REFLECTIONS ON A CAREER IN CONSULTING – WHAT NOT TO DO
The development consulting profession has, often justly, come under sustained attack in recent years. We’ve all seen them – the cynical, ruddy-faced, washed-up resident consultant dispensing generic advice between shots of the local brandy; lavishly budgeted and staffed projects churning out glossy report after glossy report with little chance of anyone reading, let alone implementing the recommendations; donors pushing beneficiaries to sign onto the latest governance fad regardless of its applicability to the actual problems being faced in-country.
Criticism is not just coming from entrenched skeptics (Dambisa Moyo, William Easterly, et al), but from self assessments by development institutions. Internal evaluations by the World Bank have highlighted public sector reforms as being particularly prone to having less-than-stellar impacts. Matt Andrews work (check out the “fireplace conversation” with Matt elsewhere on this website), underscores the perils of flogging cookie-cutter approaches by the development community based on best-practice approaches from developed countries. So, why work in this area at all?
For my final post, I thought I’d offer a few reflections on our oft-maligned profession. So as to end positively, I’ll start with what, in my experience, does not work.
When I left government to embark on an international consulting career seventeen years ago, I was expecting to find work helping governments do similar tasks that I had performed or encountered within the Canadian government. There, consultants were often contracted to assist government departments solve a problem, complete a task beyond the skill set of existing staff or, occasionally, provide a fresh perspective on some particularly vexing issue.
To my initial surprise, consulting in the governance industry worked quite differently. The majority of projects I encountered comprised a phalanx of international and local consultants working in a project office (sometimes near the client; sometimes not) trying to implement a far-reaching, multi-pronged reform in three years or less.
The biggest of all was termed public administration reform, or PAR. Here, governments were somehow convinced that what they needed to do was concurrently, rapidly and comprehensively change their existing approach to managing the civil service, structuring their organizations, training their staff, formulating multi-year budgets, preparing and reviewing policy and legal documents, making decisions, monitoring results, auditing themselves, fighting corruption, eliminating red tape from regulations, mainstreaming gender equality, delivering services to citizens, introducing e-government, consulting with external stakeholders, strengthening public accountability, decentralizing to local government, interacting with parliament and, in case they weren’t busy enough, eliminating poverty by radically restructuring their health, pension, education and social assistance sectors while fostering the expansion of their private sectors and reducing the wage bill . Not surprisingly, PAR work plans tended to be Tolstoyan in their breadth and scope, testing the outer limits of complexity theory while proving that it is possible to coordinate yourself into total paralysis.
Another favourite was the iconic whole-of-government functional review, which remarkably persists today. Here, hordes of consultants were brought in to streamline government, eliminate duplication and increase productivity – what government would not want that? Fanning out across government, the review teams compiled incredibly complex tables of functions, sub-functions and sub-sub functions (most often unrelated to the budget structure) which then fed into a master design indicating that by consolidating, eliminating, divesting, deconcentrating and/or decentralizing various functions, government could function more efficiently with fewer ministries, many fewer agencies and many, many fewer employees. At some point, an impressive and encyclopaedic report would be submitted for approval to Cabinet. At this point, the Prime Minister finally realizes that streamlining government, however appealing it sounds, means breaking up his Cabinet, terminating rafts of patronage appointments in agencies and provoking a civil service strike by laying off hundreds of staff. Needless to say, while thanks was duly expressed to the functional review teams for their thoughtful advice, implementation was felt to require a little more thought...indefinitely.
And then there was cumulative effect. While implementing a full-fledged PAR reform could keep a government and civil service actively engaged for a decade or more in a developed country, it was just one among many reforms being urged on the beneficiary developing country. Each and every sector had its own donors and consulting teams overhauling the way that sector delivered its services. Perversely, it seemed that the less able a country was to absorb aid, the more it received – Let’s call it the donor Disneyland paradox
I could go on, but you get the idea. (Excuse the biblical paraphrase) I certainly did wonder at times why we were doing unto others what we would never do unto ourselves. Yes, the context is different in developing countries, but the demands on government are pretty much the same.
REFLECTIONS ON A CAREER IN CONSULTING – WHAT TO DO
Fortunately, amid the chaotic swirl of public sector reforms, I did find some familiar terrain and tangible problems that seemed worth tackling. In my field, this meant working with a Prime Minister’s/Cabinet Office to improve the quality of policy advice and planning provided to decision makers. In most countries, I found others, usually across the street, helping the Ministry of Finance prepare and oversee the implementation of better budgets. Together, these organizations can make a lot happen across government.
