If I’ve been asked that question once, I’ve been asked it a hundred times in the last few years. In an age of the “sound bite” trying to talk about the complexity of human relationships that make up business life doesn’t quite lend itself to co-operation.
All of my work comes to me structured as a “problem” that needs to be “sorted out”. That “problem” may be a plan that needs to be written, a consultation process that needs to be designed and rolled out; a “difficult” person or team in an organisation that needs to be “fixed”. While the framework around which my invitation is phrased can often look quite generic – the underlying issues are always about people and relationships. What I “do” is design processes for engaging people in dialogue. What happens as a result of that is that we create plans that are owned, consultation processes that are genuinely dialogical/meaningful and solve human resource issues.
My toolkit consists of questions – rather a lot of them at times. I work from the perspective that there are no “taken for granteds” and my starting point is generally trying to explore the assumptions and hypotheses around which the particular problem or issue is constructed. One approach I use is Appreciative Inquiry.
I like working with problems. I see them as solutions. By that I mean that a particular kind of behaviour – whether it is bullying, excessive praise, stubbornness, stuckness etc… - is the only way at this moment in time that an individual or a team can give voice to an issue. As such, I approach problems from a benign, curious position. I don’t begin my work by assuming that this problem is a bad thing (which can be challenging for my clients sometimes!). In fact, it may be a very useful thing. It may contain rather a lot of information about how the whole system is communicating. That way, I avoid falling into the trap of blaming and I hope that I can approach each member of a team or organisation from an appreciative position. It gives me, and the organisation, a richer understanding of how this issue is relevant to the broader organisational system.
As well as working appreciatively and asking questions about what is going on overtly, I’m curious about what’s not said – the unconscious processes that contribute to organisational life - and more interestingly – the emotional climate in organisations. Because like it or not – we don’t leave our emotional selves at the front door and enter into a rational entity that is “organisation” even though there is a dominant discourse that organisations are “rational” entities. Organisations are emotion generating environments and asking people to be rational only is a fairly irrational request when you think about it.
Approaching consulting to organisations from this perspective means I offer insights that address the overt “problem” while also addressing the “covert” issues that may be informing it at a deep and unspoken level.
Tomorrow morning I head for Paris where I’m participating in my first Group Relations Conference. It’s not a traditional conference where papers are presented, workshops convened etc. Group Relations conferences are about the study of behaviour in organisations. To that end managers, consultants, students and psychotherapists from all over the world will converge in Paris to spend 7 days working together to more closely understand how leadership and organisations work and more importantly, how we contribute to the task of organising. The temporary organisation that we create over the course of the week will be the context and the purpose of our work.
There will be a number of organising tasks – as yet unknown - and as we gather and organise together over the course of a week we will be invited to look at
What roles we take up in organisations
How those roles are “assigned” through the organisation itself and by our personal stories
What authority looks like
How learning is constructed and integrated in organisations
How what is not openly acknowledged influences action
The emotional life of organising and leadership
I have a variety of feelings about participating in this conference – I’m anxious in case it descends into “group therapy”, I’m stressed because there is a strike scheduled for tomorrow so by the time I arrive at the Conference it will have already begun – will I be left behind? Will I be able to catch up? I’m excited about networking with colleagues many of whom work from a systems psychodynamic perspective as I am. The conference will be bi-lingual and I'm a bit nervous that I'll end up in the wrong working group where my French won't be adequate.
My point is that working in organisations is influenced by more than what happens when you walk in the front door – we bring a lot of stuff with us and the task of organising creates its own dynamics. Conferences such as this are structured around the process of reflection and reflexivity – two activities that I place very high on my list of essential consulting tools. The process of reflection will be the key tool for organisational learning, planning, review, evaluation and strategy.
Reflection and reflexivity mean more than navel gazing – they present a challenge to act on the basis of what is discovered. Leadership is an act, not a job title.
I’ll be attending with three hats on – as consultant, as psychotherapist and as PhD researcher and I’m looking forward to contributing and learning from each perspective. I’ll keep posting as the week evolves.
For more information on Group Relations Conferences, click here.
What happens when you have 80 people in a confined space over 8 days?
Emotions start running high, that’s what. And in some cases – very high and I include myself in that description. It’s interesting to find myself in an institutional setting experiencing much of what my clients experience when they invite me to work with them to “solve” the problem.
Many organisations fear emotion. There is an assumption that to be emotional = out of control and to be out of control = inevitable chaos. Often the point at which someone starts exhibiting emotional behaviour in an organisation the three Cs will be called for – the Coach, the Consultant of the Counsellor. Taking the “problem” out of the system is seen as a way of containing and controlling the situation.
Here in Paris there’s nowhere to go. The hotel is about 25KM from the centre of Paris, there’s little outside the hotel in terms of distraction, (in fact the location has all the charm of an industrial estate on the edge of nowhere) there are limited circulation spaces and many people are sharing rooms. From an outside perspective it looks like a recipe for disaster. But we’re being challenged to look at, experience and understand emotion as a systemic manifestation. Why is it that people get “set up” in organisations to be the carriers of emotion? In my own experience, many of the trouble makers in organisational life are expressing what the rest of the system is too afraid to say. Here in Paris there is a lot of emotion – frustration, anger, intimacy, sadness etc and we are exploring how the relationships in our temporary institution create carriers of emotional messages. Both how we accept the invitation to act on behalf of the group and how we assign that invitation and responsibility to others.
Increasingly I’m becoming more interested in keeping the learning about this kind of systemic interaction within the organisations with whom I work. If I can help the organisation understand why particular kinds of behaviour speak on behalf of the organisation then the intervention can be appreciative as distinct accusative. That’s not to suggest that people don’t have choice about how they behave in organisations either – not everything can be blamed “on the system”. Systems can generate emotion but individuals make the choice about how to express it. Coaching and consulting can work hand in hand to bridge the gap between the individual and the organisation and when I’ve been privileged to have access at both levels the results in terms of organisational learning are impressive. It takes bravery to contain rather than control emotion and then use the wisdom to advance the learning of the entire organisation.
I'm delighted to announce that Interactions has won the contract to design and manage a consultation process for Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council to inform the first strategy for arts development in the county. We'll be working closely with the Arts Office and I'm looking forward to meeting artists, policy makers and audience members over the course of the next few months as we wonder out loud and draft a plan that speaks to the priorities for arts development in the county over the next 3 - 5 years. Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council is a new client for Interactions and we're very excited to be their chosen consultation partners for this assignment.
We're also looking forward to rolling out a creative approach to the consultation using our Dynamic Participation model. We've already used the Dynamic Participation model in our work with The Arts Council in 2005 where we designed and rolled out a national consultation process involving over 1000 people, 100 meetings and many geographically disparate locations to inform the national plan for arts development. Set against significant consultation fatigue in this sector, the consultation process was widely hailed as a successful model of public consultation and resulted in the recently published Partnership for the Arts (available on The Arts Council's website).
“In terms of clarity, strategy has become an ever more obtuse art” (Micklethwait J and Wooldridge A, 1996, pp159).
We are regularly invited to assist organisations in the generation of strategic plans. The generation of a document or report is very often seen as the “end product” of a process and in some cases the plan itself then needs to be “sold” to the organisation. Increasingly we find management teams wanting to approach this task in a more creative way. The following are some thoughts, garnered from conversations with our clients about how it might be done differently.
Controlling the future
Why do organisations strategically plan? This question is rarely asked because of the dominant discourse in business that suggests that not to plan is somewhat reckless. Banks require plans in order to release funds. Marketing departments require plans in order to position the company or product. Most business engagement with state or central government requires a written plan that serves to reassure the parties that some kind of certainty exists as to who the primary actors are. Plans and strategic plans in particular are a primary map and compass of the business world. This raises one of the fundamental aspects of strategic planning – i.e. the hope that in producing a plan, uncertainty will be controlled and the future predicted.
Many strategic planning processes are predicated on the assumption that the “future” exists as a separate tangible place and the role of the strategic planner is to identify which aspects of the organisation’s mission and activities can be made to “fit” with that expected arrival. This can sometimes set up a defensive pattern within organisations that may turn a strategising process into one which seeks to prevent the organisation from experiencing any risk whatsoever, thereby protecting it from uncertainty and potentially from growthful risk and challenge.
The Paradox of Plans
The paradox can often look like this:
Increasingly I’m working with clients to create strategic planning processes whereby the strategising is fluid and evolving while at the same time visible and tangible. A plan is delivered but it is the result of and beginning of strategic thinking. If we are fixated on “one” future, then any unpredictability or deviation from that future can leave us feeling unprepared which is what we’re supposed to be addressing by doing a strategic plan in the first place!
Strategising vs Strategy
The contracting phase is now a time when I work with clients to re-frame the possibility of strategising and planning as one where the future is co-created in the present and is seen as a plurality rather than a single certainty. As a consultant I assist clients create safe enough spaces to imagine a different way of working, and more importantly, a jointly constructed future that embraces change, challenge and uncertainty.
Graetz draws a distinction between strategic thinking and strategic planning.
“..Planning concerns analysis – establishing and formalising systems and procedures; thinking involves synthesis - encouraging intuitive, innovative and creative thinking at all levels of the organisation”.
Hypothesising, de-constructing, re-framing etc are all tools for creative thinking and strategising which fit within my consultancy tool kit.
“So long as contrasting right versions not all reducible to one are countenanced, unity is to be sought not in an ambivalent or neutral something beneath these versions but in an overall organization embracing them” (Goodman, 1978, pp5).
In revisiting some of the work I have undertaken with clients strategising has been a way of asking creative questions with a view to generating new possibilities and new futures. The other insight of course is that we strategise all the time – whether how to sneak out of the house in our teens or securing additional finance for a business venture – strategic thinking comes naturally!
The Challenge for Consultants
The primary challenge to those of us involved in assisting organisations to strategise is the co-creation of a secure enough environment in which to envision a future that is insecure.
An un-attributed quote states – “Martin Luther King did not say, ‘I have a strategic plan,” he said “I have a dream’” – and has a lot to offer those of us in the midst of strategising. The dilemmas about outputs become secondary to the strategising itself and business plans, marketing material, bank proposals etc become obvious ways of developing contextually situated conversations that can only enhance understanding.
Goodman, Nelson, (1978), Ways of Worldmaking, Hackett Publishing Company
Graetz, Fiona (2002), Strategic Thinking Versus Strategic Planning: Towards Understanding the Complementarities, Management and Decision, Volume 40, Number 5, pp456 - 463
Micklethwait J and Wooldridge A, (1996), The Witch Doctors, Heinemann, London,
As I mentioned in the previous post, I use a process called Dynamic Participation as a methodology for consulting and facilitating. Increasingly we live in an age where "participation" is thrown around like snuff at a wake - what exactly does it mean? and more to the point, what does it look like? Here are some of the principles that I work by:
Always work in the “here and now”. Who said what to whom a week ago; a month ago or a year ago is rarely useful in terms of moving a situation forward. Working with what is going on in the room right now is.
Always work on a live issue. Role plays and case studies can be really interesting ways of getting a group to work on a task, but they rarely result in that group applying the learning in their work environment after the workshop/session has finished. Working on something that is a live issue for everyone in the room is one sure fired way to ensuring that learning sticks.
Context is as important as content. How someone decides to "put something into the room" is always as important as what they say and is a huge source of information about how this group works together in helpful and unhelpful ways.
Making a difference starts with being in the room. If people can’t understand why you have invited them together then the process is pointless. If however, you can show people by the way in which you interact with them that their presence and view is essential then you create immediate buy in.
Keep the process public. Have the conversations about why you are there, what is expected and hoped for, boundaries around time etc out loud and with those you invite into your process. Take a risk and produce notes of the meeting that summarise what has been discussed and distribute these openly to all who attend.
Dialogue, not monologue. Are you sure you are consulting/facilitating? And not disseminating? A real dialogue involves myriad views…are you open to changing yours on the basis of what you hear? If so, then a real and genuine dialogue can yield exciting results. If not, then you are engaged in a monologue and people will rarely come back for a second lecture.
Roles come with responsibilities and that goes for everyone in the conversation. Dynamic Participation offers a space to ask each participant – what is my role? And what is my responsibility? Taking the blame culture out of organisational life can only be done if both of these questions are asked and answered by everyone in the room (including the consultant).
Attend to boundaries, not rules. By attending to the boundaries of the process you leave room for difference. By attending to rules you impose conformity.
Ask those who present with negative statements to offer positive alternatives, thereby focussing on what is possible as distinct from what is not.
Defensive people are usually trying to protect something important. Instead of getting frustrated with the defence try asking “what is so important here that it needs this kind of protection?”
In order to meet the demands of (some!) readers...I'm reverting to consulting "lite" for this post which I've shamelessly borrowed from this site.
The idea is to choose a word from each column and viola! instant consulting jargon...and if anything I ever write conforms to this protocol, please operationalize bleeding-edge thoughtware.
How much responsibility does a facilitator take on for what happens in a room with a group with whom he or she is working? This is something I think about quite a bit depending on the kind of relationship, the longevity of it and what the task in hand is.
I am a believer in keeping the planning conversations about the process in the room and out loud. Any other approach infantilises clients and results in the facilitator having more control than s/he needs to. If the ultimate aim of the process is to generate action then this set up can stifle that before you even begin.
The “difficult” or “angry” person in a group is the place where this approach is really tested and I’ve worked with this in myriad ways over the course of my consulting career. Now if I’m working over an extended period of time then I can process what that hostility may be communicating on behalf of the group. You need a good working alliance and time and space to do that kind of work. If I am in a situation where I have a short amount of time and a clear piece of work the group needs to engage with then my approach is more direct.
If someone is “interrupting” the task of the group by complaining (usually about a deficit of some kind) then instead of dealing with them directly about it I put the following into the room.
I appreciate the fact that people feel comfortable speaking freely about what they wish to talk about
However, the context for the meeting is that we are here to discuss the following items – and then I refer to the invitation or agenda.
There are resources available to the group including my facilitating skill, time, physical resources etc and they need, as a group, to make a choice about how they want to do that. We can talk about what’s “not” happening or we can talk about what is….They can choose to change the agenda and focus on other items and I will willingly go with them there and facilitate that discussion. What I am not willing to do is make a decision for them and then find out that many people in the room are disappointed that we didn’t talk about the agenda which was agreed.
I generally find that putting that out into a group does several things
It respects the diversion from the topic at hand, and the person who is brave enough to say out loud what some people may not be able to articulate.
It puts responsibility for the content of the conversation where it belongs – with the group
It puts responsibility for the context and boundary of the conversation where it belongs – with the facilitator
It engages with the participants as adults, with choices about how they use the resources available to them
It requires action on the part of the group, which if the outcomes of the meeting are to be successful will require the same kind of action.
The alternative is for the facilitator to take all the responsibility which in turn means that you prevent a group from learning how they choose to include and exclude.
So far I’ve never encountered a group that hasn’t been able to engage with that task and make a decision about how to continue to work together.
For years I’ve fooled everyone around me into believing I think in straight lines. My academic and business writing makes “sense” and I can follow the rules if I’m pushed to it. But I’m a secret mind mapper…it’s the only way I can make any kind of sense out of complex ideas and concepts while doing them justice before re-framing them for consumption elsewhere.
Over the past few days I’ve been reflecting on my France experience with a view to writing up those reflections in the form of a paper. As usual, it took me ages to get going on the computer to actually write it up. But I kept a mind map open and as thoughts occurred to me I added them in to a branch here and there so I had the paper plotted before I started writing.
In all honesty this isn’t a real mind map because there is far too much writing and not enough single words and images. But the thing with mind maps is that each one is individual. I’m guessing that no one would be able to figure out what the final document looked like from this diagram and that suits me just fine – they don’t need to – I need to!
I have used mind maps over the years to capture the content of books, plan presentations, to think through complex meetings and I’m amazed at how it aids retention of information. If, like me, you take notes at meetings and never read them again then you’ll breathe a sigh of relief when it comes to mind maps. They’re creative, playful and indulgent in all the best senses of those words.
The thing about mind maps is that each of the branches really doesn’t need to connect to the others when the idea occurs to you. The connection is with the middle. And that’s the way I work in groups also. I’m not that concerned when seemingly random comments or branches of conversations happen that on the surface, don’t seem to link up. My job is thinking about how they link to the middle, or the big picture. When conversations “wander” there’s always something interesting happening in the room. Sometimes it’s an avoidance of difficult issues, other times it’s free association, but ultimately it’s all related to the middle. Who enjoys being in groups where it all works in linear and straight lines. If you're like me - then the big picture is where it's at.
I’ve embarked on a PhD programme this year which is throwing up all kinds of challenges and delights (so far, in equal measure). I’m in that beginning phase where as each day goes by I realise what I don’t know. There are times when it’s incredibly dispiriting because I know it is going to be a long time before I can speak with any confidence about what it is I do know.
I’ve found this little tool useful in the past in helping me position myself in relation to learning and newness. It’s generally outlined in a matrix but I prefer a circular model because there’s never a point at which learning “ends”. We’re always at some point in this circle in relation to something.
Right now I’m in the unconscious incompetence phase of learning and it’s uncomfortable beyond belief. However, I‘m in the unconscious competence phase in relation to the process of learning – I have been here before and while I can experience the uncomfortableness of it, I know it will shift and abate somewhat when the time is right.
When I’m working with clients I refer to this model to help people position themselves in relation to what they “do” know. There’s so much of what we do in organisational life that we take for granted and by taking it for granted, we often dismiss it. When a learning opportunity arrives we then feel inadequate in some way instead of seeing learning as a cyclical process. Often, taking the time to sit with what we take for granted can lessen the anxiety about “starting over” with something new.
critique of the current orthodoxy that the world is changing at an ever faster rate, that organizations must adapt to this change in order to survive, and that change management techniques enable organizations to do this. There is no basis to evaluate the proposition that thewe face unprecedented rates of change, and change is not something to which organizations must respond, but is instead an outcome of organizational actions. Change management initiatives are largely failures, and the usual explanations for these failures are inadequate.
He goes on to talk about change management in these terms:
change management rests upon the conceit that it is possible systematically to control social and organisational relations, a conceit shared by the social sciences in general
The article is a great read and Johnnie offers his own take on the change process at the end with which I completely agree.
too often, conversations about change treat it as something done to other people at another time; as something that people must be talked into.
I’d offer an additional perspective which is that (a) we are always resistant to change and (b) we are always changing. So many managers and leaders I work with are grappling with having to implement or deal with the fallout from change. They enter into the relationship feeling scared, utterly inadequate and hiding in their academic understanding of the “value” of change. I have moments when I genuinely think they’ve been brainwashed into believing that it should be simple and straightforward. Which of course it’s not. How could it be when we are grappling with that paradox?
