I have never considered the origin and evolution of the culture of my workplace, not even the one that I created as a small business upstart.  I guess I just accepted that ‘it’ is done this way because that’s how ‘it’ has always been done.  In the case of my consulting firm, it was a spin off of another firm and their culture.  While we did create our own artifacts and had our own espoused values (that were designed to be counter culture to our parent firm, but weren’t really), there were very few assumptions I would call our very own. In retrospect, I can see that it was these few assumptions, however, that were actually the ones that caused my increasing dissatisfaction in my work when faced with economic difficulty – because they weren’t aligned with my value system.  Schein’s chapters on how culture emerges in Organizational Culture and Leadership shed an interesting light on not only the role of the founder and leader, but the role of every member of the organization along the way.

Of all the primary embedding mechanisms Schein Schein points to, ‘how leaders recruit, select, promote, and excommunicate’  was most intriguing to me.  Having recently gone through a rather arduous interview and hiring process, I considered why I hired from a new perspective.  Schein says, “One of the subtlest yet most potent ways through which leader assumptions get embedded and perpetuated is the process of selecting new members… Founders and leaders tend to find attractive those candidates who resemble present members in style, assumptions, values and beliefs.” Was I hired, then, because I resemble other members on the team or because I do not?  From what I’ve been able to discern perhaps a little bit of both.

There were seven coworkers involved in each of three interviews I had for this position.  The first was a phone interview, the second a face to face where I was asked to conduct a presentation, the third a Skype in which I had to suggest changes to a learning module that would integrate technology.  The fact that the ‘leader’ involved all of my soon to be colleagues would seem to say something about her values and beliefs.  What did they learn about me in the process? Were they looking for innovation and change or confirmation and consistency?  Did they realize they were responding to culture?

What if you would like to hire for innovation and change?  From what I’ve read, this is where wheat Schein calls ‘the reinforcement mechanisms’ come into play – systems and procedures, rituals of the organization, space, formal statements, etc.   I read several articles on this topic that indicate if you want to bring in innovation, you have to reflect innovation – in the job descriptions, in the screening process, in the interview questions and process itself, on the website.  In other words, you have to both externally and internally prove an ‘innovative culture’ to the candidate.  By this definition, it appeared that by giving me several tasks to perform and creative ways to demonstrate my skills and knowledge, the team was seeking innovation.  You always want to think that, at least, when you are job seeking.  Creating an innovative culture, the ‘gurus’ on the videos say, “has to come from the top down.”   They also say that you can bring in the right person, but that innovative implementation – “going to market” with the innovation is much, much harder.  I believe that is because of the inconsistency between the embedding mechanisms and the reinforcement mechanisms.  Schein says these work to create a positive culture by being consistent.  I can find my answer to why I was hired, so he says, in observing leader behaviors.

I know what I would like the answer to be.  Does it have to be all or nothing?  One article suggested that innovation can occur ‘a bit at a time’ – after you do enough the big ideas occur.  Steven Johnson, in this creative video – Where Good Ideas Come From  - says that good ideas are “where hunches collide.”  Perhaps culture shifts, little by little, with each collision over time.

Can a slow shift in embedded mechanisms help to shape a culture in new ways?  Can I shape culture in this way?  It seems when we want to create a new or different culture we start by ‘bringing in the reinforcements,’  forcing change to procedures, and structures, and rituals, and space.  These are the amateurs.  The professionals focus on the thinking, feeling and behaving – and little collisions over time.

“If, on occasion, the knowledge brought by science leads to an unhappy end, this is not to the discredit of science but is rather an indication of an imperfect ability to use wisely the gifts placed within our hands.”     –Polykarp Kusch

Tis the season.  Time to make the list, choose the perfect gift, wrap it up, and give it to the lucky receiver.  I cannot help but draw an analogy to client feedback.  It is a gift.  Like the perfect gift, there was a great deal of thought that went into its choosing – matching the purchase to the person.  And just like a gift all wrapped up in a bow, how it will be received depends upon what’s inside.

