Consultantspeak

The murky, maddening world of management lingo.

Government managers would be forgiven if they asked for translators to help slog through the obfuscating and befuddling world of consultantspeak. You know, you've read it or heard it. It's the teeming jumble of jargon larded through official reports about managing government's most expensive and important projects.

Consider this random sample of definitions taken from federal literature on one strategy favorite-"change management:"

• According to guidance from the Chief Information Officers Council, all CIOs must possess "core competencies" in "process/change management," which entails knowledge of "techniques/models of organizational development and change," "modeling and simulation tools and methods," and "quality improvement models and methods." That's three models, one set of tools and one technique/model hybrid.
• The Office of Management and Budget offers guidance on implementing the Federal Enterprise Architecture, an overarching blueprint of agency "business processes." In it, change management "involves the processes that facilitate a smooth evolution, composition and workforce transition of the design and implementation of changes to agency resources such as assets, methodologies, systems or procedures."
• And from a "concept paper" by the Defense Department comptroller: "Change management at the federal level involves aligning an agency's culture with new ways of doing business." The paper admits that "an agency's particular organizational culture can be difficult to fully understand."

If change management means all these things, then how can it mean anything? Where did this term come from?

" 'Change management' is really a consultant's term," says Steve Katz, author of Lion Taming: Working Successfully With Leaders, Bosses and Other Tough Customers (Sourcebooks, 2004), who lectures on management and consulting at many federal agencies. Katz has advised four senators and was a member of the Senior Executive Service. In federal agencies, he says, managers use the term change management "because the consultants you're paying use it." They apparently invented the term, or at least brought it into widespread use, in the 1990s, when the larger consultancies began establishing change management units. Around the same time, agencies' use of consultants surged, particularly on large-scale technology projects.

Consultants probably introduced the term for good reason. They "would be out of business if not for change management," declares Henry Mintzberg, the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal. Mintzberg says change management isn't the only hazy term polluting the contemporary business vernacular. He co-authored a book on strategy that skewers consulting nostrums for making managers' jobs more confusing, not less so.

"What's in the word 'strategy'?" Mintzberg and his colleagues ask in Strategy Bites Back (Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005). Gazing across the literature, the authors declare, "A lot more and a lot less."

The strategy book compiles biting critiques of consultantspeak. Lucy Kellaway, a columnist for London's Financial Times, dissects the 2002 annual report for consulting titan Accenture. "What interests me," Kellaway writes, "are not the clumsy bits of jargon such as 'business process outsourcing capabilities,' which form the backbone of the report, but the normal words, fed to us over and over again, until we become desensitized, left with no idea of what they mean at all." Among the examples:

• "Value: The Accenture report shows there are '101 Ways With Value.' You can unleash and unlock it. You can create it. You can capture it."
• "Solutions: These are new products and services. They are what we deliver. . . . There are 'scalable solutions,' 'solutions units,' 'outsourcing solutions,' 'and robust and repeatable solutions,' to name just a very, very few."

Turning back to change management, Linh Nguyen, a partner in Accenture's federal practice, says the foundation of the idea is based on common sense. "The fundamentals are intuitive," Nguyen says. "But for whatever reason, they're not always followed on a consistent basis."

Consultants are hired to keep agencies focused on those fundamentals for large projects. Indeed, Accenture is managing some of the biggest, including the multibillion-dollar US VISIT program to track foreign visitors in the United States. Given the uncertain character of consultantspeak, it might be that the "fundamentals" aren't followed in part because the consultants themselves don't know what they are.

Language should clarify. In the context of a "strategic plan," it should instruct and help people solve a problem. Language should simplify. But "In the world of consulting, everything is relative," says Richard Chang. He should know. Chang is a consultant, and has worked for the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Army. Too often, he says, agencies write plans that are "so laborious and complicated that, of course, those changes aren't going to become reality, because people can't figure out what they're doing." Hence the frequent failure of strategic plans.