1

Book Review Process Consultation Revisited Building the Helping Relationship By Edgar H. Schein
The book Process Consultation Revisited - Building the Helping Relationship* by Edgar H. Schein describes how consultants can create a helpful relationship with a client. Edgar Schein is the Sloan Fellows Professor of Management Emeritus and senior lecturer at MITs Sloan School of Management. He is also the editor of Reflections, the journal of the Society of Organizational Learning. His first book on Process Consultation was written in 1969 and updated with Process Consultation - volume II in 1987. His decades of consulting, study and writing have resulted in what I believe is the most helpful book ever written about business consulting. It not only provides profound insights for consultants, it is useful for anyone who assists others in attempting to solve their complex problems. It is particularly useful for supervisors and managers who routinely are attempting to assist their staff in understanding current reality and creating new direction. His other books on a variety of subjects are equally exceptional. The following pages are selected excerpts from his book that I find of great assistance in preparing for and helping clients. His book is rich with description. Those who desire to help others help themselves in organizational learning are urged to read his book for in-depth understanding. Process Consultation Process Consultation (PC) is the creation of a relationship with the client that permits the client to perceive, understand and act on the process events that occur in the clients internal and external environment in order to improve the situation as defined by the client. *Edgar H. Schien. Process Consultation Revisited Building the Helping Relationship. 1999, Addison-Wesley Publishing, Inc.

Focus The focus of PC is to build a relationship with your client and help them figure out what to do. 1. Build a Relationship Permit the consultant and client to deal with reality Remove the consultants areas of ignorance Acknowledge the consultants behavior as being always an intervention All of the above in the service of giving the client(s) insight into what is going on around them. 2. Help the client figure out what they should do about the situation Clients must be helped to remain proactive Clients must own the problems Clients know the true complexity of their situation and they know what will work in the culture where they live Key Assumption It is a key assumption underlying PC that the client must learn to see the problem for herself or himself by sharing in the diagnostic process and be actively involved in generating a remedy. The reason the client must be involved is that the diagnostic process is itself an intervention and any intervention has ultimately to be the responsibility of the client and be owned by him. If tests or surveys are to be administered or if interviews are to be conducted, the client must understand and take responsibility for the decision to conduct these activities. Process Consultation Principles There are ten principles that are described in the first three chapters: 1. Always try to be helpful 2. Always stay in touch with the current reality 3. Access your ignorance 4. Everything you do is an intervention 5. It is the client who owns the problem and solution 6. Go with the flow 7. Timing is crucial 8. Be constructively opportunistic with confrontive interventions 9. Everything is data: errors are inevitable learn from them 10. When in doubt, share the problem

Summaries of Principles A summary of these principles is as follows: PRINCIPAL 1: Always try to be helpful. Consultation is providing help. Obviously, therefore if I have no intention of being helpful and working at it, I am unlikely to be successful in creating a helping relationship. If possible, every contact should be perceived as helpful.

PRINCIPAL 2: Always stay in touch with the current reality. I cannot be helpful if I dont know the reality of what is going on within me and within the client system; therefore every contact with anyone in the client system should provide diagnostic information to both the client and to me about the hereand now state of the client system and the relationship between the client and me.

PRINCIPAL 3: Access your ignorance. The only way I can discover my own inner reality is to learn to distinguish what I know from what I assume I know, from what I truly dont know. I cannot determine the current reality if I do not get in touch with what I do not know about the situation and do not have the wisdom to ask you about it.

PRINCIPAL 4: Everything you do is an intervention. Just as every interaction reveals diagnostic information, so does every interaction have consequences for both the client and for me. I therefore have to own everything I do and access the consequences to be sure that they fit my goals of creating a helping relationship. _____________________________________________________________

PRINCIPAL 5: It is the client who owns the problem and the solution. My job is to create a relationship in which the client can get help. It is not my job to take the clients problems onto my own shoulders, nor is it my job to offer advice and solutions for situations in which I do not live myself. The reality is that only the client has to live with the consequences of the problem and the solution so I must not take the monkey off the clients back.

PRINCIPAL 6: Go with the flow. All client systems develop cultures and attempt to maintain their stability through maintenance of those cultures. All individual clients develop their own personalities and styles. Inasmuch as I do not know initially what those cultural and personal realities are, I must locate the clients own areas of motivation and readiness to change, and initially build on those.

PRINCIPAL 7: Timing is crucial Any given intervention might work at one time and fail at another time. Therefore I must remain constantly diagnostic and look for those moments when the clients attention seems to be available.

