Our House

Visual and Active Consulting

Antony Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000650549
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Development
• Index: Business

For consultants, facilitators or OD specialists, a house's familiar image will help their clients see, think and feel their ways solving their business issues. No need for dry and hard-to-remember management schemas. The striking visual and active methods shown here deeply engage clients – they get it right away. The House and its 'Rooms' make sense to them, and they willingly start working with you.

The Our House model has many of these 'Rooms' where complex business issues are sorted into one area at a time. The focus, the mood and the process vary with each Room, and the author reveals an entirely original consulting process each time. Disciplined creativity begins: loosening the grip of the past in the Attic; testing business foundations in the Cellar; preparing a meal the customer would love in the Kitchen; suppliers, maintenance and low-hanging fruit in the Garden; the team's dirty washing in the Laundry; elimination and waste goes into the Toilet; frank talk and vision alignment take place at the Dining Table; big systems perspectives can be seen from the Balcony; analysis in the Study; conversation and connection in the Living Room.

The simplicity of the images of a House and its Rooms belies their frugality and their strength. In each Room, your clients are put through something demanding yet liberating. They see things differently and they see different things. Our House shows you how to succeed with simple action methods that are enlightening and strong.

Chapter 1

The Front Door

A guided tour

Are you an experienced internal or external OD consultant, a manager seeking to revitalise a team, or a facilitator looking for some new frameworks? Come in. Welcome. The methods and techniques of Our House can assist you, for this is a book about ways you can help your clients think about their business. Every process described here is designed to promote clarity, vitality and alignment for your client.

We all know what a house is, and what each room is for – we don’t need bedrooms or kitchens or toilets explained to us. Now put a consulting issue, say ‘systems perspective’ into a suitable ‘Room’ – the Balcony – add a set of techniques specific to seeing systems and one’s own part in them, and you have already got one of the Rooms in Our House. A business frame and a set of novel techniques wait in each Room. Once you’ve seen the House, you can locate anything and remember everything: space gets laced with meaning, cognition becomes embodied, and clients get clear about their business.

Figure 1.1 Floor plan

You can start in whatever room suits your client’s needs. Although the chapters are numbered, there is actually no sequence that must be followed. It depends on the job on hand. Start anywhere – Basement or Study or Balcony. The order is yours.

To help you choose, what if we have a guided tour …

let’s go downstairs to the Basement, where work on foundations is done – there your clients test the very fabric of their business. The underground feel of the Basement – helped by pictures of columns, etc., indicates a

step away from the day-to-day. But clients step away from the day-to-day only to reform the day-to-day by agreeing on the foundations of their business. They intensely examine these foundations for their adequacy and fitness to hold up the business above them.

Back to ground level now, and cross over to the right hand side. Here is the Study, the Laundry, and the Toilet. These Rooms engineer attention by having particular techniques proper to them, and may be just what your client is looking for. An exacting team performance self-review is offered in the Study. Other Rooms invite social and emotional response to a set of issues – in the Toilet, what to ‘drop’ (elimination issues of product, services or process), or in the Laundry, what to wash (structural, routine or delicate issues in teams). Being in a Room precludes other activities – all you can do in the Toilet is drop something or not drop something; all you can do in the Laundry is the washing. The very restrictions of the Room help teams be creative and stay on task, just as the restrictions of, say, ballet, intensify creativity, rather than reduce it.

On the left hand side of the House you will find the Living Room and the Dining Room. In the Dining Room, the focus is on the dining table, and the issue is vision and alignment to that vision. In the Living Room, clients use evocative figures to examine systemic issues within their organisation, and enter a peer consultation process.

The Rooms create their own emotional and intellectual climates. The mood and the work varies in each Room. Some Rooms have dreamlike, sexual or scatological overtones – the Bedroom and the Toilet are obvious candidates for this. Some, such as the Living Room, suit connection and reverie. Others, such as the Kitchen (where should we apply the heat?) and the Study (where are we strong and where are we weak as a team?), are fiercer. Unlike the cluster of Rooms in the Hub, which are run by a generic facilitation process, each of the other Rooms is specialised and has a unique consulting process attached. To my knowledge, this is the first time they have been published anywhere.

Including the Balcony and the Garden, there are nine Rooms in the House. It’s best not to visit all of them in any one day. Indeed, sometimes much more than a day will be spent in just one room – I have several times spent three or four days in the Laundry with groups, just doing the washing. That room can open urgent issues of leadership, role clarity, organisational structure and team morale for inspection and repair.

Up the stairs is the Attic where clients can ease the grip of organisational memory’s hold on current functioning and workplace culture. The Balcony is also upstairs – this is where clients, usually in leadership positions, can leave the dance floor and see over the whole landscape. The height and distance of the Balcony allows them to take a systemic view of their organisation, and their part in it.

Looking again at the floor plan, you will see that the Innovation Hub is at the end of the hall, opening on to the Garden, the Kitchen and the Bedroom. Unlike all the other Rooms we have encountered, these three – Garden, Kitchen and Bedroom – are run simultaneously by a single facilitator/consultant. If innovation is your brief, the three-Room Hub is an exciting place to work.

Except for the three Rooms in the Hub, I have provided a suite of tools, mostly involving action methods – physical and visual depictions – for each Room. But the tools are not the Room – they are merely suggested methods. We experience rooms in any house physically and symbolically. They have meanings and memories attached to them. The secret of Our House consulting is the metaphor of the Rooms themselves, and the use of the very simplest of action methods: stage, place, encounter, role, lines, objects, image and movement – to help business thinking. Issues unfurl towards the light becoming clearer, sharper and brighter. Solutions surface that were not seen before. With action methods, you see things differently, and you see different things.

