No one follows free advice

Free advice is everywhere but it is rarely followed.

In my professional experience, decision makers ignore free advice. I can present the best ideas in the world but if the audience has neither requested nor paid for my analysis then they will ignore it.

Throughout my career I have presented, and I have seen colleagues present, solutions on how to improve processes, products and find new markets but these are rarely followed by decision makers. There are many reasons why I and my colleagues were not listened too –
• The decision maker views it as their job to come up with ideas
• The ideas threaten a decision maker’s role and status in the company
• The ideas threaten a department’s role and status in the company
• If processes are complex and hard to replicate, then the people who perform them have value and cannot be removed
• The idea is expensive to implement
• The department or organisation is not yet ready for such a significant cultural or technological change
• The ideas are not that good!

Before an idea can be listened to and accepted the audience must be willing to hear it. This means that unsolicited guidance will not result in the desired change.

When a business wants to change or is in trouble the decision makers normally bring in outside help to review the business and to suggest ways it can be improved. This may be because of a number of reasons such as, they do not trust themselves or their staff to perform an honest assessment of the business and to come up with new ideas, they believe that their own staff lack the skills to perform the assessment or they want to spread the blame if something goes wrong. As the decision makers are now willing to listen, they need someone they want to listen too. Enter consultants. Consultants are experts in assessing companies and providing ideas. In my experience, when consultants are bought in to assess a company and its opportunities, they find the solutions map for the future of the company from the employees themselves. Then the consultants perform the analysis of the employees’ ideas while adding supporting data and analysis to back up the employees’ ideas. This is then presented to the decision makers as something new and they are amazed and impressed by it. So, the company has paid thousands or millions of euros for ideas that they already owned as they came from their employees. However, before the idea was free, and they were not willing or ready to listen. Now through the act of hiring the consultancy they are willing to listen. This is because free advice is not appreciated.

Not only does the audience have to be ready to hear ideas they need to not to be afraid of them. I believe that employees’ ideas are ignored by decision makers due to fear. I have seen the views of employees being ignored and then decision makers bring in external consultants to tell them what their employees have been telling them for years. I believe that this is because decision makers are afraid. Because if an employee tells a decision maker to do X or change Y then there is a risk as the choice to perform the change is the responsibility of the decision maker. So, the decision maker sees ideas from employees as a threat to their career and status. However, if the decision maker manager pays an external consultancy and they tell the decision maker to do X or change Y then they will make the changes. This is because the risk to the decision maker ‘s career and status is minimal as they have the excuse that they only did what the consultants told them to do and that this advice was paid for. The external consultancy adds to the status and importance of the decision maker as it communicates to the company that this person is so important that they can spend thousands or millions of euros of the company’s money.