Will the client be happy?  Will they use the gift?  If the feedback is positive, and the client feels they got what they were hoping to out of the experience and developed new insights, they will be happy.  The best gifts are those that are from the heart, well thought out and matched with the person.  Sometimes, happiness is because the gift is more than what was asked for, but it hadn’t been really thought possible. The gift provides a fresh perspective. This is our ultimate goal – consulting flawlessly to be truly helpful, to be a gift.

Will the client be surprised or upset?  If the feedback is inconsistent with the goals, the discovery process and the conversations you’ve had along the way, the client may be taken totally off guard.  When we receive a gift that totally surprises us, it takes awhile to determine how to react.  The initial reaction can be deceiving, and often does not fully express the recipient’s feelings toward the gift, only the feeling of being surprised.  Often, we will hear someone ask, “Do you like it?”  And often, an awkward silence follows with a sheepish grin and a tentative, ‘of course I do.’  Perhaps you thought you understood what would make a good gift for the individual, but was actually misinterpreted.

Will the client be indifferent?  Sometimes there is no anticipation and no surprise at what is inside the box.  Every Christmas my husband gets caught up in the sales and buys his own gifts then gives them to me to wrap for him.  In consulting, we call this collusion.  The client expresses what they want and we give them exactly that, without trying to further explore if there is a gift that better suits.  The client may get exactly what was on the list, but next year the list will be the same because they haven’t had experience with something that is better suited to their needs.

As we wind up the consulting process and provide our feedback, I am considering the gift I am giving the client.  It has to be more than a pretty package.  It must not elicit an awkward silence.  It has to be something a little unexpected, but perfectly tailored to their needs.  Am I providing the best opportunity to use wisely the gifts I place within their hands?

Did you know that the discovery of the Titanic was accidental?  That Robert Ballard and crew were really on a spy mission disguised as an exploration to find the ship? …an accident meeting a prepared mind. On Saturday at the Forum, Robert Ballard, ocean explorer, discoverer of the Titanic spoke at the Richmond Forum.  His hour long lecture was riveting, and there is promise of more to come as the 100 year anniversary of the event approaches in April of next year.  Dr. Ballard lives his life in the pursuit of discovery – not to extract and display, but to learn.  He leaves the artifacts to continue to tell the story over time.

As I began the discovery analysis for our project, I started thinking about Ballard’s approach as it relates to process consulting.  I couldn’t help but wonder if there is a parallel.  Working through the layers of discovery, have we been extracting artifacts and holding them up for display?  If we do so, does that contribute to what is learned or just put the concept safely under glass for awhile?  It feels great to have a ‘breakthrough’ in the discovery process, but it feels discouraging when the artifact turns out to have little value or interest after the initial excitement.

I wonder if Robert Ballard ever felt this way.

What have we learned from the discovery?  What are we going to do about it?  How prepared has the mind been to meet (and deal with) the accident?  What is the CLIENT DOING about the problem?

In one of Block’s additional content papers, The Oversight Fallacy, he warns, “A cost is incurred the moment we start believing that if we closely and critically watch something, it will get better.”  I wonder if we have been spending too much time closely and critically watching our client work through her problem in her way and not enough time actually being helpful.

Block suggests that to turn oversight into insight, one has to rethink the role.   Three of the ways he suggests to do this may be worth it for our client to try:

• Take power and status out of the focus and turn to one of help and service.  Our client can ‘be helpful’ by shedding the power and status of the old model of business and use her abilities to make the new model successful.  We haven’t focused on making the new model successful.
• Accountability should flow in both directions.  It is time for the client to state how she is contributing to the problem.   It is time for us as process consultants to make this happen.  Block says, “When we begin to value insight above oversight, and invest more in connection than in correction, we make real accountability possible.”
• Make dialogue the purpose of meetings.  Johnson and Johnson theorized that dialogue’s purpose is to increase the learning – that it provides a way to achieve mutual goals and be motivated to strive for mutual benefit. In this way, dialogue is a process of discovery – but, like Robert Ballard, not one of extracting for the purpose of display, but for learning.

Let’s hope we can prepare our client’s mind.  You never know when an ‘accident’ may happen.  Will we sink or will we swim?

