Christmas for consultants is a time of desperate work and deadlines. Even non-Christian consultants suffer from the vagaries of this holiday, so it is legitimate to call it what it is – Christmas. No one has ever heard the words, “the client absolutely needs this report before Kwanza!

While other people are thinking about gifts and family dinners, stealing time away from work to catch up on personal matters, consultants are trying to meet Christmas deadlines. At least those of us with public sector or voluntary sector clients endure this seasonal rush, in part because of reporting deadlines set by government funders. Somewhere up the funding food chain, there is a bureaucrat sleeping soundly because of the reports stacked on his desk awaiting his or her attention in January. Hardly visions of sugarplums, but who would begrudge noble civil servants the rest they need?

It’s not like summer, when for all practical purposes, decision-makers acknowledge an inability to get much done. There is a basic consensus that discretionary consulting work is impractical during the long days and short weeks of July and August.

There is no such consensus about December even though, depending on the school schedule and the days on which Christmas and New Years fall, many offices shut down for nearly two weeks. Unlike the summer doldrums when work slows down, this is a virtually complete productivity vacuum in which Canadians consume – merchandise, poultry, bonhomie, and non-sacramental wine – but make no net contribution to GDP. These are good times for everyone except shop clerks, bartenders, and consultants.

As usual, I will start Christmas shopping on the 23rd and will surprise my family with an assortment of periodicals, pharmaceuticals, and prophylactics from the nearest Shoppers Drugmart. It’s open until midnight just for consultants who won’t get a break until then. After all, Christmas is a time for giving, so Christmas is really all about timing, and timing for consultants is all about deadlines. Ho, ho, ho….

There’s nothing worse than a metaphor gone rogue. We’ve been doing a lot of work on business incubation lately, and it’s amazing how much liberty is taken with that idea. The idea of hatching new businesses like fertilized eggs entered business jargon in 1959 when Joseph Mancuso created the Batavia Industrial Centre in Batavia, New York.

Perhaps the strength of the metaphor is the reason why it is so carelessly applied to every kind of support available to business startups today. However it is clear that incubators are places, structured and programmed environments in which promising entrepreneurial talent and ideas are refined, tested, capitalized, and put out into the marketplace.

A seminar on business planning in a community centre is not incubation. Even if the seminar is part of a complete business startup curriculum, delivered by recognized experts, those seminars or workshops in their aggregate are still not providing business incubation,, and the provider is not an incubator. This practice is analogous to taking your fertilized eggs, rolling them all out on a carpet, and hoping that no one walks in the door and crushes them before they start to hatch. Whatever the result, it’s not as good a strategy as putting them safely together in an incubator and closing the lid.

Incubation happens in incubators, it’s as simple as that. If this wasn’t a clear distinction, incubators couldn’t claim to produce an 87% survival rate among graduate companies, compared to 44% among unincubated companies. If “incubator” didn’t mean anything particular, the claim simply couldn’t be made.

I was in New York looking at NYU Polytechnic’s Varick Street incubator a few weeks ago. It is an utterly pragmatic response to the need of small businesses that need and deserve a better than even chance at success. The unadorned office is full of bright young people trying to make things happen, availing themselves of more experienced practitioners, and learning from each other’s mistakes. There should be no mystery about how to create these environments, nor confusion about why they are more valuable than isolated business training opportunities.

My 12 year-old dog has a less reliable bladder than when he was younger, so I thought I might put some newspaper down for him while I’m at work during the day. So I bought a hard copy of the Saturday Globe and Mail, which I would normally read online or scan over coffee at Dark Horse.

I realize that this isn’t the kind of reader endorsement that publisher, Philip Crawley, might wish for. Still, today’s paper seemed in some ways as if it was written especially for me.

First, there was John Barber’s article about the city’s insane tolerance of injury and death among cyclists and pedestrians. Finally there is another grown-up willing to ignore received wisdom and admit that he doesn’t wear a helmet. I don’t wear one either. It is simplistic and unfair to tell the victims in a collision that they should have armoured themselves. If harm reduction were sufficient to impose safety measures like bicycle helmets, we’d all be wearing helmets in cars too, where heads injuries are among the most common injuries. Our children would wear helmets all the time. As a safety measure, it’s punitive, and misdirected. If we’re serious about not killing people on bicycles, we’ll take more effective measures, like segregating lanes and enforcing the existing rules.

