James G. March, Organizational Consultants and Organizational Research, J of Applied Communication Research, 19:1&2 June 1991

The sins of consultants

Consulting and research exist in different social structures, different incentive systems, and norms.

Consultants try to solve problems, not understand them.

3. Learning from experience in organizations

Organizations learn what strategies to adopt, where to locate themselves, and how to allocate resources. The are subject to reinforcement, doing activities that were successful in the past and not ones associated with failure. Organizations learn (and forget) competence. They become more able at things they do frequently, less able at things they do rarely.

Organizations also change aspirations as a result of experience.

In most cases a manager who wants advice would find it better from himself or his associates than from a consultant or a research study. Good advice assumes the existance of ordinary knowledge and tries to contribute something that is as little redundant as possible. The problem is that advice that tries to summarize as much "truth" as possible will tend to be redundant and thus not very useful.

4. Contributions on the Margin

Thus good research and consulting attempts to complement the contributions of experiential learning in specific organizations. It avoids three traps:

* overestimating the importance of actual events than those that didn't happen

* experience closes the door on experimentation

* simple learning will drive organizations to disconfirmable theories

Thus research and consulting can help protect against the limitations of ordinary knowledge.

Pooling experience

Research and consulting pools experiences across organizations. It describes current practice and spreads the benefits of experience. Spreading success and failure stories can produce an effective, evolving system of organizations.

In the course of this system some people are innovation carriers who identify a new organizational form or practice somewhat before it becomes standard practice and present it as a new solution to a problem, a solution with special advantages demonstrated elsewhere but not fully exploited. These new discoveries become the gimmicks of consultancy. Gradually, successful technologies become SOP's or rules of thumb. and become communicated through professional associations, schools, consultants, and teachers.

Pooled learning also produces more variation that reduces vulnerability to local optima.

However, if the pooled experiences are not independent, the advantages are fewer. In the same industry what one company learns from another may be just an echo of themselves. When ambiguous experience is pooled rapidly, it may become irrelevant. Pooled experience doesn't necessarily lead to better theories.

Often it isn't a problem with the people's expertise but the limitations of learning from ambiguous, echoed experience. We also learn from experience to modify our behavior, but every modification complicates learning. We may get so competent at some skills we inhibit the development of others.

Providing interpretations of experience

Consultants also provide alternative explanations for experience. Good consulting emphasizes certain events and interpretative schema that in combination with ordinary knowledge leads to improvements in understanding.