PRINCIPAL 8: Be constructively opportunistic with confrontive interventions. All client systems have areas of instability and openness where motivation to change exists. I must find and build on existing motivations and cultural strengths (go with the flow), and at the same time seize targets of opportunity to provide new insights and alternatives. Going with the flow must be balanced with taking some risks in intervening.

PRINCIPAL 9: Everything is data; Errors will always occur and are the prime source for learning. No matter how carefully I observe the above principles I will say and do things that produce unexpected and undesirable reactions in the client. I must learn from them and at all costs avoid defensiveness, shame or guilt. I can never know enough of the clients reality to avoid errors, but each error produces reactions from which I can learn a great deal about the clients reality.

PRINCIPAL 10: When in doubt, share the problem. I am often in the situation where I do not know what to do next, what kind of intervention would be appropriate. It is often appropriate in those situations to share the problem with the client and involve him or her in deciding what to do next.

The Process Consultation Model The following assumptions may not always hold; but when they do, it is essential to approach the helping situation in the PC mode. 1. Clients often do not know what is really wrong and need help in diagnosing what their problems actually are. But only they own the problem. 2. Clients often do not know what kinds of help consultants can give to them; they need to be helped to know what kinds of help to seek. Clients are not experts on helping theory and practice. 3. Most clients have a constructive intent to improve things, but they often need help in identifying what to improve and how to improve it. 4. Most organizations can be more effective than they are if their managers and employees learn to diagnose and manage their own strengths and weaknesses. No organizational form is perfect; hence every form of organization will have some weaknesses for which compensatory mechanisms must be found. 5. Only clients know what will ultimately work in their organizations. Consultants cannot, without exhaustive and time consuming study or actual participation in the client organization, learn enough about the culture of an organization to suggest reliable new courses of action. Therefore, unless remedies are worked out jointly with members of the organization who do know what will and will not work in their culture, such remedies are likely either to be wrong or to be resisted because they come from an outsider. 6. Unless clients learn to see problems for themselves and think through their own remedies, they will be less likely to implement the solution and less likely to learn how to fix such problems should they recur. The process consultation mode can provide alternatives, but decision making about such alternatives must remain in the hands of the client because it is the client, not the consultant, who owns the problem. 7. The ultimate function of PC is to pass on the skills of how to diagnose and constructively intervene so that clients are more able to continue on their own to improve the organization. In a sense both the expert and doctor-patient (doctor) models are remedial models whereas the PC model is both a remedial and a preventive model. The saying instead of giving people fish, teach them how to fish fits this model well.

This last point differentiates the models clearly in that the expert and doctor model can be compared to single-loop, or adaptive, learning, whereas PC engages the client in double-loop, or generative learning. One of the goals of PC is to enable the client to learn how to learn. The expert and doctor models fix the problem; the goal of PC is to increase the client systems capacity for learning so that it can in the future fix its own problems. The helping process should always begin in the PC mode because until we have inquired and removed our ignorance we do not, in fact, know whether the above assumptions hold or whether it would be safe or desirable to shift into the expert or doctor mode. Once we have begun this inquiry, we will find out that one useful way to decide whether to remain in the PC role or move to one of the other modes is to determine some of the properties of the type of problem being faced by the person seeking help. If both the problem definition and the nature of the solution are clear, then the expert model is the appropriate one. If the problem definition is clear, but the solution is not, then the doctor has to work with the patient to develop the right kind of adaptive response, using his or her technical knowledge. If neither the problem, nor the solution is clear, the helper has to rely initially on process consultation until it becomes clear what is going on, what help is needed and how it is best obtained. The decision whether a technical fix or an adaptive response will be needed will then depend on the degree to which the client or learner will have to change attitudes, values and habits. Other Consultation Modes The expert (or selling and telling) and the doctor (or doctor- patient) are referenced briefly in the previous page. A summary of these models follows: The Expert Model The expert (or telling and selling) model of consultation assumes that the client purchases from the consultant some information or expert service that she is unable to provide for herself. The buyer, usually an individual manager or representative of some group in the organization, defines a need and concludes that the organization has neither the resources nor the time to fulfill that need. She will then look to a consultant to provide the information or the service. For example, a manager may wish to know how a particular group of consumers feels, or how a group of employees will react to a new personnel policy, or what the state of moral is in a given department. She will then hire the consultant to conduct a survey by means of interviews or questionnaires and to analyze the data.

