In almost six years of writing these Topics we have probably enthused about consultation without acknowledging that there are times when the best advice is, Don’t do it!

Some of these are pretty obvious. If you recently asked people their views but nothing much happened, it’s a waste of time to repeat the exercise. Maybe it was someone else; another agency perhaps, possibly with a different agenda, but still with access to your customers or stakeholders. Even if it kept the resulting data to itself when this could have been shared … tough! Don’t duplicate!