SAMPLE

Ask most people what informed consent means and they’ll describe a hospital form, or maybe a psychology intake session: here’s what this involves, here’s what happens to what you tell me, sign here if you’re comfortable proceeding. It’s a formal concept with decades of ethical and legal weight behind it, and for good reason. Nobody should be examined, treated or diagnosed without understanding what that actually entails.

Step outside a clinical room and into an organisational one, and that entire structure tends to just disappear. A leadership team agrees to a diagnostic review. A group of staff get invited to a workshop. Nine candidates sit down for a selection interview. Somewhere, a contract was signed, a budget was approved, a sponsor said yes. But the actual people in the room, the ones being interviewed, observed, asked to fill out a survey or talk through their leadership style, usually have no equivalent moment where someone tells them plainly what they’re agreeing to.

That gap isn’t malicious. It’s structural. Organisational consulting doesn’t have the same regulatory forcing function that clinical work does, so there’s nothing external making anyone build consent into the process. But the absence of a rule doesn’t mean the ethical question disappears. The person answering questions honestly in a diagnostic interview is still trusting someone with something real: an observation about their team, a frustration about their manager, a pattern they’ve noticed and never said out loud. They deserve to know, before they say it, what happens to it next.

This is why I write a proper engagement guide for every project rather than relying on one general policy sitting on a website. A privacy policy tells you the floor: how information is generally handled, what the legal position is, who to contact if something’s wrong. That’s necessary, but it’s nowhere near specific enough to help an actual participant make an informed decision about what they’re walking into. A board effectiveness review needs to answer different questions than a cricket team’s selection process, and a coaching engagement funded by an employer needs to answer different questions again. What’s confidential here. What gets fed back, and in what form. Whether anything is attributed to a specific person. What happens if something sensitive comes up that isn’t really about the work. Whether saying yes to this is actually optional, and what it costs to say no.

None of that fits on a generic page, because none of it is generic. It changes with who’s in the room, what’s being asked of them, and what’s actually at stake for them personally in saying something true.

There’s a practical side to this too, not just an ethical one. People give better information when they understand the container they’re giving it in. Someone who isn’t sure whether their comment will end up quoted back to their boss will hedge, soften, or say nothing useful at all. An engagement guide that answers the real questions upfront isn’t just fairer. It’s usually what makes the diagnostic work worth doing in the first place.

Consent in this world was never going to look like a hospital form. But the underlying question is the same one it’s always been: does this person actually understand what they’re agreeing to before they agree to it. If the answer’s no, the fact that nobody legally required an answer doesn’t make the gap acceptable.