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THE CONSULTING DIFFERENCE

A primer for the expert consultant

© 1988, 1989, 1998, 2014 Ioan Tenner

Copying parts or the entire pamphlet is permitted for personal or educational usage only with clear mention of this copyright statement. Printed publication without written approval from the author is not permitted. Ioan Tenner, 38 Ch. du Pré-de-la-Croix, 1222 Geneva Switzerland, E-mail: tenner@wanadoo.fr http://wisdom.tenner.org

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What is a consultant? How is a consultant different from other professional people? How to know who is and who isn’t one? In what is consulting different from people management, from project management, or research and expert work? Is there a special style of thinking and acting, unique to consultants? How to explain the added value we give as consultants? How to ensure that the conditions necessary to succeed such work are negotiated? What features do consultants need to develop to become excellent? The essay is my answer to these questions.

The reader will find in the following pages, models and rules of thumb for consulting excellence. My aim is not to analyse or prove. I want to shape and improve Consultancy. The intention is to support consultants when they need to explain, to value and to expand their competence and the benefit they give to clients.

Between the lines, this essay expresses the core of my belief; Experts, scholars, knowledge workers, white collars, “intellectuals” of all kinds are not doomed to be powerless spectators or political pawns of this world.

In war and peace, industry and commerce, finance and art, religion and government, in strategy and tactics, things are done through the intervention and the transfer of knowledge, of experience, of know-how and of wisdom (or unfortunately, of the opposite to wisdom).

The creation, the communication and the application of ideas are among the strongest industrial forces in today’s Civilisation, to its best and worst. Knowledge-work has a clear action value and a high money value. But most intellectuals I met have yet to learn the art of doing things with ideas. I work for this art.

Introduction

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From many meanings of the word consultant and ways to qualify it, I want to present the work of people that should be called “expert consultants”.

Such people are generalists in the sense that the skills of giving advice and the facilitation tactics used apply to almost any expertise.

We could call the same consultants, “experts”. Consultants are “knowledge workers”. They include, but not exclusively, management consultants and a variety of advice-giving professionals: scientists, engineers, educators, lawyers, artists, military, accountants, and businesspeople. Senior managers are in this sense management consultants who provide strategic and operational advice to their executives, to their peers or to their subordinates. All these people find themselves in a position to give advice and to help other people to use the advice.

While the common or “general” aspect is the skill to advise and make things happen, the expert side is the specialised know-how and knowledge without which consulting would have little value. In theory there is a whole range of approaches to consulting, between “content free” and “content heavy”. In practice there is no pure expertise consulting as there is no pure “communication” or “process” consulting. Some Organisation Development colleagues and Human Resource Development agencies, claim to practice “pure process” or even “content-free” intervention. I don’t believe that this is possible.

In fact, “process consulting” applies a content expertise (about human processes). The “process” interventions require advanced knowledge of social science and concrete competencies grown through practical experience.

Any person, who has mature expertise in any field and is able to communicate it usefully, is a potential consultant.

Consulting is helping other people to manage, to do things - not managing other people to do things, and not doing things for other people. It is work of a third type. This is why I claim that there is a perceptible consulting difference.

Who are the consultants?

What is consulting?

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In other words I define consulting as a pragmatic, professional service, offering to a contractual, temporary client: expert looking, listening and asking questions, needs, situation and risk assessment, forecasting, decision advice, transfer of expertise and intervention.

Let me give a short explanation: Consulting is pragmatic for it is a result-orientated practice. Instead of serving the finding of a truth or the perfection in method, it serves action and results. Today, we see consulting evolving into a vocation of knowledge and know-how transfer for practical purpose, different and sometimes opposed to the practices of scientific research and to the teaching of expertise for its own sake.

Consulting is a professional service given by people, who are talented, highly educated or experienced, employed for their expertise and personal impact.

Consulting is a service evaluated in terms of demand and offer. Advice and help are offered for sale to contractual clients who may accept and buy them, possibly only on a temporary basis. It is also a transaction of trust. It cannot be forced upon people. It means serving other people. You cannot be sent to consult unwilling people who are not your clients. It is a very specific and fragile feature of consulting, to be so dependent on perception, on the personal credibility of the adviser and on the degree of mutual agreement, understanding, and acceptance between the adviser and the clients.

There is one-time or brief consultancy, usually explanation, support or advice, which may be given occasionally by any knowledgeable person. However, professional consulting is today a specialised and structured occupation with temporary assignments of shorter or longer term.

The first offering of the profession is expert looking and listening. This is another way to say that the mandatory groundwork of consulting is observation and understanding. The human quality and the technique of the listening as well as the prestige of the listener may even be the core of the offer in some forms of consulting, like psychoanalysis or the catholic confession.

Pragmatic

Professional

Service offering to a contractual, temporary client

Expert looking, listening

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Listening and observing is a warranty that you will understand the clients’ situation, their interests and points of view, not only the subject. It is the main chance to develop a bias for client reality instead of blindness produced by our own knowledge. Quality listening is the first non-tangible deliverable of any consulting service and a critical success factor in understanding the client and in building the support relationship.

