Can You Trust Consultants?
applied intelligence & the Future-Of-Expertise
I recently listened to a New School of Economic Thinking podcast with Economist Sandra Peart, Dean and E. Claiborne Robins Distinguished Professor in Leadership Studies, and President, Jepson Scholars Foundation at the Jepson School of Leadership Studies, University of Richmond. Professor Jepson poses a simple question: How do you know an expert is giving you good advice? This is an insightful and complicated question to ascertain because of the human motivation factor in business. Prof. Peart notes that we are not arguing against experts, we need expertise. However, at the same time she says, especially in the realm of policy consulting, the objectives of the population being ruled over are not often being met by the expert’s policy development.
There needs to be an awareness of the different motivations consultants have, relative to their fame and fortune incentive in applying their consulting services, she says.
There needs to be a mechanism in place to help elevate better transparency must be build process which addresses peoples’ benefits from policy development. And the dynamics and motivations between those giving advice and those consuming it, so the privileged few are not making all the decisions for the many.
The latter would be well aligned with the ethics of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty writings, and we should utilize those same democratic principles when it comes to knowledge acquisition, analysis, and application. Particularly in the area of political economy consulting. We must avoid being dictated to by an aristocratic group of people and the consultants acting as courtiers. Involvement shouldn’t left to the well-connected and privileged few, society is better off when many voices contribute to policy development and the direction of humanity.
In the area of political economy consulting — economic, political and social policy development can be significantly influenced by the sheer biases of those doing the policy work. Which can impact our lives for generations to come. Therefore, the issue of putting trust in consultants is paramount to the future direction of our humanity.
Intellectual thinking, for example, may sound good and may work in a classroom setting or theory, but in the real world, things seldom go as nicely as theories set out. There are a tremendous amount of variables involved and the future is unpredictable we must maximize and leverage as much information and insight as feasibly possible to optimize that policy development. Therefore, it must be taken out of the academic realm.
So often we see university professors being corrupted by big consulting firms like McKinsey and Company, and university professors too like fortune and fame. The consulting industry uses academia to add credibility to their business, while they disingenuously go about deploying classroom management theories, which may not have any basis in reality. Therefore, you get a world run by consultants instead of one by us.
Acclaimed professor Mariana Mazzucato, exposes the consulting industry, in her most recent book titled THE BIG CON — How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies. Saying that the overuse of consultants by private businesses and governments around the world, “stunts innovation, obfuscates corporate and political accountability, and impedes efforts to fight climate change.”
THE BIG CON is an accurate indictment of a dubious industry which hampers organizations from building capacity and capabilities internally. From public companies to non-profit organizations and governments — have all handed mission-critical functions over to management consultants. This effectively strips them of enhancing their learning and bettering their expertise. Of course, that’s what the consultants want because it serves them well with continued contracts and fat retainers. Sucking value from the organization while they get paid for it.
You can’t outsource growth; sustainable and dynamic growth can only come from within. As Brett Christophers, author of Rentier Capitalism says, “A management consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you the time — and then keeps the watch.” Ideas matter, and where, how, and from whom they are generated from matters!
There needs to be some knowledge and analytical egalitarianism in the business of expertise, otherwise, our world will be left to be dominated by a powerful and well-connected few. These tiny few are essentially running our world, i.e., Big Tech corporations and big consulting firms coupled together become the arbiters of our lives.
In the international bestseller Suberhubs — How the Financial Elite & Their Networks Rule Our World; the book skilfully lays out the science of networks and how human networks run the world. It describes how the world’s most powerful titans build their mighty networks, and in most cases, big consultants are the courtiers of the aristocracy.
These Suberhubs, therefore, make all the important and impactful decisions that impact all of our lives. These invisible platforms are anchored and directed by the global financial elite, i.e., James Dimon, American billionaire banker and the CEO and Chairman of JPMorgan Chase. Has anyone ever asked how is it that an executive, not an entrepreneur, running a federally regulated bank becomes a billionaire?
Suberhubs effectively shows how the global elite; bank CEOs, fund managers, big tech and billionaires, politicians, and an army of consultants, form an interlocking relationship and collective influence that shapes our world. But only to leave our society increasingly fragile.
As an example; Microsoft strikes a $2 billion AI partnership with KPMG. Over the next five years, they will co-develop cloud and generative AI tools. And rival consulting giants like PwC and Accenture have also made large-scale commitments toward AI-powered changes. Big Tech and The Big Con industry work together to dominate the future, and influencing policy is critical to that success. Thus they dominate our lives!
Stifling entrepreneurship, diversity and innovation, effectively harming competition which is the bedrock of capitalism and highly inclusive and sustainable growth economies.
Dr. Peart goes on to say that the consultants or experts who design and put policy into effect are no less nor no more self-interested than the rest of us. Meaning ambitions are always behind decisions! Effectively, their interests are reflected in their outputs versus those of the organizations they consult. So at minimum, we should be aware of this…that they may not always have our best interest at heart.
