[The following is an abbreviated script I use in my teaching of Total Quality Management consulting--Tom Glenn] Consulting Introduction Calvin Coolidge stories Introduction and expectations: þWhat do you hope to know when you leave here today that you did not know before?þ Introduction: me. Credentials: doctoral work, FQI, NSA. Sources: I am indebted for the content to the work of Chris Argyris, Donald Schon, Mike Harmon, Peter Vaill, Gordon Lippett, and Edgar Schein. Much of their work is based on or created for National Training Laboratories. Let's start with definitions: Consultant: A consultant is an agent for change. His/her job is to intervene in an organization at the invitation of the organi- zation for purposes specified by the client and agreed to by the consultant. A consultant can be internal or external to an organization. Either way, the consultant is an expert in the intervention subject matter, a professional in the field, better at the subject matter than others. A consultant is an interventionist whose purpose is to help the organization change directions to go where the organization wants to go. A consultant works by intervening. As a result, the consul- tant is always an outsider and is expected to maintain neutrality and objectivity. By intervening when good can come of the inter- vention, the consultant helps the organization stack the deck for success. But the consultant does not write the deck. A consultant is enormously powerful and therefore must have higher ethical standards than many in other professions. A consultant can do great damage to an organization or help the organization to achieve great good. A consultant is not a contractor hired to do the organiza- tion's work. A consultant is not a report writer and should avoid agreements to writing up findings wherever possible. A consultant is not someone brought in to make the organization feel good. Process Consultant: A process consultant helps principally by holding a mirror up to the organization--that is, by providing feedback in various forms. "Process," in this context, means human interaction. A process consultant's principal tool is the face-to-face meeting. The meeting can be one-on-one, or it can be a group session. The tool can include classical facilitation of group processes; it can also include intensive work with a single individual or series of individuals. A process consultant's secondary tool is the surveyþdesigned to collect data about feelings. But a process consultant looks at on-hand data first, resorting to surveys only if no data are at hand. If, for example, the level of organization members' commit- ment is relevant, the consultant looks at turnover rates, absen- teeism, numbers of voluntary participants in teams, and numbers of suggestions first. If surveys are necessary, they are assumed to be, at best, secondary indicators, ambiguous and difficult to interpret. Whenever possible, process consultants work in teams rather than alone. They regularly check data with one another. They need to have a colleague observe their behavior and offer alternative views of dataþi.e., what happened or is happening. Consultants rely on observable data rather than gut feelings whenever possible. Observable data are observed actions. They include spoken words, actions, body language, facial expressions, and personal exchanges. Compare "George is arrogant" (a judgment) with "George interrupted Harry three times" (data). The consultant makes the assumption that only the actor knows why he/she acted. In other words, instead of assuming a meaning for the data (that is, attributing meaning to a person's actions), consultants ask the actors what the actions meant. If the consultants have established themselves as open and honest, most people will be open and honest with the consultants and will speak candidly about why they did what they did. The consultant also makes the assumption that people are active and not passive. That's why consultants usually avoid the word "behavior" which connotes activity not controlled by the actor. Consequently, I as a consultant will never manipulate anyone or try behavior modification on them. I will never make judgments about the state of a client's psyche or try to be a psychotherapist. That's not my business. I treat my clients as healthy, responsible, and autonomous people. When I treat people that way, they usually act that way. The active-passive dimension is more important in Total Quality Management than it may seem at first. Implicit in the idea of Total Quality Management is the belief that people are competent and honest; trust, therefore, is requisite. Conse- quently, any acts on management's part aimed at manipulating people or treating people as passive objects are antithetical to Total Quality Management and will ultimately cause Total Quality Management to fail. Therefore, the active model in consulting is the only one which makes sense in a Total Quality Management setting. Process consultants' personal feelings are the consultants' problem, not the client organization's problem. In other words, my anger, hurt, disappointment, tiredness, or stress are my business; I don't blame the client organization for them or expect the client do deal with them. But the feelings of organi- zation members in relation to each other are the consultants' business--to the degree that they affect the operations that the consultants have agreed to work with. Content Consultant: A content consultant is an information, data, and techniques