The reason why so many people believe this is because they have directly experienced situations where these consultants come in, understand less than the people who work there, and do a below-average job. It’s the idea that these consultants are hired for their capabilities that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
I understand where you are coming from. Here you have two misaligned incentives.
You have people making coming from the outside, making decisions that would affect rank and file in a company. I think its natural for the rank and file to be biased towards believing in their own skills and dismissing outsiders.
Why would shareholders, the board and the CEO waste so much money on paying consultancies when the only value is being able to pass blame? Isn't it simply easier to believe that consultancies indeed provide valuable judgements and the price paid is worth it?
Accountability sinks is the buzzword we are looking at here.
It's to do something that is not easy to do in an organization due to major breaks in the current status quo.
The risk of doing one thing and complaints hampering the progress there is often too high which is why you give authority to a third party who will just do it regardless of feedback. One time breaks are necessary sometimes but can also be misused a lot for things employees want to do anyway. It's up to leadership to identify what is necessary and not generally possible with the current crew.
The term accountability sink was originally intended to describe how bureaucracies cover their asses from customers, regulators and employees, but certainly not from the company owners.
> Why would shareholders, the board and the CEO waste so much money on paying consultancies when the only value is being able to pass blame?
Management does it in large part to provide external validation (most importantly to the board and shareholders) of the decisions they sought to take anyway.
The board and shareholders accept it because the external validation works exactly the way management intends it to. (There's also cases where using independent consultants as part of some process is a compliance checkbox thing, and in those cases they are used for that specific reason.)
You are assuming that decisions to hire consultants are driven by merit alone, that the outcome invariably matches what was desired, and dismissing any experience to the contrary as sour grapes. None of this is reasonable.
Please understand that I'm literally debating against a conspiracy theory. Sure some times they are not hired for merit but do you think all this is a pyramid scheme where massive amounts of money are wasted for no real value?