Ask anyone about the value of an academic approach to fitness, weight loss, saving for a rainy day and see how effective it is to talk at people about something they are willingly losing or giving up by not doing things the “new” way. It simply doesn’t work. Most of the time people are scared about what they are losing – sense of self, dignity, finance, position etc…our identity is completely challenged by change processes and yet…
We all change
we recover from relationships that don’t work
We learn to move on from the death of significant others
We adapt to being in relationships with others where our sense of self has to evolve and accommodate difference
We deal with our children leaving home
And somehow, at the end of it all we survive. Change processes that tap into what we already know about change, our capacity for both hating and managing together with our ability to survive and move on are the most meaningful change interventions I have seen work. I’m privileged to have been part of designing some of those processes also and like Johnnie I believe in the power of open spaces (using that technology and others) for genuine and meaningful connections between people. Safe places that address and manage power relationships are they only ways to effective real change in my humble opinion.
David Maister has an interesting post about whether or not blogging is "dead" but more critically he's talking about blogging as a relational activity also (one of my key reasons for blogging!). He asks a great question at the end of the post
Let me ask all of you out there a question: based on what you tell of my interests by reading my blog, what other blogs should I be reading regularly? It's like those reviews in music magazines - if you like this CD then you'll probably like that one. Help me out here, folks!
And I'm sure he won't mind if I ask the same question here..on the basis of what you are reading and what fires you up when you read - what blogs would you recommend that I read?
Edit: If, like me, you often lose track of where you've been commenting and when (not to mention with whom!) then this gizmo will change your life! Co-Comment is a comment aggregator - you sign up for an account then it automatically tracks and saves the comment feeds (your comments and others) and shows them all on one page...you can run it in the background and add a firefox extension...So while I'm technically asking for your recommendations of what I should be reading consider this an offer in the other direction. Thanks to Amy for the link.
Some of the bloggers I read include a "links for the day" posting where they link to four or five sites sometimes with little or no information about why those links have been chosen. I guess if you like a blogger's fare then you're likely to understand why they've chosen this particular selection.
I'm also a member of a number of listservs in relation to my research and occasionally someone will link to an article or a site and ask others what they think about it, without saying why they have selected what they have and what interests them about it.
Sometimes, depending on what mood I’m in – I’ll get a bit grumpy and say to myself “why are they posting links? Isn’t that just lazy? Expecting me to do the finding out?”
I think of blogs as curated spaces…the selection of what we choose to talk about or link to, says something considered about who each of us are. In much the same way as walking into a gallery space, there’s the individual art pieces and then there’s the selection together – what does this say about the artist’s body of work? What does it say about the curator who gathered together this particular selection of work?
I work with a lot of arts and cultural organisations and come up against the “what does it mean?” comments frequently. I’m lucky to work with people who want to make it possible to make connections between the work, where it is shown, who makes it, what it means, and how people can make their own meaning from the experience. Part of my work is to create thinking spaces for people to say “I don’t understand that” and for it to be acceptable to do so.
While I’m initially confused by the links many bloggers post, I can choose to engage with them, follow my nose (and theirs) and maybe discover something interesting for myself. I don’t need to be spoon fed the whole way. If I know something of the blogger’s interests and work then the selection tells me something more about their interests without them having to spell it all out for me. The list is an invitation – and likewise when someone is confused in a group I’m working with, their confusion is also an invitation to curiosity.
I contributed to a comment stream over at Creating Passionate Users recently and meant to come back to it to post something here in response.
Kathy posted a really interesting article on criticism. She says
The tricky part is that the criticisms aren't always wrong. It really might be all hype. It might be BS. It might be just a fad, or the same s*** with a new name. But things are rarely that black and white. Where there is passion (not just fad or fashion), there is something real there. Something that some people see and feel. But the key point to keep in mind--and the one that offers a simple solution--is this:
People will sometimes diss things they know very little about
In my response to a really great article about the value of passion (in all its forms) I said:
Sometimes the uninformed criticism is a reaction to being patronised and I think advocates and evangelists for various products/services need to be careful that they don’t cross the boundary between enthusiasm/passion and being patronising. Ultimately, we have to make it possible for people to say “I don’t like that” or “I don’t know” without imposing a value judgement. I’ll never get golf…I don’t think my life is in any way diminished as a result…the more I can admit that then the less I am likely to take a cudgel and bludgeon golf lovers to metaphorical death!
I sometimes come across this situation with client organisations which are so enthusiastic to promote the value of what they do that they sometimes forget that not everyone sees it the same way. Take golf for example (and I apologise in advance to any golf playing readers). I don’t play it, I probably never will and I remember feeling distinctly patronised by a friend on one occasion who suggested that I was missing something by not trying it out. I didn’t feel like I was missing anything and felt then that I’d never walk onto a golf course because it would be proving him right, me wrong and as a result I haven’t entertained the notion since. He made it difficult for me to see the value of it by assuming a high moral ground about the value and I made it impossible for myself to see the invitation by reacting to it.
I agree with Kathy that passion comes in all shapes and sizes and needs to be attended to. I also believe that creators, consultants or whomever need to moderate our enthusiasm so that it comes across as an invitation and not the potential sound of a door slamming.
I contributed to a comment stream over at Management Craft where Lisa has a great rant about the intrusive nature of mobile phones (I am soo with her on this one). The post is about the message we give to the person we are with when we ask them to hold on a moment while we answer our phones. The overt and covert message is that the person on the other end of the phone is more important than the person we’re talking with.I’ve seen the increase in this type of behaviour rocket in the past 24 months here in Ireland. As Lisa says
Unless you are the President (of a country), an on call neurosurgeon, or the only person with nuclear launch codes, you do not need to answer the phone. If you are talking with someone in person, it is rude and inconsiderate to interrupt that conversation. In addition, doing both things is pretty close to multitasking which we know is not an effective way to use time.
But the point I made over there and I’ll make it here again, is that this idea of being available 24/7 is a myth. I think there are a few things going on. Sometimes our sense of self is reliant on external sources. Being “available” is one way of feeling better about ourselves and in turn convincing ourselves that we really "matter". The 24/7 thing with phones/blackberries is also a way of saying we are available to everyone all of the time which in turns means – to no one body most of the time. The relentless availability culture is in my opinion a charade that is an avoidance of “intimacy”. If I’m scanning my text messages or waiting to answer a call then I’m not available to the person I am with. My mind is wandering, my attention is frayed and I’m simply “not there”. “Showing up” then takes on a vacuous quality that undermines and gets in the way of an authentic meeting.
If I can’t pay attention and be present when I’m with someone – be it a personal friend or a business colleague then I’m wasting their time, being disrespectful and ultimately pretending to be interested. How can authentic communication happen under those circumstances? Being present is the best way we have of making the people we know "matter" and in turn having the same experience ourselves. So switch off the phone/blackberry and pay attention to the moment...yes, this moment, right now...
I was recently asked to participate in a survey by a by post graduate student who is investigating blogging. It involved me ticking a series of multiple choice answers in response to around 30 questions. I’m always keen to offer what ever wisdom I’ve picked up after nearly 3 years of blogging so off I went with my cyber pen in hand. After getting thorough about half of the survey I found myself getting tense and agitated.
“It’s only a survey” I kept telling myself – what’s the problem?”
The “problem” was the way in which the questions were framed. Closed questions, limited pre-ordained answers and no context.. My agitation arose from feeling like I was being channelled in a direction that had nothing to do with my experience and everything to do with the interests of the researcher. (I hasten to add this was all in my own mind and not a criticism of the individual researcher).
I’m currently doing my own PhD research which is predicated on qualitative interviewing i.e. lots of open questions and data that I will have to hand code and interpret. No computer programme is going to do the work for me. My open questions are generating the most extraordinary insights from the people who are graciously giving me their time. After comepleting the survey above, I wondered what kind of impact a closed questioning approach would have on my research participants, if my experience of the online survey is anything to go by. My hypothesis is that they would have felt agitated; limited in their ability to reply and less generous in their responses. I know that’s how I felt 50% of the way through the survey. I felt as though “I” didn’t matter but whatever data I might have gathered would. All in all, a depersonalising experience.I can’t emphasise enough the importance I place on personalising my engagements with clients, research participants and others…If it’s not about what happens between us – then we should just “Phone it in”. There’s no point in being in a room with someone, or asking them to participate in something we’ve originated if we’re not that interested in making it possible for them to shine.
I didn’t “shine” in the online survey, but it’s given me a good lesson in how to ensure my research participants do.
I'm quoted in this month's Business Plus magazine in an article by Dick O'Brien about business blogging. I've made the transition from writing a personal blog to writing a business one and while there are definitely differences in content and motivation, I still view this space as one where I bring my personal self to the table as much as my business self. O'Brien comments at the end of the piece:
The common thread running across good business blogs is that authors tend to leave the marketing talk at the door. A willingness to engage on industry issues, interact with readers and follow up on their feedback, seems to be the recipe for success.
I think that's an astute observation about business blogs in general. The ones I am reading are all stamped with the personality of their authors and its rare to see any of the writers I enjoy selling something directly or peddling a predictable line. So I guess the line between personal and professional is a thin one at times.
It appears that we've still quite a bit to go in Ireland before business blogging takes off but I'm optimistic that within a few years we will see key opinion formers blogging and engaging directly with peers and customers. I've been very heartened at the response I've had at home and abroad since I took up the biz blog mantle a couple of months ago and I'm getting more excited as the weeks progress about the possibilities, the conversations and the new relationships.
I spent today in Kilkenny where I was a speaker at the Craft Council of Ireland’s one day seminar on Best Practice in Commissioning and the Corporate Gift Market. The speakers included Cornelia McCarthy (Crafts Council of Ireland), Rachel Joynt (Sculptor), Tim O’Neill (Calligrapher), Lorraine O’Rahilly (Researcher), Angela Rolfe (Assistant Principal Architect at the Office of Public Works) and Gerry Crosbie (Designyard). I managed to get the graveyard shift at the very end of the morning and just before lunch. As we were over time I did a very speedy run through of my presentation which was about Professionalism in Answering a Brief. My brief was to give some pointers for crafts people who may be entering into the commissioning process in the public arena about how to approach the process from a professional perspective.
This is the first time I’ve given a presentation and avoided the bullet points - the feedback from people was pretty positive overall so it’s definitely something I need to think about doing again in the future.
The afternoon was taken up with a series of “clinics” (speed dating effectively!) where attendees spent short amounts of time with the speakers and additional experts who joined us. I’m hoping that some of what I was able to offer was useful (I was the only person who didn’t have money to spend purchasing or commissioning) and I promised several people there that I would upload my presentation, the notes that I worked from and also some useful links so here goes:
My presentation is here. (It's a fairly large file so will take a while to download, you also shouldn't need powerpoint to view it and it won’t make any sense to anyone who wasn’t at the seminar).
The following are some links which people who attended might find useful.
The Arts Council’s website has some useful information that people working in the craft area may find helpful. If you click on the Links and Resources page and then on the Arts Officers link (no direct hyperlink available unfortunately) then you get a list of all of the current Arts Officers in Ireland.
Each local authority in Ireland has a web site and all are mandated to produce a county development plan and arts plan. Both of these documents are essential reading for anyone considering applying for commissions from local authorities as they will give you the context and background out of which the commission is being generated.
Here is the link for Sligo County Council, their county development plan is available here and their last arts plan (which I wrote) is available here.
The Public Art Guidelines referred to by Angela Rolfe from the Office of Public Works are available here.
The two artists' briefs that I referred to in my presentation are available here (In Context 3) and here (Breaking Ground).
Another useful resource is Visual Artists Ireland. Their website is a treasure trove of helpful information including contracts, commissioning opportunities, professional development programmes etc.
I had a most enjoyable day – the Crafts Council of Ireland looked after us really well and the conference centre in Kilkenny Castle was a superb location for this event. I hope that the material I’ve referred to here is useful for people who attended (and indeed others) and I’m looking forward to participating in more of these events in the future.
I should also mention the wonderful Liam at Butler House who, after I managed to miss my return train to Dublin (don't ask), organised a room, pots of fresh tea, broadband access, a generous discount because I would be missing breakfast in the morning and a hearty welcome in out of the rain. My thanks!
I spent a great day yesterday delivering a training seminar for a group of crafts people from north and south of the border. One of the interesting issues that emerged at one point in the proceedings was the difference in how men and women deal with money. Most of the people present were solopreneurs and working independently, the quality of their work from the brief tour of websites I undertook is superb. Yet many of the women in particular professed a degree of discomfort when negotiating face to face with clients about fees.
We talked about some practical strategies for dealing with the very real issue of getting paid for your work but there seemed to be something more profound going on that reminded me of my training as a therapist. There comes a point when you have to feel comfortable asking for a suitable fee for the work you have done – particularly when that work is personal – and can only be undertaken by you. It’s a paradox. You are charging for a service, but you are also valuing your particular view, craft, skill or way of doing business. That’s why someone is standing in front of you asking you to do something for them. In a large corporation there’s a department that deals with the mucky stuff of invoicing and credit control. Many creative types have agents and managers…then there are those who have to manage both the creative stuff and the mucky stuff together – it’s hard to separate out the personal from the professional. The men present yesterday seemed to have no problem whatsoever in charging for their work, placing a value on what they do and asking for money.
There is a cultural discourse about women asking for money for “personal” service that inevitably plays into this whole discussion. The fine line between prostitution and therapy has been written about extensively and when there is no external “object” around which a discussion takes place it can be deeply uncomfortable for some people. As I have mentioned before, I don’t have a bag of tricks or a “thing” I sell. What I bring to a client is myself, my experience, my wisdom and my skill. It is personal – it has to be. But it can only work if there are good boundaries and I am a fond fan of that cliché that good fences make very good neighbours.
Some of the strategies we discussed that might be useful for crafts people yesterday included:
Writing up a “terms and conditions” document, framed in positive language about what you can and will provide and how you expect payment – post it on your website so people can see this before they contact you. The chances are they won’t bat an eyelid about payment terms if you’ve outlined it in advance.
Follow up “informal” discussions about commissions or work with a friendly email – put your understanding of what the client is looking for in writing, this will serve to clarify your own thinking and prompt some similar thinking on the part of the client. It also serves as the starting point to the assignment.
Keep a log or a diary of a project from the outset and include in it the time you spend thinking about a client and designs as well as the time you spend making – you’ll be surprised at how much work you are actually doing and how little value you may be attributing to it.
Sometimes small interventions can be the most meaningful of all and I hope that some of the people who came to the workshop yesterday will find those three suggestions useful in creating a boundary around what needs to be protected – their personal skill and ability and what can sometimes be eroded – their sense of worth and value.
I spent much of the last few days working on a number of interview transcripts for my research. One of the challenges when trying to put together a paper is how you carve up the space between those who are “experts” i.e. published authors, and those who are “applied experts” i.e. those who reflect on their experience of theory in practice when invited to participate in research projects such as my own. When I submitted my Masters dissertation I wrote a chapter on that dilemma and made a decision to give equal weight to the published and non published experts. Both complimented each other very well but I do remember weighing up that decision very carefully.
I suppose the reason it is popping into my mind again is that on several occasions over the last week or so I have found myself in conversations where the issue of “expertise” and who owns it has arisen. I often ask myself – what am I an expert in or at? And how can I see the expertise in those I work with even when it’s a challenge to do so.
Increasingly I am looking at “difficult people” in organisations as “experts” about a certain type of organisational intelligence. Sometimes the story they tell has to be shouted loudly and inarticulately for those who have “authority” to hear. Perhaps I’m deluding myself but I do think that there is an expertise at work there…there’s also an expertise involved in decoding and hearing it and I think the real challenge is finding a way in which someone’s expertise can shine instead of asking them to modify that expertise into something that fits a preordained box which denudes them of their expertise in the first place. In my fantasy life recruitment processes would be full of questions about how a candidate’s expertise could shine, what their suggestions for modifying or adapting organisations to fit them might be and what they themselves could contribute to the emotional temperature of a system…maybe someday!
I left a comment over at Johnnie’s blog about empathy. It’s a fairly essential element of a psychotherapist’s toolkit and there is much writing to substantiate the position that regardless of orientation, a therapist’s ability to empathise with a client is a key factor in the success of the working alliance.
Johnnie's take on it is interesting
I think empathy is what gets left out of many narratives about how change happens
In business I see an enormous anxiety about being empathic because there can be an assumption that to be empathic means I have to experience the other’s pain and if I do that then I will become as incapacitated as they are - out of control. It's a false assumption of course and it inevitably leads to the insincere empathy where everyone is "understanding" of everyone else’s pain. The false empathy then becomes a defence against our own feelings and ultimately destroys any chance of an authentic encounter. If we can't walk in someone else's shoes for a moment and try and understand what their world view is - then change or any kind of difference becomes academic and not authentic.
I’ve been having computer problems over the last few days. My Fujitsu Lifebook is continually crashing and I’m getting a “2060 System Timer Error” message when I try and boot up. I don’t have a back up computer so it’s fairly serious.
The machine is out of warranty (just) and Fujitsu will “have a look at it” by sending it to the UK – that will take a minimum of 2 weeks. I’ve phoned 10 laptop repair places in Dublin and none of them can help me.
So as an alternative to banging my head against the wall I’m trying to understand what’s going on here. I’m feeling like the problem isn’t serious enough to warrant attention from the fixers. I’m feeling stupid because I don’t have the jargon to understand what the problem is and I haven’t a clue what to do next in terms of having it repaired.
I’m not looking for therapy here – some sympathetic murmerings and a list of who might be in a position to help me solve my problem would be a good starting point. But being left with my problem and the disinterest of people who might potentially be able to help is deeply frustrating.
When I’m working with clients – I don’t get to decide what’s important and what’s not. If they think it’s important then it is – my job is to come up with creative ways of engaging with them and it. I’m rarely disinterested and if I can’t help then I’ll try and steer them in direction of someone who can. In the meantime, I have some phone calls to make to try and salvage my co-dependent relationship with my machinery!
I'm currently in Amsterdam where I'll be attending a symposium at the end of the week. I decided to take a few days off to spend a little time being a tourist and I can safely say right now I'm overwhelmed by ambivalence. This morning as I sat in the garden of the magnificent turn of the (20th) century canal house that I'm staying in, I couldn't say I wanted to move out of my seat to experience all the goodies that the city has to offer. There's a little voice in my head suggesting that this isn't quite what a holiday in Amsterdam has to offer and wouldn't I be better off getting my act together, my walking shoes on, guide book in hand and getting out and about.
I'm not normally stricken by ambivalence, so of course I'm curious about what's going on and it occurred to me that I'm overwhelmed by the choices on offer....There's simply too much to choose from and I don't feel adequately equipped to make the right choice so "hiding" in the back garden seems to me, right now to be the most adequate choice I can make.
