Intervention as System

In this post, I want to talk about a couple of consultancy projects I worked on several years ago.

My strongest memory of these projects is not the actual content of what we were trying to do in the client organization, but the almost unbearable conflicts that arose between the members of the consultancy team, and especially between the two principals. We were each talking to different stakeholders within the enterprise, and as a consequence of this we took aggressively different positions on what was important, leading to some extremely uncomfortable meetings. Reflecting on this afterwards, I realized that the two principals were (probably unconsciously) acting out some of the conflicts in the client organization - in other words, the team had become as it were a microcosm of the organization. In such a situation, if the team can manage to resolve its own internal conflicts, this may be a valid step towards dealing with the conflicts in the enterprise as a whole.

This means that I now pay a lot of attention to the intervention process, and to the people engaged in these interventions, and ask how these affect the course of the intervention itself.

I greatly admire Jerry Weinberg and have enjoyed his writings on consultancy, but I would rank Peter Block's book on Flawless Consulting even higher. For Block, one of the most important things for the consultant is to be authentic. An authentic consultant is one who doesn't just think "I'm finding this narrative really boring, why is the client putting so much effort into not saying anything?" but actually says something rather than suffer in silence.

By the way, I think this is also what good therapists do.

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Originally posted in the Enterprises *as* Systems - Enterprise Systems Theory group on Linked-In. Following a discussion on Methodological Syncretism, Tom Graves had challenged me to put up some of my own experiences rather than merely question those of other people.

In the subsequent comments, Sally Bean interpreted this example in terms of Checkland's distinction between Hard Systems Thinking and Soft Systems Thinking, prompting Geoff Elliot to challenge Checkland's account of this distinction. Tom Graves quoted Dave Snowden's maxim "every diagnostic is an intervention, every intervention is a diagnostic", mentioned the use of the unconscious in Jerry Weinberg's work, and invoked spiritual and magical thinking.

Satiable curtiosity

Many people like to quote Kipling's poem

I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.

and most of them probably assume that Kipling endorses this approach. But I think it is pretty clear from the context of the poem that "I" is not supposed to be Kipling himself but the Elephant's Child, an annoying creature, who goes around constantly asking What-Why-When-How-Where-Who questions. He gets obsessed by one such question (What does the Crocodile have for dinner?) and set off on a quest to find the answer, nearly gets killed in the process, and returns with a quite unexpected benefit: this is How The Elephant Got His Trunk. If the Elephant's Child actually learns anything valuable from the experience, this is largely thanks to the intervention of the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake who (apart from saving his life) asks grounded questions like "Try this" and "Don't you think" and "How do you feel".

If you read the whole of Kipling's poem (Wikisource: The Elephant's Child) the irony can hardly be missed.

So there are two alternative role models for the consultant here. Are you an Elephant's Child or a Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake?

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Of course, not everyone sees this my way. In The One Conversational Tool That Will Make You Better At Absolutely Everything (Fast Company December 2012), Shane Snow is on the side of the Elephant's Child.

Questions that start with “who,” “what,” “where,” “when,” “how,” or “why” have high probability of thoughtful responses, whereas those that begin with “would,” “should,” “is,” “are,” and “do you think” can limit your answers.

And the Wikipedia article on 5Ws identifies some classical precursors.

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See also

My presentation (Slideshare): The Kipling-Zachman lens
Daily Telegraph (28 Oct 2010): Picture of the day

Related posts: Why Wise (July 2010), Arguing with Mendeleev (March 2013), Nudge as a Speech Act (May 2019)

Updated 19 December 2012. Links added 1 March 2022.

Fairy Tale Logic

Peter Evans-Greenwood makes some interesting points in response to my post on Three Wishes, but I don't agree with his interpretation of fairy tale logic as incomplete and inconsistent. As I see it, fairy tales follow a rigorous logic that produces an inevitable outcome. (From Freud to Lacan and Matte Blanco, psychoanalysts have explored the strange but inevitable logic of dreams and the unconscious.)

It is this logic that makes fairy tales so powerful, not merely as entertainment but as rich sources of metaphor. See Magic Fairy Tales as Source for Interface Metaphors

Magic follows strict rules. J.K. Rowling put a great deal of effort into creating an internally consistent magical world for Harry Potter and his friends to inhabit; although some minor logical anomalies do appear, these are trivial compared to the main elements of magic upon which the plot relies. And within the context of the Rapunzel story, climbing hair is consistent and makes perfect sense.

Now here's the relevance of this for consultants working with organizations. When we look at families or organizations from the outside we may say "that behaviour doesn't make sense", but for the people inside the family or organization the behaviour seems perfectly logical or inevitable or both.

In order to intervene usefully into such situations, the therapist or consultant needs to be in touch both with the external logic (this doesn't make sense) and with the internal logic (this is inevitable, this is how we do things).

(I read somewhere that in post-war Britain, American management consultants had some advantage over British management consultants. At that time, one of the biggest perceived issues was something called "Industrial Relations" - in other words, conflict and distrust between management and labour. Whereas British consultants were constrained by their perceived background, American consultants were outside the British class system, could pretend to know nothing about the role of the trade union in British politics, and could ask dumb but necessary questions.)

Dysfunctional organizations may sometimes be logically incomplete or inconsistent. But more often they are obsessively complete and consistent. (J.K. Rowling paints a disturbingly plausible satire of government in the Ministry of Magic - see Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy). We can learn a lot from the structure of magic.

Consultancy and Professionalism

A consultant advises a CEO to hide behind the scene and not face the people after a layoff. Catuslee asks: What kind of professionalism is this?

Whose professionalism - the CEO or the consultant?