Your second offer is in your questions and in your method of questioning. People expect all consultants to be able to ask the right questions and listen to the client’s answers. Questioning and building ways from the client’s own answers are an effective manner to lead people in a process of clarifying and achieving what they want. This is how clients understand a solution and own it afterwards. Before giving solutions, and even without an explicit request, professional consultants would also ask questions to probe and to clarify their clients’ presented needs and problems.

Thirdly, a professional consultant would appreciate the situation and the environment in order to forecast the opportunities and risks of alternative developments. It is assumed that the consultant has a wider horizon than the problem presented and foresees the possible outcomes of a choice of courses of action.

Not meeting or not clarifying some of these implicit expectations is the source of low service quality and bitter disappointment.

Further, the consultant is a professional in giving advice that is relevant, in forms that are helping things to happen; that is, decision advice. The consultant shares with everybody else on the planet the capacity to give advice. The difference is most probably in the degree of competence, the client-centred attitude, the authority and the impact of that advice and its resulting in action.

Asking questions

Needs, situation and risk assessment

Forecasting, decision advice

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I hope that it is clear throughout this study, as I already insisted that in spite of the importance of “communication skills” and of “general consulting competencies”, the essence of any consulting is authentic expertise. Without relevant knowledge, know-how, experience or talent, a “consultant” would be a mere comedian. Valuable expertise is the pre - requisite to bear in mind while this study stresses the competency to convey usefully, real expertise, to other people.

All consultants are thus management consultants. A management consultant is then in a broad sense, a person who gives advice that helps to manage: a situation, a change, an activity or an enterprise. Management consulting is offered to deciders, to people who carry out decisions, but also, in the largest meaning, to people who do work and have some issue to manage. The consulting advice is always informing and supporting decisions made by the client, be it by awareness, by planning or by help to run implementation projects.

You complete a consulting service with a solution and with help to turn it into results. From a corporate director in a top responsibility role to a private individual, the concern when seeking counsel is to manage a problem or an opportunity. The client prefers, most of the times, the consultant to suggest, even order the best solution. But wise consultancy should be, and actually becomes nowadays, transfer of expertise and decision support by or with the client, to replace the riskier forms of one-best-way assertion and turnkey solution.

Most of the consulting firms today have an explicit component of intervention: helping the client to build strategies, solving problems to the extent of producing results, expert work done on behalf of a client, project planning and launching across the organisation.

Intervention used to be a debated part of a consulting assignment. Some schools, mainly of social and political science origin, consider that “process” and “intervention” are the must of the profession. On the other hand, many clients do not accept to have things done onto them. Such clients expect consultancy to be scientific, uninvolved, and to result in objective conclusions.

Transfer of expertise and decision support

Intervention

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Social scientists, like modern physicists, believe that inquiry modifies its object. You cannot ask, analyse, give information or share knowledge without deep impact. For an example I am aware that this study is a form of organisational intervention (when it is read and accepted). To cut a long debate short, I think that most consultants are assumed to intervene and to make things happen to improve their clients’ situation and business.

This is similar to teachers growing one’s knowledge, doctors improving one’s health, or lawyers, defending one’s interests. But I also would use another metaphor, that of a priest, who is concluding the marriage (between supplier and buyer for an example) properly, without himself getting married to either of the parties.

Often, project management follow-up is included and makes most of the income in a consulting firm. However, the most important intervention expected from all consultants is change management support. A consultant is supposed to help and facilitate change to actually happen. This is opposed to an obsolete “hit and run” style of management consulting. That service used to consist in an audit and some strong “strategic” or restructuring concept billed fast, with no further responsibility and no follow-up commitment from the consulting company.

One last defining expectation towards consultants: Traditional consulting is responsive. The client (or the virtual client) perceived a need, has an intention or a problem. The consultant is required to respond to it) and to help the client to cope with whatever the environment is giving by proposing an adequate strategy, tactic, solution, action plan or tool.

Project management, and change management

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New directions in consulting are proactive. The “high-end” consultant is a Socratic entrepreneur, a creative thinker who is educating the client to do new things in new environments.

The most valuable benefits of consulting come from generating change and leading transformation. Our work is the opening of new (and useful) perspectives, and the active support given to people to change and to make their own future.

To quote George Bernard Shaw: “You see things and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were and say ‘Why not?’”

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The need that is to be met by a consultant is certainly very simple at first sight; some help is needed, some work is to be done. Quality knowledge, know-how and experience are required. But the reasons behind the perceived need are deeper. The reality is subtler. Behind the requirement for work to be done there are specific motives to call in consultants to do that work, instead of using one’s own resources. I like to list five motives (these causes are boiled down from literature about change, change management, knowledge transfer and management consulting also from the experiences shared by many consultant colleagues) in order of priority: 1. Risk, uncertainty, complexity and incompetence. 2. Change-pace, newness and surprise. 3. Conflict and influence. 4. Transient need for unique expertise. 5. “Out-of-the-box” exploring and transformation.

