damages, estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The whole thing reminds me of some of the occasions where we’ve been called in to review a troubled project. However, in many of those projects, the consultants who were at fault didn’t even see “the train” before the project's fiery crash.

The Consulting Police?

Earlier this year, I was talking to a former colleague from my days at IBM Business Consulting Services and was explaining our firm's specialty -- helping organizations that were having issues or problem of one sort or another with consultants.  I was telling her about our services, from intervening  in troubled projects -- in order to get them back on track -- to developing educational programs to transfer the skills and competencies that organizations need to successfully: identify, evaluate, select, negotiate with, engage and manage highly qualified consultants.

"Oh, I understand." she said.  "You're like one of those reformed house burglars that's gone straight and is helping home owners protect their property from other burglars."

"No," I said.  "It's not like that.  I wasn't doing anything illegal before.  We're the GOOD guys!"

"So," she exclaimed, "you're like the consulting cops?"

I laughed and dismissed the comment but thought about it over the ensuing weeks.  I didn't think it was really a fair representation of the situation or of what we did.  It's not as if consultants are the cause of ALL troubled or failed projects.  Sometimes, the consultant's client is able to seriously mess up a project all by themselves.  Most often, we find that both the consultant and the client have been behaving badly.

But clients and others liked the story -- most wanting to believe every failed project is always 100% the fault of the consultants involved.  Some of those who heard the story even asked if we carried badges.  That got us thinking.

Now we do.  We carry our business cards in small, custom made. black leather cases -- with one of the badges pictured above.  It gives us an opportunity to tell the "consulting police" story and to describe how we help our clients to 'arrest' bad consulting.

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