Like Brian Millar on advertising executives (pdf), I believe most creative consultants have completely forgotten what consulting is for.
Brian refers to:
Julius Caesar’s speeches to his troops before the battles they fought in Gaul. He started with an insight: his men were tired and frightened. They wanted to run away. He turned that on its head. You survive by attacking, he told them. You die when you retreat. Bam. Same brains, new petrol.
Looking at the recent stuff going on in Iloilo with PECO and its IPP discussed here and here, it’s clear EPIRA and all of USAID’s/WB’s/ADB’s advisories alone are not enough.
If you search Mamutong for open source consulting you can see that I’ve been wrestling with an approach that better leverages today’s tools and capabilities within a rapidly flattening world for delivering higher quality and more responsive advisory support than has been available in the past.
Leveraging off Jeff Jarvis’ work here, let’s explore what a new advisory ethic might look like:
- Transparency: Our clients deserve to know about us and our perspective to better judge what we say.
- Conversation: We do not believe in one-sided lectures. We believe conversation leads to better understanding (and therefore better strategies and advice).
- Humanity: We believe open-source consulting lives at a human level while old consulting lives at an institutional level.
- Linking: We believe one of our key jobs is to link our clients to other voices and to source material so they may judge themselves and be more informed of risks and uncertainties.
- Correction: We believe it is vital to correct errors quickly and openly.
- Immediacy: We believe that the fast spread of information will yield better information.
The above is just a postulate. But it’s predicated on using the same brains, but new petrol.