It reminds me of working with a coaching client recently who, likewise, was faced with a number of (far more important, it has to be said) choices in her work environment. No matter what kind of work we did together - she kept presenting me with her ambivalence. Nothing was good enough so nothing was acted upon.
After a while I realised (as I did with myself a few hours ago) that ambivalence is the choice not to choose and in circumstances where people are overwhelmed by the choices available, choosing not to choose is the right response. So when we're faced with clients or colleagues who seem to be "stalling" on making a decision there are times when it's appropriate to inquire into how challenged they may be by the projected outcomes of their decisions. In my case I'm faced with "wasting my time in Amsterdam" by choosing the absolute "wrong" way to spend my time or choosing to re-frame the situation as doing myself a favour by sipping another glass of white wine in the garden and refusing to choose how to spend the time outside the front door.
Choosing not to choose is sometimes the last recourse of perfectionists who fear making the wrong choice and having to deal with the attendant fall out. Those of us who are recovering perfectionists re-frame the situation as "any choice is good enough" and we then go to the Rembradt exhibition at the Rijksmuseum, followed by some retail therapy. Oh that life were filled with choices that are that taxing!
One of the lessons I learnt from working as a therapist (and something that this post from The Relaxed Therapist prompted me to think about again) is that it isn't always helpful to be helpful. It's a lesson I have taken into other areas of my work life also. And before you say "Huh?" let me explain.
When a client demands my attention - be that a reasonable or an unreasonable demand I have to ask myself the question - who's pressure is this? and "what is the request contained in the demand?" Sometimes a client can't tolerate an unbearable pressure emanating from without and will seek ways to alleviate that pressure by passing it on to me. I've seen this quite a bit in my coaching practice. The request contained within a demand for a shorter/longer/revised meeting is generally "make what is intolerable go away". Now there are times when it may be appropriate to step in and take action. But more often than not "helping" in this instance isn't helping my client address his or her need to acquiesce to their pressure. If I jump and say "yes of course" then the pressure is just passed down the line and learning leaves with it.
It's really important to hold a boundary when a client is pushing against it. This isn't the same as saying "no" but it's more to do with hovering on the edge of the boundary and trying to use it as a learning experience. Here's what I've learned about being helpful:
Any request for help from a client that comes with a hidden tinge of pressure should be questioned. The chances are they may be unable to tolerate their own pressure and want you to alleviate it for them.
Holding the boundary between an immediate "yes"and an immediate "no" is a very uncomfortable place to be. The chances are that uncomfortableness is the same feeling a client wants to get rid of.
Checking in with our own need to "help" from time to time is a useful way to stay on top of unconsciously colluding with clients.
When we feel the uncomfortable urge to "help" ask yourself - "what am I trying to get rid of here" the chances are - it's the same thing that the client wants to get rid of.
If you can tolerate the pressure a client brings to your relationship then you can teach a client how to make sense of their own pressure instead of removing what may be a powerful symptom of a more profound issue.
Psychoanalyst and Management Guru Manfred Kets de Vries was one of the plenary speakers at the ISPSO Symposium in Haarlem and he spoke about the role of the consultant in asking critical questions of clients. At one point he said he now describes himself as an "Insultant" rather than a "Consultant". After I'd finished chuckling at the expression I realised that there's more than a grain of truth in that if we are to be honest sometimes about what we do.
I think what he was really getting at (and this is certainly my interpretation) is that we can't afford to be too compliant. Our role is to stand outside the system while actively contributing to it and to question, question, question. Sometimes we have to challenge and say the unsayable and that can often be "insulting" in so far as we dare to question the status quo or how things are always done around here.
I don't think he (or indeed, I) is advocating being rude or insulting in the traditional sense of the word but there's much to think about in being an "insultant" don't you think?
It's just over three months since I started the interactions blog and last week I penned the last entry in a personal blog I've been writing for three years so it's about time for some review and reflection I think. I suspect that the things I've learned from blogging (reading, writing and commenting) are lessons that will continue to stand me well in all areas of life. But for now, here's what I think I've learned so far:
Find your voice - It takes time to find your voice. It took me the guts of a year to settle into the personal blog - I'd experimented with all kinds of ways of telling my stories and decided at the end of it all that I was writing for myself and if someone else found me interesting then they would listen in and chat back. I'm still struggling with this space in that regard. I guess it's a bit like starting a new job - you know where the desk and water cooler are but you have to sit it out a bit to find out when and where to make a contribution!
Stay connected - I realised that at the end of three years with the personal blog I had said what I wanted to say and I didn't want to continue filling in blanks on a web space just because that's what I'd always done. It was a tough decision to make but ultimately the right one. Likewise with this space - I'll write when the muse strikes and if I find that I've nothing more to say then I'll re-invent myself or move on.
Talking to yourself is a good thing - that's effectively what I did on the personal blog and I guess to a certain extent what I'm doing here. It'll take a while to build a readership (and I'm delighted to say that's growing so thank you to the faithful regulars who stop by). But if I'm not interested in what I'm writing about - how can I expect anyone else to be?
Be yourself - this is connected to all of the others but it's particularly relevant in the world of business blogging. I'm very conscious of audience in this space...much more than I was while writing a personal blog. What happens if I screw up royally in public here? How the heck can you hide? And of course this is precisely why I started a business blog - so I can actually be and show myself (Believe me I have the suit and formidable glasses for the other occasions as well!).
It's all about the space between - regardless of whether I'm consulting, training, coaching, having lunch or reading the newspaper - life happens in the spaces between people and blogging is my way of creating a mechanism for more in-between spaces. For now I'll stuggle on with the other stuff but every time someone comments or takes up something I've said in another forum or offers me the opportunity to do that here I count my blessings.
So that's the current list of learnings...continually being added to of course but not a bad way to start the second trimester of business blogging?
One upon a time there was the “Unqualified Apology” when we could freely say “I’m sorry” and it would be accepted at face value. It was a measure of the person that they could acknowleg wrong doing, accept responsibility and offer some kind of reparation via the expression.
Then we moved into the area of the “Qualified Apology”. In those days we were sorry “IF” someone else felt hurt by some act perpetrated upon them by us. All of that self help stuff really helped us see that we were responsible for our own experiences, and as such, someone else’s hurt was really nothing to do with us.
Now I see a shift into what I call the “General Pre-emptive Apology”. I’ve seen this in a lot in cases of institutional abuse where a spokesperson comes straight out and apologises at the outset for all and everything the instutition did, could do or may do to people.
What’s the point of an apology anyway? I’m not in any way undermining genuine cases of bullying and harrassement – but I see so much hurt in the work I do that appears so simple in comparison and part of me wants to make it safe for us to be able to say those words. We live in a world that is increasingly litigious and those simple words which alleviate hurt, build trust and cement relationships are more often than not, simply not allowed any more. So much inter-personal conflict in organisations could be alleviated if we accepted that in all relationships we bump into each other, we hurt, we love, we can apologise and we can recover. But if I can’t say “I’m sorry for hurting you” what hope is there for meaningful reparation, a letting go and a move to another level? Will it ever be possible to experience the "Genuine Apology" without systems, procedures, policies and lawyers hovering in the background?
I do a lot of work with boards of directors and management committees wanting to take time out to review where they are and where they are going. Sometimes this involves organising and facilitating "retreats" (I use that word advisedly because in Ireland 'retreat' has religious connotations!). But I digress.. A recurring theme is often that of board composition - Who do we need? What skill base are we looking for? Do we need to think of retiring and asking others to step in etc? When it gets down to thinking about real people groups can often get stuck. Loyalties, allegiances, politics and favouritism sometimes get in the way of the task at hand.
Increasingly I'm using other methodologies for getting at what's needed and a favourite technique I use is the fantasy board game. In this, each person in the room gets to pick a person - real or imagined, alive or dead to place on the board. It's a fun brainstorming session and the more it is played the wilder the suggestions get (and you can tell a lot about someone by who they suggest!). It's easier to pick a fantasy person than name someone you might know in a personal capacity. I then do an exercise with people about why they picked the person they did - and the list of attributes and qualities simply flows! We then have a list of all of the skills and qualities needed to populate the board that will look to the future and it's not a difficult task at this point to compare that list with the skill base of people currently sitting on the board. Augmenting, changing or moving around tends to be a much more logical task once the illogical one of picking fantasy people has been completed.
There's a lot to be said for playfullness in consulting - I really enjoy these sessions, and for what it's worth Katharine Hepburn is always on my list (for everything now that I think of it). Why? She's independent, sassy, not afraid to call it as she sees it and can stand up to Humphrey Bogart in a boat while at the time being a four time academy award winner and remaining fabulously feminine. Now I wonder what that says about me eh?
Photo courtesy of rest-in-peace.info
Another great post from Kathy has sparked my thinking about creative process, “not knowing” and all that stuff that’s a challenge to certainty and control. This has been particularly relevant for me in a recent project – the overt task was the creation of a strategic plan which went well but the covert task was managing the anxiety of my client about outcomes. Each time we’d take a break of a few days from the process my client would redesign the task and focus on the outcomes and actions to the detriment of the high level thinking we needed to stay with. The images in my head were of me physically pulling her back.
Thankfully we have a great working relationship so I moved into coach mode (with her permission) and we looked at what the gaps and the attention to outcomes was about. A complex political environment, uncertainty about her own position, a distrust of how well the consultation process we had designed was going etc all conspired to make her cautious about trusting her own and my instincts and processes for getting the outcome in the end. The process we designed was based on my rules for dynamic participation and was effectively about listening to the conversations with participants and modifying our consulting approach in response – allowing the process to unfold organically if you will. Cathy talks about this and quotes a section from Getting Real which really speaks to me about the value of holding back:
It's a Problem When It's a Problem
"Don't waste time on problems you don't have yet. Do you really need to worry about scaling to 100,000 users today...?"
Just Wing It
"Bottom Line: Make decisions just in time, when you have access to the real information you need."
"Real things lead to real reactions. And that's how you get to the truth."
Work in iterations
"Let the app grow and speak to you. Let it morph and evolve. Instead of banking on getting everything right upfront, the iterative process lets you continue to make informed decisions as you go along. The result is real feedback and real guidance..."
There's often an assumption that if you're not controlling the outcome it will slip away. I beg to differ - I hold the outcome but I don't attempt to control it because if I do that I miss the evolving processes that make that outcome authentic and rooted in real experience. At the end of the day it's that balance between authenticity and task that gets plans owend and acted upon
I’m a bad blogger and before I go any further I want to issue a generalisation alert – you have been warned.
I have discovered in my travels through cyberspace that my blog is breaking all of the rules…I don’t offer “ultimate” solutions; “rules” for getting things done right (apart from this entry which in fact happens to be they way I do work with groups); I can’t come up with too many bullet pointed “top tips” entries and I rarely spend enough time trying to compose sure fire headlines that work. Is this rush to certainty purely an American phenomenon? I say this because I see stark differences between the ways in which many American and European business bloggers approach their craft. We appear to be less comfortable offering certainty on this side of the pond – it’s a bit more conversational, less hard sell. What happens when you are so used to being offered the ultimate, no holds barred, sure fire, guaranteed solution to every problem? Do you become immune? What does the more conversational – let’s co-create something together approaches evoke? Do we look touchy-feely in a world that demands certainty? I don’t know….I have found it interesting to explore various voices on this blog but ultimately I don’t believe in certainty. I don’t believe there’s a 10 step plan to achieving anything you want to achieve that is simple to execute and follows in a logical progression.
The bit that is always missing in these foul-proof plans is emotion. Emotion is a no go area in business for a good reason – it’s the thing that makes or breaks plans. Our decisions, while they may look on the surface to be rational and planned are fuelled, contextualised and informed by emotion and there’s no 10 step bullet pointed approach to putting manners on how we feel. It requires work, it requires bespoke interventions; it requires listening and storytelling, it requires expertise; it requires process, it requires courage. That’s if you want the solutions to stick.
If emotion didn’t matter then we’d all be fit, slim, non-smoking, world travelling, happy camper workers and family people with not a care in the world and a bullet pointed map to get us there. Does that sound like anyone you know?
I don’t live in a bite sized world and while I would love to believe that there’s a bullet pointed list out there with my name on it I simply don’t buy it….My world is richer, more complex, operates on myriad levels, attends to conscious and unconscious processes, is rational as well as emotional. I assume the worlds of my clients are equally sophisticated. And yes, I do get results and yes I do get asked back to work with clients so something works about an approach that doesn't offer false hope.
So now I need to go away and write a snappy headline for this post that will get me noticed ..any ideas?
If you are in the consulting business you are going to do a lot of tendering for work. A good quality Terms of Reference (TOR) from a potential client is a joy to behold. It gives me the opportunity to ask two critical questions (a) Am I the right consultant for the job? and (b) Can I, on the basis of the information provided, compete creatively?
Why, oh why are so many of the TOR documents I see so badly constructed? Isn’t it in the best interests of all parties that the client gets good quality, creative, impressive and comparable tenders so that the right decision can be made? I’ve seen TORs with no information on the scope of the assignment, the duration of the assignment, the context out of which the project is being conceived, little or no information on the desired outcome and the most frequent one – a request for a feasibility study and a development plan for the outcome? So here are my top tips for clients wishing to generate the best quality tendering information on which to base their decision.
• Disclose the budget. Yes, you heard me correctly. If not the full amount then a bandwidth. The reason? If you give all tenderers the budget then you immediately have a benchmark with which to compare like with like. How I spend that budget will give you a clear indication of whether I’ve thought through the assignment thoroughly or not. Competition on price is a very limited way of selecting the best person to work with you.
• If you can’t disclose the budget, disclose the total number of consulting days you reckon this assignment will take – again, you’ll get a better idea of how individual tenderers will address your dilemma and utilise your resources.
• Don’t ask for a feasibility study and a development or action plan. A feasibility study means I can take your money and tell you that this project isn’t feasible. If you want an action plan as well then you’ve already made your mind up that the project is feasible.
• Be clear about the questions you want to ask and allow the tenderer to demonstrate their creativity in coming up with a methodology for tackling them. Too often TORs focus on methodology as distinct from purpose.
• Tell me why you are commissioning this piece of work – what’s the history? What’s the context? Why is this assignment of importance to you?
• Tell me what deliverables you expect.
• What is your desired outcome? Fixed? Flexible? A process? Tell me what you want to be different as a result of undertaking this assignment.
• If you are going to call me for interview give me some idea of when that might be – that way I can mark it in my diary.
The Tony Blair-Gordon Brown drama is such a fine example of the dilemmas facing family businesses – albeit on a much larger canvas. By family business I not only mean a business that is started and operated by a family but also those that are run by close colleagues. In both – the boundaries between what’s personal and what’s professional are very closely aligned. Think for a moment about your own family. Think about the innate ability of your (insert appropriate person here) to push precisely that button that makes you revert to being 10….now think about that person being a work colleague, boss or staff member and you are only scratching the surface of what working in a family business can be like.
The biggest challenge facing family businesses is that of succession. At what point does “Parent” move over and let “Child” take over the operation? Is it when s/he dies? Does s/he have to commit suicide? Can s/he plan that at some point in the future he will step aside and oversee an orderly transition. Unfortunately the latter happens less often than you would think.
In the first instance there’s never a right time – the second generation has to wait until their Parent is dead in order to step into running the operation. It’s a constant waiting role for the “top job”…(another prominent family in the UK springs to mind..)…and the reality is it may never arrive if the second generation departs (either through death, resignation or other). It may also generate fantasies of “murder” – hoping that someone or something else takes out the leader so that the second generation may step in.
In the second scenario the Parent must commit “suicide” – i.e. killing themselves off as head of the family in order that the next generation may live.
Children can find it difficult to leave the family home and build lives of their own - add to this the guilt of any “Child” wanting to avoid it all by not participating in the business (i.e. abandoning the family); how that gets talked (or not talked about) and suddenly there are Shakesperian dramas that sound very pertinent.
Why does this sound so dramatic? Suicide/murder/succession/power/politics/guilt – they all weave a very dramatic context in which identity and role are negotiated and acted out. Parent isn’t only the head of the family – s/he is head of the business. If s/he steps down as the business leader – what does this mean for their role as the leader of the family – will s/he still be respected? Will s/he still maintain a powerful position in the family – will anyone listen to him or her?
How then can a second generation evolve into being who they are if they are waiting to literally and metaphorically step into their parent's shoes? Is it possible to be your “own person” if the role has been already defined? If your Parent always knows better? It’s one thing thinking about the Super-Ego as a psychological concept and another if the Super-Ego is staring at you across the board room table!
Now back to Tony and Gordon for a moment. Tony has said he will leave (some day) he won’t say exactly when so the family is getting anxious. Meanwhile the second generation (Gordon) is waiting, and waiting and waiting. Recent news reports talk of the mounting frustration in the family that Tony won’t roll over. There is talk of “murder” and of wishing Tony would do the “decent thing” and commit “suicide” by stepping down. On the surface there is a desire for an orderly transition, beneath the surface there are dramatic tensions worthy of a Greek tragedy.
I’ve always enjoyed working with family businesses because it is the closest we get to seeing where the personal and professional overlap. It’s not enough to know how business works – you also have to know how families work. Boundary building; core issues of life and death; identity; ownership and leadership are critical issues to be worked with. At the end of the day – it’s about working out what works for the business and what works for the family – sometimes, but not always they are the same thing. But in a family business it’s not possible to say “it’s business, not personal” because it’s always “personal” and sometimes “business.”
A propos of a previous post - Tony and Gordon as Family Business - on the day in which Tony Blair, father of the Labour Party in the UK and current Prime Minister announces he will go (just not yet though so hang on again for a date...), Mary Harney, Mother of the Irish Progressive Democrats, Coalition partner and Minister for Health takes the country by surprise by announcing her resignation as leader of the party. Nominations for a replacement are due next Monday - no waiting, no agonising about naming the date - no scandal, no gossip, she gets to control her departure, the "children" get to plan her replacement, clean, clean, clean...Who says there aren't any life lessons from politics?
Do you have an elevator pitch about your business? I have tried and failed (repeatedly) to invent one. I sometimes think I need to be in a very tall building where the lift occasionally goes to the top floor.
I’ve written here previously about Dynamic Participation – the principles that inform how I facilitate and consult and I’ve refined those 10 points into a 3 point plan for working with groups
1 Keep the process in the room
2 Consult with curiosity
3 Respect the resistence
Sometimes the worst situations offer the best learning. In a gathering of colleagues recently we shared stories of some challenging consulting assignments. Yes, there were difficult clients and some harrowing stories, but each of my colleagues had reflected on their experiences, learned some lessons and allowed the learning to inform how they are in relationship with clients subsequently.
I extrapolated some of my learning from reflecting on my own practice and from participating in the above discussion and here are some of the questions I ask myself when the going seems tough.
