The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook & Companion, 2nd Edition

Chapter 25How Is Who Doing?

Peter Block

“I can’t deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me.”

Sally Field, on winning her second Academy Award

We continue to spend a lot of effort in meetings, conferences, and training sessions all designed to initiate or sustain changes. Most of our traditional planning, including in the age of the virtual world, is about the actions of the presenters, what we want to present, and how we want to present it. We think power is the point. We seem to ignore that it is people’s active experience with each other that will affect their emotional response to change, and ultimately the quality of action.

Let us focus here on the way we evaluate what we do. It can either reinforce the participant as consumer or invite them into being a producer of outcomes they care about. Change happens when we take traditional activities and construct them to capture a new, larger purpose. Evaluation is an opportunity to use powerful questions to confront people in support of strategy.

SPOTLIGHT ON PARTICIPANTS

What we evaluate and when we evaluate it are part of our pedagogy. As an example, every conference I have ever attended has an evaluation form, and they are all alike, even if it’s a survey in chat. Every one of them implies a relationship between how well the material was presented and the value received by participants.

One set of questions is about the presenters: Style? Preparation? Clarity? PowerPoint? The second set of questions is about ...