Opinion
For a sector founded around the sanctity of knowledge, the lack of rigour in arguments about the future of tertiary institutions and the post-school sector as a whole is a major gap.
When conversations and stories about the mis-steps of the sector are reduced to boss vs worker or market vs community or mass education vs quality, we all are losers – no matter which side you are trying to represent.
Allowing the conversation to descend to a simplified dichotomy endangers not just progress, but understanding. Part of the problem, for a sector so in love with complex words and concepts, is that terms used around the management of humans have been misused so frequently that they are assumed to take on a more sinister meaning than they actually have – creating a scenario where the lack of a common language is hampering change.
Performance management is misunderstood (and sometimes misused) as punishment. Consultation is often used to describe monologues or persuasion. Change management is often so badly explained that no substantive change is visible, apart from organisational chart pruning. Growth in enrolments, the centrepiece of the Accord in terms of promoting access, is derided as marketisation or massification and often assumed to necessarily entail declining standards. Proposals to supposedly democratise governance frequently put forward alternative autocracies, with little or no voice for professional staff and casual staff who make up the majority of the sector’s workforce, a conveniently elitist version of democracy where only ongoing academic staff get a voice.
There are many more mis-steps and misnomers – but let’s get to the topic of the day: consultants.
A declaration of interest is very important here. I am a consultant. Or at least I thought I was, until I saw the massive gap between what I charge and what others charge for the same work. It has become clear that consultant is too lofty a moniker and I am presumably something else – probably a humble service provider. Which makes no difference to me – because my fees are lower than that of the average exec, I am employed in all manner of ways for different projects and most of the time get paid. But it matters if you hope things are going to change by banning consultants.
When does a person stop being a consultant and start being a service provider, or a contracted employee? If someone external suggests ways to improve mental health support services while working as a contractor, do they suddenly become a consultant? Does an ad agency creating new marketing approaches consult, or provide a service? What about someone engaged to fix a payroll system so that it works effectively?
When the Minister or the media or staff rail against consultants, we all have a mental picture of who they mean – people who charge an arm and a leg to create a confusing PowerPoint that gets rolled out a couple of times during a change management process.
But let’s not kid ourselves that complaining about consultants – or banning them – actually fixes anything. Consultants can bill differently to work as service providers, or even contracted staff or corporate partners. You can call them something different, sign a couple of alternative legal forms and ask them to bill differently. Your consultancy register will look amazingly small, but your core issues are likely to remain the same.
So if we can agree that consultants are just a name for the outsiders you probably don’t like, we can all move onto the real problem. The problems at the heart of the ‘consultancy’ issue are procurement, contract management and reporting transparency. Success for outside contractors is often poorly defined, or output-oriented rather than outcome-focused. Unfortunately, performance metrics for internal staff often suffer from the same issue.
But let’s start by getting the process right for external folks. If you want contractors (or service providers, or anyone you want to treat as an outsider to your fully-employed gang) to be outcome-focused and effective and you value transparent process, then you will also have to allow a light to be shone on all the internal decisions that impact on the contract delivery. If you don’t write a clear and strategic brief for the consultant, or manage them during the process, or provide clear feedback in a timely manner, or come up with realistic metrics that can be easily measured, or follow up for a report at the end of the project, then you run the risk of the consultancy being costly and far less effective than it would be. Doing this effectively and transparently shines a light just as much on the internal staff and decision makers as the external consultant, however.
So why outsource anything? Why use consultants? If you review what is needed to improve the sustainability and performance of institutions across the sector, and then look at skills gaps within those institutions, you are never going to find all the skills you need in-house. This is particularly so as compliance requirements and technological progression spirals.
Some things can – and should – be outsourced to save money for the institution, improve performance and better spend scarce student fees. However, this has become almost taboo, because it is conflated with finding excuses to sack existing staff, or used as an excuse to avoid any organisational change whatsoever.
To be fair, if transparent procurement and performance management and measurement were in place, some staff would be justified in feeling threatened about the future of their role. But in that case, there would at least be evidence-based cases for change, which could be opened up to a genuine dialogue process.
Unfortunately, double-speak, a lack of common understanding, communication failures and sweeping assumptions continue to cloud progress.
The tertiary sector is built on exclusive, heavily structured hierarchies which are often blighted by inadequate measures of what good really looks like in terms of performance and practice in a range of roles and functions. Furthermore, investment in higher education literacy – including clear two-way communication and genuinely inclusive consultation – has been patently inadequate, as anyone on the wrong side of a change management process will tell you.
You won’t win the argument or create new solutions by populist dichotomies of boss vs worker, saint vs consultant, market vs socialist idyll. Sure you’ll get plenty of likes from people who think just like you, who will like and share your LinkedIn post, and you’ll probably convince a few more in the community that the sector is out of touch; but you won’t change the mind of the other side, because simplistic dichotomies are a smokescreen for the real issues at hand.
If you want to contribute to and even lead change, identification of root causes and evidence-based solutions are going to make a much stronger case for change. It won’t always work of course, but it will have a much stronger chance of contributing to sustainable, progressive change.
It’s much harder, and the soundbites take more work. But it is also has a better chance of contributing to the change you are after.