• How am I being “used” here?
• In the service of who’s truth and reality?
• How is what’s happening to me relevant to my client’s dilemma?
• In what way is this situation my client’s experience?
• What have I contributed to the situation?
• What problem did my contribution solve for me?
• What’s useful about my dilemma?
What kinds of questions would help you reflect on your practice?
Apologies for the light posting this week - I've been juggling a quite a few different types of work in a variety of locations. I spent today in Castlebar running a workshop for the Mayo County Enterprise Board. Soon to be blogger and Chief Executive Frank Fullard invited me there to meet with artists about the commissioning process and I thoroughly enjoyed the day. 16 artists from a variety of disciplines put me through my paces, the conversations were vibrant, the questions were challenging and I'm hoping at the end of it all it was useful for those who participated. I was amazed at the generosity of the participants in sharing their experience (both good and bad) which really contributed to the success of the day. Frank Fullard is also one set of brains behind Irish Business Women - it's a fantastic resource for female entrepreneurs and I recommend heading over there for some good advice and support.
According to the tenets of DIY psychotherapy, the idea is to re-record the past by repeating "I am a beautiful, creative, successful person" 50 times a day. And no one, except the congenitally malign, would think it remotely appropriate to pipe up: "Actually, you're rather plain and I can absolutely see why you would have been impossible as a child."
Apparently people lie on their cvs because we live in a culture populated by diy psychotherapists and
psychoanalytically derived psychotherapy, when patients are coaxed to produce a more helpful account of how they got to be the person they are. Damaging beliefs that have become internalised ("I was a bad child who made my mother unhappy") are reframed so they become less toxic ("My mother was often depressed, which meant she found it difficult to say she loved me").
So goes the argument from Kathryn Hughes in last Saturday’s Guardian. The piece really irritated me because of the sloppy transitions and casual way in which the genuine art of reframing is now a co-conspiritor with reality tv, makeover programmes and virtually any other media fabrication that makes it possible to avoid work in the hope of an instant makeover.
Interestingly Ms Hughes seems to think that there is only one version of the truth and re-framing is a way of avoiding it. The whole point of reframing is to see a situation from disparate perspectives. When we’re locked into seeing the world in one way our choices disappear and we are immediately disempowered. Most good psychotherapists will encourage clients to not only see their own “stuckness” from a different perspective, but also their own less than useful behaviour. It’s not about avoiding “reality” it’s an acknowledgement that reality looks different depending on who’s shoes your standing in.
Re-framing is one of the most useful interventions I can make as a consultant and if a client is willing to look at their situation differently – well, that means change is already a reality and the work has already begun.
Over at Anecdote there's an interesting post about Organisational Stories and how organisational myths are a great way of understanding the culture of the system.
Finding an organisation’s myths helps you understand the boundaries and constraints for any new interventions you might have planned. I’ve discovered that myth discovery is simply a matter of asking for stories that lots of people know.
I've shaped many of my interventions and consulting assignments on the basis of unheard organisational stories which have been generated in informal contexts. Sometimes it's important to find a way of telling those stories more publicly but in a way that's respectful of the content and context. I've found that working with professional actors - particularly those who are skilled at devising - is a fantastic way to present those stories back to groups in a way that generates very significant conversation.
In presenting a theatre piece, devised by actors, I'm hoping that the group I'm working with will know that their concerns have been heard and as a result we don't have to open up a difficult conversation that may close down the work rather than open it up.
To date the feedback I'm getting is really positive and clients have spoken about how significant it is to have their "reality" reflected back to them in a dramatic way. I'm looking forward to developing this methodology further and creating more bespoke interventions in organisational contexts.
I spent a couple of days last week with a group of highly creative and artistic people assisting them think at a strategic level about their sector. Like many people in the arts they are passionate, committed, enthusiastic and are not afraid of moving between their personal and professional selves in the service of the task. One of the things I noticed from the outset was how long it took some people to “arrive” both physically and psychologically. Some were late for our sessions and others were on time but not on message. I guessed that many mobile phones were on vibrate or silent and not many had been switched off entirely. (As it turned out, I was right).
This was a really experienced group of practitioners who were interested in the dilemma I reflected back to them about being in the room. I wondered what was going on that made it challenging for people to be really connected in the task. We worked through those challenges and emerged at the end of our work with a manifesto of responsibilities each was willing to sign up to in order to work productively in the future. They recognised that there was important information in not turning the phones off and being psychologically “outside the room”.
Physically “showing up” isn’t enough. The key question is – are you present? Being present requires a psychological and spiritual connection to the work that is happening in the moment and to the people with whom you are working. It requires intimacy and connection and it also means dealing with the fear of being connected. Being connected brings responsibilities and commitments and if we’ve left the phone on or are making ourselves available somewhere else it means our sense of commitment is also somewhere else. Agreements about tasks and decisions will then fail to deliver because that bullet pointed list may be a way of avoiding something deeper.
There was a time at the early stages in my consulting career when this kind of dilemma would have bothered me and I would have tried to “fix it”. These days I see it as a rich opportunity to introduce more of the shadow into the room – if people are willing to have their “resistance” seen then it’s a clue that the time may be right to have a look at what’s important about that resistance.. So it’s not only the participants who need to show up, it’s also the consultant or facilitator who needs to pay attention to what’s actually going on in front of them rather than what they think should be going on. In my own case, the less attention I pay to the detail of the discussion and the more I pay to the context and tone of the discussion the better I am able to work between the levels to create a space where everyone can be present. I can’t make them show up but I can wonder out loud about the quality of presence.
Ben Zander, conductor for the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, and professor at the New England Conservatory of Music, was faced with the same problem every year for 25 years: Teaching students who were in such a chronic state of anxiety over the measurement of their performance, they were reluctant to take creative risks. One night, he sat down with his partner Roz Stone Zander, a therapist, to try to find a solution. They decided the best approach would be to give everyone an A, at the beginning of the course. The A was not intended as a way to measure someone's performance against standards, but as an instrument to open them up to new possibilities.
This didn’t mean students could slack off for the rest of the semester. Students were required to write a letter that began with “Dear Mr. Zander, I got my A because…” and they had to describe in as much detail as possible, how they came to achieve this “extraordinary grade.”
In writing their letters, Zander said students must “place themselves in the future, looking back, and report on all the insights they acquired and the milestones they attained during the year, as if those accomplishments were already in the past. Everything must be written in the past tense. Phrases such as ‘I hope,’ ‘I intend,’ or ‘I will’ must not appear.”
Zander asserts “the A is an invention that creates possibilities for both mentor and student, manager and employee, or for any human interaction.” The A allows teams to accomplish what is possible, and reduces “the disparity in power between them can become a distraction and an inhibitor, drawing energy away from productivity and development.”
Zander doesn’t say what happens to the A when his students don’t pull their weight. His point here is to help people we work with to remove the barriers that block achievement--and to embrace the mindset of giving an A, by letting go of rigid mindsets that keep people pegged.
Zander applied this kind of thinking to his conducting and it transformed him from being a dictator, to an orchestrator of collaboration. This approach opened the door for musicians to speak more freely with him about their concerns -- about the way a piece of music ought to be played, for example, and he discovered that "the player who looks the least engaged may be the most committed member of the group." This new openness in communication had a huge effect on the morale of the orchestra, improving the performance of both conductor and players.
Edit: Benjamin Zander and Rosamund Stone Zander will be at the Burren Leadership Forum on 21 and 22 July 2007.
Mayo County Enterprise Board are holding an event on Achieving Your Potential to mark International Womens' Day on 8 March. The location for the event is Pontoon Bridge Hotel. I'll be one of three keynote speakers and the focus of my presentation will be on the emotional factors that help (and sometimes hinder) our ability to achieve our potential. The other two speakers are
Darina Loakman, who runs I am a WHAM who will talk about: Achieving Your Potential: Working From Home
and
Aideen Kane, Television Producer, of GMTV, who will talk about: Achieving Your Potential: The Working Woman
There's a nice video piece here promoting the event created by Darina and the Western People picked up the event this week also.
If you are interested in coming along to the workshop you can contact Nicola Fitzpatrick on 094 9047597 or at nfitzpat@mayococo.ie. Don't forget to say hello if you are there on the night!
The latest edition of the Blog Carnival of Management tips (to which I've contributed this post) is over at Mabel and Harry - there are some great posts and I'm realising what a great idea carnivals are for gathering like minded bloggers around communities of interest. Carnivals are where
There are Carnivals for every conceivable topic and the site is a great place to meet new bloggers, gather creative ideas around a specific topic and hopefully have some good conversations along the way.
I've just come across a superb blog from Mark McGuinness called Wishful Thinking. Mark coaches creative professionals and his blog is a fabulous resource of articles, posts and insightful thinking about management in the creative industries. Mark is undertaking a Masters Degree and he has posted a lot of his research material (interviews etc) here and it's a very generous resource waiting to be tapped.
I particularly liked this quote from Mark about why he works with creative professionals:
So if the special “creative person” is a myth, why do I focus on working with creatives? Having worked with professional artists and creatives for over 10 years, as well as with many other types of client, I would say there are basically three differences between them and many other people.
1. They think of themselves as “creative”. I’ve come across many people who are perfectly capable of coming up with original ideas - but who keep blocking themselves by saying “I’m not creative”. Even when it is pointed out to them that they have done creative things, they resist the label, and clearly feel uncomfortable with it. The “creatives” on the other hand, are quite happy to think of themselves as creative, and don’t create this kind of internal obstacle to their natural creativity.
2. They love doing creative work. Because they enjoy creative work more than most people, they spend more time doing it. Which means they get better at it. Which means they enjoy it more. Which means they do more of it… and so on. This is not to say they don’t enjoy money, status, recognition or other rewards, but these are not as important to them as the pleasure of creativity itself.
3. They put themselves in an environment where creativity is encouraged. I once ran a seminar and set a group of managers the task of finding the “second right answer” to a question (based on Roger von Oech’s excellent creativity book A Whack on the Side of the Head). A couple of minutes into the activity, I noticed they were looking very uncomfortable. When I asked them what was wrong, they said it felt very unsafe, as they were constantly told by senior management that mistakes were unacceptable and they had to get things “right”. No wonder their creativity was inhibited! Creative types on the other hand, gravitate to situations where creativity is not only encouraged but expected of them - art schools, ad agencies, design studios, artists’ quarters, writer’s colonies, film sets and ‘clusters’ of creative businesses. By surrounding themselves with others engaged in creative work, they immerse themselves in the latest ideas and developments in their field - and some of that creativity rubs off.
These three factors help them develop their raw creative talent into accomplished skills. This is not to deny that some of us are naturally “gifted” with more talent than others, but this is a matter of degree rather than kind - and talent is nothing unless you put it to work.
Over at Wishful Thinking Mark is pointing out the differences as he sees them between Coaching and Counselling. He's making the traditional distinctions but I would take issue about the assumptions on which they are based and have posted here about this difference before (I’ll repeat some of it in this post). Mark says:
Counselling and therapy deal with personal problems - Coaching addresses workplace performance.
The idea that our personal and professional lives are separate and distinctive is not something I agree with. Organisations don't exist - they are networks of human relationships and as such are emotional and emotion generating environments. We don't come to work and leave our personal selves at the door and I don't know about you - but I have rarely heard someone come home from work talking about "the bottom line" - if they do they are expressing their feelings about the bottom line. Workplace performance is interconnected with personal issues and problems and vice versa. When I am coaching I am always observing why someone brings this problem (personal and professional) to me at this time. The permission I seek to inquire, and the level at which I work is what differentiates coaching from counselling and psychotherapy.
Counselling begins with a problem - Coaching can begin with a goal or aspiration
and
Counselling is sought by people having difficulties - Coaching is used by high achievers as much as beginners or people who are stuck.
People can often come to counselling or therapy with a goal that is framed as a problem. Nobody I have ever worked with has come to therapy to purely talk about problems - they are there to understand and resolve that problem. I have also worked with people who come to counselling and therapy to gain a better understanding of themselves - not just when a problem manifests. And I have also worked with coaching clients who have come and been referred because there is a problem with their workplace performance, so this distinction doesn't stack up for me.
Many (but not all) forms of Counselling focus on the past and the origins of problems - Coaching focuses on the future and developing a workable solution.
Many forms of counselling and therapy seek to understand the past as it impacts on the present. It's essential (in my view) to understand transference - living the past in the present - if you are going to change the future. You can't come up with a 10 point plan and expect it to be implemented overnight if you don't understand what is driving the behaviour in the first place. If this were doable then we'd all be rational only entities with no bad habits.
Mark's differences are the standard ones I have seen when coaches want to differentiate themselves from therapists and it speaks to me of the anxiety many coaches have about the training therapists undergo to understand the unconscious and how that impacts on the present behaviour both in and out of the workplace.
The similarities between both are important to note:
• All individuals who work with a coach or a therapist are interested in a “better” future
• Therapy and Coaching offer skills and possibilities for that future – the methodologies employed are different
• The quality of the relationship is the essential mechanism by which change is effected
• Self awareness on the part of the coach and therapist is essential for successful work with clients
• Unconditional positive regard, empathy and a person-centred approach are key to both approaches
While I apply psychodynamic thinking to my coaching relationships the key difference is about the permission sought to inquire into a client’s personal story and how that information is worked with in the coaching relationship. There are times when it is helpful to know more about family of origin – it may help to understand a dynamic being played out in organisational contexts. But unless a coach is trained to work with this material they run the risk of opening up emotional responses that may be difficult to contain. It’s also essential to know when to refer a coaching client to a therapist. Very often this is when a repeating pattern of unhelpful behaviour, rooted in unresolved personal relationships in the past, is unhelpful in the present.
As a therapist and a coach I bring distinctive skills to the client relationship that are based on my psychodynamic training and which allow me to:
• Meet a client in an authentic person-to-person encounter.
• Process my own feelings in the coaching relationship and to use them as constructive interventions.
• Spot a client who may need a therapeutic relationship and to refer on appropriately.
• Translate psychodynamic insights into powerful work related interventions that impact on work performance and behaviour.
Welcome to the March 19, 2007 edition of emotion at work. (The first edition in fact) and thanks to everyone who submitted a post. I'm fascinated to see what a topic like "emotion at work" has evoked - there are really interesting and different approaches to the topic here that echo much of the management discourse around emotion as something that needs to be valued in its own right (my own view) or controlled in the service of organisational harmony. I'm also curious about the fact that no women submitted posts around this topic and wonder what might be going on there that's interesting.
Mark McGuinness presents 7 Ways to Tap into Enthusiasm posted at Wishful Thinking. Mark talks about tapping into your natural enthusiasm and how reconnecting with your curiosity is a critical first step in banishing procrastination and keeping the creative juices flowing.
Erik Mazzone presents Deciding to Quit your Job posted at Erik Mazzone's Blog. Erik advocates tapping into your feelings as distinct from your rationale when you have to make a decision to stay in or quit a job.
Alan presents There is always a way posted at Made to Be Great. Alan advocates stillness as a way of connecting with the sense of what’s possible and he also talks about reframing problems as potential solutions (something I’m a huge advocate for).
The Positivity Blog presents 5 life-changing keys to overcoming your fear posted at Henrik Edberg. Henrik offers some strategies for overcoming fear which are useful for work and personal life beginning with a non-judgemental approach.
Noel Kuhlman presents How To Destroy The Lazy Drones In Your Team posted at Self Help Can Be Fun. Noel offers some no nonsense approaches to co-dependency in the workplace. The title is challenging but I think he’s addressing the way in which we enable people to adopt less than helpful roles in the workplace and he asks us what our part in that is.
Craig Harper presents A Letter to all Blokes.... posted at Renovate your life with Craig. Craig invites blokes to reconnect with their emotions in a witty and “bloke-friendly way”. I'd like to hear Craig's view on the relationship between blokes, their emotion and the world of work as I imagine he'd have an interesting take on that subject.
The Silicone Valley Blogger presents Work Place Drama Ends In More Money at The Digerati Life which is an interesting piece on how the organisation in the mind (or the boss in our mind) is very often out of kilter with the external experience and how our emotions are central to that experience.
Scott Young presents Introduction - Emotional Mastery (Series) posted at Scott H Young. Scott offers an introductory blog post on the "secrets to emotional mastery". The rest of his series focusses on the issue of control and emotion.
That concludes this edition. Thanks to everyone who submitted an article for this first carnival. Submit your blog article to the next edition of emotion at work using the carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.
One of my favorite shows on TV is called "Intervention" on A&E, which is about the struggles of people dealing with addiction. On the show, families stage interventions with the addicted member of the family in order to get them to seek help and change their ways. One of the principles that is encouraged is not only that the person is willing to change and get help, the family needs to come together in order for the change to work.
I haven't seen this particular programme on this side of the pond but am familiar with the concept - Travis applies the thinking to organisational change processes and suggests that there needs to be a healthy "family" and a desire for change if this process is to work effectively in organisations. He goes on to say:
The dynamic of the workplace, whether it be a team, group, division, or whole organization, has to be in a healthy state for the organization to undergo serious and permanent organization change. It is almost a paradox that in order for change to be successful, there must be some level of stability in terms of relationships, communication and culture before the instability of change takes place.
This got me thinking about the way in which interventionists are used - the 3Cs Counsellors, Consultants and Coaches. Very often (not always) the 3Cs are called in when an individual is perceived to be "unhealthy"...the 3Cs are marshalled in the service of keeping the organisation healthy by splitting off the unhealthy individual to be made more healthy externally and reimported once s/he is sorted out. To take Travis's example above (and addiction is a great example of a systemic approach) there are other questions to be asked about what work the individual does on behalf of the system and how the system itself contributes to and informs how the individual behaves within it. Increasingly I am working with client organisations to feed back into the system the dynamics that emerge within the coaching relationship and this is having significant impacts. The contract with the individual respects the content of the discussion but also makes space for the overall themes to be explored in the context of the whole system and as such is fed back as organisational intelligence.
I'm taking the opportunity here in New York to catch up with some colleagues who practice in a similar way to myself (not a lot of us back in Ireland!). Over lunch this week I had a fascinating conversation with one colleague about how consultants (particularly those of us who are psychodynamically inclined) participate in listserves. The impulse if you're a psychodynamic consultant is to wonder about the question or dilemma rather than answer a question. Very often in business settings it's that ability to step back that generates interesting material - don't take the obvious for granted etc. But when a group of consultants gather on a listserve there is often more energy devoted to exploring the question rather than offering an answer.