Experts do not have neutrality and only scientific objectives in mind when applying their expertise. Human nature is such that they will take their own interest into account first.
Preat’s book, Escape from Democracy: The Role of Experts and the Public in Economic Policy, (Cambridge University Press, 2017), provides significant historical examples of where and when experts routinely put their own interests ahead of the policy advisory of their clients. It gives numerous examples of disaster outcomes when people trusted the experts.
Nevertheless, our notion is not that ‘expert consultants’ are dishonest but more so the [system], where experts receive directives from leaders to put policies into place. They go ahead and start without additional checks to see if this is in fact what the people being ruled over would agree with.
The other big problem we found was that consultants would selectively report data. Consultants routinely break the critical scientific rule of concluding first and then going out to find the data to support their pre-established conclusions. This is why all these models and predictions fail, they are futile and fragile.
Adam Smith remains timeless, he says everyone is motivated by things and goods, i.e., fame and fortune. So how to we change things and find adherence to ethical behaviour in the consulting space? Disrupting the space with generative AI technology and applied intelligence (ai), is the path forward. Replacing or minimizing using consultants, with a data/AI-driven SaaS enterprise strategy software — 6ai Technologies!
In an ever-increasing digital and globalized world…with the ease of accessing information today, there is no reason for overreliance on consultants. Technology allows you to simply use that same technology to do it yourself, and at a fraction of the cost.
Further, employers should not be paying twice. Paying both staff/management and outside management consultants too. Accessing information, learning, and executing projects internally, must be a major part of the future of work. As intelligent technologies provide the capabilities, they also produce enormous long-term value for organizations, government and society. For those who begin to internalize their strategy development via SaaS enterprise strategy tools.
And the question becomes even more clear. Why would anyone reasonable or critically thinking person pay tens, hundreds of thousands, and millions of dollars to consulting when technology can empower people to do it themselves? And at an infinitesimal fraction of the cost?
6ai Mission
Those giving advice have an ethical obligation to look at different perspectives as opposed to the pre-constructed, status quo ones, which effectively serve their interests best. Without the ability to scan all the available data in the universe objectively and transparently on a given subject matter, we block ourselves from the objective truth. Unable to leverage data science effectively in developing relevant robust insights for developing good strategy options that can transform our organizations and society.
Faulty consulting is a major problem, not because consultants are bad people, they are not, but what they are is not objective. The fame and fortune Dr. Preat talks about; and so too did Adam Smith — about the significance of human motivation and behaviour.
6ai Technologies provides solutions through the democratization of generative AI technologies, that can be highly useful in internalized strategy development and execution. Also, the strategy process works as an intrinsic risk management tool too — so you get two-for-one value.
Democratizing access to technical capabilities once dominated by consultants and advisors opens up the universe to different fact-based perspectives.
- 6ai utilizes GenAI purposefully and responsibly to augment human capacity and ingenuity. Creating extraordinary value for organizations and individuals which inherently work to serve humanity best.
- Organizations are struggling to harness data to build transformative strategies. Consultants come with exorbitant costs and are inaccessible to most.
- Consultants can’t compete with the awesome processing power and in-real-time insight generation that machines can perform.
In a survey of 10, 000 senior leaders. 97% said strategy is the most important thing to their organization’s success. However, 96% said they lack the time and the right tools to effectively engage in strategy development.
— Harvard Business Review
When asked about the most important business objectives they have set for their enterprise over the next two years, business owners responded: a substantial degree of alignment with a growth-oriented business strategy.
— MIT Technology Review Insights
The surveys also highlight that new SaaS platform solutions that enable enterprise-wide, team collaboration, data-driven strategy development tools, monitoring and management, are top priorities. The need for a single, easy-to-use, data-driven SaaS solution that gathers insights for developing effective sales and marketing strategies is critical to business success.
Architectures have gotten really complicated, but only because we tend to over-complicate them. We do this because we lose sight of what matters most. We too often bring in the latest and greatest technology, thinking they will solve the problem. But unless the business is ready to leverage the tools, and has the maturity to extract the insights processes and agreed-upon logic. We’re only adding to the spaghetti architecture.
Sol Rashidi, chief analytics officer at The Estée Lauder Companies
So, by combining big data/artificial intelligence with the applied intelligence (ai) strategy framework solution. Allows for a series of processes that can identify the whitespace within industries/sectors that offer significant market growth opportunities out of the whitespace. The applied intelligence process doesn’t give us the answer. It gives us a framework to help us think better, in a more nuanced way, and at an even higher dimensional level of strategic thinking.
The overriding mission of 6ai is to gather and develop both internal and external data (including public anonymized data,) that can be taken as empirically warrantable, to effectively develop a fit-for-purpose organizational strategy for winning in the 21st Century.