Last Thursday evening I attended the Bravo Awards, an annual event celebrating extraordinary Chesterfield alumni.  I am proud to have been a part of developing this fund raiser, and continue to be influenced by the truly extraordinary individuals it honors – alumni of Chesterfield County Schools that not only have achieved amazing things in their careers, but also use their influence to better the communities in which they live.  This year in particular I looked forward to the event with great anticipation as one recipient was a former fullback for the Green Bay Packers, William Henderson.  My husband and I awkwardly approached him for an autograph and a picture after the event – and he was very willing to do so as we proclaimed we were stockholders of the Team (as he responded – his boss).  Secretly, it was great fun to think of how we would make our fellow Packer fans jealous.

It isn’t the memory of meeting William Henderson that makes my heart full, though.  It is the other reason I was so looking forward to the event:  a former student of mine also received an award that evening.  I taught Kellee Santiago as a 4^th grader.  Then she was a demure young lady — quietly creative.  Today Kellee is a pioneer of the video game industry, co-founder of thatgamecompany (www.thatgamecompany.com – check it out).  Her company aims to make non-violent video games that communicate different emotional experiences and expand communicative possibilities of games.  She has worked with the DOD to develop video games that teach US Army offices cultural sensitivity and negotiation; she was recognized by Gamastura as one of the 20 Breakthrough Developers of the Year, she was named a Fellow of the TED Fellows 2010 program; she was named a Top 10 Innovator to Watch by Variety magazine and was one of the Ten Most Influential Women in Games of the Decade on Kotaku.com.

Kellee has spoken around the work on game design, production and entrepreneurship. She has been awarded for HER influence in her field.   It was the words she spoke upon her receiving her award, however, that had an amazing influence on me – because she spoke of how an innovative mathematics program she was taught in elementary school was influential in helping her make the connection between math and creativity – and started her on the pathway to where she is today.  She did not know I was there, or what it meant to hear that an innovative mathematics program I taught her had made a difference in her life.  I piloted this program; I taught others how to teach it.  I used it for gifted students and for students with learning disabilities.  I believed in its ability to make mathematics meaningful to elementary students – rather than rote memorization of facts and practice of 100 problems.  Unfortunately, parents and other grownups did not feel the same way.  It wasn’t how they had learned; it couldn’t be reinforced with a book.  The program was rescinded within five years. But in that short period of time, it had an influence on a young lady’s life.  I helped to make that happen.

These are the moments we live for, but rarely get to experience or know – the satisfaction of influence felt.

When I was in elementary school, a lesson each year in geography had to do with contour maps.  The maps were in 2D on a textbook page, and I never understood the concept that these maps represented elevation.

Years later, I taught the same lesson, in the same way, forgetting how difficult this concept was to grasp looking at a flat representation of elevation.  On one of the first days working in an architectural office I came across a model of a house addition, sited on a steep hill.  The model of 3D, with elevation represented with layers up gator board in contour format, caused a glaring light bulb to go off in my head – “oh, contour maps show elevation!!” The truth was there all the time; however it now had a more meaningful representation for me.

And so it was after our discussion about Hatch’s Cultural Dynamics theory.  I had a very difficult time getting through The Dynamics of Organizational Culture (Hatch, 1993). Our class discussion helped a bit, in particular the diagram of the theory and the discussion around symbols as representations of individual meaning.  We picked at the model, we discussed it, we tried to interpret it, and we applied it to a research study.  At the end of class, I concluded that the way the model is presented allows it to be all things to all people.  If you can’t quite wrap your hands around Schein’s Artifacts/Values/Assumptions framework, just add symbolization, interpretation, manifestation, and realization in a reciprocal relationship and you can prove it relates to any cultural observation somewhere within the model.  Yet, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a way to simplify the concept, to increase my understanding of cultural dynamics, much like the 3D contour model had done for contours and elevation.