This got me thinking about the power of interpretation. A consultant is given, and accepts tremendous power in organisational systems to interpret what others can't make sense of. How that interpretation is done can be a very creative endeavour - but ultimately it's the interpretation that a consultant is being hired to offer. The permission that is sought and received to interpret is a delicate negotiation. When a group of consultants gather in virtual space to converse it can be a different matter - the jump to interpret is somehow assumed rather than negotiated and this makes me rather uncomfortable because I think this needs to be made explicit. I may ask a question of you as a colleague but that's not the same as inviting you to interpret as a consultant.
Ultimately this is a boundary issue which arises all the time in work settings - am I interpreting from a coaching? counselling? consulting? perspective? Am I throwing my weight around to show how smart I am? Am I endeavouring to close down any difference in the discussion by using my interpretative authority to say it "as it is"?
The lunch time discussion offered so many interesting perspectives that I'll be ruminating over them for quite some time to come - but it has made me consider the explicit and not so explicit ways I negotiate with clients and colleagues and the assumption of authority which each brings.
Over on Presentation Zen there’s a fantastic piece entitled “Jazz and the art of connecting”. If ever there was (another) argument for the value of an arts education, this is it.
“Jazz is inspiring to me; it's lessons can be applied to other aspects of life”
There are quotes from 11 great Jazz musicians that can be applied, in a heartbeat, to any area of life, even (and most particularly) business. Can you apply any of these to your business? I know I certainly can.
“The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.” (Duke-Ellington)
“Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can’t be taught.” (Paul-Desmond)
“Don’t bullshit… just play.” (Wynton-Marsalis)
“If they act too hip, you know they can’t play shit!” (Louis-Armstrong)
“Master your instrument. Master the music. And then forget all that bullshit and just play.” (Charlie-Parker)
“It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.” (Dizzy-Gillespie)
“You can play a shoestring if you’re sincere.” (John-Coltrane)
"When people believe in boundaries, they become part of them." (Don Cherry)
“Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.” (Charles Mingus)
“I can’t stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession. If you can, then it ain’t music..." (Billie-Holiday)
“A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not to dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves.”
(Herbie-Hancock)
I don’t believe in tricks when it comes to facilitating and consulting. At the end of the day it’s me and my client(s) in a room trying to figure something out together. Yes, I have a toolkit, but it’s pretty bare in terms of stuff I can take out and wave around…I don’t do “off the shelf” solutions and I’m rarely in a position to talk with any degree of freedom about previous work, primarily because so much of it comes to me as “confidential”. It’s a dilemma…
One of the things I do bring to the table is my ability to listen and more importantly, my ability to hear. Why differentiate I hear you ask? Well there’s a critical difference from a client’s perspective in being listened to and being heard and the ability to move between one and the other is what makes good consulting and facilitation work.
I recently worked with a client who ranted and raved for a full 45 minutes “at” me about the “uselessness” of a manager in the system. He listed out the deficiencies in this manager, quantified the losses accruing as a result of his inadequacies and was blistering in his personal attack on his peer. He wanted me to “sort this person out” so the company could get back to doing what it needed to do. His preference was for me to take this manager out of the system and give him a “bloody good talking to”.
I didn’t do as he asked…and about a week later both the manager (above) and the vilified manager were back at work, getting along better than they ever had been and productivity was on the rise again.
Listening can be a tough station. For a full 45 minutes I listened to this manager’s anger. It was clear, unambiguous and in the service of some kind of action – any kind of action….
I heard a number of unspoken things while listening to his anger. I heard the anxiety in his voice, his escalating tension as he spoke, the lack of resolution as he “dumped” on me…his insistence that I “get rid” of the problem and also his isolation in dealing with it. If only I could make this problem go away then everything would be back to normal. I was being warned not to let him down. I heard his fear that the department would be vilified by head office if he couldn’t make this department perform its task and get the staff to work better together.
So I had a choice about what to respond to, knowing that how I would respond would dictate how we might progress together. If he didn’t feel “heard” then I was going to be as vilified as the manager I was expected to “fix”.
In this instance I took a risk and responded out of an empathy with his fear and anxiety. The look on his face was one of – “how did you know that?” but he couldn’t deny that I had heard him. He felt met, seen, listened to and heard - out of that meeting we managed to do some productive work together looking at his isolation in the system and also the expectation being piled on the new manager – most of which this new manager wasn’t aware of and couldn’t possibly respond to. Our work developed into a coaching relationship which was significant for this manager as it was the first time he had availed of any kind of professional support. I also coached the new manager helping to negotiate deliverables and ongoing professional support for him in the system. Each manager had felt unheard and was feeling pressure to respond to "unreasonable" demands from a "senior" in the organisation. Attending to what I was "hearing" allowed us to use the emotional content of the meeting to look at what was going on in that wider context. Once we'd established a relationship of trust it was possible for the situation to be resolved in a way that allowed each to hold on to their truth and their integrity. The tension in the relationship diminished, a better working environment was created and targets were met. The fact that I had heard as well as listened was a key factor in building a working alliance.
There’s a delicate dance between listening, hearing and the point at which you make an intervention to feed back what you think will make a difference. I see this as an intricate balance and this diagram goes some way to outlining the process from my perspective where the outside circle represents what I listened to and the inside what I heard.
Note: some details have been changed to protect the identity of the client and this piece has been published with the client's permission.
This is a reprint of a post I published on 25 May 2006 and I think it has a real resonance for many of us attending the Irish Business Women Conference in Mayo later this week the theme of which is Thinking bigger - what are we waiting for?
One of the central themes at the workshop I ran recently was the issue of self confidence and self worth. The room was full of bright and talented people and most spoke at some point during the day about the crippling plight of low self esteem and how, even with inputs from people like me and others, it gets in the way of taking action. Where this really emerged was around the issue of charging for work. Now this is something I have grappled with myself – how much is enough? How much is too much? And more importantly – how much is too little? All the market research in the world isn’t going to help if, at the end of the day, we don’t think we’re worth what we think we should be charging for what it is we have to offer.
I spent a lot of time during my training as a therapist grappling with this issue. How could you charge someone for being with them? Wasn’t that akin to prostitution in some way? And then, as a client, I would have gladly paid twice over for the insights I received along the way...so the paradox was very live for me about how we value worth.
I think the conclusions we came to were that if we are waiting for someone else to assign worth to us then we’ll be waiting for ever. In the inimitable words of Dr Phil “we teach people how to treat us” and I’m total agreement with him (even if he is cognitive behavioural and I’m not!)..but somewhere along the line we have to draw some boundaries around how we value ourselves and how, in turn, that is translated into value for a client, a customer or a commissioner. We need to communicate our value system first and hope to attract people with whom it resonates, or say “no” to people with whom it doesn’t. And all of that takes self confidence and courage.
Looking back over my coaching career in particular I’m struck by how much of the time I have spent with people has been around helping them take a step into the unknown…helping them to garner the courage to take just one step. So much of that work is acknowledging fear - and being scared (regardless of what word you use to describe it) is something that affects everyone. If we're not scared then that means we're happy with the status quo. Being scared means we're hovering on the edges of change and any kind of "next step" will take us out of that comfort zone.
If we can trust ourselves to manage ourselves instead of fretting about how someone else will see us, then that’s real empowerment…and real power comes from within, it is never awarded from without.
Sometimes the worst situations offer the best learning. In a gathering of colleagues recently we shared stories of some challenging consulting assignments. Yes, there were difficult clients and some harrowing stories, but each of my colleagues had reflected on their experiences, learned some lessons and allowed the learning to inform how they are in relationship with clients subsequently.
I extrapolated some of my learning from reflecting on my own practice and from participating in the above discussion and here are some of the questions I ask myself when the going seems tough.
• How am I being “used” here?
• In the service of who’s truth and reality?
• How is what’s happening to me relevant to my client’s dilemma?
• In what way is this situation my client’s experience?
• What have I contributed to the situation?
• What problem did my contribution solve for me?
• What’s useful about my dilemma?
What kinds of questions would help you reflect on your practice?
In our rush to offer solutions to clients’ problems we often (too often in my opinion) eschew the personal and embrace the professional. We really don’t get the value of being “ourselves” because somewhere along the line we’ve learned that to be ourselves is to not be good enough. I’m of the firm belief that there are no differences. What there are – are boundaries. People hire people because after they’ve assured themselves that you have the skill set to do the job, they want to be in a relationship with someone they like, feel comfortable with and ultimately feel safe with. All of that requires a large degree of self awareness and an ability to manage boundaries. It also requires that we be ourselves. You can try faking being personal but it won't work. It never does.
I have a number of questions I ask myself when working with clients to make sure I’m “being myself”.
What’s my emotional response to this client and to undertaking this assignment?
Would there come a time in this relationship where I could share that understanding in the service of the relationship?
Whose authority am I drawing on to make this client feel confident about working with me? My own? Or someone else’s?
How do I feel about “not knowing” in the presence of this client?
What is my motivation for working with this client? Money? Learning? Creativity? All three? something else? i.e. what's in this for me?
Those basic questions help me to keep connected to myself and more importantly, they ensure that I bring myself to the relationship. Tricks and tools are great and important sometimes, but if I’m not sure of what I’m feeling and when, I can’t reach for what I need in the service of my clients. Unlike the customer in the advertisement above, I want to feel personally connected to my clients and it’s only in that frame of mind I can grasp how best I can give them value for their money.
I teach my clients how to to say “no”. Many are simply overwhelmed by the task of managing and leading to garner the resources to tell others that they are simply not available. So many managers I know feel guilty about saying “no”. I think it’s one of the most liberating words in the English language and used effectively it’s one of the most empowering.
We’re so conditioned in business to saying “yes” - to being available 24/7 to meet the client’s needs that saying “no” evokes anxiety and fear. But what does constantly saying “yes” set up?
Exhausted and worn out executives
Excessive demands from clients
A never-good-enough culture
Lousy boundaries
Saying “no” on the other hand fosters
Empowered and sane executives
Good boundaries
Realistic expectations and deliverables
So saying "no" in this instance is really saying "yes" to something that's defined by healthy boundaries
Think for a moment about small children. At the age of 2 they discover the “no” word and apart from the frustration it causes, it’s a pivotal moment in a child’s life when they realise they are empowered to get what they want. It creates a negotiating position and forces parents to be more creative about their demands. “Pick your battles” is the advice from those who have been there before. And it’s wise advice. If you can’t use the word “no” then every demand and expectation assumes the same importance as every other. Using the “no” word judiciously invites others to choose what’s important and approach accordingly.
Good boundaries make good neighbours and I encourage my coaching clients to examine what they are setting up for themselves by constantly “being available”. Sometimes we have to take responsibility for the demands we place on ourselves before we look to those being awarded by others.
So much of the art of facilitation is simply getting out of the way. The more I get out of my client's way, the more they generate the content they really want heard. I'm sure there's a mathematical formula or a two by two of some kind to quantify the relationship between the facilitator's activity and the creativity of the group. I'm learning this more and more every time I work with a client group. I'm also realising that the real role of the facilitator is about minding three things
Task
The big picture and the overall reason for the gathering. I have this in my mind as the day goes on. My role is to make sure we achieve the task we have set ourselves.
Time
There's a finite amount of time available to us and within that there are choices about how that time is managed and used. My role is make sure the time boundaries are adhered to and the use of the time is consciously acknowledged. If a group decides to use the time in a different way then they need to take responsibility for that in the moment.
Territory
Making sure we have a safe conceptual space and a good enough physical space in which to work (and ensuring both are respected) is a key part of my role.
Essentially I'm minding the boundaries of the conversation and getting out of the way so that my clients can have the conversations they want to. It's amazing what happens when you simply get lost!
I've been enjoying Creativity at Work and found this story there about the authors of The Art of Possibility. It's a nice variation on Appreciative Inquiry. I've just bought the book and am looking forward to settling down with it one of these days.
Ben Zander, conductor for the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, and professor at the New England Conservatory of Music, was faced with the same problem every year for 25 years: Teaching students who were in such a chronic state of anxiety over the measurement of their performance, they were reluctant to take creative risks. One night, he sat down with his partner Roz Stone Zander, a therapist, to try to find a solution. They decided the best approach would be to give everyone an A, at the beginning of the course. The A was not intended as a way to measure someone's performance against standards, but as an instrument to open them up to new possibilities.
This didn’t mean students could slack off for the rest of the semester. Students were required to write a letter that began with “Dear Mr. Zander, I got my A because…” and they had to describe in as much detail as possible, how they came to achieve this “extraordinary grade.”
In writing their letters, Zander said students must “place themselves in the future, looking back, and report on all the insights they acquired and the milestones they attained during the year, as if those accomplishments were already in the past. Everything must be written in the past tense. Phrases such as ‘I hope,’ ‘I intend,’ or ‘I will’ must not appear.”
Zander asserts “the A is an invention that creates possibilities for both mentor and student, manager and employee, or for any human interaction.” The A allows teams to accomplish what is possible, and reduces “the disparity in power between them can become a distraction and an inhibitor, drawing energy away from productivity and development.”
Zander doesn’t say what happens to the A when his students don’t pull their weight. His point here is to help people we work with to remove the barriers that block achievement--and to embrace the mindset of giving an A, by letting go of rigid mindsets that keep people pegged.
Zander applied this kind of thinking to his conducting and it transformed him from being a dictator, to an orchestrator of collaboration. This approach opened the door for musicians to speak more freely with him about their concerns -- about the way a piece of music ought to be played, for example, and he discovered that "the player who looks the least engaged may be the most committed member of the group." This new openness in communication had a huge effect on the morale of the orchestra, improving the performance of both conductor and players.
I don’t believe you can do any kind of authentic work with people unless you name (and tame) the elephant in the room. On several occasions over the past week I’ve worked with groups where someone has been brave enough to name what’s not being said and the depth of the discussion has substantially changed for the good. I think it takes a huge amount of courage to name the unnameable and I think it’s part of my role as a facilitator to make it safe enough for the naming to take place. It’s also part of my job to make sure that the naming is done in a respectful way and is owned by all of those present. I see the courageous one as doing a service on behalf of all. When someone is brave enough to name the shadow and is supported by a group who are brave enough to see their part in it - that’s where real change and transformation takes place. You simply can’t not know what you know. You can make a choice to ignore it or act upon it, but “reality” is forever changed and hiding can’t ever be an option. “I didn’t know” or “nothing to do with me” won’t work in a system where the elephant has been named and ultimately tamed.
Firms in the US are hiring consultants to help them manage "needy" workers. Apparently the Generation Yers are so used to persistent parental praise that they have become a demanding demographic in organisations. NPR has an interesting story on this that's worth listening to (click here for the download).
What's fascinating is how "demanding" the 20 somethings appear in the piece. Daily affirmations of a "good job" are a prerequisite for loyalty to the organisation and HR departments are having to invent ways of complimenting workers daily on a job well done when "well done" means doing the job that was meant to be done in the first place. The option of choice appears to be hiring consultants as surrogate parents to ensure adequate ego management.
The NPR story doesn't take on the real challenge here, which is the degree to which this narcissism is being encouraged and promoted by hiring consultants to assist in the persistent praising. The "no" is missing and it will just fuel incessant and unreasonable demands for "more" that can never be fulfilled.
It reminds me of that great quote from Laurence Oliver who quipped "Dear boy, it's called acting." - upon seeing Dustin Hoffman's "method" acting by not sleeping and making a mess of himself to get into character while shooting "Marathon Man".
I've just returned from Stockholm where I attended the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations annual symposium. The symposium is an opportunity for those of us working in a psychoanalytic way with organisations to meet and share knowledge about this area of practice.
There were numerous interesting papers and one in particular on a group relations conference conducted via the internet caught my attention. I have to admit to being mystified by how a group relations conference that didn't deal with the territory (i.e. cyberspace) would work. The consultant presenting the case paper bravely stepped into the project and fed back his experiences of how it was managed and conducted. The detail of that isn't of particular interest here. But what did interest me is how systems-psychodynamics needs to be applied to working on the web. There is a whole body of literature at this stage (particularly from psychology and systems thinking) about operating and working on line which I think systems-psychodynamics needs to attend to and build on, not merely replicate. Working on the web seemed to be a very new idea to many people who were at the conference and to some extent mirrors my experience of therapists and consultants who work psychoanalytically, many of whom have a sometimes neurotic attachment to being "in the room" and privilege this as the primary way of generating the transference. (As an interesting aside, of the 14 people who attended this workshop only 2 of us were women...I'm not sure what that means but the gender imbalance was more pronounced here than at any other event I attended).
Some of the thoughts that occurred to me about this..
1. The web doesn't exist - it is a wonderful manifestation of the collective unconscious - everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
2. The web is a boundary less space and many of the conversations (particularly in the wake of the Kathy Sierra incident) about placing boundaries on it have resulted in strong reaction and an acknowledgement that formal rules simply won’t work in this space which means it’s ripe for persescutory experiences and a regression to primitive drives.
3. The only thing that stops any of us committing an “offence” online is our own conscience or sense of what is right and wrong. So our internalised boundaries and how those boundaries are negotiated and made meaning of, are of primary importance in this space.
4. The absence of the social clues that assist us make meaning of, and interpret, relationships offline are absent online so this heightens the transference and counter-transference in a way that can be persecutory. This is why I’m mystified as to how a group relations conference that doesn’t address the territory can operate with integrity in this space.
5. When a conference finishes we have our experiences of the people who attended and how we entered into relationship. When contact online ends we have that, minus the physical presence of people but we also have the written correspondence. What happens to the text afterwards? And how are boundaries around text negotiated? We all know that once something is out there in cyberspace it is never coming back so the archiving function of the web is something that has to be looked at?
I'd love to hear from any psychodynamically informed practitioners working online about their own experiences of this area..
Synchronicity is at work once again - Finola Howard is doing something I've been thinking about for a while - Paying it Forward. It's a simple idea - you do three good deeds for people unknown to you in return for each good deed done for you. Lots of people (many of them complete strangers) have gone out of their way to help me over the years whether it’s been in business, personal or blogging life and this is a nice way of saying thanks to them and offering something back to others who might benefit from some of my accumulated wisdom.
I’m offering free executive coaching sessions or consultation time on one day a month (starting on Friday 3 August) to anyone who wants a space to reflect on their role or on relationship management issues at work. The three hour-long sessions will be free of charge and your only commitment is to pay it forward to three people you don’t know after we've finished. We can work in person (in Dublin), via Skype or phone.
Finola is a marketing consultant based in Carlow and she is offering a free clinic on the third Friday of each month. If you have a marketing question, dilemma or issue, phone her on +353 59 9183206 and book in for one of the three hour-long slots. IT consultant Colm Whelan of Rockfield IT has also joined the movement and he can be reached at colm.whelan@rockfieldit.com (he’s based in Carlow also) and if anyone else is taken by the idea to sign up then let me know and we can start building a community of practitioners interested in paying it forward.
should, for the most part, forget about issues, policies, even facts, and instead focus on feelings.
