One day a group of consultants appeared at our shop. Equipped with clipboards and stop watches (it was 1974), they observed, timed, made notes. They must have been “real” industrial engineers. My role at the time being fresh from university included production/inventory control plus anything else required.
They left. A few bench assembly stations were rearranged. I assume they picked up a nice check. I thought, I might be new, but what they did was far from earth-shaking.
I recently picked up Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes, to leaf through. This aphorism caught my attention: “A mathematician starts with a problem and creates a solution; a consultant starts by offering a ‘solution’ and creates a problem.”
We might poke fun at consultants (often rightly so). More to the point—how does this apply to our problem solving? How often do we begin at the end?
