Consulting in Uncertainty

The Power of Inquiry

Ann Brooks, Kathy Edwards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136519680
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Consulting
• Index: Business

The traditional model of consulting places an emphasis on diagnosing a problem and finding a cure. But in today's business world of globalized organizations, rapid knowledge proliferation, and the intertwining of economies, that approach is becoming less and less viable; problems are quickly redefined, new knowledge (and ownership of that knowledge) is constantly surfacing and being challenged, and no solution is a permanent solution. Consulting in Uncertainty articulates a model of consulting that addresses the uncertainty and interconnectedness of the world in a post-industrial, knowledge era.

Emphasizing outcomes and inquiry over 'diagnosis', Brooks and Edwards outline this new consulting model, as well as the skills consultants must bring to the table in any uncertain and dynamic environment. Integrating practical knowledge with scholarship, this book covers skills such as:

• Relational skills and the consulting relationship
• Cultural awareness and related skills
• Contextual analysis
• Facilitating inquiry
• Collecting and efficiently analyzing data or information

Consultants and students of consulting, as well as managers, teachers, counselors, and even parents, will find this book enlightening and useful in navigating today's uncertain world.

Part I

Rethinking Consulting as Inquiry

Consultants are knowledge workers. We draw on both our education and our experience to help our clients. But in an uncertain world, is that enough?

Humans have always looked to those who know more, have more wisdom, or have more experience to help us find our own paths through the world. In traditional societies, elders or spiritual leaders have played that role. As societies became more complex, religious and educational institutions developed to guard and transmit that knowledge. In our current world, we draw on all of those sources as we try to figure out how things should be done or, often, how they should be done better.

Educational institutions have traditionally treated learning as the transmission of knowledge and skills from those who know more to those who don't yet know as much. This tradition is embedded in the form of a teacher at the front of the room and the process of testing to make sure students “got it.” Increasingly, though, these habits of educating are coming under fire. As it turns out, particularly in the world of professional education, this “telling/testing” model is not very effective. Students may “know” more about their chosen profession and have sharpened analytic skills, but when they start to practice, they have a tough time applying all of the knowledge. This is especially true in a world that defies both our tradition-based and our science-based predictions of the future and our hope that one setting is pretty much like another and so what worked here will work there, too. Our world is both uncertain and culturally complex.

What we count on, though, is that humans are learners by nature. We naturally seek out the best information and then try it for ourselves. If the best information comes from watching someone else do something, then we take what we observed and adapt it to our own bodies, our own cognitive gifts and limitations, and our own situations. If the best information comes from the Internet, an educational institution, or an expert, we go get that information and then figure out how it can work for us in our situation.

Consulting at its least effective adopts the “tell them” model. Whether we bring a proprietary process that we or our company has developed or an off-the-shelf training package or process, or simply try to sell what we learned in graduate school, we are ignoring the ability of our clients to participate in finding better ways to do their work.

Part I lays out an understanding of consulting that assumes our clients' abilities to innovate ways to get to the outcomes they want and the role we can play in helping them do it better.

Chapter 1, “Changing the Consulting Story,” elaborates on how the “tell them” or advice model differs from an inquiry model of consulting. We challenge the model of consulting as problem oriented and reliant on consultant knowledge and the application of expert knowledge to our clients' worlds. Instead, we suggest a shift to outcome-oriented consulting that draws on a client-consultant collaboration aimed at producing innovative, context-specific new knowledge.

In Chapter 2, “Shifting to An Inquiry Model of Consulting”, we lay out, step-by-step, what the process of consulting would look like from an inquiry perspective.

This shift requires consultants to adjust the stance we take as we work with our clients. Chapter 3, “The Consultant's Stance,” looks at the kind of person we become in our interaction with our clients. Joining together with our clients in inquiry challenges us to relate to both our own expertise and our clients in different ways. Many of us ground our confidence in our own knowledge and try to communicate our own competence to our clients through sharing our knowledge with them. When we shift to inquiry, though, we are not only drawing on our expertise in a specific body of knowledge and know-how, such as engineering or human resources, we are also inviting our clients to join with us, drawing on whatever knowledge and know-how is available, to come up with better solutions. The upsides of this approach are not only better outcomes for clients, but enhanced learning for consultants.

1
Changing the Consulting Story

Everyone is a consultant. We don't have to be employed by an international organization, travel the world, or work with Fortune 500 companies—every time a friend or family member confides in us about an issue with which they are struggling, we are consultants. When colleagues ask us what we think about a problem they are facing, we are consultants. When a member of our team asks for input on part of a project, we are consultants. When a customer or client in any profession seeks our help, we are consultants. And of course, when we or our consulting companies are hired by a client in an organization to advise them, we are consultants.

In other words, each of us is in a consulting role any time we do not have direct responsibility for the outcome, but are asked to help. This book is about what we can do to be most helpful to those who turn to us, no matter the setting.

The Advice-Givers

For many, consulting is about experts giving advice. Box 1.1 shows some of the common definitions of this term.¹

Box 1.1 Definitions of a consultant

• “An expert who charges a fee for providing advice or services in a particular field” (Encarta Encyclopedia).

• “One who gives professional advice or services” (American Heritage Dictionary).

• “One who advises another, especially officially or professionally: advisor, counselor, mentor” (Oxford English Dictionary).

• “[A] consultant is defined as someone who either advises a client—another person or an organization—on the desirability of taking some action, who assists the client in making a decision and then assists the client in planning or implementing action as determined by the client” (Stroh & Johnson, 2006, 3).