In an article in yesterday's New York Times (free subscription required) Westen is described as wanting more passion in politics - Bill Clinton thinks it's great so it won't be long before the rest of the Democrats row in behind establishing their USP as the party that's emotionally intelligent. The New York Times piece goes on to outline the rational and scientific justification for attending to emotion in political life which is awfully familiar if you're aware of the EI industry. For the record I'm not a fan of EI - while it may be a useful tool to begin a conversation about emotion in organisations it's still a rational instrument for the control of feelings and largely designed to manage and hide "negative" emotion. Cognitising emotion is reason not feeling and if we don't pay attention to how feelings (and their public performance as emotion) are generated in systems then we get more "irrational" behaviour and less intelligence about what's really going on. Organisations are emotional and emotion generating environments so feelings are valid intelligence in their own right and not experiences that should be considered toxic, dangerous or 'out of control'.
We also need to be aware that reason and feeling are inter-related and not separate domains that exist in parallel universes...but maybe I'm getting too emotional about this stuff?
I frequently work with boards of directors and management committees wanting to take time out to review where they are and where they are going. Sometimes this involves organising and facilitating "retreats" or "away days". A recurring theme is often that of board composition - Who do we need? What skill base are we looking for? Do we need to think of retiring and asking others to step in etc? When it gets down to thinking about real people groups can often get stuck. Loyalties, allegiances, politics and favouritism sometimes get in the way of the task at hand.
Increasingly I'm using other methodologies for getting at what's needed and a favourite technique of mine is the fantasy board game. In this, each person picks a person - real or imagined, alive or dead to place on the board. It's a fun brainstorming session and the more it is played the wilder the suggestions get (and you can tell a lot about the group by whom they suggest). It's easier to pick a fantasy person than name someone you might know in a personal capacity because it removes the emotional awkwardness and allegiance difficulties. I then do an exercise with people about why they picked the person they did - and the list of attributes and qualities simply flows! We then have a list of all of the skills and qualities needed to populate the board that will look to the future and it's not a difficult task at this point to compare that list with the skill base of people currently sitting on the board. Augmenting, changing or moving around tends to be a much more l"ogical" task once the "illogical" one of picking fantasy people has been completed.
There's a lot to be said for playfullness in consulting - I really enjoy these sessions, and for what it's worth Katharine Hepburn is always on my list. Why? She's independent, sassy, not afraid to call it as she sees it and can stand up to Humphrey Bogart in a boat while at the time being a four time Academy Award winner and remaining fabulously feminine. Now I wonder what that says about me eh?
Questions are a key part of my consulting toolkit. In particular there are 6 questions I think every consultant should ask of themselves and the clients with whom they are working because I believe that asking questions of ourselves is a key way to process and analyse information we receive.
1 Who is the Client?
Sometimes the client isn’t the client and it’s important that you are working with or reporting to someone who has authority in the system. If you are not, then you are compromised from the start.
2 What’s really going on here?
The presenting problem is rarely the problem. It may be that the problem is a solution to a particular set of circumstances in the organisation. Treating the presenting issue as a symptom will generally yield more information and possibilities that moving in with a solution
3 What am I listening to? What am I hearing?
There is a difference between listening and hearing (and I’ve written about this topic before). A consultant’s job is to respond to what they are hearing, not what they are listening to.
4 How am I being used?
Consultants are engaged for many reasons and it’s important to work out what task you have been given on behalf of the entire system. It may be that you have been selected because you can offer insight. It may be your task to say the unmentionables out loud. It may also be that you have been selected because you can’t do the job. In the latter instance it may be important for the organisation not to resolve this particular issue and selecting the “wrong” consultant ensures that the status quo is, in fact, the status quo and a scapegoat is being required.
5 Is my experience the client’s experience?
Pay attention to how an assignment makes you feel because your experience may mirror your client’s experience in this organisation. Your experience therefore is a critical piece of systemic information about how this organisation works.
6 What is useful about the client’s experience and problem?
Persistent behaviour (constructive and destructive) has a pay off and a value in organisations and dealing with the pay off is essential if the issue is to be resolved so asking what’s useful as distinct from what’s “wrong” can be a helpful place to start.
There are many more questions to be asked when consulting but I have found these to be a central part of my toolkit. What’s in your consulting toolkit?
I spent a couple of days last week with a group of highly creative and artistic people assisting them think at a strategic level about their sector. Like many people in the arts they are passionate, committed, enthusiastic and are not afraid of moving between their personal and professional selves in the service of the task. One of the things I noticed from the outset was how long it took some people to “arrive” both physically and psychologically. Some were late for our sessions and others were on time but not on message. I guessed that many mobile phones were on vibrate or silent and not many had been switched off entirely. (As it turned out, I was right).
This was a really experienced group of practitioners who were interested in the dilemma I reflected back to them about being in the room. I wondered what was going on that made it challenging for people to be really connected in the task. We worked through those challenges and emerged at the end of our work with a manifesto of responsibilities each was willing to sign up to in order to work productively in the future. They recognised that there was important information in not turning the phones off and being psychologically “outside the room”.
Physically “showing up” isn’t enough. The key question is – are you present? Being present requires a psychological and spiritual connection to the work that is happening in the moment and to the people with whom you are working. It requires intimacy and connection and it also means dealing with the fear of being connected. Being connected brings responsibilities and commitments and if we’ve left the phone on or are making ourselves available somewhere else it means our sense of commitment is also somewhere else. Agreements about tasks and decisions will then fail to deliver because that bullet pointed list may be a way of avoiding something deeper.
There was a time at the early stages in my consulting career when this kind of dilemma would have bothered me and I would have tried to “fix it”. These days I see it as a rich opportunity to introduce more of the shadow into the room – if people are willing to have their “resistance” seen then it’s a clue that the time may be right to have a look at what’s important about that resistance.. So it’s not only the participants who need to show up, it’s also the consultant or facilitator who needs to pay attention to what’s actually going on in front of them rather than what they think should be going on. In my own case, the less attention I pay to the detail of the discussion and the more I pay to the context and tone of the discussion the better I am able to work between the levels to create a space where everyone can be present. I can’t make them show up but I can wonder out loud about the quality of presence.
Every problem is a solution to a set of circumstances – so you could say that the problem is both the problem and the solution.
One of the things I try to do with clients is help them “appreciate” the problem they are having. No, that’s not some new age methodology that doesn’t deal with the issues. It’s more a case of asking them – is there any way in which this problem has truth to it? Most particularly if it’s a problem person we’re talking about. I try to encourage my clients to look at the “job” this person is doing for the organisation first before we talk about what to do about it.
Here are some examples of the work problem people have done in organisations I have been invited to consult to.
A technical director in an engineering company made the working life of the sales department “hell” (their words) by refusing to co-operate with them. He withheld his staff, demanded more appropriate briefing, took the sales requests back to his department and sat on them for days holding up the closing of business. When we actually looked at what was going on here, this technical director was seen to be protecting his division and team from an increasing set of demands by all departments that were impossible for his technical team to meet. The technical director was, in fact, offering leadership to his team by protecting them from being overwhelmed by demand. By helping the sales team appreciate the problem they were able to articulate the real problem which was an unrealistic set of sales targets that had been imposed by senior management on both the sales and technical teams and not negotiated with them.
The manager of a cultural organisation was increasingly vilified by her board of directors as being “useless” and having “terrible” communication skills. The board never knew what was going on and more to the point this manager wouldn’t take their calls when they phoned. On closer examination it emerged that the way of communicating in this company was informal. The 10 directors on the board would frequently phone the manager at all hours of the day and night sometimes requesting the same information. The manager was in 10 different relationships and each director was comparing notes with the other. It was a fact that she was “useless” and had “terrible” communication skills when you looked at it from this perspective – who wouldn’t be? The organisation had transitioned being a voluntary organisation to a company limited by guarantee with a board of directors. While they had hired a professional manager, the board themselves were still operating like a voluntary group – which meant that the company business was done informally and out of traditional business hours. The director was trying to run the business during the business day and the directors hadn’t settled in to their new roles. By helping them look at the “problem” as the “solution” they were able to openly negotiate a way of working that resolved the tension and achieve what they really wanted.
More often than not, problem people are articulating something in organisational life that others refuse to do. When you’re on your own you sometimes have to shout louder to make yourself heard – the louder you shout, the more problematic you are and the more isolated you become. “Problem” people can emerge for lots of reasons and the person who carries this role may have a personal back story that makes them the perfect candidate for the job. A person’s back story may also be where the intervention is required so knowing when to refer someone on for more personal work is a key part of any consulting in this area. The working environment and context for the issue is of course an essential part of the story as well.
Building a good working alliance with a client is essential if we are going to have that kind of conversation. Organisations have an unconscious life. Because it’s unconscious it’s unseen and difficult and very often threatening to look at and my clients have to trust in my skill that I have some idea of what I’m talking about. But if you can have an appreciative relationship with the problem, then that’s a really great place to start the conversation.
Steve Roesler googled "emotions at work" and came up with a list of topics that confirms something I've always known - that emotion at work is a fearful topic for many people. The assumptions are that
• Emotion happens at home i.e. it's personal
• Being emotional means being out of control
• Emotion is not masculine
• Emotion is negative
• Emotion is extraneous to everything the organisation stands for
The discussion on emotion at work invariably centres around the notion that emotion happens "somewhere else" and that emotion is destructive - nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. Organisations are emotional and emotion generating environments and most of my work concerns working with individuals and groups helping them to understand what systemic intelligence is contained in emotional situations. Very often the emotional person (aka the scapegoat) is voicing a concern on behalf of a system - i.e. they are doing a job in the system that needs to be done..How many people do you know who roll home after a day at the office talking about the activity they did today as distinct from how they felt about the activity. Most "irrational" behaviour in organisations is very often a conscious representation of unconscious emotional issues that are repressed because of the "rules" that suggest that emotion is not welcome...
I'm one of those odd people who believe that we can't decide to be rational-only because let's face it, that's a fairly irrational request...emotion is a vibrant and compelling type of data that can really contribute to learning .. But then again, we have examples of rational only entities - they are called bureaucracies - and the individual equivalents? sociopaths...Allowing emotion a place to breath doesn't mean abandoning reason - it means allowing the whole person in the room and that can only be a good thing in my view.
Tammy Lenski has a great article about the Gotcha trap - you know that moment in a consultation process where someone moves in with a snappy statement and shouts "checkmate"...Tammy describes a zoning meeting about a cell tower to be located in her neighbourhood.
The attorney for the cell tower company, standing at the front of the room, interrupted one speaker. Do you have a cell phone? he asked the speaker, in a pretty unpleasant tone. Then he turned to the room of us, “Ok, show of hands,” he demanded. “How many of you own a cell phone?”
Gotcha, I thought, he’s pulling a Gotcha.
Oh this feels so familiar - short term triumph which results in long term resistance. I've seen this approach fail miserably on so many occasions, particularly in stakeholder consultation processes which are very often dissemination processes masquerading as consultation. When I am working with organisations about to embark on a consultation I ask them a very simple question at the outset - how willing are you to change your mind/hypothesis/position on the basis of what you hear throughout this process? It sounds simple but it isn't...and if the organisation isn't open to being surprised then the consultation won't work and they are better off engaging a marketing expert to sell what they've already agreed on. The other side of the process is the willingness of the stakeholders to "reality check" their list of requirements of the consulting organisation. An open ended "what do you think we need to do?" consultation will result in a shopping list, raised expectation and yields disappointment. Reality testing that shopping list means asking the hard questions in the room - "if we need to do A with X amount of resources then help us think through how to prioritise what's important?" That generally means a more mature discussion, less disappointment and a move out of the either/or position that generates those "gotcha" moments that Tammy describes.
If someone is pulling a Gotcha moment then the triumph will result in polarisation, monologue and resistance. If someone is willing to suspend their need for triumph, open themselves up to the possibility that they may be dealing with experts in their stakeholder group - that will yield a dialogue and reduce the possibility of entrenched resistance.
Matt Moore continues to write really engaging posts and his latest one The Technology of the Secret really piqued my curiosity. He's writing about the process of telling and keeping secrets and how much of his work (and indeed my own) revolves around secret keeping.
Simply hiding something makes it more desirable to others. We may hide it for any number of reasons. It may be shameful, boring, illegal, hurtful. Whatever it is, we don't want people to know about it. We manage & maintain our identities and the exposure of a secret threatens that. Our secrets make us vulnerable. And because they are a part of ourselves that form us that we cannot publicly acknowledge, they can be a heavy burden. Many cultures have developed rituals & roles for the entrustment of secrets to others. The catholic confessional, the psychiatrist's couch.
Secrets (of ourselves & also of others) are powerful tokens of exchange. The secrets of others might be exchanged for material gain but our own secrets are offered to people to build trust between us. We often start with little vulnerabilities and then move on to the bigger things. And in a world where random connections are increasingly common, we sometimes fell happier giving our secrets to complete strangers instead of those close to us.
In my experience there are 4 reasons why someone "tells" their secrets to someone else.
1. I’m telling you a secret because if I say it out loud in the presence of another person then I can begin to hear it myself for the first time.
2. I’m telling you a secret because I feel lonely holding this and I want some company in my isolation.
3. I’m telling you a secret because you can then have the worry about what to do with it and I can absolve myself of that responsibility.
4. I am telling you a secret because I need you to “mind” this for me until I can work out what to do about it.
I'm ambivalent about secret keeping primarily because there is an assumed contract around confidentiality which is rarely negotiated. It's fairly clear if someone is breaking the law but outside of the legal requirements to disclose what about the moral or ethical issues?
I remember one consulting assignment where 10 people revealed their (competing) views about the organisation and made it clear that they expected me to keep their stories confidential. At the end of the few days they were relieved to have told someone and I was burdened with the content and the expectation that I would miraculously come up with a “solution” to a problem nobody was prepared to talk about.
In the end, I gathered the group together, told them I’d maintain confidentiality around their stories but I wanted to talk about the formal and informal ways in which communication was conducted in the company. The assignment turned out ok in the end because my interpretation of the balance between container and contained was a good fit and we had a very meaningful discussion but what I learned from that assignment was never to take confidentiality for granted so now it’s an ongoing part of my contracting with clients.
My work as a therapist brings up all sorts of issues about secret keeping but at a macro level I wonder why psychotherapists are so absent from public discourse when doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists appear with regularity in the media. One of the stories therapists tell themselves is that they have to maintain the confidentiality of the clients’ stories. Yes and no. Keeping secrets is also a way of colluding with the powerlessness of being unheard. Is it ethical to “fix” clients to return them to wider social systems that may have contributed to their distress in the first instance? Is it “ethical” to maintain a vow of silence about family life; relationships; abuse and all of the other secrets we are entrusted with? Who does secret keeping really benefit?
So you could say I’m ambivalent about secrets and my instinct now is to wonder what’s behind the giving of a secret to a secret keeper and how are we both being made and re-made in that process.
Another fine TED talk - this time from Charles Ledbetter. I heard Ledbetter speak at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier in the year about creative collaboration. There are so many interesting ideas in here for any organisation with consumers, customers or audiences...like - how do you organise without organisations? What do you do when your consumers, customers or audiences know more about what you do than you do? And of course...the advent of the pro-am. Interesting stuff
Do you have an elevator pitch about your business? I have tried and failed (repeatedly) to invent one.
I’ve written here previously about Dynamic Participation – the principles that inform how I facilitate and consult and I’ve refined those 10 points into a 3 point plan for working with groups
1 Keep the process in the room
2 Consult with curiosity
3 Respect the resistance
I spent a most enjoyable 90 minutes or so on a Skype call yesterday with more Moores than you can shake a stick at (Johnnie from the UK and Matt who is in Australia to be exact.. who depending on whom you speak with are either evil twin brothers or utterly unrelated...). At Johnnie's invitation we were discussing the Shadow side of organisations. Jung is credited with the term but it was interesting that the day we choose (unbeknownst to ourselves) was the 68th anniversary of the death of Sigmund Freud who had a thing or two to say about the hidden, unconscious and repressed side of ourselves. Johnnie is busy editing the conversation into a bite sized podcast and I'll post a link as soon as he's finished.
What I found fascinating about the conversation was that we're all coming from very different perspectives, working with different kinds of organisations and industries and had myriad examples of how the shadow manifests in organisations. Johnnie's shadow Mr Rant even had an outing, prompted by the term "Knowledge Manager" (which Matt is) after I shared my fantasy of what they do (putting manners on wayward and out of control files). Yes, it got silly at times but it was a thoroughly enjoyable way to spend a Monday morning and we uncovered lots of topics we'll return to in future conversations.
Following the blogging and podcasting workshop I ran with Conn earlier this year and some of our conversations about extending the reach of publicly funded services Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council Library Service (a client of mine) decided to commission a series of 2 podcasts of one of their cultural events Books in the Park. The podcasts were created by Conn at Edgecast Media and part one The Children's Corner is now available for download from the DLRCC Library website. Part 2 is now also available by clicking here and features the adult authors who read in Cabinteely Park on June 23rd. They are Paul Carson, Sarah Webb, Robert Dunbar, Marisa Mackle and Jacinta McDevitt.
The event itself was held in Cabinteely Park on 23rd of June, organised by the Library and Parks Service and 5 Childrens' authors read their work to a rapt audience. Conn and Brian Greene recorded the events and interviewed a selection of people on the day and this episode includes authors Don Conroy, Oisin McGann, Aisling O Loughlin, Joe O Brien, Derek Landy. Mairéad Owens and Conor Peoples from the Library Service and some of the attendees are also included.
I'm hoping this is going to be the start of many more podcasts from Dun Laoghaire Rathdown who are trailblazing in this regard - and I'm hoping that other local authorities will follow. This is such a brilliant example of how to extend the reach of publicly funded services - it's about connecting with people where they are when they want rather than the other way around. The trick now is going to be to find ways of evaluating the impact of initiatives like this when they don't tick the traditional number-crunching formats. For now, I'm thrilled to have been part of the conversations that led to this development. The DLRCC Library site doesn't have a comment facility on the post (not yet anyway!) so please leave a comment here or at Conn's site, or alternatively drop the Library Service an email at libraries@dlrcoco.ie I know they would appreciate your feedback.
Johnnie's asking some great questions this week. On Friday he asked:
Obviously, this is too simplistic.
But I have this question for anyone who's got some process to manage human beings in organisations. You know the sort of thing... a process to set and manage coaching; a format for efficient meetings; a form for 360 feedback, an assessment "tool" for interviews.
Does this process bear any resemblance to how you actually relate, in your own life, to anyone whom you love? (eg how you chose your spouse, how you treat your children etc etc)
I think a lot of organisations create complicated processes in an effort to systematise human relationships. These processes generate what a friend calls a "corporate nod", the kind of assent that really means "yeah, I'll play along" and not "yes, I love that idea".