The name Mary Jo Hatch seemed to emit a sense of awe among class colleagues and our guest instructor.  It was inevitable that YouTube would not disappoint – but there were only 2 videos of Hatch.  I decided to watch this video:  Art, Design and Management.  To my surprise, in this video Hatch reveals extreme aggravation with the academic world over doing exactly what we had done with her work:

“…you can only define concepts related to something as complex as organizational culture so far, and then you run into a series of overlaps and it gets messier and messier.  They want clean, clear definitions so the methods vultures can descend on your definition and feed upon it until the point of saturation, which is when they have sucked all the meaning out of the words.  ….the more you can extract the meaning away from the data you are working with the easier it is to use the data to generalize, to get us closer to that universal meaning.  The trouble is the meaning lies in the difference that the universe is for each of us, and we lose that when we conceptualize something for the purpose of operationalizing it, measuring it and then nailing it with the numbers…”

 

 Were we being vultures?  Should we focus less on how an element of culture fits a framework or theory and more on how a framework helps us to understand the culture?  The meaning lies in the difference that the universe is for each of us.

 Schein makes a similar point in Organizational Culture and Leadership when he suggests, “you will benefit most from asking yourself in each of the chapters what your own position is on every dimension we will review.”  Whether it is discovering what the universe is for me or as Shein suggests, discovering “the layers of culture within yourself,” I need to remember as I conduct organizational analysis of any kind – for academic, social, or personal reasons – to be very aware of my position as it relates to the analysis: there’s a 2D version, and a 3D version.

Newton’s First Law of Motion – a body remains at rest unless acted upon by an external force.  And so it is with client resistance.  We were flowing along well, our client started our meeting declaring that she had an ‘aha moment’ since our contracting discussion – that she was resisting change, which is generally not in her nature.  Breakthrough #1 — and we are barely into the process.  I was feeling quite proud of our work.  Building on this, we were able to get enough information to develop a strong contract with actionable goals and timeline.

Then it happened.  On the day of our scheduled meeting, we received this email:

Alan and Joanne,

I’m so sorry but I need to cancel our meeting this afternoon. I’ll be at Challenge Discovery with the Emerging Nonprofit Leaders until 3 – and with the weather, and the presidential congestion, don’t know that I would make it back to the Boulders. Ack! 

Sorry for the last minute notice. I was really looking forward to our meeting and hope we can pick up next week.

All my best,

Luckily, Block tells us that resistance is an emotional process taking place within the client and that it is predictable when facing difficult problems – AND that it is a necessary part of the learning process. Resistance should be viewed as a sign we are on target.  So, should we grin and shout as Charlie Sheen would, “I’m WINNING!”?  It really doesn’t feel like that – it feels a blow to our process, our ability to ‘get along’ with the client.  Now we have to name it, to confront it, to potentially cause more discomfort in our client – and in me.

What type of resistance are we dealing with here?

Is the client asking for MORE DETAIL instead of deciding what to do….

Is the client using busyness and how little TIME there is to avoid meeting…

Is the client not ‘SURPRISED’ by the discussion…

Is the client CONFUSED and asking for clarity more than three times….

Is the client is passive and SILENT…

Is the client INTELLECTUALIZING why things are this way…

Is the client in AGREEMENT with everything you say….

Is the client sure everything is HEALTHY now…

Does the client just want SOLTUIONS not process….

There are actually a few faces of resistance at play here, I think, and I shouldn’t be surprised.  There is a lot at stake for our client, most of all her vulnerability in a changing work environment – one in which she has little control over the politics at play.  Should her willingness to name the issue as her resistance to change so early on have been a red flag of INTELLECTUALIZING?  Is she really strapped for TIME or is she avoiding discomfort?  Is her lack of response to request for data from her a sign that she really wants only SOLUTIONS even though she stated she knows this isn’t the quest here?  Is she avoiding responsibility for the problem or solution?

What about ME?  Am I resisting as well?   Am I also avoiding my responsibility?  Block says that “resistant clients are defending against the fact that they are going to have to make a difficult choice, take an unpopular action, and confront some reality that they have emotionally been trying to avoid.”

Perhaps Newton’s First Law of Motion may also apply to people:  a body remains at rest unless acted upon by an external force.  If there were no demand from consultants and no push back from the client, the problem would remain at rest and not evolve into discovery and a preferred future. Name it and be silent.  Alan and I are going to give this a try.

