Schein's Process Consultation: Three Reactions

Schein's Process Consultation: Three Reactions This prĂŠcis outlines the process consulting style and notes three reactions to the exclusive division of alternatives it intuits, the assumptions of the approach, and the concept of client.

Olivier Serrat 18/01/2018

1 The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling Any discussion of process consultation would do well to recognize from the outset that Schein (2011) developed this consulting style from " … realization that helping was not only an important ingredient of what organizational consulting was all about, but was a core social process in its own right that needed analysis" (p. xiii). Because offers of help can be resisted and resented, when they are not categorically refused, Schein (2011) felt the need to investigate what social and psychological dynamics are common to different types of helping relationships, explain why help does not always help, and give advice to would-be helpers about how they might build effective dynamics in one-to-one, group, and organizational situations to make their assistance welcomed and practicably useful. Shrewdly, this in contrast with pure, diagnostic, or confrontational kinds of inquiry, from Schein (1969), Schein (1999) saw that "Process Consultation 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 client's internal and external environment in order to improve the situation as defined by the client" (p. 20). Vitally, "Process consultation means that the helper focuses from the very beginning on the communication process" (Schein, 2011, p. 61).

That said, the adoption of process consultation rests on a good number of assumptions: • Clients … often do not know what is really wrong and need help in diagnosing what their problems actually are. But only they own and live with the problem.

• Clients often do not know what kinds of help consultants can give to them; they need guidance to know what kinds of help to seek.

• Most clients have a constructive intent to improve things, but need help in identifying what to improve and how to improve it.

• Only clients know what will ultimately work in their situation.

• 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 ultimate function of help is to pass on diagnostic skills and intervene constructively so that clients are more able to continue to improve their situations on their own. (Schein, 2011, pp. 63–64) Reaction: The Case of Either–Or Explicatory as it may be, there is something of the purist behind process consultation: it is not— simply—that "Someone who is asked for help has a choice [emphasis added] of three possible helping roles: expert, doctor, and process consultant" (Schein, 2011, p. 64). There never is a perfect situation whereby—paraphrasing—an expert only provides information or service, a doctor only diagnoses and prescribes, and a process consultant only aims "to reveal the information necessary to decide on what kind of help is needed and how best to provide it" (Schein, 2011, p. 64). Both academics and consultants are wont to isolate variables so they might all the better make their case: and yet, notwithstanding the above, a careful reading of Schein's (1999, 2011) work suggests ambivalence about the three roles: they are at times mutually exclusive; at other times, they are not. In point of fact, organizations rarely recruit consultants to fulfill one role and no other: yet, Schein (1999, 2011) gave no pointers on possible trade-offs between the three helping roles or how the need for pure, diagnostic, and/or confrontational kinds of inquiry might help ascribe relative weights to the distribution of one's services as an expert, a doctor, and/or a process consultant.

2 Reaction: Assumptions The six assumptions on which the adoption of process consultation rests, according to Schein (2011), evidence a strong problem-solving mindset. For instance: "Clients ‌ often do not know what is really wrong and need help in diagnosing what their problems actually are. But only they own and live with the problem" (Schein, 2011, pp. 63); and: "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" (Schein, 2011, pp. 64). But, not all consultants are engaged to solve thorny problems: they can also help develop strategies, advise on policies, facilitate, unleash energy and strengths in the organization, etc. Therefore, harking back to the necessity, we are told, to choose between the three possible helping roles of expert, doctor, and process consultant, there is a need to clarify what kinds of situations warrant process consultation and which do not. Surely, it cannot just be that process consulting and nothing else (e.g., an expert, a doctor) is most effective when, say, "Clients often do not know what kinds of help consultants can give to them; they need guidance to know what kinds of help to seek" (Schein, 2011, p. 63) or when "Most clients have a constructive intent to improve things, but need help in identifying what to improve and how to improve it" (Schein, 2011, p. 63). On top, these assumptions seem at odds also with Schein's (2011) other assumption that "Only clients know what will ultimately work in their situation" (p.

64).

Reaction: The Concept of Client Helpfully, Schein (1999) isolated six basic types of clients: (a) contact clients, (b) intermediate clients, (c) primary clients, (d) unwitting clients, (e) ultimate clients, and (f) involved ''nonclients'', which presumably refers to what we would these days term "stakeholders". Usefully, Schein (1999) also drew attention to seven levels of problems (or issues): (a) individual, (b) interpersonal, (c) face-to-face group, (d) intergroup, (e) organizational, (f) interorganizational, and (g) system. [Inexplicably, Schein (1999) did not mention the intraorganizational level, which in large organizations simply cannot be ignored.] These distinctions can only help where the problem is relatively simple (in which case, paradoxically, the resources one devotes to it need not be onerous); they might also help where the problem is complicated. But how, one may ask, can process consulting serve effectively where the problems are complex (if not chaotic) and a process consultant must simultaneously work with the six basic types of clients at the seven levels identified, of which the intraorganizational level is likely to be the most difficult?

References Schein, E. (1969). Process consultation. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Schein, E. (1999). Process consultation revisited: Building the helping relationship. San Francisco, CA: Addison-Wesley.

Schein, E. (2011). Helping: How to offer, give, and receive help. San Francisco, CA: BerrettKoehler Publishers.