Recently, I had one of those “a-ha” moments with a client as we were working through improving a key process in his company. In the middle of our dialogue about improvement opportunities to test, he stopped me and said, “We are talking about a lot of ideas, but when are YOU going to improve it?” It was right then that it struck me that I had failed when
we contracted our relationship, but also he was caught in a common paradigm of consulting.

The challenge comes in the way we are conditioned to learn. As children, our primary mode of knowledge-building came from trial and error discovery. I’m fascinated to observe my five year old daughter and her nearly two year old brother play. They make predictions, test them out, fail, and then try again from what they’ve learned. This is knowledge building, action learning. It’s fantastic.

Unfortunately, as John Dewey (1994) points out in an essay on “Thinking in Education” that opens the great book Teaching And The Case Method, my children will soon be trained or conditioned to learn differently as they enter school. No longer will they learn by doing, but we’ll place them in rows of desks in front of a teacher (the expert) who will instruct them on facts or “what’s known.” They’ll learn to memorize and perform to set expectations. Hopefully, they won’t also lose the ability to learn and build knowledge through action. Learning through action is experiential.

One of the premier thinkers in the area of experiential learning is David Kolb, a professor as Case Western Reserve University. Kolb recognized experience as essential to learning and development. This concept has also carried over into organizational systems through the work of scholar-practitioners like Chris Agryris at Harvard and Donald Schön at MIT who began to look at loop learning in organizations, Edgar Schien at MIT in his work in process consultation, and Peter Senge at MIT for his framing of the learning organization.

In quality improvement, probably one of the most known experiential learning model is the Shewhart-Deming Cycle or Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle for improvement. The PDSA cycle has since been improved upon by the Associates in Process Improvement and is known as the Model for Improvement, which is widely used in healthcare and other industries. In each of these scholar practitioner’s work is a recognition that learning and developing knowledge is the result of thinking, doing, and learning.

This brings me back to our discussion at the beginning about my consulting relationship. In the 1960’s Edgar Schein from MIT first described three ways consultants work with managers. Peter Block would later describe these as the expert role, pair-of-hands role, or the collaborative or process consultative role. The pair-of-hands role is essentially outsourcing or hiring someone to do something you don’t have the time or expertise to do the work.

The two roles relevant to my client example are the expert and collaborative roles. In the example given at the beginning, my client was looking to me as the expert role and wanted and expected me to solve and fix his problem. The expert roles is comfortable for many. It goes back to that example of the problem with our learning system. With an expert helping you, you don’t have to take responsibility for learning and improving because someone else (the teacher or consultant) is expected to do it for you. If it works out, great, if not, you can always say it was a bad consultant, but either way, you may be left with a loss rather than a gain because there was no knowledge gained as the client. The export role is probably the most common consultant/client relationship.

The collaborative model or process consultation model is my preference and the role I had been hired to fill. In this model, the consultant acts as an improvement advisor or coach that guides the client system in actively participating in the improvements they wish to make in their organizations. In this approach, the client has complete responsibility over their change activities and, in the process, gains new skills and abilities as they roll up their sleeves and make changes that result in improvements. As their advisor, it’s my job to enable their learning, ask powerful questions, introduce them to tools and best practices, and support them as they test changes and act on what they learn. The result is faster and more sustainable change and a client system that builds capacity for organizational learning and improvement—my win-win.

As someone considering a consultant for a project, I encourage you to consider what kind of engagement and experience you hope to have. Do you want to learn as part of the process? What is the outcome you hope to achieve? Many expert consultants can support you with their answers or a well-drafted report summarizing their analysis. There are also many improvement advisors like me who would be happy to collaborate with you, to roll up our sleeves, and learn together as we make great changes. Make the choice that’s right for you.

In the meantime, I need to sit and re-define what role I’m filling with my client today. As collaborators in change, I know we will learn a ton together, and I know we can make great improvements that will benefit his team and customers for years to come. What fun.