Powerful Ideas Coming Your Way! Thoughts on the consulting industry and rebranding
I recently looked at my business and my life’s purpose from a new angle and gained some real insights. Don’t get me wrong, I remain a scholar-practitioner at heart, firmly grounded in Kurt Lewin’s (1951) famous statement that “there is nothing so practical as a good theory.” Practicality is the "why" of theory, without a doubt.
There is no shortage of expert consultants, eager to address the kinds of issues that are apparent in any business whose focus is local and short term. While I can certainly do that, it’s not me. My heart just isn’t in it and the time spent chasing that kind of business has sometimes drawn my focus away from the work I am meant to do. So in the interest of the 80-20 rule, I am turning the bulk of my attention more deliberately toward research and collaboration. As an out-of-the-box thinker and doer, I have decided to limit my future consulting work to organizations with a need for, and the courage to embrace, truly creative problem solving that brings in the best from multiple approaches. The greatest service I can do for anyone— and it really is about service after all— is to focus on developing useful tools for tomorrow’s organizational development challenges.
My “why” has expanded a bit—encouraging and bringing forth out-of-the-box ways of thinking about organizations as part of a much larger symphony of scholar-practitioners.
I remain enamored of fractals and yoga, but I am no longer fixated on one or two ways of knowing. At the end of the day, the lineage of our understanding matters less than the necessity to adapt the modern concept of organizing such that it creates sustainable, adaptable, strong collaborative arrangements. In an interconnected, computer biomediated world where change is the only constant, this requires a fusion of ideas from various schools of thought. Only by embracing a dynamic, multifaceted comprehension of what it means to organize, can we even begin to understand how the world of work really works!
Think of it this way. You are working on a huge jigsaw puzzle with your friends. One guy is working on all of the blue-sky pieces in the top right corner. Another is doing edges on the left. You are assembling a tree near the bottom and a fourth person is gathering up all of the pieces that look like part of a flower. Now, suppose you became so enamored with your tree assembly that you ceased to see that it was part of a bigger puzzle. Worse yet, you might even begin to criticize your friends’ sky/flower/edge work as somehow inferior to your own. Ridiculous! Right? Are you not collaborators in developing a much bigger picture than any of your own pet projects would suggest?
Yet that is how we can be when it comes to consulting and developing new concepts. I occasionally meet people who truly believe that there is only one right way to do things, their way! Not only does this approach guarantee that clients are only in it for the short term fix (i.e. the quick, easy answer du jour), it also leaves the client feeling dependent and continually going back for more hand-holding— hardly the helping profession that Edgar Schein (1999) described!
Don’t be the guy with a blue-sky puzzle piece who declares it to be the entire scene! Eventually someone will point out that there is a lot more to this picture than your own myopic view.
There are as many ideas about consulting in business as there are consultants. Sometimes an organization needs appreciative inquiry [endif]--(Cooperrider and Whitney 2005), or appreciative sharing of knowledge (Thatchenkery 2005). Other times it may need a complexity-derived approach like adaptive action (Eoyang 2009) or fractal change management (Henderson and Boje 2015). Other times we might turn to the search conference (Emery and Purser 1996), or any of a host of different approaches to helping organizations and communities strategize and improve their long-term efficiency and effectiveness. (Aside: My own doctoral work in Organizational Development included the chance to become intimately familiar with at least six or seven methodologies, not to mention those I became superficially acquainted with.)![endif]--[endif]--
We all have our favorites, to be sure, and for those of us who have developed methods ourselves, it can be tough to see beyond the elegance of our own approaches when the situation beckons for something else.
Yet the fact is that consulting methods are like tube tops. One size cannot possibly fit all!
Either you can’t contain the organization’s rather obvious problems because there is not enough fabric— stretching out what there is in a very unflattering way, or there is so much fabric that you can’t even tell who’s underneath, losing the substance of the actual organization so that all we see is the consultant’s favorite knit, which is often not machine washable and can not be maintained without extra help.
This concern has eaten away at me over the past few years. It’s difficult to witness the number of tube tops you see without letting that inward wince show on your face once in a while. The mother in me wants to offer a wrap, a cup of tea, and the phone number of a good tailor. Yet all is not lost! There are also many, many times when I see something that is absolutely working well for an organization, regardless of who is working with them or the method they chose. Then it becomes easy to praise all parties in a public way that leaves us all smiling. I love those days! So now, as I breathe in deeply, taking stock of the consulting industry and my own role in it, I see things a little differently than I did last year.
I find that I am grateful for the learning, even the parts of it that were unpleasant at times. The beauty of learning is that we get to grow and change from it, building new and exciting things with every breath of insight we are fortunate to take in.
So I have begun the process of rebranding to match a shift in my strategic focus, from scholar-PRACTITIONER to SCHOLAR-practitioner— from a big ‘P’ to a big ‘S,’ as my coach, Phil Brown, likes to say. I remain grateful for the earlier efforts to brand Gly Solutions and those who helped me along the way, but it is time to write a new chapter in this book— a chapter that is all about thinking bigger.
WAY bigger!
To that end, you may notice a few changes around the Gly Solutions website in the coming months. In fact, you might have already noticed the new logo and tag line. This new twist on my old brand is about encouraging the free and open exchange of ideas from all comers, not just the traditions that I am already familiar with...
It's about openly considering the many, many good ideas lurking in the pages of books as yet unread and shared cups of coffee yet to be brewed!
Additionally, the text of all blog posts[1] on this site, beginning with this one, may be copied under the creative commons share-attribution license, although I would appreciate your citations and kind words. If you like what you read here, please share it. Quote it. Copy it.
Most of all, add to it! Dive in!
Think critically and take part in the dialogue about what it means to do organizational development, to be an entrepreneur, a thinker, and to step out of the box, in your own right!
So what about you?
Are you with me?
Let’s generate and share some POWERFUL IDEAS!
The text of this blog posting may be shared, reproduced, and used in accordance with the creative commons share alike-attribution license (generic, 2.5). For details of acceptable use, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/ . Photographs are used by permission of Tenacious Photography. Their reproduction and use in other works requires permission from both Gly Solutions, LLC and Tenacious Photography http://www.tenaciousphoto.com/ .
References:
Cooperrider, David L., and Diana Whitney. 2005. Appreciative inquiry: A positive revolution in change. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
Emery, Merrelyn, and Ronald E. Purser. 1996. The search conference. 1st ed. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, Inc.
Eoyang, Glenda. 2009. Coping with Chaos: Seven Simple Tools. Circle Pines, MN: Lagumo.
Henderson, Tonya L., and David M. Boje. 2015. Organizational Development and Change Theory: Managing Fractal Organizing Processes: Routledge.
Lewin, Kurt. 1951. Field theory in social science. Edited by Dorwin Cartwright. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers.
Schein, Edgar H. 1999. Process consultation revisited, Addison-Wesley Series on Organization Development. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley. Book.
Thatchenkery, Tojo. 2005. Appreciative Sharing of Knowledge. 2011 (11 March). Accessed 11 March, 2011.
[1] Please note that the photographs used herein are reproduced with permission from their original copyright holders. Please contact me at tonya@glysolutions.com to obtain permission for the reproduction of photographs.
![endif]--