 “It’s the constant and determined effort that breaks down all resistance, sweeps away all obstacles.”        — Claude Bristol

What does it take to change attitudes and behaviors about teaching and learning?  Why does it seem so easy to accomplish within other settings and so difficult within educational institutions?

Let me start by saying this reflection is a very broad generalization of educational institutions.  I know pockets of excellence exist, but I also speak from ‘real world’ experience in educational environments – over a period of 30 years. Ian Jukes, an educational ‘futurist’ refers to these pockets as ‘committed sardines’ – here’s why:

 If you take a careful look at a school of sardines, you’ll notice that although the fish all appear to be swimming in the same direction, in reality, at any time, there will be a small group of sardines swimming in a different direction, in an opposite direction, against the flow, against conventional wisdom. And as they swim in another direction, they cause conflict, they cause friction, and they cause discomfort for the rest of the school.

But finally, when a critical mass of truly committed sardines is reached – not a huge number like 50 percent or 80 percent of the school, but 15 to 20 percent who are truly committed to a new direction – the rest of the school suddenly turns and goes with them – almost instantaneously!

Three excellent examples of organizational learning ‘committed sardines’ were presented last week in class – all with different institutional backgrounds:  corporate, military, and medical.  These are lessons Education can take away from them as they relate to changing Learning:

One – focus on who the learner really is

The Mayo Clinic has always focused on what is in the best interest of the patient, on innovation for a better patient experience.  The Army, over the years, has adapted to learning styles, particularly in their innovative use of technology and contextual-based delivery of the AAR process – learning is driven by experience (Kolb).    IBM shifted from” bringing the worker to learning to bringing learning to work” because they realized learning doesn’t happen only in a classroom on a given day and time.

Two – learn from each other

Each of these institutions understands the necessity of the team approach to work, of the importance of peer and expert contributions.  They have developed whole entities for this:  Mayo Clinic’s Center for Innovation (CFI), IBM’s – Center for Advanced Learning and Institute for Business Value, and the Army’s companycommand.com -– a social media portal that is a “means of connecting past, present, and future company commanders in an ongoing conversation about leading soldiers and building combat-ready units” Connecting leads to conversations, which leads to content – to advance the practice of the company command. (read more about this in Company Command:  Unleashing the Power of the Army Profession).

Three – use data to improve practices

The Mayo Clinic uses shared medical records, the Army collects AAR data and focuses on knowledge sharing and innovation, IBM is the daddy of data generation and use, but one specific example for improvement of practices is their Client Team Advantage program for team building.

Four – change the environment

The big idea here that all of these institutions understand is that learning takes place anytime, anywhere and always.  It is not confined to space, time, or context.  These can be simulated through technology.

Five – invite outsiders to join the conversation

Lou Gerstner of IBM fame sums this one up perfectly:  “Anything of value to us has value to others…one of the lessons we are learning (was that knowledge) can’t be proprietary.”  IBM’s idea that we are living in a time where there is not only fierce competition, but broad collaboration (love the term coopetition) is an essential lesson for the institution of education.  The Mayo Clinic understands this, having always sought out the ‘experts’ in the field to add to their knowledge bank.

In each of these examples, there were committed sardines – some that swam in the opposite direction for a long time and through long periods of adversity before the group joined their direction.  What I love about committed sardines is that it doesn’t take many to ‘convince’ the majority – just the will to keep swimming against the crowd.  Can the pockets of excellence in our institutions of education meet the required ‘critical mass’ to turn the crowd? 

One of my favorite things about this program is the diversity of backgrounds/career experience of the students.  I enjoy content discussions from the perspective of training experts in the corporate world, teachers in prisons, non-profit staff, literacy experts, and a variety of medical professionals.  So when I read Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you? (Atul Gawande), an article provided by a student in another class, featuring a surgeon reflecting on hitting a ‘slump’ in his expertise and subsequently hiring a coach to work with him on review of technique, I naturally thought about fellow classmates.  This decision wasn’t without a lot of trepidation and a bit of justification about the need for a coach – which he found in athletes, musicians, and teachers. The results — delivery out of the doldrums and increased skill and knowledge.

