The Ethics of Risk Assessment

[Wes Bucey]

If would-be clients are frightened by reality, that's hardly the would-be consultant's fault. We should be able to assume that a consultant knows things that his clients don't know or there would probably be no need for a consultant. By the same token, one would think that an experienced consultant would understand the difference between honest disclosure of observations and gratuitous hyperbole.

You are correct insofar as clients who are looking at relatively narrow consulting requirements. The game changes quite a bit when dealing with clients in the process of major makeovers under a lot of pressure. My practice is concentrated to those clients where the
"organization should be in self-perceived "crisis" due to pressure from time, regulators, creditors, or customers."

The kind of referrals I get are primarily from attorneys, accountants, investment banks, and creditors about their troubled clients, rarely from companies I've helped. Usually those targets are in crisis BECAUSE the top managers had a blind spot about some aspect of reality. If I've done my job correctly, those consulting clients should not be encountering and interacting with the organizations in crisis - they should be avoiding them.

In short, I'm the consultant who DOES deal with the FUBAR clients which most consultants should avoid. I guess I must have a little masochistic streak which drives me to take on very challenging assignments. Even so, I still can recognize early on when the situation is one beyond my ability to fix, primarily because of the mind set of a principal owner or top manager. In such cases, I'm usually back on the job helping to pick up the pieces after the owner or manager has been ousted in a foreclosure or forced sale.

 

[Jim Wynne]

There is a lot of buzz about cyber attacks, but often the most devastating attack to documents and records can walk in the front door with a warrant and the resultant disruption can be very costly and often uncompensated by insurance. What are the ethics of a consultant scaring the pants off a client who thinks he's only signing up to "modernize" a document management system?

If would-be clients are frightened by reality, that's hardly the would-be consultant's fault. We should be able to assume that a consultant knows things that his clients don't know or there would probably be no need for a consultant. By the same token, one would think that an experienced consultant would understand the difference between honest disclosure of observations and gratuitous hyperbole.

You are correct insofar as clients who are looking at relatively narrow consulting requirements. The game changes quite a bit when dealing with clients in the process of major makeovers under a lot of pressure. My practice is concentrated to those clients where the
"organization should be in self-perceived "crisis" due to pressure from time, regulators, creditors, or customers." <snip>

You went from "...only signing up to 'modernize' a document management system..." to "...dealing with clients in the process of major makeovers..." which I assume would entail a great deal more than updating a document management system.

 

[Marc]

The problem with doing a criminal search like that is there are typically many people with the same name.

As a caution, this whole thread is suspect to me.

 

[immaya08]

I have been in the consulting business for over 26 years and I found my Clients overall very receptive. I have never encountered the issues that were described in Wes' posts. Something must be OK because 85% of my business is by referral.

if I may, consulting service means not complicating things - for customers.