Do you want dirty or clean OSS consulting?

The original management consultant was Frederick Taylor, who prided himself in having discovered the “one best way” which would be delivered by “first-class men”. These assumptions, made in 1911, are still dominant today. Best practice is today’s “one best way” and recruiters, HR and hiring managers spend months and months searching for today’s “first-class men”.

I call this type of consulting clean because the assumptions allow the consultant to avoid dirty work or negative feedback. The model is “proven” best practice. Thus, if the model fails, it is not the consultants’ fault – rather it’s that the organisation doesn’t have the “first-class employees” who can deliver the expected outcome. You just have to find those that can. Then everything will be hunky dory.

All responsibility and accountability are abdicated downwards to HR and hiring managers. A very clean solution for everybody but them.

It’s also clean because it can be presented in a shiny manner – lots of colourful slide-decks promising a beautiful outcome – rational, logical, predictable, ordered, manageable. Clean. In today’s world of digital work, the best practice model is a new platform transforming everything you do into a shiny, pixelated reality. Cleaner than ever.

The images drawn by clean consultants are compelling. The client gets a clearly defined vision of a future state backed up by evidence of its efficacy.

But it’s far too often a dud. Things are ignored. The complex differences between the client and the other companies the model has been used on. The differences in size, in market, in demographic, in industry. None matter – because the one best way model is just that – one best way. It will work everywhere for everyone. As long as they keep doing it right and can find the right people to do it.

The dirty consultant has a problem that the clean consultant doesn’t have. It’s a big problem. He doesn’t have an immediate answer for the complex problem vexing the client. He has no flashy best practice model he strongly believes in. No shiny slide deck that outlines a defined future state.

It’s a difficult sell.

What he does have is a research process. A way of finding out what is actually causing the organisational problems. Why and how the espoused culture is different from organisational reality. Why and how the supposed best practice solution is producing stressed out anxiety or cynical apathy.

This process is underpinned by a fundamentally different perspective on the world of work. Context is everything. There is no solution that can fit every company all of the time. But there’s always a solution for the problem. It just has to be discovered.

The dirty consultant enters an organisation ready and willing to uncover the dirty reasons for the organisation not performing. This involved two processes – (1) working out where the inefficiencies and absurdities are, and (2) finding out who knows how to solve them.”

The text above all comes from this LinkedIn post by Dr Richard Claydon. It’s also the longest quote I’ve used in nearly 2000 posts here on PAOSS. I’ve copied such a great swathe of it because it articulates a message that is important for OSS.

There is no “best practice.” There is no single way. There are no cookie-cutter consulting solutions. There are too many variants at play. Every OSS has massive local context. They all have a local context that is far bigger than any consultant can bring to bear.

They all need dirty consulting – assignments where the consultant doesn’t go into the job knowing the answers, acknowledging that they don’t have the same local, highly important context of those who are at gemba every day, at the coal-face every day.

There is no magic-square best-fit OSS solution for a given customer. There should be no domino-effect selection of OSS (ie the big-dog service provider in the region has chosen product X after a long product evaluation so therefore all the others should choose X too). There is no perfect, clean answer to all OSS problems.

Having said that, we should definitely seek elements of repeatability – using repeatable decision frameworks to guide the dirty consulting process, to find solutions that really do fit, to find where repeatable processes will actually make a difference for a given customer.

So if the local context is so important, why even use a consultant?

It’s a consultant’s role to be a connector – to connect people, ideas, technologies, concepts, organisations – to help a customer make valuable connections they would otherwise not be able to make.

These connections often come from the ability to combine the big-picture concepts of clean consulting with the contextual methods of dirty consulting. There’s a place for both, but it’s the dirty consulting that provides the all-important connection to gemba. If an OSS consultant doesn’t have a dirty-consulting background, an ability to frame from a knowledge of gemba, I wonder whether the big-picture concepts can ever be workable?

What are your experiences working with clean consultants (vs dirty consultants) in OSS?

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2 Responses

  1. Very good points, as always.
    It reminded me of one of the truisms in the area of most of my career: Sales and Operations Planning. When it comes to system functionality, a consultant should have an excellent understanding of the the general features of the new system. However, it’s often the client to has a better understanding of the niches of functionality that are relevant to to their application. In a consulting / client relationship, it helps to keep this in mind to create the best synergy.

  2. Hi James,
    There are places for both clean and dirty no doubt!
    There’s a place for big-picture, left-field thinking to inspire innovative new ideas (if that’s what the customer wants)… although it always helps if it’s tied to an element of reality. 🙂
    Data-driven decision-making trumps guesswork!

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