The likelihood that this model will work then depends on 1. Whether or not the manager has correctly diagnosed his own needs 2. Whether or not he has correctly communicated those needs to the consultant 3. Whether or not he has accurately assessed the capabilities of the consultant to provide the information or the service 4. Whether or not he has thought through the consequences of having the consultant gather such information or the consequences of implementing the changes that the information implies or that may be recommended by the consultant 5. Whether or not there is an external reality than can be objectively studied and reduced to knowledge that will be of use to the client. The frequent dissatisfaction with consultants and the low rate of implementation of their recommendations can easily be explained when one considers how many of the above assumptions have to be met for the purchase model to work effectively. It should also be noted that in this model the client gives away power. The consultant is commissioned or empowered to seek out and provide relevant information or expertise on behalf of the client; but once the assignment has been given, the client becomes dependent on what the consultant comes up with. Much of the resistance to the consultant at the later stages may result from this initial dependency and the discomfort it may arouse consciously in the client. In this model the consultant is also likely to be tempted to sell whatever she knows and is good at. When you have a hammer, the whole world looks like a bunch of nails. Hence the client becomes vulnerable to being misled about what information or service would actually be helpful. And of course, there is the subtle assumption that there is knowledge out there to be brought into the client system and that this information, or knowledge, will be brought into the client system and that this information or knowledge will be understandable and usable by the client.

THE DOCTOR MODEL Another common generic consultation model is that of doctor-patient. One or more managers in the organization decide to bring in a consultant to check them over to discover if there are any organizational areas that are not functioning properly and might need attention. A manager may detect symptoms of ill health, such as dropping sales, high numbers of customer complaints, or quality problems, but may not know how to make a diagnosis of what is causing the problems. The consultant is brought into the organization to find out what is wrong with each part of the organization then, like the physician, is expected to recommend a program of therapy or prescribe a remedial measure. Perhaps leaders in the organization discover that there is a new cure being used by other organizations such a Total Quality Programs, Reengineering or Autonomous work groups, and they mandate that their organization should try this form of therapy as well to improve the organizations health. The consultant is then brought in to administer the program. In this model the client assumes that the consultant operates from professional standards; that the selling is done responsibly, based on good data that the program will provide help for the problem; that the consultant has the diagnostic expertise to apply the program only where it will help; and that the cure will take it. Notice that this model puts even more power into the hands of the consultant in that she diagnoses, prescribes, and administers the cure. The client not only abdicates responsibility for making his own diagnosis and thereby makes himself even more dependent on the consultant, but assumes, in addition, that an outside consultant can come into the situation, identify problems, and remedy them. This model is of obvious appeal to consultants because it empowers them and endows them with X-ray vision. Providing expert diagnoses and prescribing remedial courses of action justify the high fees that consultants can command and make very visible and concrete the nature of the help that they claim to provide. In this model the report, the presentation of findings, and the recommendations take on special importance in identifying what the consultant does. For many consultants this is the essence of what they do, and they feel that they have not done their job until they have made a thorough analysis and diagnosis leading to a specific written recommendation.

The degree to which the doctor-patient model will work will depend on 1. Whether or not the client has accurately identified which person, group, or department is, in fact, sick or in need of some kind of therapy 2. Whether or not the patient is motivated to reveal accurate information 3. Whether or not the patient accepts and believes the diagnosis that the doctor arrives at and accepts the prescription that the doctor recommends 4. Whether or not the consequences of doing the diagnostic processes are accurately understood and accepted 5. Whether or not the client is able to make the changes that are recommended

CAPACITY TO BE HELPFUL There is a great likelihood that the process consultation mode will work best at the outset of a consultantclient relationship. But the consultant needs to be prepared to deal with the most appropriate mode given the situation. Edgar Schein describes this in the following paragraphs: Process consultation is a difficult concept to describe simply and clearly. It is more of a philosophy or a set of underlying assumptions about the helping process that lead the consultant to take a certain kind of attitude toward his or her relationship with the client. Process Consultation is best thought of as one mode of operating that the consultant can choose in any given situation. It is most necessary early in the encounter because it is the mode most likely to reveal what the client really wants and what kind of helper behavior will, in fact, be helpful. If it turns out that the client wants simple information or advice and the consultant is satisfied that she has relevant information and advice, she switches into that mode. She must be aware of the assumptions she is making and recognize the consequences of encouraging the client to become more dependent on her. She must also be careful not to take the problem onto her own back.

10

What the consultant must really be expert at, then, is sensing from one moment to the next what is going on and choosing a helping mode that is most appropriate to that immediate situation and that will build a helping relationship. No one of these models will be used all the time. But at any given moment, the consultant can operate from only one of them. The experienced consultant will find herself switching roles frequently, as she perceives the dynamics of the situation to be changing. We should, therefore, avoid concepts like the process consultant and think more in terms of Process consultation as a dynamic process of helping that all consultants, indeed all humans, find to be appropriate at certain times.