Of course, any organisation needs its procedures but there seems to be an impulse to create too many of them, and too complicated. A personal peeve of mine are "evaluation forms" at the end of events. These seem to encourage an evaluative rather than participative mindset - where people are invited to assess whether it "worked" (on a 5 point scale) instead of engaging live in making it work at the time.
One fine day, I'll announce that I won't read those feedback forms - to emphasise how much more valuable it is to get live engagement from people taking risks to make things work in the here and now. Probably on the same day I'll kick off a creative thinking meeting by saying, "Could we all embrace the possibility that nothing useful may come of this meeting? That way, we can all stop trying to control what happens, relax and probably create an atmosphere that's actually more likely to see something useful emerge."
The comment stream is just as interesting and to the latter one I added the following:
I'm with you on the evaluation forms for all of the reasons you outline, and because they take no account of the responsibility people have to participate or not - as if it is all in the hands of the facilitator/trainer to produce the goods. However those of us who are process consultants/facilitators have to be able to talk about what we do in ways other than just 'trust me' which I see a lot of consultants reverting to in the absence of something more robust...I am thinking out loud as I write this but there has to be something in between 'trust me' and '10 sure fired ways to control anything that moves so you can guarantee certainty' kind of approaches...
I've been having this conversation on and off with several people in the last few weeks - the certainty/uncertainty paradox..clinging to a defined outcome rarely delivers what it promises because most of the time the problem isn't the problem. Then how do we talk about what we do if we're not talking about what our clients want to hire us for? All of a sudden I feel the need to talk to a Knowledge Manager.
Why are we so attached to the official story of events? I’ve spent a large part of the last week engaged in wonderful conversations with peers and friends..a lot of those conversations were ‘unofficial’ stories of shared experiences. 100% of those stories will never make it into the official discourse of ‘what happened’. This seems to mirror so much of my experience in organisations where an attachment to the idealised image of ‘who we are’ and ‘why we are’ is deemed to be more important than the lived experience of ‘how we are’. In my mind’s eye I have an image of being together where the official discourse is listening to the unofficial stories..but maybe that’s another fantasy that may need to remain imaginary?
Most of my work in the past year or so has been designing and managing stakeholder consultation processes. In my experience, there are three types of consultation methods
The first is what I call the Defensive Model where the organisation consults with stakeholders out of a requirement to do so. The process is designed to 'tick boxes' and it is invariably created for the purpose of optics.
The second is the Persuasive Model where the organisation has made its mind up about what it wishes to do and the consultation process is a sophisticated publicity and marketing exercise designed to get 'buy in' for an already established idea.
And the third is the Discursive Model where the organisation is seeking the stakeholders' help to 'think out loud' about changes or a new direction and the process is created as an inquiry.
I favour model number three because numbers one and two are effectively monologues not dialogues. Number three creates the possibility that the organisation can answer 'yes' to the only question that really matters:
Are you willing to change your mind on the basis of what you hear?
I've been fortunate to work with clients in 2007 who have jumped at the challenge presented by consultation with stakeholders, designed in a spirit of inquiry and conducted as conversations. What kinds of consultation processes have you been part of in 2007? Monologue? or Dialogue?
More than ever, bands must be able to manage themselves. The age of lavish label advances and indulgent A&R handholding is over. Upheaval and stress in the industry means diminished tolerance for chaotic behaviour among band members. There is less money available to clean up the messes created by out-of-control artists.
So says my colleague Mike Jolkovski. in a fascinating article he's written for Music Connection Magazine. Mike is a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, musician and organisational consultant working with music groups (of all genres). In this article he's taking on the heady issues of artistic license and what it allows and doesn't; the music group as an organisational unit; working with feelings and psychology as well as technique and politics; dealing with problems as soon as they arise (instead of trashing the hotel room as a minor diversion) and the tricky issue of dividing the spoils. It's a great piece and his blog is full of more fascinating insights into how psychoanalysis can be applied in a practical way to the world of work in the music field.
I like questions. I like them more than answers. Very often when I’m pitching for a piece of work I’ll ask questions as well as offering solutions. Sometimes, the questions we ask say more about us than the answers we provide. Here are 10 questions I’ve used in organisational contexts. I’d love to hear some of yours. Or, I’d love to hear questions you wish you’d been asked.
If you could appoint anyone – alive or dead, fictional or real to the board of directors who would it be? And why?
If this organisation was a religious group – what would constitute a cardinal sin?
What’s the most exciting experience you have had in this company? What were the characteristics of it? How can we create more experiences like that?
What are we not allowed to talk about around here?
How would your favourite TV personality describe this organisation?
If you could pick one person to give you feedback on how you manage in this company – who would it be and why?
If this organisation were a film what would it be called? Which actor would play you?
What would it be like to work for a company that’s the exact opposite of the one you work in now?
Where do the real decisions get made around here?
If you could give yourself a new job title that reflects the actual job you do, what would it be?
I've mentioned this video before - A Vision of Students Today - from a working group of Kansas State University students and faculty and now Professor Michael Wesch has outlined in detail the process that went into creating the piece and it's a fascinating example of reflection, reflexivity and participant observation in action. He outlines a five step process which includes inquiry, formal research, and my favourite aspect of it all is the open ended questions he used to start the process such as:
What is it like being a student today?
So the basic idea is to create a 3 minute video highlighting the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime.
We already know some things from previous research (and if you know of any interesting statistics, please list them along with the source). Others we will need to find out by doing a class survey. Please add whatever you want to know or present.
The data were captured in a Google document which he has made available here and of course the final video is a masterful piece of work.
The more I consult and the more I'm embedded in my own research the more I know that finding the right question to kick start a process is where the energy needs to go. Finding a creative way of engaging a client unlocks so much energy and very often that means flinging our own hypotheses about what's going on out the window.
Blogging has been lite the past few months. Due in some part to other commitments and due in no small part to a degree of disillusion on my part as to what I have to offer in this medium. If I pay attention to how it 'should' be done I would regularly offer 10 Tips to Success/remedy/sorting your work and life out and continue in the vein of so many established bloggers by generating a problem/syndrome and offering a remedy.
My disillusion and my increasing optimism comes from knowing that life isn't that simple - if only it was. If only I could diagnose in 5 minutes flat and quickly write a prescription that would make it all better. I see so many consultants falling into this trap in the work world and then watch them wonder why there is so much cynicism about the profession. Over promising and under delivering is the consultant's syndrome. I see so much of it in the blogging world as well - bullet points, simple solutions, increasing helplessness on the part of those of us who simply 'don't get it' and the roundabout goes on.
I've fallen into this trap myself - I do have 'rules' of a kind but I tend to play fast and loose with them - perhaps I've adopted the lingo of the blog world in an attempt to slot in? But increasingly I'm uncomfortable with it and as a result my blogroll will undergo a massive spring clean in the next week or so. My increasing optimism comes from wanting to put down the burden of writing a 'useful blog' and giving myself the freedom to think about abandoning this space altogether - I've no plans to quit just yet - but thinking about it has certainly fired the creative juices again. Perhaps I've ignored my meta rule which is - work with what's staring you in the face instead of trying to ignore it'. So no quick diagnoses or solutions to be found here ... I eschew the bullet points ..and I invite you to slap me on the wrist if I fall into complacency mode in 2008.
Further Edit (thinking out loud) of course this really is a cry for help on my part - I want a simple 3 step plan to solving this dilemma I find myself in - all answers on a bullet pointed post card please.
I had a conversation with a poet this week about how the value of something like poetry (which, in comparison to many other art forms is a relatively niche area) is captured. Our discussion centred on the ways in which we value experience and how increasingly, that is through quantitative measures. A poetry festival can never compete in terms of numbers with a music festival and a music festival can never compete with a soccer match. So if the numbers are the only way in which we can attach value then we’re losing before we start.
Our discussion evolved into one of how to capture the quality and value of experience. In our social and personal lives we can speak to this with ease and comfort but we find it difficult to attach a value to it when we get “organised”. Of course, this is relevant in the world of consulting and business as well. How can I add value to what it is I do in a way that is meaningful to me, to my client and to what happens as a result of our time together? My poet colleague remarked on the feedback he hears each year which is about the intimacy of the surroundings, the quality of the engagement between readers and audiences and the informal way in which conversations evolve out of the formal task of the enterprise.
As I’ve mentioned before, it’s not always possible to know what you know. That space in between is where the real added value happens. That real added value isn’t something that can be sold or promised. It’s something that’s created when the quality of the experience is significant. So the relationship is the thing – and tending to that means
Listening as well as hearing
Knowing when not to talk
Taking time to reflect on what each brings to the relationship as well as what each takes away
Knowing what baggage as well as luggage is carried
Knowing that it isn’t the client’s responsibility to make up for previous bad experiences I have had with others
Knowing that it isn’t my responsibility to prove to the client that I won’t repeat the same damage as a previous consulting experience has
And ultimately
Knowing who I am and what I want out of this relationship
And that’s as well as doing the job I’ve been hired to do.
I often wonder if we were to put as much effort into our personal relationships, in terms of courses, methodologies, evaluations etc as we do into the science of managing relationships with clients, what the world would look like. Is it that we can see the prize in business but can't in our personal lives? I guess I think of myself as being in the business of joining up the dots between both which is why the balance between one-on-one consulting and larger consulting engagements suits my skill base, personality and passion. It also seems to attract clients who are interested in resolving problems while learning the lessons they contain.
I’m increasingly beginning to believe that successful consultation processes create, at their core, the possibility for all participants to say “I don’t understand that” or “I don’t know”. And I also believe that the approach I take as a consultant to meeting with consultees sets the tone for how the conversation around knowledge and not knowing is generated. “Not knowing” is one of those hackneyed phrases that lives in the same box as “excellence” (I’m sure you can add to the list)…essentially they are meaningless and meaningful in equal measure.
I’ve had several great conversations this week with people who profess to “not knowing” anything about the arts. Some have even gone so far as to label themselves “philistines”. Never one to accept something at face value, I inquired further and of course all of these people knew much more than they thought they did about the arts….some haven’t had the official “jargon” with which to talk about the topic - others didn’t know that what they knew counted for expertise about the subject.
I’ve deliberately held “meetings” in informal places. I’ve resisted wearing a suit and the informality of the setting has gone some way to an increasing comfort level and much creativity in the conversation. I guess in each of these cases I have started from the perspective that we all know more than we do and the conversation must be structured around the meaning of “not knowing”. In the past few weeks I’ve learned the following from people who have claimed not to know what they were talking about.
We all know much more than we think we do
When someone tells me they “don’t know” I hear “I don’t know how”
All we need is an invitation to reflect on what it is we think we don’t know anything about
Informal conversations are as important as formal ones – in a jargon defended arena informality can create a safe place in which to be creative
If someone tells me “I don’t know” I inquire into what it is they do know
I meant to pick up on this great post from Johnnie some time ago but I've been too busy working on strategies with clients! Seriously though, of course he's right. There's a lot of idealisation around strategies - as though a strategy is a fixed object of wisdom (preferably published in a book) that when published will reveal the way ahead. Strategies are about now, and how we see the future from this vantage point - so I am more interested in cultures of strategising than I am in trying to control the future. Having said that, I've experienced a lot of fear amongst some clients of wanting something different in the future - as though admitting their desire will in some way ensure it can't be realised. Strategising means a degree of making the fantasy real to some extent and consultants can be pressurised into containing that fear by providing the framework (or offering their own wishes and interpretations of what's possible). So I agree with Johnnie and at the same time ask my usual question which is - how are consultants and facilitators used in that process to do a job on behalf of the client system?
Robbins' photographs grace an article in the March 6 edition of the New York Times in which Penelope Green asks What's in a chair? The article is an exploration of the physical spaces in which therapists work and she asks a number of interesting questions - what is the impact on a patient's therapeutic process when the sessions take place in a therapist's house? or when the decor or arrangement of the room gives something away about who the therapist 'really is'?
Few therapists today would contend that it’s possible or even desirable to present oneself as a true blank slate, with an office and treatment style utterly free from personal influence. And so the conversation now centers on degrees of influence and revelation: is a family photograph too much? What about the family dog?
The real question that's not addressed in the article is - why are some therapists (and for this read consultants, coaches etc) so grandiose that they think they can control the patient/client's transference? There's a difference between flaunting one's personal life in the face of clients and bringing oneself fully into the room/relationship. The physical presence we create says as much about us as practitioners as the psychological and emotional one. What's absent from a room says as much about someone as what's present. I don't have a lot of time for practitioners who angst about controlling clients' emotional and unconscious lives with the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) inference that the therapist or consultant's 'real life' is somehow split off and unimportant in building a working alliance. A therapist's life is not a contaminating quality. As a therapist and consultant I work with who is in the room and with what is presented in the room - consciously and unconsciously. I am not and neither do I believe I have the right to attempt to be in control of the client's experience of me. I wonder how many therapists and consultants are really comfortable in a space where the free reign of a client's unconscious is unleashed in the room?
Co-incidentally? Psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips is the subject of the Guardian's Writers' Rooms series in which he talks about the physical space he has created in which to write (his consulting room has been photographed many times for various interviews).
One of the unchallenged tenets of consultancy is the concept of confidentiality. In the course of assignments I am often assumed to hold a confidential space and for many years I accepted this principle as a central hypothesis in my work. While the concept of confidentiality is always discussed in therapeutic relationships, I am finding myself more and more curious about why consulting clients are not as ready to have conversations about this concept in the same way. In more recent times I have also become more interested in the concept of confidentiality and how it is constructed as a mechanism for the distribution of power within organisations.
As a society I see an ongoing struggle between what is useful in terms of confidentiality and what is sacrificed as a result of it. The discourse here in Ireland surrounding the Catholic Church and the various tribunals etc – have all contributed to new interpretations of what confidentiality means and constructs. In each of these situations, power and confidentiality appear to sit side by side.
So I’ve been developing a series of hypotheses about confidentiality and consulting
1. The first is that my role as consultant is often defined by the confidentiality I offer – as though I “own” the concept and bring it “to” my clients. My credibility in the organisation can be defined by the way in which I manage and navigate the concept i.e. I retain sole responsibility for it.
2. The second is that the stories that are revealed “in confidence” are perceived to contain the “truth” of the organisation – those stories revealed openly as part of the lived experience of clients are merely one level of engagement.
3. The third is that those who reveal the most “dramatic” stories in a confidential setting can be perceived to be the most “honest” members of an organisation and maintain a powerful position as a result of their ability to “say it as it is”.
As a consultant I am often invited to hear the stories, be influenced by them and synthesise the meaning into something more objective and less personal. In many cases this may result in little sense of ownership and participation on the part of those interviewed in conversations concerning the co-constructed nature of challenges and more importantly the co-constructed nature of moving forward. This places the consultant in a powerful position within organisations, particularly as we continue to live in a culture that values information as currency.
So in recent times I have opened up this whole issue of confidentiality as part of the contracting phase with clients and begun to question what confidentiality means and how I am being used as a container for the client’s secrets. I have also begun to reframe the conversation about confidentiality by asking these kinds of questions:
• What are the limits of confidentiality?
• What would a ‘safe enough’ environment look like?
• How can we jointly create a safe enough space in which we can tell the stories that need to be told and heard in order to move forward?
• How is power distributed in this organisation and how does confidentiality contribute to that?
• How can we begin to distribute empowerment in this organisation?
Tracking and discussing the shifts in the power relationships with clients is a way of holding power ‘for them’ as distinct from ‘instead of them’. It may be necessary for me to hear and hold confidential content while at the same time exploring what confidentiality means for this client and how each of us are being made and re-made in each others’ presence. I now welcome a richer conversation about confidentiality – one that addresses content and context and hopefully one that challenges a few ‘taken for granted’ stories about the power of secret keeping.
The annual meeting of ISPSO takes place in Philadelphia between 20 and 22 June this year. The title of this conference is Meaning and Motivation at work. If you are interested in how organisations 'really work'; and are curious about how emotion and unconscious processes influence how and what gets done then this gathering of consultants, managers and academics is the place to be. Before the main part of the proceedings there are four days of professional development workshops (16 - 19 June) open to anyone to attend. The questions being covered this year include:
How does one effectively market psychoanalytic work?
How does photography introduce new power into understanding organizations?
When consulting or coaching assignments involve working through impasse, what methods can encourage transformation?
What can organizations do to build resistance to corruption in their work?
There are any more fascinating topics - so if you are in the Philadelphia area and are curious about a psychoanalytic approach to working and organising check out the full schedule here.
There's more information about ISPSO here and the full conference schedule is available here.
When is enough enough? San Francisco based Psychoanalyst Dr Owen Renik says
The profession is in a great decline, and I predict the decline will continue. The reason for it, and the reason a corrective is needed now, is that although psychoanalysis began in a spirit of open-ended inquiry, with an orientation above all to be helpful to the patient, it took on a self-perpetuating guild mentality that was its ruin. The possibility is still open to reverse the decline, but it will be necessary to escape the clutches of an establishment that, unhappily, has increasingly gotten away from the original scientific enterprise.
He goes on to say
There is a tendency among psychoanalysts to pursue self-awareness as a goal in itself, rather than a means to an end. Originally, the idea was that the self-understanding that arose as a result of psychoanalysis was unique and impressive and valid because it afforded relief from symptoms that were otherwise impossible to treat.
If you don’t require that self-awareness be validated by symptom relief, there are two destructive consequences. The first is scientific. You have no independent variable to track; you set up a circular situation in which it’s the analyst’s theory that determines what is found in analysis. Many critics of psychoanalysis have recognized this.
The points he raises are interesting in themselves, but they also relate to any kind of inter-personal and professional relationship – when is enough enough? And what kind of methodologies do you use to determine if you your intervention is (a) appropriate? (b) working? or (c) past its sell by date? There is always the temptation to keep clients wanting more. I don’t see coaching in particular as an endless process. There comes a time when you have to say goodbye – often times it’s the coach who has to determine that if a client appears to be too reliant on their coaching process and reluctant to move on and it's sometimes the case that a client is ready to move on long before a coach or consultant is willing to let go.
Renik goes on to say
You should have a criterion for judging whether the outcome is satisfactory, which leaves you free to judge by trial and error. If the treatment seems sufficient, you stop. You can always resume the therapy when and if there’s a need. What might also happen along the way, you might become aware of other things that then you define as symptoms, and you want to address those. Let’s say you have trouble dating, for example. We discover when we look into it that you have trouble asserting yourself, and that applies in a number of areas, including your work life. So we go on, until you are able to make progress there. If you’re not having symptom trouble after that, there’s no reason to keep analyzing stuff. That’s it. You’re done.