Working at the centre is always high risk/high reward and I’ve described in earlier posts both successes and failures. As for the keys to effective engagements, in true consultant fashion, let’s look at a few critical success factors.
1. Don’t overreach: Things tend to work best when the task is initially defined and perceived as strengthening rather than reforming the centre of government. Every now and then a Prime Minister gets excited about doing this, makes a lot happen very quickly, and rightfully decides that this should be touted as a big reform – this is fine, of course, but should not be the assumption going in. What one can do is find out what problems are facing senior management and provide pragmatic advice on solving them; i.e., take something off their plate rather than heaping ten new things on it. This makes their day job easier, builds rapport and makes your arrival in the office a welcome rather than anxiety-inducing event. Work with them, not at them. Over time, if things go well, the Prime Minister may notice that his or her office is starting to function more effectively and may give it more authority and face-time. In turn, this increases the office’s stature at the centre and across government. At this point, and especially in those project reports back to the sponsoring donor, feel free to refer to the successful completion of a series of client-identified problem-solving tasks as a gloriously-conceived, flawlessly executed reform package.
2. Pick the most viable entry point. Various assessments have identified anywhere between 6 and 10 core coordinating functions of Prime Ministers or Cabinet Offices. Sometimes one might begin with strengthening policy coordination and the quality of ministry policy proposals (e.g., Latvia), sometimes with strategic planning (e.g., Lithuania), sometimes with a Government Work Plan (e.g., Romania), sometimes with the office organization (e.g. Palestine). To some degree this reiterates the previous CSF – begin with something that your client needs now.
3. Engage the political level: A Prime Minister, Minister of Finance or Chief of Staff will rarely be working with you on a weekly basis, but that is no reason to avoid them. First, you need to understand their needs since the person you are working for works for them. Second, a gulf often exists between the political and administrative levels. In such cases, you may be able to play a bridging or legitimization role. If your project does not have any political access, the risk of it failing at the approval and implementation stages increases significantly. Finally, it also gives one the opportunity to pre-empt or at least limit failure. If the political level is truly disinterested in the improvements one has been asked to make, then the project should be refocused on matters that can be addressed by the administrative level, or, in extreme circumstances, discontinued. In a couple of instances, over the years, I have in essence fired myself. Although disappointing, such consultancy mercy killings are ultimately better for the donor, client and consultant.
4. Make your own connections: For any number of reasons, governments tend to work in silos. However, in any government one silo that must be broken is the one between the Ministry of Finance and the centre of government. Otherwise, disconnected policy, planning and budget processes will ultimately fail at the implementation stage. If these two critical areas do not interact, try and make it happen. If you are working on a PFM project, make sure you connect with whomever is working with the Prime Minister’s/Cabinet Office or vice versa. And then encourage your respective clients, at the appropriate time, to work together. If that works, go meet some people in ministries. Central institutions, however important they perceive themselves to be, do not implement anything. If line ministries are ignoring all those cleverly-formulated directives from the centre, their impact outside the government building will be zero.
5. Avoid loitering: Curiously, the term “fly-in, fly-out consultants” is used pejoratively. Well, that’s what I am, and for good reason. Senior officials are too busy to have me hanging around their desks for days on end. And it’s hardly value for money to stash oneself away in a project office for weeks at a time. I like to arrive, work hard and collaboratively, see the right people, re-energize momentum if required, leave homework and get out of the way.
6. Make time for junior staff: Even the most lacklustre project can be beneficial if it helps some bright, young analyst see a path forward in their public service career. I can think of several cases where that young person who was somehow always around at coffee breaks or dropped by for an informal chat after work went on to become a superb senior manager, political candidate or consultant.
Well there we are. Having begun to talk about passing one’s knowledge on to the younger generation, I am clearly at risk of crossing the geezer threshold – my pet term for consultants who have exceeded their best before date and spout random, largely irrelevant pearls of “wisdom” while regaling anyone who will listen with mostly tedious anecdotes from projects past.
As I reflect back on the last seventeen years, I can say that nothing I did increased any nation’s GDP or even their percentile on the World Bank’s governance indicator for government effectiveness. However, I do feel that I was reasonably nimble in avoiding dead-end projects and did help a number of high-calibre public officials around the world solve some pressing problems. In several cases, over time, this produced a better-managed PM/Cabinet Office able to coordinate effectively with the Ministry of Finance and line ministries. Such an outcome was always considered valuable in the Canadian government. I would like to think the same holds true in the over 25 countries in which I have worked since. And, of course, I did meet a lot of great people and did have a great deal of fun. Bon voyage with your careers.