resource. His/her job is to teach and provide information at the juncture when it is needed but not extraneously. A content consultant, like a process consultant, intervenes, but he/she intervenes in a different way, using topical data, information, and techniques, such as nominal group technique. He/she watches the on-going process of the organization and steps in with observations, data, and information about the expert subject matter whenever necessary. The interventions are always stated in neutral terms. Not "you ought to..." but "Let me tell you what IRS did in this situation" or "Let me suggest a technique that's helped other organizations in similar circumstances" or even "What all successful Total Quality Management organizations have done is..." Content consultants (unlike process consultants) make a sharp distinction between data and information. Data are raw factsþideally quantifiable. Data are unprocessed and uninter- preted. Information is processed data ready to be interpreted. Information includes purpose and meaning. Data do not. Compare "The organization established a goal of 12 percent but reached 10 percent" (data) with "The organization failed to reach its stated goal" or "the organization may have set its goals too high for the first year" (information). Compare both with "The organiza- tion screwed up" (judgment). If the content consultant does not have the data or informa- tion he/she needs at the moment, he/she must say so and ask for time to retrieve them. He/she might, for example, say, "Xerox used benchmarking very effectively in this situation. Let me bring you the data on what they did." A content consultant must know the subject thoroughly. More important, he/she must know where to get additional finite specific data and information quickly. Very often, content consultants must create situations in which they can observe the organization in action and gain access to opportunities to intervene. In setting up the contract, therefore, they often need to specify what meetings they will attend, what offices they will visit, who they will talk to, etc. Total Quality Management Consultant: A Total Quality Management consultant works with both process and content. He/she must make both r“les clear during the contract phase and may have to remind the client organization of both r“les repeatedly. Sometimes, the consultant needs to clarify the two r“les for the organization members; sometimes the clari- fication needs to be repeated. Most important, the consultant must be very clear in his/her own mind about the distinction, be- cause the intervention techniques are different. Difference between Consultants, Facilitators, and Coordinators:  Coordinator: One who (1) facilitates continuous improve- ment and other tasks in the Total Quality Management jour- ney; (2) acts as an information resource on Total Quality Management issues; (3) points the leaders towards Total Quality Management; and (4) is a proactive force for Total Quality Management in the organization.  Facilitator: One who helps teams and groups with the human interactive process and provides expertise on Total Quality Management principles, practices, and tools.  Consultant: An expert on Total Quality Management who assists an organization during the journey. Can act as a coordinator and as a facilitator. PRINCIPLES FOR THE PROFESSIONAL CONSULTANT Violate at your peril: 1. Stay neutral. Not my organization, can't lead it, can't judge it. My r“le: help that organization go where it wants to go, not where I want it to go. Guiding is not leading. Say,"Other organizations that have tried to do it that way have not succeeded," or "In my experi- ence, organizations have been most successful when they..." Never say: "Don't do it that way. It's wrong." If the organiza- tion wishes to go its own way against my guidance, I must decide: accept or withdraw. 2. Help the client organization take ownership for its decisions and work. Facilitate, I don't make the decisions. Facilitate the work, don't do it. Avoid a dependency relationship. 3. Make a clear contract with the client and live up to it. Be sure the client understands (a) what I am committing myself to do, by when, and for what fee; (b) what the client organization is committing itself to do; and (3) at what point I disengage. If the client does not live up to his/her end of the contract, I can try to get him/her to live up to the contract; I can amend the contract; or I can disengage. What I must not do is to allow the client to violate the contract or renege. Nor can I violate the contract or renege. At the disengagement point, I disengage. I may then write a new contract for further intervention. 4. Never enter into a contract for something you cannot do. If I lack the professional training or credentials in a given field, I am professionally and morally bound to steer clear of that field until I have the training or credentials. Professional ethics forbid that I contract to do work and then get the training to do it. What I should do in these circumstances is (a) recommend a professional in the field, or (b) recommend that the client send one of his/her own people for the training and credentialing. In the same vein, I must never misrepresent my professional compe- tence or credentials. 