Page 10 - PGL Environmental Consultants

make sure our clients understand the problem well understand that information.

enough to give us good instruction,” says Gaherty.

“We’re in a position a lot of the time where we have In some cases, it may be comparatively rare to have
to explain something to someone where they don’t a manager with significant post-graduate training

understand it and they want to. Some people like to in science, and the issues PGL needs to explain to
have consultants — where they just hire an expert them are often unusually complex and multifaceted,

and they don’t need to know — but we tend to work Gaherty says. “And they want to know the person

best with people who actually care about what we’re explaining it.”
doing and want to be able to give us instructions and

understand why we’re doing what we’re doing. So one While it continues to forge ahead, PGL Environmental
of the most difficult things we have to explain is the Consultants Ltd. would like to remain a relatively

completely Byzantine regulations that we deal with, modest-sized firm. Gaherty cites an observation from

as well as some of the technical stuff that we have to behavioural psychology: the largest group of people
deal with, and that’s both verbally and in writing.” you can truly know is somewhere around 200 people.

The communication also involves breaking down “One of the key problems in consulting is knowing
complex data so a more general audience can what you know, so we decided we don’t want to

PGL Employees at their corporate retreat in Whistler, hiking a glacier (Photo Credit – PGL)

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