HUB RESEARCH PAPER - Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussel

Process consultation revisited 25
This experience contrasts with the change process in the consulting organization. Here
also a two-day long ‘strategy-meeting’ is organized that was facilitated by an external consultant
in order to create a common vision and strategy for the company. The action principles of
appreciative inquiry (e.g., Cooperrider, Withney & Stavros, 2003) were similarly used. At this
meeting participants also enacted energizing and reciprocal practices. This resulted in setting up
three task forces that were mandated to elaborate on important strategic issues identified. All
participants agreed to organize a follow-up session six months later. However, the quality of
interacting during the task force meetings was characterised by monologic talk, dominance of
certain ‘voices’ and often lack of engagement. As a result every task force faded out. In the
follow-up meeting six months later only half of the actors who participated at the strategy
meeting were present. Interactions were characterized by low energy, ‘aboutness’-talk, no
possibility for mutually testing assumptions and by a problem-oriented self-reinforcing discourse
that made actors get stuck in mere analysing without progression. Eventually a steering
committee was established and the decision was made to monthly meet with the whole
organization. In the continuation of the change process, the original goal, creating together a
vision and strategy, and acting on it, is put on the agenda several times, but no real progress has
ever been made. The pattern here is that change initiatives remain isolated without qualitative
coupling. Several relational practices are set up but fade quickly without a sustainable
connection to other change activities.
By looking through a ‘relational practice’ lens, one can see that organizational change
generally implies that a diversity of actors bring about a variety of change initiatives at various
places in the organization (e.g., reformulating the company’s vision, creating new tasks and
functions, generating new structural arrangements, setting up new training activities, etc.). All