5. Never lie. If I don't know something, if I can't do something, I must say so. If I am uncomfortable or uneasy with that the client is doing, I must make my state public. As soon as I deceive a client, I have lost my ability to help him/her. 6. Never hit below the belt; never attack covertly. I know how to help or hurt people, and I can use consulting techniques without people knowing what I'm doing. I am duty-bound to use my tools overtly and only to help the client. If I let my feelings trick me into striking back at a client using the tools of my trade covertly, I will win the contest and destroy the consultant- client relationship. 7. Feed back to the client data, not judgments or advice. This dictum often means using "I-statements." Common formulations are, "My sense of what's going on here is...," "When you do x, I feel y,." "What I see happening from my perspective is..." In other words I can express as valid data what I feel and sense; I cannot express what you feel as valid data--only you can do that. This principle therefore means focussing on observable data, not on my guesses as to what's going on in your head. Compare "You're assuming Helen has a hidden agenda" with "I don't remem- ber hearing Helen express those goals. Let's ask her." Statements of fact are always better than judgments. Compare "You are mistaken" with "You and I hold different data on that subject." And data are better than advice. Compare "I strongly advise you not to charter teams without training the members" with "Organizations who have been into Total Quality Management for many years state that team members need to be trained in the tools before the team is chartered." 8. Assume the stance and attitude of the care-giver. Difficult to describe: good physicians and nurses, effective coaches. The consultant disengages his/her ego during the consulting process by focussing exclusively on helping, and not at all on his/her own prestige, dignity, or image. The consultant sees the members of the client organization not as sources of need fulfillment for the consultant, but as human beings who need help to be better at what they are doing. The care-giver attitude is based on a kind of detachment possible only when I put my personal needs, problems, sen- sitivities, vulnerabilities, and desires out of the picture. Praise or damnation of me has no meaning; all that matters is what is effective in helping the client. I personally learned the most about how to develop this kind of loving detachment while I was do volunteer work in a hospice, working with dying people. Some of them were delightful; others were extremely trying, selfish, and obnoxious. Some treated me with respect and even love; some belittled and insulted me. They were all the same, because my feelings were not at issue. Only what was good for them mattered. This kind of attitude which the best consultants model is really a form of agape--a kind of love defined as affirming the existence of another person, wanting them to be, without desiring them or wanting to control or possess them. Parental love at its best is very much like this. The principal pitfall in this approach is the tendency to beatify the client--that is, to see the client as perfect. Consultants call this "falling in love with the client." What the consultant needs to do is to accept the client whole cloth without reservations, to see the client clearly without judging him/her. The consultant does not speak of the client's flaws or virtues but simply speaks of the way the client is. Compare, "Sally is bad-tempered" with "Sally feels anger acutely and frequently and expresses it openly." We are all human, and none of us can assume the care-given posture flawlessly. But we can learn to do it better and better with practice. General Guidelines Don't do the organization's work. People in the organization will almost unconsciously try to get the consultants to do some of the organization's work, including making decisions. Total Quality Management cannot be accomplished that way. The organization must do its own work. It must make and own its own decisions. Discourage unnecessary written communications. Some things need to be written down, but in government our tendency is to turn everything into report writing. Stress effective face-to-face communications in preference to writing memos and notes. When people know and trust one another, verbal communications work very well. Coach the organization to use numbers on things and reason on people. The tendency will be to mix these up. Emphasize that the statistical method can be applied to the work process but not to people. With people we use God-given human reason and judgment. Encourage consensus decision making and empowerment. Total Quality Management cannot flourish without trust, and autocratic management destroys trust. Prepare the organization for occasional setbacks and the eighteen-month slump. The organization will not be one-hundred percent successful in every Total Quality Management endeavor. Help it to learn from its mistakes rather than to be discouraged by them. Warn the organization's leaders that somewhere between one and two years into the journey, discouragement will set in. Help them prepare for it and overcome it. Weathering discouragement is a key leadership challenge. Help the organization to understand that it is better to do one task well than one hundred tasks poorly. Help the organization to do one job at a time, to start small and move slowly at first, to give full attention to each task as it comes along. Help the organization to be proactive rather than reactive. Discourage the organization from playing "ain't it awful." Help them avoid waiting for their external superiors (that is, their bosses