Mind‐ful Consulting

Citation

Latemore, G. (2010), "Mind‐ful Consulting", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 31 No. 8, pp. 758-760. https://doi.org/10.1108/01437731011094793

Given the title, it would be tempting to postulate that the integrating concept in this book is “mindfulness”. After all, mindfulness is currently popular and is echoed in other disciplines such as spirituality and in leadership. However, the integrating concept in this book is actually “consulting” and a scholarly approach to consulting, at that.

I have long accessed and respected the contributions and ideas from the Tavistock Institute and the ground‐breaking approach of Emery and Trist. This book is a collection of papers within the Tavistock intellectual tradition. The authors are alumni of their Advanced Organisational Consultation (AOC) programme (yes, “programme”, not “program”). The three core principles of the AOC Programme are: consulting competence, organization theory and systems psychodynamics (p. xxviii).

The Tavistock model has been described as … “a heuristic framework for identifying what conscious and unconscious processes take place within and between groups of people” (p. xxii). The authors state, that while this book is intended to codify our own practice, the “AOC” way, it is not just “a retelling of the normative” or “implying that the Tavistock approach is static” (p. xxii). Rather, the contributors are clearly keen to “invite phenomenological accounts of consultants at work” (p. xxii) – that is, praxis. This stated concern of this book for on‐going critique and dynamism is possibly evidenced in that many of the contributions were listed as being “registered activities in refreshing the Tavistock Institute's intellectual tradition”.

So what is “mindfulness” and what is mindful consulting? One of the contributors defines mindfulness as … “awareness of present experience with acceptance – paying attention to what is salient in the present moment” (p. xxiv) Mindfulness is the opposite of being on auto‐pilot, or of just being in accord with a well‐honed mindset. The key to this is avoiding stereotypical responses, and actually being present, present to the client and their reality. One of the quoted sources, Weik and Putnam (2006) based their work on fire‐fighters, and they wondered why fire‐fighters in high‐risk, stressful situations disregarded obvious evidence from their experience: they were not truly “mindful”.

Mindful consulting is an approach to the discipline that avoids mindsets that unnecessarily limit the practitioner as well as the phenomenological pitfalls of just “going with the flow”. Here, there is non‐judgmental awareness of what is actually happening, making sense of data and interactions that are more focussed on the client's systems and dynamics than on protecting the consultant and the relationship for commercial gain. This is a wise and mature perspective on the profession.

This book is in tune with writers like Schön (1983). The distinctly European approach to this book is obvious, not just in the case studies but in the “feel” of the contributions. They are less proscriptive and more exploratory – maybe this is deliberate or unconscious? The transferability of the Tavistock models for American and Australian readers would be debateable: one might wonder whether these principles were universal.

There are ten chapters, with each chapter being appropriately referenced and there is a seven page index. The one annoying feature of this book is the tight binding – you need a 5 kg paperweight to anchor the open pages to read the book. Given the desire of modern publishers to be accessible and user‐friendly, it is surprising that the final presentation of the publication itself was not market‐tested.

Some key ideas within this book are: social learning; professional identity; collaboration and narrative structure. I liked the discussion of turbulence and the need for “sense‐making” in chapter 3 and highlighting the power of visual metaphors and story‐making. This echoes the earlier work of Peter Checkland (1981) at Lancaster University and the qualitative power of soft systems methodology. Here, the strategic leaders employ “rich pictures” as a way of understanding stakeholder complexity and intervention options. Such a consideration seems more important than ever, post global financial crisis (GFC). Some writers in strategy also regard “sense‐making” as one of the most important roles performed by the senior leaders of the organisation.

A helpful insight in this book is that the consultant needs acute awareness of one's own needs and behaviour. This is reminiscent of Manfred Kets de Vries who speaks of the “inner theatre” of leadership' and cautions senior mangers against narcissism (De Vries, 2001). This is a wise concern – the notion of “re‐perceiving” the client consultant relationship might indeed assist to move out of the “shadow” of the consultant's narcissistic brilliance (p. xxix). In similar vein, in chapter 4 the authors later warn us:

The lure of brilliance privileges a power‐based relationship, the power of knowing, which is seen as preferable to that of power being located in the relationship, in the capacity to help people think and generate conditions for change (p. 63).

The audience for this book is scholarly practitioners. It has a distinctive post‐graduate flavour and would be most useful for experienced organisational development practitioners and senior human resource practitioners. These readings are indeed thoughtful and there is rigor in the research support for the ideas presented: this is not a simple “tool kit” for the novice consultant, nor is it merely a breathless exhortation on how to become a successful and wealthy consultant. This book offers a wise and healthy challenge to the naïve charisma of the “one‐string‐in‐your‐bow” gurus to whom clients pledge unquestioned loyalty and abundant recompense!

This book advances the statement of Aldous Huxley who said … “experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him”.

Mind‐ful Consulting is reminiscent of the European Group of Organizational Studies (EGOS) conference which I attended in Amsterdam in July 2008. One of the colloquiums I attended addressed the topic of “the reflective practitioner” (Schön, 1983) – the style and content of this book is very similar to that colloquium.

Dare I suggest (as we did over dinner at the 2008 EGOS Conference) that the balance of academic precision and consulting reality as shown in this book could be mischievously portrayed in how we even refer to scholarly practitioners? We experimented with titles like “acadultant” and “pracademic” (!) I recommend this book for the “thoughtful acadultant”.