So who is in charge of learning transfer?  Gawande’s surgeon says, “Expertise is thought to be not a static condition but one that doctors must build and sustain for themselves.”  In The Organizational Learning Cycle Dixon says “Individual learning is dependent upon the collective.  . . .  we shall see that the converse is also true:  collective learning is dependent upon the individual.”  Are both my learning and collective learning dependent on me?

Dixon’s Five Types of Knowledge Transfer refers to the collective, but I can’t help wondering about who initiates the request for knowledge transfer in the name of the team?  If someone is always the seeker of knowledge
for the team, how do they sustain their own knowledge?  I believe that when the individual learns in the collective, both goals are achieved.

We’ve been discovering a great deal about learning in the collective from IBM, which we will share in our team presentation.  The most important thing I see in this organization is that learning and knowledge transfer do not happen by themselves.  When a culture of seeking knowledge is established, it can grow and develop in such a large variety of creative ways and actually begins to permeate daily work – thus blurring the line between transfer of knowledge and process of work.  Crossan, Maurer and White’s framework for organizational learning includes a strong connection between cognition and behavior.  They suggest that “learning captured at the organizational level becomes institutionalized in the form of nonhuman elements such as products, processes, rules, routines, systems, structure, and strategy.”  Is this what is meant by a learning culture?

Is it learning, not knowledge itself, that is critical?

Did you know that your brain can think at between 4 and 10 times the speed of speech?  That means when you are listening you have spare time to use ‘brain time’ for looking for meaning between the lines. How does a process consultant make the best use of this brain time?  How should I make the best use of brain time?

I think I should begin by using this brain time to develop my listening skills – to fasten on the big ears and really listen.  What does this mean?  The paradigm of ‘process’ consulting is evolving for me, and I’ve had to link to other concepts or ideas to be able to thoroughly understand the process.  For example, in the last post I explored the difference between a consultant and coach.  I believe process consulting really first the definition of coaching more than consulting. 

Last week in class Alan made the comment, “the less I talked the productive it was.”  What other concepts or ideas could give me better insight into how effective inquiry – which relies on effective listening — provides for a productive conversation?  My search this week included active listening skills, social intelligence, and the attributes of a good therapist. 

I came across an interesting presentation on The Art of Listening  based on social intelligence.  The presentation points out (as Block concurs) that listening includes:

• Being aware of body language – what is felt as much as what is said
• Focusing – magnify the sound of the person’s voice so others fade to the back
• Eye contact – fundamental to communicate interest
• Creating pictures and links (mind maps) of what is being said
• Keeping an open mind – avoid getting distracted by negative or emotional words; judging content, not delivery style and avoiding being critical
• Collecting the big ideas – determining the emerging themes

 Is perfecting this art  how you make the best use of ‘brain time’?

I continued by exploring the concept of social intelligence, which I equate to one’s ability to make this art of listening tacit.  Dr. Daniel Goleman in his book Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships defines SI as “being smart about relationships. . . being empathetic, sensing what the other person is feeling, understanding their point of view, and ease and facility in having smooth, effective interactions. It’s both knowing what the person is feeling and acting effectively based on that.”   He says almost all of this is tacit.

Do we, then, build our Social Intelligence by developing our inquiry and listening skills?

 Finally, I thought about what kind of person would be an expert in active inquiry and high on the Social Intelligence scale?  This would be the type of person an effective process consultant would most likely emulate.  I came across a blog by Dr. John Grohol on Psych Central that had an interesting perspective on the qualities of a good therapist.  Dr. Grohol says, “A therapist is more than a plumber for your mind, you can’t just pick one at random from the yellow pages.”  I think Block and Shein would say the same about a process consultant.  Grohol says a good therapist:

• Complements the needs and personality of the client – meaning they are positive and empathic
• Has a relationship that is professional, courteous, and respectful – including explaining how they work in a clear and direct manner
• Recognizes their own strengths and limitations – and looks for good fit with client
• Is genuine (Block and Shein call this authentic)

Interestingly, good LISTENING skills are never mentioned by Grohol in the attributes of a good therapist, although it may be assumed in the other attributes. 