Each time I am called to give advice I would use the “list of reasons” to ask myself: “Why do they invite me? What do they hope in this case? What do I offer to meet all or some of these five reasons?” The first motive of requiring the services of a consultant is risk. People love to share risk. Without risk aggravated with uncertainty, vagueness and doubt, individuals and organisations do not invest in consulting. People do not ask for billable advice spontaneously. Usually they do not like to involve outsiders. The driving force is the need to share and diminish a risk. I must remember that this is what I have to produce – less risk. A familiar setting seems to be found every time a consultant is opening a door. Everything is just too complex around. Honest people are struggling with wicked ambiguity (no serious and objective definition is available). Worst, at least some hosts hide a guilty feeling of ignorance. Otherwise, if they could manage it by themselves, who would ever call a consultant? Tolerance to incompetence and the respectful readiness to help with patience people who do not know, are critical in the practice of consulting. Persons allergic to incompetence cannot be consultants.

Five reasons behind the need for consulting

Risk, uncertainty, complexity and incompetence

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Newness and its pace are the next best reason for calling upon a consultant. With no exception, the subject of consulting is change. I believe that consulting (under many names) is an explosively growing business, worldwide, because of the way our Civilisation evolves. The technological speeds achieved and the acceleration of social processes create an ever increasing need for support from people and organisations capable to learn the new things and unlearn the old ways.

Individuals and organisations call consultants to help others cope with the surprises of change and adapt to its pace. While the need for creative knowledge workers able to support change-management is growing, under the current demographic trends, and with the traditional education methods, the school and university systems world-wide are unable to produce such a competency. This may be very good news for some of us; it means that we are in business for life. Very often, there is another hidden factor behind calling a consultant: conflict. Part of the client may want an impartial referee, a facilitator or a negotiator; others hope to use the consultant as a weapon. There is always an expectation of influence. The “outsider” is necessary and is called to confirm something or to convince somebody or even to do something that the “natives” do not want to do themselves. The daily business of a consultant is diplomacy. There is often a purely economic consideration in hiring external or periodically reassigning internal consultants. At a given moment, in a business, there is a temporary need for some unique high level expertise. “Consultants” can be an answer. The massive use of external or, even better, internal Consultants may even be an elegant (or expedient) solution to the ever changing Organisation sizes and structures, attractive in turbulent times. Recently we can see consultancy used to diminish social obligation towards costly workforce. My guess is that consultancy will be the most important “job” of the next century. Consultants work only where they are needed.

Change-pace, newness and surprise

Conflict and influence

Transient need for unique expertise

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The “high end” of consulting is dedicated to enterprise undergoing crisis, expansion or substitution. Most of the driving forces quoted above as calling for homeostatic consulting, inviting responsive “problem-solving-and-trouble-shooting” work. Exploration consultancy (often named “out-of-the-box” or “strategic”) is a different mindset. It is apparent now that being strategic is not doing the same things you did and your competitors did, forever better. Strategy means today at least doing the same things differently and better, doing new, different things. The approach of proactive consultancy is also “value chain” conscious. We should go beyond trying to solve our client’s problems by a solution sold to them. The aim is to advise the clients how to re-think themselves in order to achieve more and win, with their own suppliers and clients, in their evolving environment or market. We must work for the client’s clients, not for the clients. Exploration doesn’t concentrate on the past, nor the present. It looks into the future. Let me coin an expression for this; what is required is not feedback but “forefeed”; i.e., responses that come from the future. The companies of this ever smaller world can only survive and be successful if they are “homeorhetic”; i.e., if they maintain stability not by sustaining a steady state but through permanent improvement and transformation. When transformation stops, they decline. To survive and thrive, the heavy organisational and social bodies need assistance to explore new ways, things done never before, and to understand their implications. Therefore, a special type of service, proactive consulting is required. Last, what most companies and individuals expect from consultants is “fresh blood”; new ideas, your energy and your enthusiasm. This is a vampire business. You must find every day new blood to give to your clients. In the end of the day if you are not exhausted you didn’t work well enough. (I hope my readers and potential clients will pardon this joke).

“Out-of-the-box” exploring and transformation

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I used to teach these six rules of thumb as six sources of professional power:

1. The power to make things simple

2. The pragmatic attitude

3. The tactic of giving a choice

4. The N1 strategy

5. A rhetoric of action

6. An art of change

I present them as six signs useful to diagnose who is and who is not a consultant. Some consultant colleagues seem to appreciate them as directions of self-assessment and self-improvement.

I am certain that clients could use them to evaluate and buy quality consulting.

This sentence looks elementary. It is not. Let me explain. People need advice and guidance because of uncertainty. When things are too complicated, individuals and groups alike feel and fear loss of control. As we saw earlier, that is why they need help. They need help to diminish the complexity. Whoever is able to make things simple gains power. Politicians know that only too well. Let me summarise this consulting difference:

A good specialist can explain with precision. He can explain things as complicated as they exactly are. A good consultant can explain with simplicity. He can explain how manageable things are.

While listening to an explanation given by an expert, the normal urge of a client is to delegate it back to the specialist. It is precise, true, factual, but just too complicated. It is the way my father, a university professor in electronics and automation, used to speak to me. I asked him to help me solve some simple problem of mathematics for the next day. He wanted to explain all mathematics (this is probably why I became a psychologist, a journalist and a teacher and, finally, a consultant, anything but a scientist).