external to the organization--the Department Secre- tary, the President, or the Congress, for example) to lead them into Total Quality Management. Assist them in shedding cynicism and getting excited about what they can do. Consulting for Innovation: Notes on the Joel Barker lecture on introducing an innova- tion at a plenary session od the Association for Quality and Participation--undated (1990?). The amount of disequilibrium caused is directly proportional to the perceived (not to the real) change the innovation creates. If I perceive no change, the innovation is much easier for me to accept. In times of crisis, people are more willing to accept change. Therefore introduce massive changes when there is a crisis. The social climate of the moment can powerfully affect the acceptance of innovation. Resistance can come from emotional reaction. All innovations must be evaluated from the users' point of view. So let go of your ego attachment to the innovation. If you have a very deep feeling about your innovation, let someone else introduce it. The value of the innovation comes from its use. If it's not used, it's of no value. So sometimes the inventor has to walk away from the invention and let someone else present it. Test cases: the light bulb and the easy seat. Rule number 1: The user must perceive an advantage. Easy seat doesn't hurt where it always hurts. Rule number 2: Perceived simplicity. From the user's point of view does it look simple? "User friendly." So present the innovation as if it is simple. Don't brag about the complexity. Brag about the simplicity. Rule number 3: Compatibility: must fit with what is already there. Edison put the light bulb where the gas light had been, not in the center of the ceiling. Make it look like what it's replacing. Sure looks comfortable--I'd never have it on my bike. Looks are important. Rule number 4: Divisibility: Can I do in little pieces rather than in big pieces. Do it one small slice at a time. Edison: "Try a bulb. One bulb." Only later did he introduce more bulbs. Sometimes you have to forego cost benefit analysis. He didn't say, "Let me electrify the whole house." A week later, they'd call back and say, "How about doing the whole house?" Example: computer. No longer a mainframe. "Take one cup off and sell it to the half-ass." Tom Peters says, "Do it all at once." Poor idea. Do it one step at a time. Thriving on Chaos. Rule number 5: Communicability: If you have a choice between using old words in a new way or developing a new vocabulary, always use old words in a new way. Example: buying a computer. 1978: "How much RAM do you want? How many bytes do you need? Do you need floppy disks? What kind of software?" I walked out. When you come into my store, you speak my language or you don't buy. If the user doesn't use the innovation, the gain is zero. Language is used for status symbols. Groups devise jargon to make themselves special so you can't discuss their discipline in everyday language. Example: physicians. Guild language. Latinate terms. Edison: "Electric burner." Do not make people feel dumb. Use their language. Look at the respect we give to them. Moffitt and Mitchell: airplane introduction. Mitchell: court marshall; Moffitt: air fields named after him. Mitchell talked "aerodynam- ics." Embarrassed the generals. Moffitt: not one word of aerody- namics. "Flying torpedo tubes," "flying observation towers." "Aerial gunnery platforms." Took the navy language and added the words "flying" or "aerial." If we need these, we're going to have to build very large ships. "Flying deck cruisers." [Moham- med: "Speak to those in accordance with their understanding." 1300 years ago.] Paradigm synonyms: norms, values, methodolo- gies, theories, systems, algorithms. Rule number 6: Reversibility. Can I get back out of this if I want to? Answer must be yes. And it must be easy to get back out. Then people will resist. Torro: if you don't like it, bring it back. Pontiac: if you don't like it, full price for another one. Warranties. Get the product back with comments: great educa- tion. Rule number 7: Relative costliness: Given all the cost, is this cheaper or more expensive? Not just dollars and cents. Electricity cost four times as much as gas, but safety was the relative cost factor. Say to people: there is a relative value. Macintosh: training costs. Other costs words: anxiety, embar- rassment, confusion. IBM PC's: relative cost is very high because you have to learn so much to use it. Easy seat: relative cost: comfort. Better from the bottom up. Invented for weak enders. Rule number 8. Failure consequence. What happens if the innovation fails? Computer failure: loss of all data. What happens if the light bulb fails? Things go dark. Nothing more. Easy seat: what happens if it fails: castration. Design for no failure. So think about it ahead of time. Get eight out of eight: they'll listen. Seven out of eight: OK. Six out of eight: on the edge. Anything less: forget it. If people can give you three reasons why not to do it, you're dead. When people start resisting, they name one of these eight. These rules are rules of respect for the user. Easy seat: should have called it easy saddle. Exercises Closing Thoughts: Two thoughts: It is good to be born in a depraved time; for compared to others, you gain a reputation for virtue at small cost. þMontaigne The best thing about the future is that comes only one day at a time. þDean Acheson Except for portion of the text based on Joel Barker: Copyright Tom Glenn, 1992