I think the same is true of any kind of coaching or consulting, particularly if it’s a one to one relationship and where the identity of the consultant gets tied up with the assignment. If the job is done, it’s done and it’s time to move on – dealing with the personal nature of ending and rejection is something that consultants need to integrate into their practice. I know when I was working as a therapist I had regular supervision where I addressed endings and beginnings on a regular basis. Now that I’m consulting I try to build in some kind of formal ending process with clients – be that a review or other – to mark the transition.
But as Renik says –
there’s no reason to keep analyzing stuff. That’s it. You’re done.
I'm pleased to see that my colleague Mike Jolkovski is back blogging again (about time Mike - where have you been?). Mike is a psychoanalyst who specialises in working with musicians and music groups. He has a great post here about How to work with a Prima Donna in which he describes said creature as
A classic Prima Donna is arrogant, vain, high-maintenance, demanding, petulant, and entitled. The entitlement can help them rationalize exploiting and manipulating others. This is especially destructive in bands. A prima donna is by definition not a team player, and will often unrealistically expect to live a lifestyle that hasn’t yet been earned. Alcohol and drugs tend to make all of this this much worse.
He then goes on to outline some strategies for working with Prima Donnas and on the off chance that any are actually reading his post he says
It’s a fantastic relief to be able to let go of that superior business — the world is a lot less lonely that way. Some perspective can help, as can a sense of humor about yourself. Maturity is not a bad thing. A competent psychoanalyst can help. I’m just saying.
Mike has another post called Who owns the band - all useful information for those of us who work with artists. Mike is currently doing research on conflict, power & ego in bands for an upcoming book and is interested in hearing your stories - you can email him yours at this address mj [at] workingthroughmusic [dot] com.
Elsewhere a new friend Bettina is writing about the relationship between religion, spirituality and work. She's even coined a new phrase and goes on to apply it to fearless leadership
My current winning combination seems to be Quantum/Tolle/Chopra/Secret (which really is all one thing, isn't it?! Let me call it Quan-To-Cho-Se for now and tell you about how some of the concepts and techniques really seem to work in challenging management and leadership situation
It's great to see Omani back in the blogging saddle as well and I'm sad to see that Shane Hegarty at the Irish Times is hanging up his blogging boots for a while. Shane's blog was consistently great reading and I'm sorry to see him go. But if there's a day job and a book in the offing I guess something has to give?
Whether or not there is a gene for worrying -- or indeed a gene for being a geneticist -- a psychoanalytic story about worrying would try to persuade people to see that by worrying they are doing a number of interesting things, many of which may not have even occurred to them.
First, worry is an ironic form of hope. It is a way of looking forward to something -- even if it's something awful -- and that implies a belief in the future. So worrying is a version of desiring; when we worry, we anticipate.
Second, each person has a very specific history of worrying that evolves over time. Each of us chooses certain things to worry about and chooses whom, if anybody, we will tell.
And the way our worries were received when we were children -- whether our parents seemed horrified or indifferent or only too keen to hear about them -- will leave us with a mostly unconscious set of expectations about what we can say and to whom. Worries, like secrets, are part of the essential currency of intimacy.
Last, but not least, worrying is a form of thinking. At one end of some imaginary spectrum, there is something akin to creative rumination. At the other end, there is the stalled thought of obsession. If worrying can persecute us, it can also work for us, as self-preparation. No stage fright, no performance.
In other words, if we can lop off the worry gene, what else might go with it? People without worries are people without self-doubt. And we know what people are capable of in states of ultimate conviction.
I've become a regular reader of Ferdinand von Prondzynski's blog. Ferdinand is the president of Dublin City University and his blog is a fascinating insight into the life, interest and times of a senior academic. DCU are about to launch a new strategy at the end of 2008 and I'm hoping that Ferdinand will blog the process. As someone with a vested interest in strategy and meaningful stakeholder consultation processes I think it would be fascinating to see a senior manager at this level talk about the reality of these processes from the inside. He describes the particular challenge of university strategies as
that they have to address the balance between the need for an overall organisational purpose and direction on the one hand, and the need to respect academic autonomy on the other. This is a very difficult balance to get right, but unless it is got right the whole planning concept cannot work.
I think that's about right for any kind of creative working environment - add in the complexity of the public sector and you have a heady mix of competing stakeholder interests.
I do hope that Ferdiand takes the plunge and tells it like it is.
The most consistent web search that leads people to my blog is 'the difference between listening and hearing' and this piece originally posted in May 2007 is the most frequented on the blog. Looking through my stats for the past few months brings this to the top of the pile once again so for all of you who haven't read it I'm republishing it once again.
I don’t believe in tricks when it comes to facilitating and consulting. At the end of the day it’s me and my client(s) in a room trying to figure something out together. Yes, I have a toolkit, but it’s pretty bare in terms of stuff I can take out and wave around…I don’t do “off the shelf” solutions and I’m rarely in a position to talk with any degree of freedom about previous work, primarily because so much of it comes to me as “confidential”. It’s a dilemma…
One of the things I do bring to the table is my ability to listen and more importantly, my ability to hear. Why differentiate I hear you ask? Well there’s a critical difference from a client’s perspective in being listened to and being heard and the ability to move between one and the other is what makes for good consulting and facilitation work.
I recently worked with a client who ranted and raved for a full 45 minutes “at” me about the “uselessness” of a manager in the system. He listed out the deficiencies in this manager, quantified the losses accruing as a result of his inadequacies and was blistering in his personal attack on his peer. He wanted me to “sort this person out” so the company could get back to doing what it needed to do. His preference was for me to take this manager out of the system and give him a “bloody good talking to”.
I didn’t do as he asked…and about a week later both the manager (above) and the vilified manager were back at work, getting along better than they ever had been and productivity was on the rise again.
Listening can be a tough station. For a full 45 minutes I listened to this manager’s anger. It was clear, unambiguous and in the service of some kind of action – any kind of action….
I heard a number of unspoken things while listening to his anger. I heard the anxiety in his voice, his escalating tension as he spoke, the lack of resolution as he “dumped” on me…his insistence that I “get rid” of the problem and also his isolation in dealing with it. If only I could make this problem go away then everything would be back to normal. I was being warned not to let him down. I heard his fear that the department would be vilified by head office if he couldn’t make this department perform its task and get the staff to work better together.
So I had a choice about what to respond to, knowing that how I would respond would dictate how we might progress together. If he didn’t feel “heard” then I was going to be as vilified as the manager I was expected to “fix”.
In this instance I took a risk and responded out of an empathy with his fear and anxiety. The look on his face was one of – “how did you know that?” but he couldn’t deny that I had heard him. He felt met, seen, listened to and heard - out of that meeting we managed to do some productive work together looking at his isolation in the system and also the expectation being piled on the new manager – most of which this new manager wasn’t aware of and couldn’t possibly respond to. Our work developed into a coaching relationship which was significant for this manager as it was the first time he had availed of any kind of professional support. I also coached the new manager helping to negotiate deliverables and ongoing professional support for him in the system. Each manager had felt unheard and was feeling pressure to respond to "unreasonable" demands from a "senior" in the organisation. Attending to what I was "hearing" allowed us to use the emotional content of the meeting to look at what was going on in that wider context. Once we'd established a relationship of trust it was possible for the situation to be resolved in a way that allowed each to hold on to their truth and their integrity. The tension in the relationship diminished, a better working environment was created and targets were met. The fact that I had heard as well as listened was a key factor in building a working alliance.
There’s a delicate dance between listening, hearing and the point at which you make an intervention to feed back what you think will make a difference. I see this as an intricate balance and this diagram goes some way to outlining the process from my perspective where the outside circle represents what I listened to and the inside what I heard.
Note: some details have been changed to protect the identity of the client and this piece has been published with the client's permission.
In our rush to offer solutions to clients’ problems we often (too often in my opinion) eschew the personal and embrace the professional. We really don’t get the value of being “ourselves” because somewhere along the line we’ve learned that to be ourselves is to not be good enough. I’m of the firm belief that there are no differences. What there are – are boundaries. People hire people because after they’ve assured themselves that you have the skill set to do the job, they want to be in a relationship with someone they like, feel comfortable with and ultimately feel safe with. All of that requires a large degree of self awareness and an ability to manage boundaries. It also requires that we be ourselves. You can try faking being personal but it won't work. It never does.
I have a number of questions I ask myself when working with clients to make sure I’m “being myself”.
What’s my emotional response to this client and to undertaking this assignment?
Would there come a time in this relationship where I could share that understanding in the service of the relationship?
Whose authority am I drawing on to make this client feel confident about working with me? My own? Or someone else’s?
How do I feel about “not knowing” in the presence of this client?
What is my motivation for working with this client? Money? Learning? Creativity? All three? something else? i.e. what's in this for me?
Those basic questions help me to keep connected to myself and more importantly, they ensure that I bring myself to the relationship. Tricks and tools are great and important sometimes, but if I’m not sure of what I’m feeling and when, I can’t reach for what I need in the service of my clients. Unlike the customer in the advertisement above, I want to feel personally connected to my clients and it’s only in that frame of mind I can grasp how best I can give them value for their money.
I haven't had a lot of time to blog this week but one thing that's going around in my mind is "stress" management and how that actually works? I'm thinking that before you get there you may need to engage in some "dis-stress" management which is really what people present with and then maybe you get to "de-stress" management....But "stress" management..I don't know...I don't think I've ever been useful helping anyone to manage stress...live with it yes, manage it? I don't know...any thoughts anyone?
Apologies for being pedantic but I don't think change is difficult. Control is what's difficult. People and organisations are changing all the time, just not in the ways that some of us want.
I think a lot of boring discussions about "change management" would be more interesting if we looked at what demands are being made for obedience and why they're not being met.
There's interesting discussion going on here and here and here about the Open Space model of facilitation. I'm not going to attempt to do justice to the various writers but Johnnie said something on this post about the role of facilitator that really caught my eye
What's more interesting - and harder to express - is a more fundamental question: do we really believe in the idea of one person leading a group of mere mortals through the wilderness? Or is it more realistic to expect confusion, frustration and mess as well as epiphanies and breakthroughs? And sometimes much more of the former than the latter?
There's so much richness in this comment but what struck me is that I don't believe one person leads and many others follow - the act of leadership is a complex one - leaders need followers so to follow is as complex a decision as to lead - sometimes the leader is the one who didn't declare their followership early enough and got the top job by default. So the breakthroughs, epiphanies and frustrations that Johnnie refers to belong to followers as much as leaders i.e. there is group ownership. All of this begs the question as to why bother hiring a facilitator in the first place? What's their (or my expertise?)...in my case my expertise is about process and the most I can bring to the table is my awareness of what's happening in the room (which may be very different from the group's interpretation of what's happening) and in sharing what I see and feel I'm hoping to facilitate the group's awareness of how they are doing business, thinking, creating or stagnating. Most of the time that's about identifying, naming and trying to process all of the confusing stuff that Johnnie refers to above that in being ignored gets in the way of moving forward...
So I agree with Chris that there's really no such thing as objectivity and all I can do is be aware of my subjective self and wonder what tuning into that tells me about fantasy and projection. I guess that's where a psychodynamic understanding of groups is incredibly helpful - allowing the unconscious and emotional processes some air time as useful intelligence about what's working and not. You can't tap into that material if (a) you're being 'objective' and (b) see leading or facilitating as a process that's separate from following and participating. Such rich material in these posts....Now I'm wondering what objectivity might actually look like ... anyone any ideas?
Let’s imagine that disappointment is a useful refuge, so that once you feel disappointed you know where you are. This is one version. The other version is that there’s a life organised to avoid the possibility of disappointment. And then the question would be, what’s the big problem
with disappointment? You could think disappointment is integral to being human so you had better start learning about it in order to be able to take risks. I would not want my children not to do things for fear of disappointment. I’d want them to be attentive to the moments when they take flight into disappointment as an avoidance of something else. Because I think disappointment is extremely consoling.
There’s also a sense in which hope can be poisonous… I think it would be better to bring up our children, from early on, with the idea that there is a question whether life is worth living for any given individual at any point in their lives. For some people, it is a real question and one of the things we can do, thank God, is to kill ourselves. That should be a serious option built into our education. Why are you tolerating pain? I would prefer to start from the position of asking the question whether life is worth living, whether certain kinds of pain are worth suffering.
My colleague consultant and psychoanalyst Ian Miller from New York has started to share his thoughts over at Accord Consulting. I worked with Ian at Saturday's ISPSO regional meeting here in New York and I'm really looking forward to his thoughts on the application of psychoanalysis to organisations. Ian's company website is here. Welcome to the world of blogging Ian!
Ever wondered why hiring the wrong consultant is very often the right decision for organisations? There may come a point when you know that the task you’ve been hired to do or facilitate simply isn’t the task that needs to be done – what on earth are you going to do? How are you going to manage the mounting pressure to deliver when all around you the signs are telling you that failure is on the horizon?
Change processes evoke anxiety – whether it’s at a personal or professional level – that’s one reason why the change industry is outsourced to consultants. Anxiety is difficult to talk about or deal with at a conscious level but its presence is felt everywhere in what may look like irrational behaviour and illogical decision making.
You’d imagine that choosing a consultant to manage the change process and deliver on the strategic goals would be important? After all, this is an important stage in the organisation’s development isn’t it? All well and good with our rational hats on. Unconsciously it may be more important to choose a consultant who can’t deliver, thereby protecting ourselves from the anxiety of change by blaming the consultant for not being good enough.
Consultants can be “not good enough” in various ways. They may not have the right people skills to work with the emotional issues that change presents. The IT system will be up and running in no time but people won’t have a clue what’s happening and where they may end up next week. A consultant may simply not have the professional experience to engage with the task at a strategic enough level. The project will be micro managed, take enormous amounts of time and may be discontinued due to excessive costs. The consultant may not have the authority in the system to roll out the changes that have been agreed – s/he may be de-authorised by the board from actually delivering on the task.
In all of these scenarios the consultant will absorb the organisation’s anxiety by feeling unwelcome, not good enough, set up to fail, disappointed, confused and angry etc. Very often, the consultant will be scapegoated for failing to deliver while not knowing that they were hand picked to fail.
When the wrong consultant is picked it may be the right decision for an organisation not ready to deal with change. A ritual sacrifice is often required and on many occasions the consultant is that offering. In this instance failure isn’t failure it’s a strong signal that there is other work to be accomplished before change is actioned. Very often that other work is finding a safe way to address the underlying anxiety that all change evokes. If a company is brave enough it may look to its “failures” as rich learning about the need to connect with the very real and very human fear of change.
So much of the art of facilitation is simply getting out of the way. The more I get out of my client's way, the more they generate the content they really want heard. I'm sure there's a mathematical formula or a two by two of some kind to quantify the relationship between the facilitator's activity and the creativity of the group. I'm learning this more and more every time I work with a client group. I'm also realising that the real role of the facilitator is about minding three things
Task
The big picture and the overall reason for the gathering. I have this in my mind as the day goes on. My role is to make sure we achieve the task we have set ourselves.
Time
There's a finite amount of time available to us and within that there are choices about how that time is managed and used. My role is make sure the time boundaries are adhered to and the use of the time is consciously acknowledged. If a group decides to use the time in a different way then they need to take responsibility for that in the moment.
Territory
Making sure we have a safe conceptual space and a good enough physical space in which to work (and ensuring both are respected) is a key part of my role.
Essentially I'm minding the boundaries of the conversation and getting out of the way so that my clients can have the conversations they want to. It's amazing what happens when you simply get lost!
Matthew Stewart's essay on the value and worth (or not) of management education in The Atlantic is worth reading. It's a bit of a rant about management theory and education but he does ask som provocative questions which should be relevant to anyone thinking of embarking on a management training course - particularly in the current climate where the old models don't appear to be working very well right now.
After I left the consulting business, in a reversal of the usual order of things, I decided to check out the management literature. Partly, I wanted to “process” my own experience and find out what I had missed in skipping business school. Partly, I had a lot of time on my hands. As I plowed through tomes on competitive strategy, business process re-engineering, and the like, not once did I catch myself thinking, Damn! If only I had known this sooner! Instead, I found myself thinking things I never thought I’d think, like, I’d rather be reading Heidegger! It was a disturbing experience. It thickened the mystery around the question that had nagged me from the start of my business career: Why does management education exist?
He then goes on to say
Between them, Taylor and Mayo carved up the world of management theory. According to my scientific sampling, you can save yourself from reading about 99 percent of all the management literature once you master this dialectic between rationalists and humanists. The Taylorite rationalist says: Be efficient! The Mayo-ist humanist replies: Hey, these are people we’re talking about! And the debate goes on. Ultimately, it’s just another installment in the ongoing saga of reason and passion, of the individual and the group.
The tragedy, for those who value their reading time, is that Rousseau and Shakespeare said it all much, much better. In the 5,200 years since the Sumerians first etched their pictograms on clay tablets, come to think of it, human beings have produced an astonishing wealth of creative expression on the topics of reason, passion, and living with other people. In books, poems, plays, music, works of art, and plain old graffiti, they have explored what it means to struggle against adversity, to apply their extraordinary faculty of reason to the world, and to confront the naked truth about what motivates their fellow human animals. These works are every bit as relevant to the dilemmas faced by managers in their quest to make the world a more productive place as any of the management literature.
Couldn't agree more!
But I particularly liked one of his closing paragraphs in which he says
There are, however, at least two crucial differences between philosophers and their wayward cousins. The first and most important is that philosophers are much better at knowing what they don’t know. The second is money. In a sense, management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much.
Knowing what we don't know is an undervalued skill - one that I believe will become more valued as this current recession/depression/repression unfolds...
I met up with a consultant colleague of mine last week for lunch. We were discussing the dilemmas presented by the initial client encounter and the (sometimes) "impossible" tasks we are asked to perform. In his case he'd been asked to solve a dilemma he knew, and they knew, couldn't be solved. He seemed a bit stressed out by the impossible task and wasn't sure how he was going to proceed.
We kicked around the dilemma for a while until I asked him - what's your dilemma telling you about the client, the client's system and their dilemma? That seemed to be a lightbulb moment for him becuse his experience of dealing with them, was in fact, their own experience transferred on to him. While I'm glad the conversation was useful for my colleage it did get me thinking (apropos a previous post on whether coaches are coachable) as to whether consultants are consultable to. I would love to run some workshops for Consultants - particularly those working on their own, where we could explore our innate intelligence and how working with our emotional reactions to clients tells us more than we imagine. I'm not sure of the format right now - online? offline? Or whether consultants would be interested in this kind of intervention. I would love some feedback from those of you who work on your own as to how you reflect on your practice? and whether you would be interested in a workshop designed to help you capitalise on your emotional intelligence about clients?
This page contains an archive of all entries posted to Interactions - Creative Strategies for Business in the Consulting category. They are listed from oldest to newest.
I spent today in Kilkenny where I was a speaker at the 