The “consulting difference”

The power to make things simple

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A consultant clarifies the sufficient, in simple words. The benefit is to help people be and feel in control.

The relevant subject is what can be done rather than how complex the causes and mechanisms are.

The most important explaining method of a consultant is analogy. Like Socrates, you find an example that people understand and figure. Then you compare with it the complicated thing to explain. You lead people from what they know towards what they do not know. Moreover, you prefer to leave the model open. Metaphors do not explain. They provoke thought.

The typical questions could be:

Did you experience something like this?

Tell me about similar cases that you encountered. What did you learn from them?

What do you think we should consider now?

The typical comments could be:

This reminds me of a similar case from my own practice...

Let us look at this model and see how to adapt it…

I found that someone had a very useful explanation of this…

This is how it happened and how we did...

The typical suggestions could be:

By comparison, you have a choice to deal with it by the following ways...

I went through this myself and I observed some errors to avoid...

People will understand better if we put it this way...

I will not confuse you with all the jargon and all the details...

The key points seem to be...

What we can do, is...

Analogy

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The difference between expert and consultant is not a matter of expertise but of role and human impact. Both must have the expertise but they use it differently. The same person may have to play alternatively the two roles. The difficulty is that the more one acts expert the less one is consultant.

Expert and expert-consultant are two different vocations.

Pragmatism in consulting means to be client-centred and biased towards results. This goes against our education. Most of us learned in school to value and be guided by a “discipline”, something impersonal, beyond daily life; truth, science, profit, ideal, faith, justice, art.

Consulting is serving something personal and biased; it serves peoples’ actions and interests. Actions are not something that is given, but something that is making.

As experts we are committed to accurate completeness and perfection. In “good, serious work” our field of expertise, our authority, our technology, a “content matter”, prevail. We turn our face to the field we explain and not to the people we explain it to.

A consultant practises the opposite of the expert attitude.

The aim of consulting is to help, here and now, this, usually imperfect, individual or Organisation succeed. This client is not impersonal and success is not complete, nor objective, but a relative achievement, practical, and situational.

Trust, empathy, reliability, purpose, feasibility and finally, getting results, are more important in consulting than the means of method and precision. “Man is the measure of all things” as Protagoras said. This may be wrong in philosophy but it is quite appropriate in practice.

The pragmatic attitude

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The ethic of the consultant is to consider the issues and the knowledge available, in good faith, from the angle of the client’s best interest.

We have a bias for clients and for getting things done.

Indifferent consulting is coming with “right” methods and ready-made answers. It is knowledge-centred, technology-centred or psychology centred.

Client-centred consulting will start by walking a mile in the client’s shoes. A skilled consultant will not speak before listening. He has first to understand this client, to learn some of his words, to share his meanings and interests. The choice of method will fit the concrete subject but also will consider the situation, the intention, the timing, the people concerned, their readiness to understand, their feelings and legitimate interests.

This is a heretical view of methodology. It is a very common view of wisdom.

Valuable advice is mind-size for this client, right now.

A solution is something feasible and acceptable, not in general, but here and now.

The consultant will do his work by considering the world trough the eyes of the client instead of serving one of the distant entities we all learned to be the ultimate. Even more so, if the client is wrong or you know much, much, more about the subject; if you want to change somebody’s mind you must know first where that mind is and start from there.

This is the client-centred attitude.

Client centring

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There are rules of thumb for client-centred consultancy. Let me share what I think to be some rules of thumb in practising client-centred consulting:

You cannot consult fairly people you dislike.

Research in psychology concluded amazingly that the (positive) attitudes and feelings of a therapist are more important to cure illness than the school of theory used and its scientific value. This is shocking but meaningful.

An effective consultant is “client-friendly” and the client becomes his friend. The method to use is simple; “if you want to have friends, be a friend”.

Clients are persons, motivated by human benefit.

Advice which neglects individual interest is uninteresting.

Have only one client at a time!

You have credibility and you are effective as an adviser, to a person or to a group, only based on trust. You cannot be sent to consult people against their will.

Ethically speaking, but also as a basic method, it is out of question to report on a client or to breach confidentiality. A written or informal contract must clarify this at the very start of a consulting assignment. One error in this and you are “burnt”.

You do not need to be a psychologist to understand people.

Our own, deepest, most intimate concerns and motivations, are the ones shared by most people on earth. The point of view and some vectors may differ, the circumstances too, but not the human nature. As you fear and wish, they do too. Therefore common sense is a good guide; if you want to know people, know yourself, imagine yourself in their situation and take time to observe and check your assumptions.

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Offer advice, but let the clients help themselves to it!

Clients will accept and use only as much as they are ready to understand and receive. You can take the horse to the water but you cannot make him drink.

Avoid doing things for the client if you can help the client to do them.

A consultant’s role is, at his best, to be the coach, not the runner. Moreover people grow fond of the harvest they grew, and will defend it with a feeling quite different from the evaluation of something “easy coming, easy going” and “not done here”.

Don’t withhold your best secret knowledge. Withholding knowledge is a symptom of little knowledge.