If consultant says "why not hide" and CEO says "dammit I'm not hiding", then the consultant has achieved the right outcome. Sometimes big businessmen need to be treated like small children - you suggest the exact opposite of what you really want them to do. Is it more professional to trick or bully someone into doing what's right, or to permit someone to do what you know is wrong?

But if CEO says "please help me hide", what should the consultant say?

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@catuslee The fact: CEO said "I don't know what to say to the people." and the consultant said "why not ask HR to face them."

@richardveryard If the HR director is the one with backbone, maybe it would be better all round if the HR director took over as CEO.

@richardveryard A good CEO would know exactly why not to delegate that to HR. Is it consultant's job to provide moral backbone to a weak CEO?

@catuslee I like this. And the new CEO should first fire the consultant. ha ha

@catuslee At time that the CEO need to show leadership, the consultant should do whatever to influence him to do so. (yeah, ur case 1)

Binary Advice

Why is it that the question "what do you think?" seems to call for a Yes(because)/No(because) answer?

Apparently, when Jeff Bezos asks people what they think of his latest crazy idea, they all say No Way. (Well, who wants to be a Yes-Man these days?) (The Creative Generalist blog translates Bezos wisdom into poetry.)

Seth Godin reckons that "what do you think?" is the wrong question. Instead, Seth recommends the question "how can I make this project even MORE remarkable?".

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In my experience, the question "what do you think?" is rarely straightforward, and I have learned to be cautious about the kind of answer I give.

At the start of a relationship, when a woman asks her boyfriend for an opinion about something she's wearing, he is inclined to say something pacifying. (Says: Yes that looks gorgeous darling. Thinks: We are already late, yes that's fine, can we go now.) In the middle of a relationship, the boyfriend is careful to mix a few negative opinions from time to time ("Perhaps it would go better with the pink"), in order to increase the credibility of the "Yes that looks gorgeous darling" when they really are in a hurry. (Thus the question is not treated as a one-off game, but as a tactical move in a continuing game.)

Here's another example. If a man is in therapy, he might come up with a plan to change his life; and before taking action he might ask his therapist’s opinion: what do YOU think. Perhaps there are some therapists who would give a simple Yes/No answer. But many therapists avoid on principle giving a client a straight answer to any question.

In logical terms, "What do you think?" is a perfectly good open question, that allows the recipient to express a wide range of feelings (including anxiety, envy, or excitement) or creative ideas, or perhaps even further questions. But in practice, the question doesn’t elicit these kinds of response. Maybe this tells us something about the people who are being asked this question, the context in which the question is put, and the implied relationship that the question sets up between the questioner and the questioned -- for example between Bezos and his selected expert. Maybe this tells us something about the egos involved, or about the asymmetry of power and entrepreneurship.

Even among equals, peer review only works under carefully contrived conditions. (Software engineering design inspections: perhaps. Academic peer review: certainly not.)

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With all this in mind, I am not sure that simply changing the question is going to give Bezos better information. If Bezos is asking a particular person for advice, he needs to understand what kind of information or idea he would be open to hearing from this person, and then ask a question that communicates this openness.

I think what we learn from Seth's blog is: What kind of questions Seth would like to be asked -- by Bezos or anyone else. And perhaps even: What is the question that Seth will always try to answer, in addition to the actual question put to him.

For my part, my working assumption is that the "What do you think?" question is asking for something of value -- like consultancy. So that takes me into the ways that I try to add value as a consultant

• asking questions that wouldn’t otherwise have been asked
• making connections that wouldn’t otherwise have been made
• developing alternative perspectives/frames/scenarios, that show something in a different light.

I don't see any point in just offering me-too opinions, either positive or negative. Straight answers yes, but not necessarily along the lines you were expecting.

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Seth Godin, Maybe you shouldn't ask (13 July 2004)

Steve Hardy, Guidelines from the Book of Bezos (Creative Generalist, 5 August 2004)

Robert D Hof, Reprogramming Amazon (Business Week, 22 December 2003)

Related posts: Jeff Bezos and Ecosystem Thinking (Feb 2004), Asymmetric Advice (July 2004)


originally posted at http://www.veryard.com/news/2004/07/binary-advice.htm

Transference and Counter-Transference

Transference

Within psychoanalytic theory, there has been a great deal written about the phenomenon of transference, where the client uses the relationship with the therapist to replace something else, and becomes as it were addicted to the therapy/therapist.

A related phenomenon also occurs with management consultancy.

Counter-Transference

Counter-Transference refers to the phenomenon where the analyst or consultant picks up feelings that are relevant to the interaction with the client.

An inexperienced analyst or consultant may allow these feelings to interfere with the consultation.

An experienced analyst or consultant may be able to use these feelings as useful pointers towards What Is Going On.

Transitional Objects

"Interestingly, consultants and other change agents often become transitional objects for their client firms: The client refuses to ‘let go’, and becomes crucially dependent on the change agent’s advice in relation to every move." [Morgan p229]

"In helping to facilitate any kind of social change it may thus be necessary for the change agent to create transitional phenomena when they do not exist naturally. Just as father or mother may have to help their child find a substitute for Teddy, a change agent - whether a social revolutionary or a paid consultant - must usually help his or her target group to relinquish what is held dear before they can move on. Significantly, this can rarely be done effectively by ‘selling’ or imposing a ‘change package’, an ideology or a set of techniques. The theory of transitional phenomena suggests that in situations of voluntary change, the person doing the changing must be in control of the process. … If the change agent tries to bypass or suppress what is valued, it is almost sure to resurface at a later date." [Morgan p 229]

Notes

Gareth Morgan, Images of Organization

John Suler, The Psychology of Cyberspace (1996)

• Transference to computers and cyberspace
• Transference among people online 

Wikipedia: Transference

Related posts: Trust and Transference (January 2004)