Radical transparency, ethics and integrity can't be a competitive edge. They're the price of entry for every firm, every consultant, every day.
Notes from our open CaféShot: two dozen consultants agreed that radical transparency, ethics and integrity aren't a competitive edge. They're the price of entry.
I walked into the EOLAS Solutions offices on Tuesday night with about half a voice. A winter cold had claimed the rest, and the irony was not lost on me. I spent weeks preparing a session built around the idea that it only ever takes one voice to break the spell of the bystander effect related to ethics and integrity in consulting, and mine was barely working.
I didn't need to worry. The room brought plenty of its own voices.
Around two dozen of us gathered in person and on Teams from around the country for something a little different: our monthly CaféShot Master Class, normally reserved for paid members, thrown open to everyone. Some topics are too important to keep behind a door, and ethics and integrity in consulting is one of them. A huge thank you to Pat and the EOLAS team for hosting us, feeding us, and wrangling the technology while I croaked into a microphone.
What followed was one of the liveliest conversations I've been part of in a while. People shared examples they had seen, felt and experienced; the small compromises, the optics games, the advice that sounds commercially sensible right up until you say it out loud. Nobody shied away from any of it, and there was nothing but passionate support for transparency, ethics and integrity in consulting. In a session built on the bystander effect, there wasn't a bystander in the room or online.
Out of all that energy came the message of the night, and it deserves to be voiced out loud.
Radical transparency, ethics and integrity can't be a competitive edge. They're the price of entry.....for every firm, every consultant, every day
If a firm can win work by promising honesty, transparency and integrity, I feel we are admitting the default is something else. Clients shouldn't have to shop for candour. It should be the floor we all stand on for every firm, every practitioner, every proposal, every price, every timesheet, every status report, every deliverable… everything a consultant and consulting firm does. That is how our sector needs to earn back a reputation, all of us, together.
One suggestion from the room deserves its own headline: that our industry needs a code of conduct. Great idea. A genuine code of conduct, with expectations we hold each other to. I'll pick up that thread in a future article. I'd love your views on what it should include?
Every single voice on Tuesday night was passionate and generous and (already) committed to ethical practice, to transparency, to being a good corporate and individual citizen. Some might say that it was preaching to the choir. I say every movement starts with a choir. The first voices make it easier for the second, and the second make it easier for a sector.
My own voice will be back in a few days. If Tuesday night is anything to go by, the profession's voice will be back too, strong, and carrying radical transparency, ethics and integrity with it.
Thank you to everyone who came, spoke up, made their own personal commitment, and stayed late.
