How to talk crap and get paid for it

I'm sure I'm not the only person who works for a large firm or government body that has over excessive use of consultants who frequently bedazzle us with their ability to tell us things we already know but in a language we don't understand.

Having to frequently put up with some of the utter tosh consultants come up with, usually written in consultancy speak in an attempt to hide how weak their knowledge or understanding of the problem they're trying to fix actually is I have now compiled a brief insight into my current pet hate consultancy terms to help you beat them at their own game.

Deep Dive
We haven't a clue whats going on so we'll visit a site with as many of the people who have hired us, say nothing and later just repeat what they tell us the problem is.

Socialise The Idea
We've written a paper that we known is total and utter pish so we'll send it out to as many of the people who have hired us and just use the comments they give us which will hopefully also contain the solution to the problem they hired us to solve in the first place.

Drains Up
The solution we provided last time was a total arse up and we haven't a clue how to solve this so we'll have a meeting with as many of the people who have hired us, let them take the blame and with a bit of luck they will provide us with a decent solution. Later if that doesn't work we will just say we were under direction to implement their solution and had nothing to do with the secondary arse up.

As you can see a clear pattern is forming in the client / consultant relationship, the cunning consultant however knows about this chink in their armour and has developed a tactical counterstrike weapon.........the Powerpoint presentation.

What any consultant worth their salt will do to detract attention from the fact they're just regurgitating what their client has already told them is to completely repackage the information in flashy, branded PowerPoint presentations with excessive use of various types of charts.

A particular favourite is the multi format chart using both lines and bars, the more lines the better, to camouflage the fact what you're looking at is actually their profit and growth margins over the last financial year creamed off from your company and has bugger all to to with any performance improvement from the solutions they have provided.

So never be afraid when in meetings with consultants to stand up and tell them to:

1. Speak in plain English.
2. Explain how they derived their findings.

Doing so will immediately get them on the back foot and sort out the bluffing consultants from the decent ones who may just be able to actually work for your money.