FF 0.3 Understanding Process Consultation

Schein (1988, Process Consultation: its role in organization development 2nd ed. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.) capture that dimension of a facilitator's responsibility in his definition of process consultation as:

A set of activities on the part of the consultant that helps the client perceive, understand, and act upon the process events that occur in the client's environment in order to improve the situation as defined by the client.

Process consultation does not provide solutions or answers. It leaves the group with the ownership of problems and the responsibility for resolutions. It is distinctly educative in enhancing people's capacity for process management and is therefore non-prescriptive. 

Process consultation can focus on the individual, interpersonal, group, or organizational level.

Process consultation revolves around strategic (reasoned and intentional) interventions into the life of the group in order to help it to be more effective.

Processes (as distinguished from content) generally involve how individuals, groups, and organizations interact and conduct their work. There are task processes (methods, procedures used to do the work) and interpersonal processes (how people relate to one another).

Processes that generally require attention are:

• Power distribution
• Commitment
• Communications
• Problem solving and decision making
• Influencing and leading
• Developing norms and culture
• Providing feedback
• Running meetings
• Rewards and consequences
• Evaluation

The facilitator needs to consider several factors in selecting and executing interventions: Purpose, Focus, Type, Timing, Intensity, Depth.

Purpose

Interventions are generally used to contribute to one of the following purposes:

1. Providing help to the group members in their thinking and action
2. Surfacing diagnostic information that is valid, useful, and lead to insight
3. Creating ownership and responsibility on the part of the members for their processes, dynamics, and problem diagnosis/resolution
4. Developing the group's capability to surface diagnostic data, to understand and manage its processes and dynamics, and to create functional relationship, norms, and methods of working

All four of the purposes are inherently aimed at producing group learning. The group needs to learn, to mature, and to become more effective over time.

Focus

The focus of an intervention can be an individual, an interpersonal pair or subgroup, or the entire group. The focus will vary based on what you see and what purpose you wish to accomplish. 

Facilitator-initiated interventions will usually occur in the group setting, but occasionally you may wish to take individual and interpersonal interventions "off-line," particularly when you believe that working away from the group with the individual(s) involved would be more effective in meeting your intended purpose.

Type

Reddy (1994) and Schein (1988) discuss various types of interventions. The following list of interventions integrates Schein's, Reddy's, and our thinking:

1. Active listening: Paying close attention to both what is being said and the processes that are occurring, leading to highlighting, clarification, summarizing, and consensus testing.
2. Inquiry: Questions and probes to raise data, focus attention, and/or stimulate diagnostic thinking; surfacing data for the group to look at.
3. Observation and feedback: seeking what is going on with an individual or the group and then (a) describing in behavioral terms what they are doing; (b) reflecting their emotional state; and (c) interpreting the underlying dynamics of what is going on.
4. Concretization: Pushing people to be concrete and specific to get beyond generalizations.
5. Historical reconstruction: Looking back over events to force a reconstruction and review of what was done and how it was done (emphasizing the process dimensions).
6. Including process focus: Building in process analysis periods, feedback sessions, and process discussions.
7. Cognitive inputs: Concepts or ideas shared with the group to help members understand something.
8. Skill building: Interjecting brief learning activities to enhance the capabilities of the group members in some needed competency (e.g., feedback, problem solving).
9. Counseling/guidance: Helping the group or individuals look at themselves and actively engage in solving their own problems.
10. Designing processes: Designing and managing activities, methods, or exercises to effectively reach desired outcomes.
11. Structural alternatives: Suggesting options for group membership, subgroups, interaction patterns, work allocation, roles and responsibilities, and so forth.
12. Content suggestions or recommendations: Providing input or opinions concerning the content the group is working on; recommending what the group should do about some aspect of the group's content.

When designing specific interventions, you can use the following continuum, which reflects the dimensions that characterize different types of interventions:

Non-directive   <-->     Directive

Cognitive        <-->     Emotional

Reflective           <-->     Active

(Diagnostic)               (Doing)

Exploratory     <-->     Confrontative

Participating    <-->     Participating  

alongside the                   in the Group

group 

For example, inquiry is more exploratory, non-directive, reflective, and cognitive and assumes there is group responsibility and that the facilitator is working alongside the group. On the other hand, the designing processes intervention is more directive and active. It could be either more exploratory or more confrontative; more cognitive or more emotional. It would probably be in the middle on responsibility and facilitator participation.

Timing

The important timing considerations are to intervene during the following:

• Close to the action of interest when it's fresh and the group can more easily remember and see what is being highlighted.
• When the group can use the information to further its progress.
• When the group is ready, willing, and able to hear and understand; when members are not engaged in something else and are mature enough as a group.

Interventions always need to be aimed at moving the group forward and helping them learn while not distracting the group or taking them off their task inappropriately. Poorly timed interventions may have little effect and can even produce confusion or resistance.

Intensity

According to Reddy (1994), intensity is the facilitator's intended impact, the resulting attention or seriousness hopes for from the group. The intensity level (high, medium, low) is controlled by the facilitator through the choice of words, voice tone and inflection, body language (nonverbal positioning, expressions, gestures), and personal emotional delivery.

Depth

The depth or level of intervention needs to be carefully considered in light of three factors:

• What you are trying to accomplish
• What the group needs at a given point in time to be able to move forward productively
• The group's maturity (level of understanding, skill, learning orientation, ability to hear and assimilate)

A common analogy used to discuss depth and levels is the iceberg, as depicted in Fig 2.

Fig: "The Iceberg"

Level 1: Content is focused on the work of the group -- its charter, tasks, methods, and outcomes.

Level 2: Overt Group Issues comprises the behaviors and interactions you can easily observe, such as conflicts, members being interrupted, lack of participation, communication patterns, and decision processes that members disagree with.

Level 3: Covert Group Issues comprises the core issues for a particular group that are not talked about or displayed explicitly. In other words, you can't "see" these. Typically, these issues relate to inclusion/exclusion, independence/dependence, competence/confidence, control.autonomy, identity.esteem, trust/vulnerability, and intimacy/distance.

Level 4: Deeper Individual Characteristics includes personality factors rooted in history; deeply held values, beliefs, and assumptions; defense systems; and basic needs and fears. Work at this level is not appropriate in most process consultation situations. Unless you are specifically trained and experienced to work on such deep individual issues.

Level 5: The Unconscious is not accessible to the individual or the facilitator. These issues and dynamics are deeply hidden and can only be worked with by trained, clinical professionals.

 When considering depth, it is important to keep in mind the following:

• The risks of the intervention -- being rejected or creating resistance -- increase as one moves from Level 1 to Level 5.
• Interventions generally shift from being cognitive to being more emotional as one moves through the levels.
• You should intervene only at the level needed to help the group progress.
• You can intervene effectively only at those levels the group is ready for and is capable of handling.

Process consultation (PC) is a philosophy, a set of skills, and a way of thinking about what is going on and what effectiveness requires. It is useful to the facilitator in the design of sessions and the building of the agenda. However, PC is most valuable in working with groups, particularly in managing data, decision making, and group dynamics.

(Justice, Thomas (1999) The Facilitator's Fieldbook, HRD Press, NY. P23~28.)