You can recognise by this defensive attitude the specialist of limited or declining competence. On the contrary, when you share the best of your knowledge for the particular use of a client, you are inevitably the one better prepared to learn even more from it. You are “doomed” to be always one step ahead. Do not wary of becoming exhausted.

Wisdom is a treasury that grows as you give it away.

Let go! Your work is to educate, empower and delegate, not to posses, judge and control.

At the personal mastery level we can see the excellent consultant as one who has “the green finger”. I mean by that a style to give life to everything he touches, to water and grow the seed he finds rather than reproducing his own models. This makes people think, participate, realise themselves, and feel enthusiasm. This attitude achieves a “transfer of ownership” and requires a dash of ego-sacrifice.

To paraphrase the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu: When a fine consultant accomplished his work, people will say: “We did it alone!” (Who needed a consultant anyway?).

Coaching

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There are two main reasons for using this tactic; the ethical aim of increasing freedom and the prudence of risk sharing.

Freedom is the number of choices that you can understand and make (or chose not to make).

I believe that the moral aim of a consultant is to create degrees of freedom for a people who saw none or few. This is achieved by designing alternatives “out-of-the-box” or by pointing at choices.

The tactic of giving a choice

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On the other hand, since consulting is a game of risk sharing, it is necessary for the professional survival of the adviser and for the sustainable success of the assignment, to share properly the responsibility and the ownership of solutions.

Someone who gives one imperative advice may be a manager, a sales agent or an expert. A consultant, unless he becomes a project manager, will choose to help other people understand, decide and achieve.

Let me use the metaphor of “kangaroo consulting” (a big leap forward with an empty pocket) to describe the risky practice that is to give only one best way solutions.

Often, the consultant does not have all the information, is not in charge of the decisions to be taken, and does not control the way the advice is applied. He has no budgeted resource to carry on the project. Giving one piece of advice and leaving may lead to an unpleasant later question: “Who had this idea anyway?” The “cost of sale” of turnkey advice can be high.

A professional way to handle this problem is to present always alternatives of solution, with scenarios clarifying benefits, risks, circumstances, causes and consequences. The consultant should reason in favour of one course of action, but the decision must be knowingly taken by the client or at least shared “50/50” with the client.

When your work is well done the clients themselves design a consulting solution, with your contribution and assistance.

Another way of resolving the ownership issue well understood by most consulting firms, is to include the implementation project management follow-up in the consulting project.

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This is the heart of consulting value. There are many levels of practising this principle. A broad and effective rule to add value as a consultant is to try always to address an issue at the next higher level or at the next deeper level.

The simplest way of applying this strategy is an educational method. Teach an individual or groups just that mind-size or “N+1” little bit more knowledge and skill, that are sufficient and necessary to answer the current need. This allows the clients to comprehend and learn, instead of getting confused. As one of my colleagues liked to say, “when you put cheese into the mouse trap, don’t forget to leave room for the mouse”.

When dealing with Organisations, N+1 means to consider always the larger view, i.e., to seek solutions to a group’s concerns at the next higher hierarchical level and so on... ending up to see that the key to a company problem is in the wider system of its market.

Much deeper than the tactic of mind-size advice and next higher level problem solving, N1 is a paradigm of strategy concerning the core of the added value of a consulting intervention.

The person or group seeking consulting is usually “stuck” with something. Something is “impossible” to solve. If it looked possible to them they would not require a consultant. Often, a wrong perspective obscures the way out “they believe that they are building a hill when in reality they are only digging a pit”. What they need is a fresh eye and an unfettered, creative mind to see a way out of the “impossible” situation.

The N1 strategy

Solving impossible problems

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It appears that the successful consultants have a habit of “re-framing” by asking, themselves and other people, “N+1” or “N-1” questions like:

“What defines this situation as impossible?”

“For whom?”

“What is so obvious that nobody even dreams of challenging it?”

“Can we alter some factors which make it impossible?”

“Can we redefine the problem?”

“Is it a problem?”

Other “N+1” or “N-1” questions could be:

“What would happen if we don’t do anything?”

“Who decides in fact?”

“Do these people have a way to know what they don’t know?”

“Why has this fact, obvious to me, go unnoticed until now?”

“How does the whole thing look at the level of the department?”

“Which part is this in the picture of the whole Organisation?”

“What is the position of the client in his market?”...

“In what business is this client, beyond his vision today?”

This N1 strategy has a solid grounding in Goedel’s theorem: you can test the basic assumptions of a system only outside that system, in a wider one. The practical consequence I draw from this subtle epidemic discovery is that when I need to change a basic assumption that makes a problem, I must (at least mentally) suspend the rule and “dig under the system”. I have good reason to be optimistic about the practical value of applying this tool. It allowed me to build a strategy session for company executives, that appears to really get people “out of the box”.

Armed with this tool, you cannot work miracles but you know that you will make a difference as an adviser.

The N1 strategy is a prime indicator of the consulting competence.

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Expert consulting is a three-legged activity. It needs expertise first. Then the expertise has to be transferred and understood. Third and most important, the transfer must meet its purpose and have impact.

Rhetoric is the technique of purposeful impact in communication.

