Process consultation Theory

Process consultation is a term developed by Edgar Schein in the late 1960s as a contribution to
organization development theory and practice. While his intention was to articulate an approach
to consultation, he found that it was being used by managers as much as by consultants. The term
process consultation has become established in the field of organization development and
management theory as an approach to being helpful to think out and work through problems.
This entry describes process consultation with regard to more expert-based approaches and
discusses how it also serves as the foundation of clinical inquiry/research.

Schein describes and contrasts three helping models: the doctor-patient model, the purchase
model, and process consultation. The doctor-patient model of helping is grounded in the familiar
process of a client experiencing a problem and going to an expert, who performs an assessment
and prescribes a solution that the client implements. This approach to receiving help is both
prevalent and most useful as the knowledge of experts is an important contribution to addressing
problems. However, as Schein points out, certain elements need to be in play for this approach to
be effective. The client needs to have identified the problem area correctly and reveal the
necessary information for an accurate assessment by the expert. The expert needs to have the
necessary expertise for effective assessment and prescription. The client has to accept the
assessment, implement the prescription, and have the problem solved after withdrawal of the
expert.

In the purchase model, the client purchases the skills of the expert, who implements them on
behalf of the client. This approach also depends on the client’s performing a correct assessment
and so identifying the relevant expert and the client’s accepting what the expert has done;
similarly, the problem is solved after the expert has withdrawn. Organizations draw on the
doctor-patient model when external experts are brought in to perform an analysis and to write a
report with recommendations for organizational action. They draw on the purchase model when
they employ external expert skills, for example, to design and install technology or other
systems. The third model, process consultation, is defined by Schein as the creation of a
relationship with the client that permits the client to perceive, understand, and act on process
events that occur in the client’s internal and external environment to improve the situation as
defined by the client. From this definition, it can be seen that core elements of process
consultation are building a collaborative relationship between consultant and client so that the
client sees what is going on, develops some understanding, and builds a plan to act.

Process consultation is based on the underlying assumptions that managers often do not know
what precisely is wrong in an organization and so need a special kind of help to understand what
their problems actually are. They may think only of the doctor-patient model and therefore have
a limited knowledge of the different kinds of help consultants can give and so may benefit from
help in knowing what kind of help to seek. More important, they may want to solve the problems
themselves and not hand over to an expert who provides a prescription, but at the same time they
need help in deciding what to do. In this manner, it may be understood how process consultation
is an organizational equivalent of what occurs in therapy, where the therapist helps clients solve
their own problems.
Assessment and Intervention
In the expert-based models described above, assessment or diagnosis is undertaken by the expert
as an antecedent to intervention. In process consultation, assessment and intervention are
simultaneous processes as the process consultant engages with the client in trying to understand
what is going on and why. Process consultants ask questions and make comments that aim to be
helpful in structuring the client’s thinking further and in revealing information about what is
really going, thereby teaching the client to be able to look at his or her own information and
analyze it. Their interventions must seem normal and not be mysterious so that clients
themselves may learn the skills of attending to their experience, testing their insights, and taking
actions based on their understanding. Hence, through the interaction between the process
consultant and the client, the client performs the assessment. A key tacit process is that process
consultants are communicating to the client that they are willing to help but not take the problem
onto their own shoulders. Schein frames a typology of interventions through which the client is
enabled to think through the problem and develop an action plan for addressing it. In pure
inquiry, process consultants listen carefully and neutrally and prompt the elicitation and
exploration of the story of what is taking place, thereby demonstrating the client’s ownership of
the issues and the facilitative role of the process consultant.

The second type of inquiry is what Schein calls diagnostic inquiry, in which process consultants
begin to manage the process of how the content is understood by the client by exploring (1)
reasoning processes, (2), emotional processes, and (3) actions. The third type of inquiry is what
Schein calls confrontive inquiry. This is where the process consultants, by sharing their own
ideas, challenge the client to think from a new perspective. These ideas may refer to (1) process
and (2) content and focus on possible decisions and actions.

