When management consulting is mentioned, the layman (and this includes practically all scientists) first thinks of Applied Science.
It may be debatable whether more business management, financial science, social psychology or even sociological approaches are to be taken as a basis. This may depend on the problems of the individual case, and in the case of complex problems touching several disciplines, "interdisciplinary" orientations are then considered advisable.
In all these disciplines, the basis of Consulting is a specific competence that results from empirically proven generalizations. One knows statistically secured probabilities and transfers them to the individual case, although they say nothing for the individual case. One commits concealed errors and compensates this by detailed investigations at the object, which are evaluated in the rare case then also for control and correction of the scientific hypothesis.
In this model of the consultant-company relationship, there are no deep-seated communication problems. Consultants may, for whatever reason, be inclined to present their knowledge as assured and their proposals as carefully crafted, outstripping reality in ways that cannot, in turn, be co-communicated. As with applied research in general, they too are operators and victims of a "rhetoric of application."
They, especially when active for economic or other reasons, thus become victims of the difficulty of talking about this relationship in a communicative relationship. (As is well known, the Palo Alto School saw and sees this problem as an occasion for paradoxical communication). However, if one trusts the science application concept, there are no fundamental difficulties in this, but at most occasions for disturbances and derailments of communication. If one trusts the science application concept, one trusts the corresponding communication; after all, what would science be if it could not be communicated?
For a long time, the difficulties that have arisen in practice have been written off as "Complexity". Since a famous essay by Warren Weaver, from which a whole literature has emerged in the meantime2 , one knows that there are no adequate scientific procedures and findings for large and complex systems (and these are business enterprises in any case); because science has methods only for systems which are small enough to be described with few variables, or for large but uniform quantities with which one can work statistically. In the face of this research bottleneck, however, there remained only the advice to try anyway, and to gradually expand scientific competence in knowledge of this problem of complexity. Thereby it could be a guideline of complexity reduction to be guided by the specifics of the individual case and to avoid generalizations. As a result, within management consulting firms "experience" is cultivated, which is accumulated in a large number of individual projects. And it becomes a problem how these experiences can be recorded, made known and discussed within the consulting group, as it were in seclusion and outside of the current business. But this only leads back again to the problem of induction, to the problem of inadmissible generalizations, and gives a questionable preponderance to the narratives and the assertive "examples from practice".
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