Comment by DanielHB

> speak to the staff, collate what they have to say, and launder it back to the boss

My wife is a management consultant and this is _exactly_ what she does in half of her projects. But it is a bit more sinister than that, the management consultant feed the info back to the _top_ bosses bypassing the middle-management hellscape.

For example, she did a project for a big bank where she interviewed 70 or so people her main output was a streamlined virtual machine requisition flow (which included merging a couple of teams together and configuring the ticketing system they already had). It used to take devs 6 months to get a VM. I bet the devs where yelling at their middle managers to sort it out, but their managers didn't have or want to actually bring it up with upper management with a plan on how to do it.

I joke that companies could just do that internally, have some people interviewing the leaf nodes in the org to find out top-down initiatives to help work get done, but companies simply don't do this.