The quaint domesticity of the Rooms is but a light cloak thrown over a hard-angled structure. Their apparent whimsy and innocence only intensifies clarity and the choices your clients must make. The aim is to deepen your practice and invigorate your organisational interventions. While the methods may appear jejune to your clients before you start, they are not so slight once participants are inside. With action methods, clients are always put through something. Participants are not observers – they are players, making choices and standing by them.

As you start to practise, you will appreciate more from the inside the hidden forces of the intervention you have chosen and the Room in which it is set. You’ll get a feel for the basic chemistry of action methods – what interacts with what, what binds, what enriches, what soothes, and what transcends. If you work with your clients inside some of these Rooms for a while, following the set-ups as given here, you’ll soon be able to improvise and adapt the work to your own style.

Having a feel for the Rooms, and for the action methods that can be used in them, will give you more joy with the designs you make, more ease with the processes you lead and more pride about your clients’ outcomes as you lead them to clarity, vitality and alignment.

Facilitator, consultant, change agent, manager, organisational developer?

For simplicity’s sake, I have called the person taking clients through the House ‘the Consultant’. Some Rooms, such as those in the Innovation Hub, are consultant-light and facilitator-heavy, but with most it is the other way round. Since a lot of the teaching is done through ‘cases’, I have tried to avoid confusions of ‘who’s-who?’ by having the Consultant’s name always begin with ‘C’ – Clive, Corinne, Claude, Casey etc., and managers’ names nearly always begin with ‘M’ – Max, Martin, Marina, Madeline and so forth.

Confidentiality, privacy

To keep confidentiality and help misidentify the workplace, sometimes these C men and women are the author, and often they are not. The Martins and Madelines and Marinas in the narrative likewise have identity makeovers. If they read this, I hope that their disguise is so heavy that they do not even recognise themselves. Their very workplaces have sometimes been spinally fused with someone else’s. These graftings make it likely that our former participants cannot pick out their own organisations, far less anyone else’s. The stories that I tell are told for illustration of a technique, rather than a journalistic reporting of an event. The point is to make it easy to use the House, the Rooms, and the process in your work with clients.

Chapter 2

The Innovation Hub

Refine, grow

Three Rooms have been chosen here to show you the Innovation Hub – the Kitchen, the Bedroom and the Garden.

Part of our evolutionary story is efficiency: to save energy, we take shortcuts by privileging succesful ways of doing a task, ‘routinising’ it, and smoothing the neural pathways to and from it. This generally works well and uses less energy next time. It leads to us supporting habitual ways of perceiving the world, and dismissing anything that contradicts it. We really need our brains to do this work, or we would take forever just to make a cup of tea. But sometimes our energy-saving tracks do their job too well.

To perceive things differently, we need to create differences that are notable – that are ‘newsworthy’ in the brain. We have, somehow, to entice ourselves to move beyond our habitual efficient thinking patterns. One way of doing this is to pepper the brain with concepts or juxtapositions it has never before encountered. Using an analogue of transformation in a kitchen to transformation in a company makes one not only see differently, but see different things. We interrupt the normal flow of ideas, and create disruptive churn. Getting one thing – weeding a garden, say, to link with another – weeding a company, is the basis of work in the Hub.

The Firm that Couldn’t Grow

Martin Hubbard’s well-worn office was on the top floor of a corrugated iron building overlooking a belching paint plant. Trucks and forklifts circled it, like horsemen in an old movie circle a wagon train. From time to time, a mournful siren would go off in the plant. Martin was Sales Director at Pylon Paints.

Casey knew these siren sounds well. She had worked with other clients at Pylon, but never with Martin. He had phoned her out of the blue to ask her to run a two-day workshop on innovation with his entire Sales and office staff.

Pylon had its own Marketing division and a sophisticated R&D section populated by PhD chemists and engineers. That meant that Casey was dealing with a company that invested millions each year on innovation; it had an army of people whose sole job it was to invent and test new products or improvements to existing products. It had another, smaller, army devoted to marketing those products. Nevertheless, Casey was confident that if she used the Innovation Hub, she could get some good results – not necessarily new products, but perhaps helpful modifications in internal processes, customer personalisation, online services, and so on.

Martin told Casey that Pylon had been instructed by its UK parent to ‘grow’, and he was happy to try. He did not mind whether Sales grew market share, or simply cut internal costs, or both. The overall effect could be growth through higher productivity or through selling more product.

Casey briefly described the Our House metaphor and told Martin about her Innovation Hub plan using three Rooms simultaneously to provide three distinct lenses on innovation.

She asked Martin to attend the opening on Day 1, and the final hour on Day 2 when results would be presented to him. She said that it was very likely that the groups would be highly warmed up and keen for him to approve of their output in their presentations to him, and he might be sensitive to this.

Figure 2.1 Innovation Hub floor plan

Innovation efforts lose punch because the boundaries of decision-making are not set, and people wander in directions that will never be allowed by the company. Exhortations to ‘think outside the box’ are frustrating if company policy is actually bound by boxes within which decisions must live. It is not helpful for a group to work all day only to find that their solution is embargoed from the outset, and that it might, for example, require regulatory approval over which the company has no control. That is why Casey got from Martin a clearly articulated statement on the boundaries and budget limits of the proje...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The Front Door: a guided tour
• 2. The Innovation Hub: refine, grow
• 3. The Basement: test business foundations
• 4. The Laundry: reform
• 5. The Toilet: eliminate
• 6. The Dining Room: align
• 7. The Balcony: see
• 8. The Living Room: understand
• 9. The Study: clarify
• 10. The Attic: remember
• 11. Goodbye, Keep Going
• Index