¶ … Consulting Project
One successful strategy is for the consultant to value learning over teaching -- to welcome questions, tension, and challenges from the leaders: this shows that they are engaged and willing to actively learn (Block, 2011, 300). It is a much better situation (albeit less comfortable) than having a passive audience that simply listens to everything the teacher/consultant says and then later takes none of the steps outlined. An audience who asks questions, who debates, who contradicts and argues is an audience that is far more thoughtful, willing to act, and ready to adapt -- so long as you make the case for why adaptation is vital.
Another strategy that Block promotes is to embrace the struggle -- because in the struggle is the actual solution (Block, 2011, p. 303). Companies that want a quick-fix to their problems are not really willing to fix anything. There are no quick-fixes -- there is only the struggle to fix them on a daily basis. Companies need to commit time, money, resources, energy to partaking in that daily struggle -- because only then is success accomplished.
A third strategy is to utilize tension and the energy behind it to help push for changes in policy or in...
307). Tension represents resistance and if that energy is not redirected, the resistance will become permanent. The consulted should tap into that energy, expose it, get workers discussing it and reflecting on why there is resistance -- this will open the way to making important shifts. Using that misplaced energy is vital.
I chose these three strategies over others because they represent the true breakthrough moments in consulting: they promote active learning,
engagement, and critical thinking -- skills the leaders and workers within the company need to acquire in order to be able to make right decisions once the consultation is completed. Part of the work of the consultant is to show the leaders how to improve -- by choosing these strategies, the consultant actually trains the leaders in improving rather than just showing how.
My ability to incorporate these strategies into a consulting project is ample: my
training as a teacher is very useful in this sense because I have always preferred promoting active learning rather than passive learning. I view Socrates as the greatest teacher of all time because he welcomed questions and always encouraged them: his goal was to…