• “By management consulting we mean advice-giving to companies provided by trained professionals who help managers solve operational and strategic problems through application of knowledge and systematic analysis of facts” (Fombrun & Oriesek, in Fombrun & Nevins, 2004, 6).

Popular culture provides us with a similar image of consultants. For example, when coauthor Edwards asked undergraduates in a course on consulting to draw their image of a consultant, their most frequent depiction was of someone, usually a man, giving advice in meetings, talking to clients, or making presentations. The consultants were invariably large and their clients were small, and the consultants seemed to dominate their clients. The students also sometimes portrayed the consultant as a doctor, imagining consultants as diagnosing the “illnesses” of and prescribing the “cure” for clients. The story these pictures tell is that a client has a problem ⇒ the client asks the consultant for his or her expert advice ⇒ the consultant gives the advice. Assuming the advice was good and the client follows it, then the happy ending is that the consultant saves the client.

Challenging this image of a benign expert is a strong shadow story that has emerged over the past couple of decades. In this story, the client has a problem ⇒ the client finds a consultant who claims to have expertise ⇒ the client asks the consultant for that expert advice ⇒ the consultant cheats or gives bad advice to the client ⇒ the client suffers. Block notes, only somewhat humorously, that “[t]he first consultant was the Serpent in the Garden of Eden. … When Eve followed his advice and picked the low-hanging fruit, the consequences were grave and long-lasting. … We still feel the chill of this ancestral shadow cast over our work.”² Books on management consulting like Consulting Demons: Inside the Unscrupulous World of Global Corporate Consulting³ and House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time⁴ tell us that consulting is a buyer-beware market. These critiques range from accusations of overcharging, fad following, cookie-cutter solutions, and lack of results to ethical allegations of lying, cheating, and stealing.

This negative image is powerful, and as Elaine Biech, the author of a number of publications on consulting, has written,

I was shocked the first time I was called a “beltway bandit”—the term assigned to consulting firms in and around the Washington, D.C. beltway. Since then, I've been called a pest because I followed up too often with a client. I've also been called a con man. … Some of the negativity is deserved. There are many charlatans in our business.⁵

The consulting profession is not a regulated industry. In addition, most consulting projects are not publicly scrutinized. The potential for abuse exists, as opportunistic snake-oil salespeople operate alongside highly reputable professionals. From this perspective, clients should exercise due diligence in seeking a consultant's help.

The field of consulting is big business. Kennedy Information estimates that the industry as a whole grosses over 200 billion dollars a year worldwide.⁶ Unfortunately, many consulting projects are not successful. It is estimated that approximately two-thirds of all consulting projects fail.⁷ So the profession still has much room for improvement in meeting the needs of clients.

The Problem with Advice

The tradition of knowledgeable advisors serving as consultants to leaders is as ancient as leadership itself. Kings, popes, presidents, and generals, as well as business leaders and leaders in other fields, have all availed themselves of what Maister, Green, and Galford call “trusted advisors.”⁸ The search for an advisor or expert appears to be a common human longing. It is a natural response to an uncertain world. From shamans to scientists, from priests to philosophers, from various spiritual guides to business gurus, the world has looked to those who claim to have specialized knowledge to guide us. If our immediate reaction to our own or other people's problems is to seek or give advice, what's wrong with that?

Most of us slip easily into the role of advice-giver; we have learned a lot in our lives. We want to help others, and we personally feel good if we are able to give someone else useful advice. However, as Alger has noted, “We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain.”⁹ For some reason, we are resistant to taking the advice of others. We hear others' advice, and it never seems to quite fit. Somehow, they seem to “not really get” our situation or the complexities of the issues we face, or they think that doing what they advise us to do is going to be easy. What's more, we know that the advice-giver doesn't have to live with the consequences of his or her advice to us, and we're rightfully wary of implementing that advice. And if we watch what happens when we give advice to someone else, we often find that the target of our advice listens closely at first, but the more we advise, the more the listening seems to be “just to be polite.” We can listen to others' thoughts about our lives and challenges, but ultimately, we add their advice to everything else we know and come up with our own solution, a solution that fits our situation.

As professional consultants, we are similarly faced with advisees who know their own organization or community better than we do. While we may bring professional expertise or a unique service, each client is unique. All organizations, industries, or communities may share similar patterns, but each has a different history, political and social environment, and constellation of distinct ways of understanding and acting that have developed as responses to a unique journey in this world. These differences mean that what works in one industry, community, or nation is unlikely to work exactly the same way in another.

So it is important to ask how we can better use our expertise to help our clients in their particular contexts. How can we narrow the gap between what our clients want and what we can actually deliver?

Hour by Hour, Moment by Moment, the World Changes

The world of the 21st century is one of uncertainty. We live in a complex and turbulent world in which prediction is difficult, and we have come to see all too clearly the unintended consequences of the actions we take. To add to our increased awareness that problems are neither simple nor clearly bounded and that more than one technically correct solution exists, information and knowledge are transforming at a dizzying rate of speed. The Internet has accelerated the speed of communication and information around the world, and geographic boundaries are no longer barriers to knowledge sharing.

In the midst of such complexity or chaos, the hope that someone can tell us the best thing to do with our work, our organiz...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures, Tables, and Boxes
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Rethinking Consulting as Inquiry
• Part II Inquiry into Relationship
• Part III Skills of Inquiry
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index