Ancient rhetoric was concerned with a speaker’s art of one way persuasion, aimed at a public deliberating on the past or voting about the future.

Aristotle described three conditions of impact - Ethos, Pathos and Logos: credibility of the source, rapport with the listeners and understandable proofs, all ending up in actionable conclusions. The three are situational and personal. But all three can be consciously prepared and “built up” by concrete attitudes and behaviours that one can learn.

Ethos - who you are for an audience, is determined by:

1. your identity established as a moral, honest, reliable person; 2. your obvious good will towards this person or group; 3. the image you give as a person of common sense and practical

wisdom, based on experience with the subject (not a dreamer). If any of the three is not granted by renown or is otherwise questioned, the consultant must do something to build up ethos. Otherwise, explains Aristotle, despite your logic, your authentic competence and your best advice, persuasion does not happen.

I would describe pathos as “being on the same wavelength” with your public (otherwise how can you hope that they receive your message?). To accomplish this, you need to do the next three things:

1. Care for their interests, concerns and feelings at the present moment (people do not care how much you know, until they know how much you care).

2. Do concrete actions to relate and to interact with them (like for example take time, listen, observe, ask questions, discuss, and do some shared activity...).

3. You have to address in your speech the concerns and the feelings of the audience, in their own terms. (If you don’t do so, you are most probably speaking in the desert).

The rhetoric of action

Ethos

Pathos

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Logos means here “the word” not “logic”. This vector is defined by the clarity of things you say and by the way you defend and illustrate your case. The force of your argument (remember, your aim is decision and action) is increased by following three rules:

1. Use words and models understandable here and now, meanings shared by the audience rather than speaking precise jargon;

2. Give proofs and examples, not general and distant, but concrete, intuitive and of local relevance like in a court of justice.

3. Present conclusions that appear as useful, practical and suggest concrete decision and action. The actions must appear as feasible and match the resources, the time - frame and the “action - mood” of the listeners. While there is much more to Ancient Rhetoric, enough was said here.

I would emulate Aristotle’s advice with a modern rhetoric of action.

A communication tactic adapted to our times goes beyond the effort to influence public decision by means of persuasive speech. A contemporary concern is the involvement of a target audience in the elaboration of a solution and the transfer of solution ownership. By such involvement, the clients decide by themselves and carry out their own plan.

Let me describe a rhetoric of action as a pull approach to complete the force of persuasive argument: first elicit the client’s own perceptions and knowledge, then display, clarify and formulate the common understanding and finally, help the clients to build their “done here” solution. Most of the successful client-centred consulting methods can be summarised by such scenarios. This method is explained in detail in my favourite workshop the “Consulting Masterclass".

Consultants are inseparably involved with change in several ways. The profession is perpetually coping with transience, frequent surprise and Newness. Most consulting assignments originate and bring (unexpected and sometimes painful) change to other people. Finally, the expectation is that a consultant will help change to happen by supporting it and by handling some risks.

Logos

An art of change

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Repeat business for you could be big change for a client. Remember, there are no old jokes; for a new-born, any joke is a world premiere. However, we have to consider that even more often change is a premiere for all the parties involved, including you. This aspect of surprise is the one that requires art.

There is no good general procedure for this art. The simple logical reason is that authentic change is about Newness. Things, when they are really new, cannot be defined in advance. I am afraid that formal change management procedure will have to wait, as artificial intelligence is still not here.

An art of change is dedicated to managing surprise. I develop this broad subject and the methodologies to use, elsewhere. Let me only shortly mention that managing surprise consists in three strategic ways: preparing against surprise, preparing for surprise and preparing the surprise.

Preparing against surprise is an effort to analyse the laws of reality and of adapting to them. The “art of change” is then, in a nutshell, the ability to learn from our own and other peoples’ past errors and experiences, and to help our clients not to repeat those same errors.

This is the dominant practice. Setting objectives, strategies and alternative tactics for change helps us deciding where we want to go and planning how to get there. But freezing forecasts or scenarios as plans, rules and procedures about what must be done, as if things had to happen in a prescribed way, may be more dangerous than useful.

Consulting engagements can be seen as projects but their specific features are to be non-recurring, non-routine and loosely structured. Rigid instructions about how to deal with surprise or how to “implement change” are as clumsy as positional bargaining. The mistake is to first set a bottom line, next to dig oneself into a fixed position and then, finally to lose face when forced to cope with reality. This cannot be a good model for consulting. I like to call this fallacy “the planagement of change”. Most of the future cannot be planned.

Against Surprise

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The most important consequence to the “unplannable Newness” assumption is that the ultimate instruments in change management are the consultant and his clients as persons armed with “live intelligence” and prepared for surprise. From the mid-eighties I dedicated a “Masterclass of change management” to the “crash” development of the ability to prepare for surprise for corporate teams engaged in major business transformation.

The high-value knowledge worker relies on an intuitive and metaphorical “database” of personal knowledge. The cost of complexity analysis, and of the formal description needed to package “consulting applications” or “change management solutions” is very high. It may be much higher than breeding individual consultants as “sages” and training them (and their client organisations) to cope with the unknown and the inevitable surprises.

