Douglas Adams and Consulting Practice

To the extent that they are trained to be consultants, and in their consulting practice, management consultants usually start an assignment by talking to the project sponsor and/or senior management and then forming a hypothesis about the problems they have been engaged to solve. It is therefore inevitable that, during the rest of the project, they tend to accept data that supports their hypothesis and discard data that challenges it. It is also inevitable that, during this process, they become more and more committed to their hypothesis and increasingly reluctant to challenge it. There may be professional consultants to whom this criticism does not apply, but they are in the minority.

The justification for this arrogance - and it has to be described as arrogance - is that they have been schooled in the belief that their training and previous experience mark them out as superior beings able to make this kind of judgement. However, let us consider an alternative view.

If, whilst I am interviewing a member of client staff, or a customer, or a supplier, or anyone else, and I ask them a question, I may often get an answer that doesn't really seem to be an answer to the question I asked. So what is happening? There are three possibilities:

a)   I am not asking the question clearly enough, or in a form that the interviewee can understand, so I am getting the answer I deserve.

b)   I am quite clear about the question but, for some reason, the interviewee doesn't understand, or doesn't have the experience to enable him to answer the question.

c)    I am quite clear about the question, and the interviewee's answer is also clear, but I don't understand his answer.

The typical consultant will probably recognise condition a) and re-phrase his question. He will be justified in discarding answers that satisfy condition b) - if he realises that is what has happened. But he will discard answers that fulfil condition c) and, in so doing, discard information that may challenge his hypothesis or even lead to a new hypothesis.

Which is where Douglas Adams comes in. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy was first broadcast on Radio 4 in 1978/9 and, some years later, was made into a television serial. And as fans, and many other listeners and viewers will recognise, the plot includes several sudden and unpredictable changes in what constitutes reality.

In January 1992, Douglas Adams appeared with Melvin Bragg on the South Bank Show in what can only be described as a happening, in which many of the characters from the Hitch Hiker's Guide drifted in and out and had an impact on the interview. At one point, Melvin Bragg said (l paraphrase), "Throughout the series, you are clearly fascinated by alternative realities and/or alternative universes - what was the origin of this fascination?" Douglas explained that, at the age of 10, his father had taken him to London Zoo and was explaining about the animals as they looked at them. When they got to the rhinoceros, his father explained that the rhino's most acute sense was smell, and not sight or hearing as for humans. Douglas began to wonder what the world must be like if one perceived it through the shifting, eddying, sometimes enduring and sometime ephemeral smells - and realised that it must be a very different world to the one inhabited by humans.

Eventually this led him (l paraphrase again) to the realisation that every sentient being has a different but equally valid set of perceptions of the universe. Which raises philosophical questions about what we mean by reality and even whether there is such a thing as reality. If you want to find out more about this, read Bertrand Russell - I can't help you!

However, even staying out of the philosophical deep water, it is quite clear that no management consultant, however experienced or clever, has the right to assume that his perception of reality is THE reality.