The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook & Companion, 2nd Edition

Chapter 6Changing Focus: The New Direction of “Flawless” Consulting

Patrick Dolan

No one has dramatized the damage and dysfunction caused by rigid organizations as compassionately and vividly as Patrick. He made famous, even notorious, the staying power of the steady state, the system in place. Also, when he worked with a client, he made a deep commitment and fully joined the fray. So when he shifts our focus, which he does in this short essay, we need to pay attention. If the new forms of work require finding glue instead of dissolving what we see, then consulting skills will in fact become everyone’s task.

This profession of “change consultant,” at its best, brings a conscious and deliberate tension between the organization itself and the people who work in it and for it. Ordinarily we are hired to help in the area of organizational improvement by somehow forming a better, a sounder, connection with the organization’s people. More information, stronger voice, proper autonomy, and responsibility have to accompany good structures and processes for anything substantial to occur. There are, of course, many elements that throw this relationship off, and our work early on is often to simply bring that information to the attention of the leadership, and begin to address the damage it has done. We have to do this before we try to move to better technique and processes. Hard, a little risky, but straightforward enough.

FLAWLESS CONTRACTING

With the rubric of “contracting” in