It is probably more effective to educate ourselves for surprise with state-of-the-art models, ideas, broad general culture, tools and experiences on how to deal with surprise than to project-plan the future. In complex situations, effective judgement and action are personal.

The more an environment is ill structured and unpredictable, the more the “tool” is the Consultant. I don’t argue against “packaged consultancy”, nor against “consulting process” descriptions and quality standards to be used by apprentice - consultants; the “how to” models are vital to teach consulting competencies to thousands of specialists. They are also effective in marketing a quality service and a “house style” for a consulting firm.

Moreover a package has the important feature of being a saleable-labelled activity. Commercial firms need more of them. But high-end consultancy, more user-centred and executive - centred than ready-made, is like Culture; it is what remains after you forgot everything you ever learned in school.

There is yet another handicap of change recipes. When the conditions change, the persistence of solutions that were successful in the past becomes a main reason for failure. This Lamarckian error is apparent in natural history, in organisational development and in society.

For Surprise

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Fast unlearning and a general education rather than a specific training, form the competitive advantage of a change - friendly consultant. This is true both for the content expertise and for the consulting skills. Therefore, it is reasonable to learn about change as an art.

The talent is born but the craft is learnt through general culture and through personal experience. “Change - wisdom” can also be learnt by observing and by imitating “masters” who possess long time experience in their evolving field. Such people can share, if they please, their sense of timing and their treasury of personal knowledge. An experienced mentor can share informal wisdom about what is good to do and what is better not to do.

An example can show which style or stratagem is applicable when you are confronted with a particular opportunity or even when you meet the unexpected. Mentoring is an approach to educating for change, stronger than any formal instruction (provided that the mentor himself has a rich experience with change). As a complement to experience on-the-job and to Mentoring, it is possible to “scaffold” the acquisition of change management competency by structured forms of experience transfer (e.g., simulations that induce discovery and learning on safe ground).

There is no unchanging recipe for applied change-management and, without experiences both with success and with failure, relevant experience can be hard to learn.

The third and most proactive option of change management is to prepare the surprise itself. Why always wait for surprise to come from somewhere else? I believe that this is the essence of strategy; attempting to change the course of change by inventing new, unexpected ways of doing things and new things altogether.

The Surprise

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This leads us back to the notion of N1. Everybody agrees that we need to practice novel thinking and initiative out of the box. The question is how to do it. My proposal is in short that there are two practical ways to advance. One is to find out the limits of what we know, to learn about what we don’t know and to systematically trespass into the unknown and the impossible. The other one, or better said the other face of the same effort is to examine the obvious, our own most basic assumptions and challenge them.

Instead of a conclusion; there is no end to a consultant’s apprenticeship

The consultant’s content expertise and some of his know-how are highly perishable. They keep their value as long as they remain state-of-the-art.

The comparison may seem cruel but I think that as a top professional, the consultant has a feature in common with a shark; the day he stops swimming, he will sink and drawn.

If there is a stable core to the competency making a consultant different, it can only be rate of unlearning and growth.

All people accumulate knowledge and acquire behaviour patterns. But not everybody is so compelled to sense which part of the authoritative knowledge we acquired, which current beliefs, which skills, successful yesterday and still respectable today, which ways currently followed by everybody, are becoming obsolete and will soon be counter productive. To survive the burn out and to prosper, the consultant must have this kind of intuition and autonomy.

In my own experience as a psychologist, the most important things I believe I learnt, in many years, were how to select early from a flood of confusing “knowledge” how to doubt my own successful recipes and how to forget fast. I observe this attitude in some of the top consultants who taught me about the profession. I would call this a purposeful cultivation of boredom and of curiosity.

Trespass into the unknown, challenge the obvious

Learning to forget

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At least one third of the working time of a mature consultant has to be dedicated to recharging batteries and to further education. This means updating of content expertise, “source building” (It’s not what you know, but knowing where to find it when you need it), learning to do new things, general culture, design and testing of new methods.

And more, much more than this, if you want to really learn something, teach it generously. Wisdom is a treasury that grows as you give it away.

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SELECTED REFERENCES

ARISTOTLE, “The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric”, Harvard University Press.., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1975

BARCUS, S. W., WILKINSON, J.W., “Handbook of Management Consulting Services”, McGraw-Hill, New York. 1986

BELL, C.R., NADLER, L., “Clients & Consultants”, Gulf Publishing Co., Houston.., 1985

BELLMAN, G., M., “The Consultant’s Calling”, Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco.., 1990

BENNIS, W.G., BENNE, K.D., CHIN, R., COREY, K.E., “The Planning of Change”, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York. 1976

BLAIR, A., J., JOHNSON, R., H., (Ed), “Informal Logic-The First National Symposium, Edgepress, Inverness California, 1980

BLOCK, P., “Flawless Consulting - A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used”, Learning Concepts, Austin, 1978

BUDMAN, S., H., “Forms of Brief Therapy” The Guilford Press, New York.. 1981

CICERO, “Ad C. Herennium”, Harvard University Press.., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981

CONNOR, R., A., DAVIDSON, J., P., “Marketing Your Consulting and Professional Services”, John Wiley & Sons, New York. 1985