Process Consultation and Clinical Inquiry/Research

There are ongoing debates about the philosophy and methodologies of organizational and
management research and their relevance to management practice. In this context, Schein argues
that the knowledge obtained by traditional research models frequently do not reflect what “things
are really like” in organizations and so are inadequate for studying organizational processes.
Accordingly, he describes clinical inquiry/research as synonymous with process consultation.
Clinical inquiry/research is based on three basic assumptions. These assumptions are grounded in
the notion of a clinician as a professional who can diagnose a problem in terms of a deviation
from “health” and work with a client to return to health.
 Clinical researchers are hired to help. The research agenda comes from the needs of the client
system, not from the interests of the researchers. In this regard, clinical inquiry and research
may be distinguished from traditional action research that typically begins from the
researcher’s initiative and where the organization accommodates the researcher’s needs. In
clinical inquiry/research the researcher is hired, and is being paid, to help, which means that
the researcher may be afforded richer access to organizations that might not be shared readily
with outsiders
 Clinical researchers work from models of health and therefore are trained to recognize
pathological deviations from health. Clinical researchers, therefore, need to be trained in
organizational dynamics and have models of organizational health so that they know what to
notice in organizations.
 Clinical researchers are not only concerned with diagnosis but have a primary focus on
treatment. Accordingly, they need to be skilled in providing help in the manner of process
consultation, which as described above is focused on being helpful. There are several
working principles underpinning the practice of clinical inquiry/research. The issues that
clinical researchers work on are important for the organization because they have been hired
to help.

They accept the assumption that unless they attempt to change the system, they cannot really
understand it. The primary sources to organizational data are not what is “out there” in the
system but are in the effects of and responses to intervention. Through being present in a helping
role, clinical inquiry/researchers are noticing how data are continuously being generated as the
change process proceeds. Clinical researchers engage in observing incidents of learning and
change, studying the effects of interventions, focusing on puzzles and anomalies that are difficult
to explain, and thereby working to build theory and empirical knowledge through developing
concepts that capture the real dynamics of the organization and focusing on the characteristic of
systems and systemic dynamics. In this way, clinical researchers’ data is “real-time,” generated
in the act of managing change, not data created especially for the research project.

At the heart of process consultation and clinical inquiry/research is the relationship with the
client and the mode of collaborative inquiry. Clinical inquiry/research is a complete form of
collaborative research because the knowledge is produced in collaboration with clients in a
manner that serves both the practical needs of the clients and knowledge for the academic
community. Working to be helpful is the central theme of process consultation and clinical
inquiry/research. It is the key starting point and a constant focus of attention. It is the client who
owns the problem and the solution, and clinical researchers must constantly be aware that the
interactions in the here and now continually provide diagnostic information about what is going
on, how the client is responding, and the relationship between clinical researcher and client. As
assessment and intervention are parallel and simultaneous, rather than sequential, clinical
researchers are always intervening. Everything is data. Accordingly, clinical researchers need to
think out the consequences of their actions.

What is central, therefore, to the theory and practice of process consultation and clinical inquiry/
research is the focus on and skill of learning how to be helpful. For the process consultant, this
involves recognizing the limitations of expertise-based models and attending to how to be
helpful to the client.
It is not that the process consultant has no expertise. Process consultants’ expertise is in
establishing a helping relationship, knowing what to look for in organizations, and intervening in
such a way that organizational process are improved. So there may be occasions that a particular
expertise is needed by the client, and the process consultant may offer that expertise. Schein’s
advice is always to begin in the process consultation mode—that is, with a spirit of inquiry.
When one begins as the expert, it is difficult to step out of that role, whereas beginning in the
process consultation mode and remaining firmly in it allows the process consultant to step into
an expert role when the occasion demands and then step out of it.
Importance
Process consultation is a foundational element of organization development; it articulates a core
philosophical value on being helpful. The focus of much scholarship is on content knowledge
and expertise, with little attention paid to the scholarship of practice. The scholarly and
educational implications of process consultation are that scholars and researchers would benefit
from learning to be helpful. Schein suggests that as part of their education, business, and
organization studies, students spend time in organizations, hanging around, learning the skills of
how to be helpful. The professional implications of process consultation for modern managers
are that as expertise becomes more narrowly defined, the role of the general managers
increasingly becomes one of enabling professionals to do their own jobs well. As Schein himself
experienced, what was articulated initially as a form of consultation became adopted by
managers in working with their own staff. He also found that process consultation skills are
useful for parents, professionals in all fields, and for the informal exchanges between colleagues
and friends. Process consultation also gives managers more choice in relation to using
consultants, and so they can avail of the different forms of help that consultants can provide.