Second, there was news about the value of the Zoo for research into animal and habitat conservation. Of course it isn’t really news. It only seems like news now that the Zoo is up for sale. Ten years ago, in anticipation of this day, NetGain advised the Zoo to trade on its higher purpose instead of marketing itself like an amusement park, at great public expense. The Board adopted the recommendation but permitted staff to take the opposite direction, building a jeep simulation ride and a water park instead. Somewhere along the way, they saw fit to dismiss it’s non-profit fund raising wing as well. Julia Dow blogged scathingly about this when she was with NetGain a few years ago, but nothing has changed except the organization’s degree of desperation. Now that it’s too late, the Zoo is finally making news about its good works.(http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/globe-to/inside-torontos-hidden-zoo/article2234337/).

Third, Marcus Gee writes about how much Canadians dislike Toronto. When I first returned from Vancouver after postgraduate studies at UBC, I often told the astonishing story of being called a “G.U.,” by a woman at a neighbourhood bar in Kitsilano. I didn’t understand at first. When after hearing it a couple of times I asked about it, I learned that it was an acronym for, “geographic undesirable.” However I stopped telling the story because friends thought I was exaggerating. Maybe it seemed incredible because it’s hard to imagine a Torontonian inventing such a elaborate insult. After all these years, Gee corroborates the phenomenon. Unless of course these were isolated instances and both Gee and I were despicable representatives of Toronto.(http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/marcus-gee/get-over-your-toronto-complex-canada/article2234424/).

Finally, I thought of a friend who suffered a neck injury in a cycling accident (he was wearing a helmet and obeying the law) and is now confined to a wheelchair. I don’t know if this is news either, but the Globe reports that our health system isn’t doing enough for people with spinal cord injuries after the initial trauma has been treated. My friend was considered statistically unlikely to recover much function, so he received more occupational therapy than actual rehabilitation, despite evident progress during his allotted time in a rehabilitation centre. The challenge of finding adequate treatment and therapy was exacerbated by his return to a northern Ontario city where the blanket coverage of OHIP services is very, very thin.(http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/medicares-no-match-for-catastrophic-injury/article2234387/).

All this news made me feel curiously relevant, but because it was all bad news, it’s hard to enjoy that feeling. Too bad the papers missed my good news last Wednesday when I encountered Margaret Atwood walking through China Town and later returned to my Regent Park apartment to discover that a fleet of Bixies had been installed adjacent to the building.

Maybe we need to write our own good news before the bad news catches up with us. Of course that kind of thinking is what makes it possible to ignore things like carnage on the roads, and zoos on the chopping block, until it’s too late. Thank my old dog’s bladder for keeping me up to date.

After three years of effort and investment by Centennial College, its bid to redevelop the former Guild Inn in Scarborough is likely at an end. In a meeting at City Hall, the Government Management Committee will probably recommend that the City pursue a diminished different development concept with a new set of proponents. Sadly this redirection will result in a far less beneficial outcome for the community, which has been pressuring the City for restoration and redevelopment of the former hotel site for more than a decade.

The merits of this specific proposal and the City’s alternatives are less interesting than the general pattern I’ve observed in the way public-private partnerships fail. Ignore the splutterings from 3-P proponents; they almost always fail, whether that failure is measured in suboptimal results or, as in the case of Centennial College, in the rejection/withdrawal of the proposal, or in the number of good ideas that are never proposed because the process is so frustrating. During this period of public sector austerity, promised by all three levels of government, it’s about time we stopped using the prospects of 3-P’s as rhetorical candy whenever the treasury can’t underwrite the public sector’s grand schemes.

Furthermore, these schemes aren’t so grand. The City’s parks, for example, are struggling with a growing backlog of unfunded capital needs that will require hundreds of millions of dollars to clear. At Guild Inn Park, Centennial College was attempting to bring about $6 million in private sector dollars to fix and reuse an important heritage building. Lacking the funds to look after its own asset, the City will likely bulldoze it and plant grass, shifting funds from other park priorities to pay for the demolition, disposal, and landscaping costs. Multiply these scenarios across the City’s massive real estate, heritage, parks, transit, housing, and recreation portfolios, and it becomes glaringly obvious that this a bad moment in history to be ignoring the reasons why so many 3-P proposals end in futility.

I think it’s a structural problem in the relationships within which 3-P’s are negotiated. The public and private sector positions are necessarily opposed, as both sides try to extract maximum value for their stakeholders. The private sector cares little for the public interest, and the public servants have little concern for the profitability of the venture for the private sector investor. Both sides are held accountable for the risks and costs of the deal, but neither side is accountable for the lost opportunity when negotiations falter.

