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Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

> Can you reasonably expect for there to be a true “safe space” in a professional setting?

My experience has generally been that, even if a leadership level person is being sincere when they say they want honest feedback and it is safe to offer it, the junior level person they are meeting with doesn't believe it. (An economist would call this an example of the "market for lemons" problem.) That is a big reason why outside consultants can break the ice on something like this, as the article describes, where internal conversations can't: the consultant can credibly promise that honest feedback won't adversely affect the speaker (the obvious way to do that is to not attribute anything to any particular person when the consultant reports to leadership), so they have a shot at actually getting the honest feedback that is needed to get to a solution to the problem.

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The consultant is being paid by management. S/he is beholden to them. If anything can be traced back to a group or individual, it will be, and it won't be pleasant for anyone who believed the request for honest feedback.

I was going to say, it is well accepted that McKinsey and related are nothing more than a way for management to launder unpopular decisions.

That is only one aspect of consulting, so you are over-generalizing.

That's true—but so is pdonis in their description of consultants.

The article is describing a case where what you describe did not happen--he, the consultant, was able to convey feedback from working level people to management, that the working level people were unable to convey themselves, and management liked the feedback. And the article says other consultants have described similar experiences.

Of course there are companies where consultants do not have this happy outcome--either because management doesn't listen to the feedback even from the consultant, or because the consultant does what you describe and doesn't protect the working level people who confided in them. But the article indicates that this doesn't have to happen, and that was my point: as I said, the consultant has a shot at getting to a solution of the problem.

> the consultant has a shot at getting to a solution of the problem.

Yes, and if the consultant fails, s/he's off to the next gig. The author did not mention any cases where his approach failed.

The author also says "One week later, I will schedule a meeting with executive leadership, and during that meeting, I will read back a very lightly edited version of the transcript of the previous meeting"

Dandy. If one has a recognizable voice - style, usage, etc. - it will be recognized. And dealt with.

I don't think the solutions he's presenting will "scale." He says "[if you need] event-driven distributed systems consensus algorithm implemented using Twisted, I’m absolutely your guy." He's a young guy with a pretty narrow niche and is making some pretty big claims for a large world outside of it.

> The consultant is being paid by management. S/he is beholden to them.

Quite the opposite. One of the reasons people go into consulting (and I don't mean working for a consulting company), is precisely because they're not beholden to them. They have much more freedom to set the terms than employees do.

If a company wants them to reveal the individual, they'll be happy to give them the middle finger and let them know their morals are lacking.

The point remains that the messenger may deliver a message that invites retaliation, and even if their plan is to protect their sources, they may fail to do so.

Someone who thinks they will protect you may be as big of a wildcard as someone who demonstrates clearly that they won't, because you haven't given anything really damning to the latter.

Usually, everyone knows. It's just that they need to hear it from somebody else (or will ignore it intentionally and did so up until this point).

Intentionally ignored for political reasons, so hiring the consultant allows them to address it minus the political fallout.

Most large companies hire large consulting firms, whose lack of morals is a selling point.

Oh, consultants from large consulting firms are a completely different thing. People upthread are not talking about those at all.

I can confirm that. I've had more than one opportunity to tell some C-level manager that asking me who said what was making them part of the problem, not the solution. It is quite an effective way to initiate reflection (whatever you think, most managers are not sociopathic morons, they just have different incentives than you).

The pattern that I have seen in consulting is that management has already heard of that feedback, but don't consider it credible for various political reasons (and they're not generally wrong in many cases), so when the same feedback is confirmed by consultants as a 'disinterested third party' as valid (and the opposite is also often the case), then they finally believe it and it can get implemented.

People with different professional backgrounds speak different "languages". It really matters how you describe a solution to the other party so that they accept it. That's one of the skills that a consultant needs to hone: Speak different "languages".

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