Consultants' Edge: Breaking the Culture of Silence

By avoiding a culture of silence and freeing employees from the bureaucratic blame‑storm, consultants demonstrate how to discover and solve root causes.

Chief Information Officers often make mistakes when working with consultants; three were highlighted in a previous article, and a fourth—failing to leverage the consultant’s advantage—can be even more serious.

A consulting team discovered that an IT organization’s practices violated basic financial compliance, exposing the company to civil and criminal liability.

When the team presented their concerns to senior management, the executives dismissed them, insisting their books were clean, and later the company restated billions on its balance sheet.

The consultants left after six weeks, having identified a major financial practice issue that the CFO ignored.

Consultants' Advantage: Breaking the Culture of Silence

External consultants listen to many voices and promise anonymity throughout their process.

In return, employees feel relieved and finally able to discuss concerns with trusted people.

This secret advantage—re‑creating an open internal culture—is harder than it seems.

Imagine you are an individual contributor who discovers a serious problem, such as accumulating balance‑sheet misstatements. You report it to your manager, who lacks authority and resources, and must either bury the issue or pass it up the chain.

The problem may eventually reach a manager with budget and authority, but that manager can become another scapegoat if the issue becomes visible during a blame‑storm.

When root causes are quietly fixable, the accumulated damage—like repeated inaccurate balance‑sheet restatements—cannot stay hidden from management’s radar.

Blame Storms: The Bureaucratic Big Problem

The common “solution” called the "knife" involves firing or disciplining everyone directly below the manager at the top of the problem tree, creating a political buffer.

This buffer protects those who take responsibility, allowing them to fix issues without endangering themselves.

Another less popular solution is whistleblowing, which is unpopular among individual contributors because it can lead to retaliation and offers little career benefit.

Because its impact is often negligible, employees hesitate to take this route, and management is even less likely to encourage it.

Solution? Cultural Change

If an organization is led by a braver leadership team, real change comes from shifting culture at every management level.

The shift means that when something goes wrong, everyone—from the board down—views the root cause as systemic rather than blaming a single person.

In the client’s balance‑sheet disaster, the root cause was that everyone acted according to the circumstances they faced.

Severe delays in system implementation, combined with a strategic decision to freeze legacy systems, led to a cascade of temporary fixes (PTFs) that were permanent, untested, and accumulated month after month.

Result: month‑end closed without anyone having to tell the new system’s initiators about the risks of PTFs, and no one admitting that freezing the legacy system was a poor decision.

Everyone in finance and IT knew the house of cards and tried to warn management, but the warnings were ignored.

What Should a CIO Do?

Bad news does not improve with age. If a problem stems from a bad system, employees can raise it while it is still minor and embarrassing, prompting the organization to acknowledge and fix it.

If the problem is caused by poor personnel, it can become a humiliating money pit.

Alternatively, hire consultants every few years to address these issues, but do not ask them to reveal their sources.

Even when resources sit on your payroll, they remain a consultant’s advantage.