Welcome

In this time of distributed work, emptying offices, virtual everything, and permanent uncertainty, living with little direct control is all of our condition.

In this sense, consulting describes everyone’s job.

A FRIEND INDEED

This fieldbook is meant as a companion to people who are doing consulting—that is, anyone attempting to help others effect a change in their lives or work. It is also meant for those who use consultants, for the more we know about the theory and practice of consulting, the better the chance we will get what we bargained for. A consultant can be a partner on a project or someone employed to be of service. The best ones are friends, too.

A consultant or companion can do at least two things for us. First, they affirm the integrity of our experience. When life is difficult, they remind us that it is life that is difficult; it is not that we are particularly wrong, unskilled, or incapable. They tell us the truth about ourselves that we can get no other way, and underneath their feedback lies an affection that heals more than any advice or suggestion they might offer.

Second, companions can help us change our minds. They give us a deeper way of thinking about our experience. Artists, visual and literary, give us a different perspective, for they see aspects of the world that we are blind to. They interpret elements of the culture that we swim in, elements that were previously felt but not understood or made explicit. Philosophers are also nice to have around, for they give us a wider view, forcing us to shift our focus outward.

So the intent of this book is to be a companion:

• To support the integrity of your experience
• To change your mind about how you interpret your own consulting experience
• To broaden your way of thinking
• To bring a manageable dose of therapy, art, philosophy, and literature into your thoughts about consulting
• To remind you that things do not always go well
• To do it all in a comforting and simple way

Another intent of this book is to explore how consulting touches on the more profound aspects of life and how our service is to translate these insights into our work and the consciousness of our clients, even those who work for us and those we report to. Questions of authenticity, risk, loyalty, and intimacy are themes that some might label more “philosophical” than “real world,” yet they are the stuff that we talk about with true friends.

FIELDBOOK AND GUIDE

We have also framed this book as a fieldbook to go along with Flawless Consulting, first published in 1981 and recently updated and expanded.

A fieldbook is something you pull out for information and guidance in the midst of action. Walking in the woods, you see a flower you can’t identify, so you pull out your fieldbook to learn what it is. In the world of work, you bounce off a difficult business problem, and with time running out, you reach for your favorite fieldbook and get an idea about what to do—a just-in-time literary aid. You can read it from front to back, or jump around to follow a particular thread or theme depending on your mood, or simply dip into it at random.

SEEING MORE IN WHAT WE DO

Every consulting project is a human encounter, even if the content is highly technical. Even in a world of automated interactions and electronic connections, there is always a human being on both ends of every transaction. The human condition sits squarely in the middle of every computer, every platform and reality perhaps wisely called virtual.

The essence of consulting is still about relationship. No matter how technical or commercial our work might become, getting our expertise used will ultimately depend on the level of trust and emotional confidence the consultant and client share with each other. After the discussion of new change models, business processes, or strategy, we finally end up in conversation with a client, and it is what we bring to that conversation that will be decisive.

Consulting as Contracting

The core skill in consulting is how to contract with your clients, and this is the heart of Flawless Consulting. Contracting is about building and renegotiating relationships. Exchanging wants with our clients. Treating the relationship as central. The hope is that if we can contract well with the client, this will, by example, help them improve their contracts with others they work with.

For this to occur we all need to know how to deal with resistance, and most of the wisdom about resistance comes from the discipline of therapy. It is from the therapeutic encounter that we learn that resistance is a sign that the client is finally taking us seriously. Resistance and learning are constant companions, and if learning is the goal of your work, then resistance to your ideas will be your constant companion, too. Seeing resistance as a natural occurrence, not taking it personally, and learning to simply name the resistance and then be quiet—these are relational skills that will save many of your days. They give resistance its rightful due and do not treat it as something to be “overcome.” The wish to overcome resistance is a thinly disguised desire for control. To overcome another is to be convinced that you are right and they are wrong.

In this context, we view resistance as a quality in the client that holds the person intact. It needs to be understood and affirmed, especially in the workplace. Much of the resistance we see in the workplace is in response to coercion. The resolution is to stop treating people as if they don’t want change and to work with them in the spirit of invitation. Then their objections will be seen in the context of learning instead of as a way to give us a hard time.

Consultant as Philosopher

There is also a philosophical underpinning to the process of consulting that gives context and meaning to what we do. The ideological questions leading to the skills and steps in the original book are really about the mental state and sociology of consulting. How to contract with a client. How to engage them in feedback and give them a clear picture of their situation. How to help them see how they operate together. What kind of culture they are producing. How to think about implementation. These are action and relationship focused. The consultant’s relationship with clients feeding into the clients’ relationships with one another. These all are in play, requested or not.

All this needs to be enhanced by philosophic insight about our work. We need to understand our purpose, and we need to help our clients understand their purpose, how this moment fits with some larger and more profound intention, and how the moment is grounded in the experience of being human.

This larger view is what is required for authentic, genuine healing. Seeing the larger story or drama that is taking place through the current event gives us the capacity to then take what we learn at the moment and bring it into every aspect of our lives. Transformation happens when the specific becomes universal. When the crisis gets reframed into a dimension characteristic of all others who are facing the same reality.

For example, we benefit when we can see the present situation as an example of the paradoxical nature of human existence, which calls attention to the fact that we and those around us are expressions of our own free will. That we always have a choice to make, regardless of the chains that seem to bind us, and that the choice is always complicated. There is a crossroads in every moment. Both paths in front of us are true; whatever we choose will carry with it some anxiety and guilt, and that is just the way it is. As consultants, we have a constant task to confront our clients with the choice facing them and to help them see the choice, to make the choice (even if the choice is to do nothing), and to live with its consequences. The insight that this dynamic is inevitable and life-giving comes from the philosopher.

Just because we begin to think philosophically does not mean that we veer away from the concrete and the practical. It means that the concrete and practical become luminescent and more profound. It is the experience of deepening and taking our work more seriously and assigning it greater consequence than simply solving today’s problem. Work is not just one darn thing after another; it is one darn thing threading its way through all others.

The Images That Save Us

It is difficult, being limited by our own experience, to know what is possible, or even to know what meaning to give to our own behavior or the events in our lives. We always need to look outside ourselves for clues about what to make of it. This is where other people’s words can serve us—even save us. We hear a short quotation and, despite all the noise of life we are exposed to, it stays with us. An example for me is a statement of Carl Jung’s: “What was true in the morning is a lie in the afternoon.” I take this to mean that all that I pursued in the first half of my life—ambition, marriage, kids, becoming somebody, acquiring things—will not have the same meaning for me in my later years. The second half of life is about something different. Jung’s wisdom allows me to accept a radical shift in my later years—without feeling regret for my younger days, or thinking that my...