[warner25]

I've mostly dealt with RAND consultants in the military / government. They were brought in to help answer specific questions about what we should do and how, presumably by writing up and delivering a report. These weren't questions that the staff couldn't handle itself, but nobody on staff had the time to focus on answering these questions (by digging deep and doing research, not just expressing a gut opinion) given their other duties and responsibilities. So the RAND people basically augmented the staff.

I guess they have the advantage of experience doing these things over and over again for similar organizations. It's also an outside perspective, which has both advantages and disadvantages. In the conversations that I was invited into, we spent most of our time just explaining things that any mid-level member of the organization would know, trying to get the RAND people up-to-speed, so that seemed wasteful. But the military is a huge bureaucracy dominated by people who've climbed up the ranks for 30-40 years, so there isn't a lot of fresh outside thinking, and it seems like it could be valuable to inject some.