CONNOR, R.,A., DAVIDSON,J.,P., “Getting new Clients”, John Wiley & Sons, New York.., 1987

COTTLE, D., “Client- Centred Service”, John Wiley & Sons, New York.., 1990

DILTHEY, W., “Introduction a l’Etude des Sciences Humaines, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1942

EASTON, T., A., CONANT, R., W., “Using Consultants. A Consumer’s Guide for Managers”, Probus Publishing Co., Chicago, 1985

FEYERABEND, P., “Against Method.” Radner/Winokur, n.p., 1970

GREINER, L.E., METZGER, R.O., “Consulting to Management”, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1983

HANSEN, J.C., WARNER, R.W., SMITH, E.J., “Group Consulting - Theory and Process”, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston. 1980

HEBSON, R., “Become a Successful Consultant”, Foulsham, London.., 1989

HOFSTADTER, D., R., “Gödel, Esher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid”, Vintage Books, New York, 1980

HOLTZ, H., “The Consultant’s Guide to Proposal Writing”, John Wiley & Sons, New York.., 1986

HUBERMAN, A.M., MILES, M. B., “Innovation up Close”, Plenum Press, New York.., 1984

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HUNT, A., “The Management Consultant”, John Wiley & Sons, New York.., 1977

JONES, K., “Simulations - a Handbook for Teachers and Trainers”, Kogan Page Ltd, London, 1987

KIRCHER, F.,(trad.), “Les 36 Stratagèmes - Traite secret de stratégie chinoise”, J.C.Lattes, n.p., 1991

Kolb, D., Frohman, A., 1970,” An Organisation Development Approach to Consulting.” Sloan Management Review 12(1): 51-65.

KUBR, M., “Management Consulting - A Guide to the Profession”, International Labour Office, Geneva, 1986

LAO TZU, “Tao Te Ching”, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1987

LAO-TSEU, TCHOUANG-TSEU, LIE-TSEU, “Philosophes Taoïstes”, Pléiade NRF Gallimard, s.p., 1980

LIPPITT, G., LIPPITT, R., ”The Consulting Process in Action”, University Associates Inc., San Diego, 1978

MARGERISON, C., “Influencing Organizational Change”, Institute of Personnel Management, Wimbledon, 1982

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METZGER, R., O., “ Profitable Consulting”, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. Reading Massachusetts.., 1989

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PLATON, “Œuvres complètes” vol II, Bibl. de la Pléiade NRF Gallimard, s.p. 1990

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SCHEIN, E.H., “Process Consultation: Its Role in Organization Development”, Addison-Wesley Publ. Co., Reading.., 1969

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The experience I used to build my normative model of consulting is cross-disciplinary. I try here to make simple some thirty years of study and practice in social sciences, media communication, teaching and management consulting.

The actual "Consulting Difference" research represents five years of observation, interviews documentary study, and teaching (when you want to know something, try to change it or to teach it). The people I learned about were, during years of growth and success, Digital Equipment Corporation’s Consultants across the world; Switzerland, UK, Ireland, France, Belgium, Germany, Holland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Greece, Italy, Israel, also in U.S., Hong Kong and Japan. There are two Japanese translations of “The Consulting Difference” available for those interested, thanks to my former colleagues Tamotsu Wada (1989) and Takeshi Muto (1993).

Between 1985 and 1995 my work was to create and manage a curriculum to develop Digital Equipment Europe’s more than 1000 European consultants.

The size of the first sample was 300, (almost equal to Digital’s total European Consultants’ population at the beginning of the inquiry in 1986). The research method was qualitative analysis of individual and group interviews, also my analysis and interpretation of observed behaviour in 170 video-recorded “critical situation” role-plays and in 52 complex inter-group simulations. Inspired by action research and by grounded qualitative methodology, the interpretations I made were fed back repeatedly to the Consulting community that generated the material (in the end, more than 700 people).

Version after version, the paper improved through the critiques and clarifications of meaning received from my consulting community. The first “final” edition was published in 1989.

Based on it I prepared a half-day teaching presentation for consultants, consultants’ managers, consulting firms and corporate clients of consulting. This simple presentation was curiously successful. Its latest avatar, a workshop-presentation illustrating this material is currently available.

A short account of the research and the methods used

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Over the years I presented the “Consulting Difference” variants more than a hundred times and elaborated on the subject with many more consultants and executives in several countries and companies. Consulting with major firms like C. S. C. Index and A. T. Kearney between 1992 and 1997 also had a strong influence on my understanding. This interaction insured a “sanity check” and a way to enrich my interpretation of” common sense data” referred to in the initial study. I must say that this paper is now concerned with the search for wisdom and practical solutions, and not with the scientific research of regularities. What I learned from readings in Consulting, Psychology, Social Sciences, Education, Ancient and Modern Rhetoric, Aristotle, Socrates, Aesop, Lao Tzu, Khalil Gibran, Zen, and Sufi Eastern lore, what I understood from helping other people to understand things alien to them, brought to this essay at least as much as observation and interviewing. And so did the years of practice with the Management Consulting Firms.

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Ioan Tenner Ph.D.

E-mail: tenner@wanadoo.fr

http://wisdom.tenner.org