There's a reason hospital staff wear white coats.
It turns out that people wearing white coats are perceived as significantly more authoritative and trustworthy than those in casual clothing.
The white coat doesn't just influence how you feel about yourself. It changes how others treat you.
Consider Milgram's famous obedience experiments. People were told to give increasingly painful electric shocks to someone answering questions wrong. That someone was actually an actor pretending to be in pain. Even when they heard the screaming, most people kept going. All because an authority figure told them to. It showed how much power someone in charge can have over what we do.
Here's the kicker though. That someone in charge had no "real" authority. But they looked the part. When instructions came from someone in a white coat, obedience levels were 65%. When the same instructions came from someone in plain clothes, obedience dropped to 20%. The white coat alone swung the needle that far.
This plays out constantly in product teams.
Someone on your team (maybe you?) champions accessibility and pushes for much-needed changes. They only get a polite nod. It goes into the backlog to die.
A consultant from outside comes in, says the exact same damn thing and suddenly people pay attention.
Why?
The consultant has the "white coat." They've got credentials. They've got the visual authority that makes people take them seriously.
The internal person has been making the same arguments for months. They have the expertise. They have the knowledge. But they don't have the "white coat."
Why should it matter?
A good idea is a good idea.
But our brains aren't wired that way. We look at the appearance of authority and see actual authority. We assume that if someone looks like they know what they're doing, they probably do.
So organisations keep hiring consultants to say things their own staff already knows. They pay external rates for internal knowledge. And the people who've been doing the work all along watch from the sidelines.
The white coat wins every time.