With Truth Comes Great Responsibility 

Consultancy has many connotations, not all of them positive. There are those who are stellar and harnessed by companies seeking thought leadership or brand association. There are those for whom consultancy is a willing pair of hands for that specialist, business critical project, or transformation programme. The third category is where we find most of our consultancy assignments, and it’s working to find lasting fixes to deep-seated problems. 

At the point we’re bought in, it tends to be when the pot is boiling over, with many eyes on it and an immediate resolution is required. Aletheia’s methods have therefore been designed to respond to this urgency.  

Our umbrella term for this phase is called ‘Discovery’. This term in itself can cause apprehension and concern with clients interpreting this as a “drains up”; activities with an inherently critical connotation. For us, this foundational stage of our work is finely honed with the following characteristics: 

• Situating the problem.

Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast Thinking Slow is analogous. Fast work filters out the noise. Slow work, delivered through interviews, desktop work and workshops, quickly pinpoints symptom or cause. Our clients determine the time available for this stage. We encourage an open, honest and participative process designed to connect us into different parts of the business for contextualisation. 

• Diagnosis. 

Our methodology, drawn from Carl Jung’s Thinking – Feeling – Sensing – Intuiting paradigm, has two elements to it. The first is reductive; breaking the problem down into its component parts and is best suited to technical problems. The second, borne of systems thinking, focuses on relationships between the components and is best suited to people and process-related problems. Invariably, we find our consulting assignments bridge both. The consultant synthesises both approaches to quickly get to the truth of the matter.   

• Building trust. 

For some, raw truth is neither wanted nor welcome. Our Discovery process operates at different altitudes. The assignment operates at ground level, but trust is earnt at the top. Our processes are scoped to earn the trust of the client by understanding the challenges they face and then determining their personality and organisational culture to ensure delivery in a way that doesn’t alienate or create defensive behaviour. Truth needs to be told in a way that optimises its reception. 

• Truth telling. 

This process of explanation and simplification allows people to coalesce around a unifying narrative – “so that’s what we mean”. This identification in itself has value. Simplification can be unhelpfully reductive, and so contextualisation is crucial to frame the narrative and build trust in the statements being made.    

And as we’ve found at Aletheia, delivering the truth isn’t just “here’s the problem” and nor is there is just one version of the truth. What we consider to be the truth may in fact be perceived in a different way by the client. This stage is one of honest co-creation to ‘co-critique’ and brief-in emerging solutions or recommendations. 

Truth telling is a responsibility. In being asked to look at these problems or find solutions, invariably to deep-seated problems, the role of the consultant is not only to show the pathway that caused the problem, but also to show the pathway through the problem. Our advice, as insiders, is rooted in deliverable advice which offers immediate change, the conditions needed for the structural fixes that need to be addressed and increasingly, delivery of that patient change as well.