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Process consultation revisited 5 Worley, 2005), or as a family of OD interventions (French & Bell, 1998), alongside many others, that is especially suitable when dealing with socio-emotional processes and problems in work groups and organizations (e.g., dysfunctional conflict, deficient group processes, poor communication, ineffective behaviours and norms, etc.). Defined this way, process consultation has become just one of the intervention techniques or instruments in the OD consultant’s tool bag instead of a general philosophy or action principle that underlies each intervention effort during change processes. Process consultation has always been and still is an ambiguous concept and practice. Schein himself stresses this point in the preface of the revisited edition of process consultation (Schein, 1999a) contemplating that colleague advisors and managers still don’t understand the essence of ‘process consultation’: it is not a technique or a collection of interventions for working with groups, it is not a model for non-directive counselling, and it is not an occupation or full-time job. Process consultation is essentially about building a helping (client-consultant) relationship through a continuous effort of “jointly deciphering what is going on” (Schein, 1999a, p. 6) in the ongoing interaction, relationship and situation in order to make co-authored choices about how to go on. In the concluding chapter of Process Consultation Revisited Schein (1999) states that: The decisive factor as to whether or not help will occur in human situations involving personality, group dynamics, and culture is the relationship [italics added] between the helper and the person, group, or organization that needs help. From that point of view, every action I take, from the beginning contact with a client, should be an intervention that simultaneously allows both the client and me to diagnose what is going on and that builds a relationship between us. When all is said and done, I measure my success in
Process consultation revisited 6 every contact by whether or not I feel the relationship has been helpful and whether or not the client feels helped. (p. 242-243) However, several reasons can be identified concerning the ambiguous nature of process consultation and its difficulty to survive the various developments in OD thinking. Firstly, the concept of process consultation is used in two different meanings by Schein (1987, 1999a). It both refers to the continuous process of building a helping (client-consultant) relationship and to a specific consultation role (doctor-patient model, expert model and process consultancy model) that is enacted during the process, depending on the joint assessment of which role is most helping at present. Secondly, empirical research on process consultation is rather scarce (e.g., Kaplan, 1979; Cummings & Worley, 2005). And thirdly, although Schein is championing clinical/qualitative approaches (1995) and is using a symbolic-interactionist approach (Schein, 1999a), there seems to have been a lack of vocabulary and conceptualization of the relational processes that are at work. Maybe this lack of proper theorizing of what really works in ongoing interactions for change, makes the survival and diffusion of process consultation so difficult. A ‘relational practice’ perspective on intervention and processes (e.g., McNamee, 1998; Shotter & Katz, 1996; Bouwen, 2001; Shotter, 2004; Bouwen & Taillieu, 2004; Gergen & Hosking, 2006; Hosking, 2006; Bouwen, 2007), as a variant of social-relational constructionist thinking (e.g., Gergen, 1994; Shotter, 1993; Bouwen, 1998; Bouwen & Hosking, 2000), can offer this kind of theorizing and can help to catch the dynamics going on in process consultation. An epistemological turn from the mere cognitive towards the relational aspects of social interaction made it possible to conceptualize in a new way the core orientation of social processes (e.g., Gergen, 1994). Where in the past reflection after the facts was considered as crucial, now the
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