How do we identify a good process consultant?  The paradigm of effective process consulting for me now includes:  a socially intelligent coach, artful listener, and therapist.

Block says, “the hard time we have is not really with the action itself, but with valuing the importance of these actions.” (p. 57)  I’m beginning to value more deeply the importance of fastening on the big ears, and am looking forward to practicing using that ‘brain time’ to build my own social intelligence quotient.

Modern Family is one of my favorite newer sitcoms, with the character of Phil providing, for me, the vast majority of the show’s humor.   Phil is an approaching middle age dad who tries to be ’cool’ for his young teen children and ‘sexy’ for his wife.  Part of Phil’s humor is his lack of knowledge of his own ignorance.   This picture shows Phil in a recent episode when he took a trip to the spa instead of his wife because her gift certificate was expiring  and she had too much to do.  While there, she calls to ask him to make dinner because of all she has to get done and he immediately goes into what Peter Block would call ‘doctor’ mode, suggesting a fix for her errands (but not saying yes to the help she is asking for – making dinner).  The women at the spa provide immediate feedback to him, telling him she doesn’t really want him to solve every problem, just to be there for her, making her feel supported.  In essence, they are telling Phil Claire needs a process consultant.

Block says as a ‘flawless consultant’ we must assess our ignorance, “distinguish what I know from what I assume I know from what I truly do not know”  in order to create a relationship with the client that allows them to improve their own situation.  Schein, in this Youtube video Helping, talks about the types of questions that build this relationship:  humble inquiry, diagnostic inquiry and confrontive inquiry.  He states that humble inquiry — asking the client to tell you more — allows yourself to be ignorant.  It is through the client’s discourse that you gain wisdom, the wisdom to best discern and provide the type of help the client really seeks.

Helping without providing solutions is not easy – for Phil or for me.  Phil discovered that providing support and drawing out more information was the key to winning Claire’s trust and affection.  This is a role I have to learn to take more often.  I start out with good intentions, but then my nature tells me to solve the problem when there is pushback.  Block says this pushback is crucial. It indicates you are asking the right questions because you are touching on the REAL issue.  I tend to react to pushback as a signal to solve the problem.  I resist confrontation and awkward silences.

A good example is when a teacher recently came to me to ask for thoughts about the implementation of a new curriculum.  He wanted to make it exciting and meaningful to the students from the first day.  BUT it was 3 days before the first day!  I started by suggesting we schedule some time to go over his thoughts about the curriculum and his plan for implementation (setting the platform for process and humble inquiry).  But I saw he was uneasy with that answer, so we briefly discussed a few ideas for the first week.  That evening I came across something that reminded me of our conversation, so I shot him the information – providing a solution.  He has not returned the email or scheduled the conversation.  Schein says that often if we try to help by doing something the other person can do for themselves we make them feel less than who they are.  Perhaps I have done this.

Asking for and accepting help does not come easy for me, but due to an accident break of my ankle I’ve spent the better part of the past few months both having to ask for help and trying to humbly accept help that is offered — even help I don’t always want to accept – because it makes me feel less than capable. Contracting for help on both sides of the equation is a delicate balance.  When asking for help, you need to be clear what you need.  When offering help, you need to be clear what is needed.  I believe it is important to not only consider how to respond as the helper, but also what it feels like to be the one asking for help, and sometimes the reaction to solutions offered without solicitation. For me, this has helped to “access my ignorance.” 

• How do Block and Shein’s definitions of ‘consulting’ differ from coaching?  From leadership?
• Is it possible to build a sustainable business model on flawless consulting?  Are there enough clients that would accept this type of ‘contracting’ for consulting services?
• How does one/ can one recover from providing ‘bad help’ (both given and received) and move on to a more productive relationship?
• How have others learned to be more proficient process consultants in the uneasiness of confrontation and awkward silence?

 “The greater our knowledge increases the more our ignorance unfolds.”     — John F. Kennedy