Minding our language? Magic Consultants week three reviewed

Management consultants are not famous for admitting their mistakes but I’m going to buck the trend and admit that I thought I was writing the last of my reviews of BBC Radio 4’s Magic Consultants series. In the first of this series of reviews I stated that it was a three-part series but at the end of the latest episode I discovered that there were two more parts. So I will be continuing to review each 14-minute programme and hopefully the extended time means that there might be a bit more insight offered to the listener.

Today’s instalment in the series, “Shaping the World”, that the announcer introduced as exploring “the equivocal world of the management consulting industry” purported to examine some of the language consultants use and the way their ideas have permeated our world. It was clear from the tone of the programme that we should see this as A Very Bad Thing and, since it was a programme focusing on language, I’m going to take issue with the use of “equivocal” in the introduction. Vague, ambiguous, confusing, misleading and ambivalent are just some of the synonyms Microsoft suggests and it was clear that the programme wanted to pin the blame for the introduction of a whole load of meaningless management guff into society at large, as well as the world of business.

I do think that consultants have been guilty of over-jargonising their industry with obscure terms known only to the cognoscenti, but no more so than doctors, architects or rap artists in my view. The assertion that we are the equivalent of mediaeval monks reading the Bible in Latin – an analogy proposed by presenter Adam Scott – was, frankly, absurd. Any consultant knows that they won’t get far with their clients without being able to explain new ideas in language that they understand.

Some of the now-familiar interviewees were on hand again to support the notion that consultants were a corrupting influence on the world at large having introduced phrases such as “low hanging fruit” and “deliverable”. Rosie Collington, co-author of The Big Con, went on to state that McKinsey consultants (this programme is definitely Obsessed With McKinsey) had published over 50 books promoting their ideas, starting off with Tom Peters and Robert Waterman’s best-selling “In Search of Excellence”.

I don’t know what you should do if you have a good idea (or one you think is worthy of a wider audience) and you happen to be a consultant in the Magic Consultants alternative universe of unsullied language and uncorrupted businesses – presumably just keep stumm and practice your ideas on your own? I don’t know how much business In Search of Excellence generated for Peters, Waterman and McKinsey but I think – and I would say this since it’s in CMCE’s name – that the pursuit of excellence in your industry is undoubtedly A Good Thing. (And – interest declared – back in 2017, Tom Peters was guest speaker at CMCE’s inaugural meeting.)

A more contentious observation from Matthias Kipping co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Management Consulting was that management consultants have controlled organisations through “creating metrics”. This is a hot button for me as a consultant specialising in customer experience the use and misuse of metrics is fundamental to how you create a customer-centric organisation (or not). In my experience you don’t get very far with your client if you drive a particular set of metrics through without their active support – after all they have to live with them once you’ve left the project – so the notion that consultants are somehow responsible for a particular agenda, irrespective of what the client wants or needs is pretty wide of the mark.

Kipping did raise the point that metrics are more oriented towards the owners of capital rather than the owners of labour but then consultants are more likely to be employed by the former than the latter. And you can, at a pinch, extend this argument to blame consultants for promoting neo-liberal economics. I’m personally not a fan of that approach to the economy – CMCE held an event on this topic recently – but I’d have thought that it was primarily neo-liberal economists who were responsible for promoting it with consultants picking up and amplifying the concepts through projects from clients who’d bought into the ideas first. But let’s not let reality get in the way of a provocative argument.

I’m slightly ashamed to admit that I once had the job title “Head of Thought Leadership” – although not when I was working as a consultant – so when the programme went on to discuss how consultants were now offering “their visions for the world”, my interest was piqued, but the topic sadly was limited to a quote from a promotional video (uncredited) introducing the concept of “phygital” – a combination of physical and digital. Anyone wishing to eliminate this term from the English language would get my wholehearted support.

Better examples were provided by Tamzen Isacsson who summarised three projects from the MCA Awards which showed that consultants could deliver projects that had real-world benefits.

I think a discussion of benefits, value and how it’s measured – and the role consultants play in it – is what this series should be concentrating on rather than drawing superficial conclusions about jargon and language.

But maybe the programme makers just went for the low-hanging fruit.

If you want largely jargon-free discussion about consulting and the value it adds, do follow CMCE on LinkedIn or visit our website.

Previous episodes are reviewed here and here.