The inherent merits of a great idea aren’t enough to survive the adversarial behaviour of the entrepreneurs and bureaucrats assigned to make these deals work. A third party needs to mediate the public and private interest, and be accountable to both sides for the survival of the proposal to a successful conclusion. It’s silly to imagine that the success rate and quality of 3-P proposals will improve otherwise. The public and private sector have to be at the table, but unless someone is advocating for the deal itself, maintaining a focus on the mutual benefits, and facilitating negotiations with understanding and respect for both parties, most of these proposals are doomed, like the Guild Inn.

The business of cultural planning and policy makes you look at ordinary things in a peculiar way. I was reminded of this on my ride into the office today, and it made me give my head a shake.

I was cutting through Grange Park, and as I entered the eastern gate I saw a group of elderly Chinese people performing what looked to me like accelerated Tai Chi moves on the pavement where the paths intersect in the centre.

Grange Park is a little green square, hemmed in by self-conscious symbols of Toronto’s heritage and big-C culture. On the north edge is the Georgian splendor of Grange House, a carefully maintained but uninviting architectural artifact. Glowering above it is the blue metallic monolith created by Frank Gehry for the Art Gallery of Ontario, with a winding stainless steel staircase protruding like intestine from a herniated abdomen. It is shadowed from the east by the outrageous Alsop-designed Ontario College of Art and Design, perched on crayon-shaped piers. Beverley Street to the west delineates the eastern boundary of Chinatown, and to the south, straight down John Street, stands the City’s petrified erection, the CN Tower.

From this description, you can tell that I experience the City in a different way than most people. For some reason, I expect the users of Grange Park to evince the character what I see surrounding it; fine art patrons, heritage buffs, art and design students, business people, or Chinese seniors engaged in culturally contextualized activities, like Tai Chi.

Instead, as I got closer, I heard tinny country music on a portable stereo, and realized that the group was trying to learn line dancing. They were all out of step, laughing and bumping into each other, clapping in hopeless syncopation at the end of each sequence, and generally enjoying the failed attempt at synchronization.

They made me smile the rest of the way to the office, and I’m smiling still as I recount it now. Our enjoyment of life in this city has less to do with what we design and build than with the little delights that arise unexpectedly.

Personal and professional lives can be difficult to separate in the consulting world, especially when you have clients who serve society in ways we all care about.  I know a consultant in New York who is working for a multinational consulting firm on ways to improve the efficiency of processing second mortgages for a US bank.  Part of her belongs in an Occupy Wall Street encampment denouncing the enterprise that sustains her, but this gets repressed and the conflict of values becomes internalized.  I remind myself of this whenever a non-profit client frustrates me, because at the very least I can usually get behind my client’s mandate.

Unlike the commercial sector, where corporate values are sometimes in conflict with shareholder values, non-profit workers are much more clearly aligned with their organization’s values.  It’s true.  If you think that waterboarding should be an Olympic demonstration event, you’re unlike to find employment with Amnesty International.  There are very few people at the Canadian Opera Company who despise the art form (unlike a character from In the Loop, nicknamed, the angriest Scotsman in England, who rants, “You only listen to it because it’s unfashionable to wear embroidered caps saying, ‘I went to private school!’  It’s nothing but f**king vowels!”).

So professionals among my clients tend to identify more personally with their organizations than do their counterparts in commercial enterprise.  If that’s true, and if organizations are indeed comprised of individuals acting in concert, then it’s understandable that personal and professional behaviours can be confused, and that this can be frustrating to outside consultants like me.

An example would be the tendency of some people to avoid saying what they really want or need out of fear that their desire will be ridiculed or rejected, or fear that if they try and fail, they’ll be left with nothing, not even their unrealized dream.  We all do it in some aspect of our lives; avoid setting goals or diminish our true desires because they’re too daunting.

The alternative is to risk success over and over again, while learning to live with the prospect of failure.  The only way failure is certain is if the real goal, the heartfelt ambition, is never expressed or actively pursued.  If you can’t even say it, it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever do it.

When this behaviour manifests itself in professional life, it has the same effect on outcomes.  It’s very hard to get clients to declare what they really want to accomplish because their ambitions become constrained by what appears possible.  Objectives are limited to incremental gains when real breakthroughs might have been possible.  If only people could speak the dream that is in their hearts, unexpected possibilities might be discovered.

Consultants can’t perform magic.  We can’t conjure up capacity and resources where none exist.  But neither can we invent strategies to achieve goals that no one dares to speak.  Too much of our time is spent studying and fixing little things when everyone knows on some level that there are bigger things to be done.