When I propose such a process I typically get the argument that the client
paying for the survey will never agree to seeing only the limited data that this
process will reveal at his or her level. However, in my experience this need to
see all the data is premised on the client's perception that he or she will have to
do all the feedback and remedial work. Once the client understands that the
upward cascading process actually gets problem solving started at the time of
feedback, he or she is typically much more attracted to it. It takes longer for the
data to get to the top level, but it is a much quicker way to get problem solving
started in the organization. If that is not what the client wants, then the survey
probably should not have been done in the first place. Just gathering the
information so that management can make an assessment of whether or not
there are problems stands a good chance of creating problems among
employees where there were none before. The survey gets them thinking about
issues that they may not have thought about and gets them talking to each other
about areas where they did not realize they had shared views. Once several
employees discover from talking about the survey that they share a concern, it
becomes more of an issue than it may have been when each thought they were
alone in their view. The survey then becomes, unwittingly a tool stimulating
"revolution" rather than problem solving.
Let me summarize. The clinical approach to action research, embodied
most clearly in process consultation, rests on a number of assumptions and
values:
1) Only the client ultimately knows what he or she can do, will do, and
wants to do, hence the strategic goal of process consultation must be to develop
a process that will build the consultant and client into a team that will own all the
interventions.
2) It is the job of the consultant/helper to educate the client through the
early interventions on the potential consequences of later interventions.
3) Everything the consultant does, from the earliest responses to the
clients initial inquiries, is an intervention. The consultant must therefore be
highly aware of the consequences of different "diagnostic" interventions.
If initial intervention are so critical, we need some concepts to
differentiate the options that the process consultant has. Initial interventions can
be categorized into four classes that have different degrees of impact on the
client:
1) Pure inquiry: What is going on? Tell me more.
This intervention interferes minimally with the client's own efforts to get
their story out in their own way.
2) Diagnostic inquiry: Why did that happen? Why did you do that? How
did that make you feel?
This intervention interferes with the client's thought process in that it
attempts to get the client to think about reasons and causal linkages. The
consultant is guiding the client's thought process and inquires further about
feelings and reactions.
3) Action oriented inquiry: What did you d? What will you do about
that?
This intervention also interferes with the client's thought process by
forcing the client to think about prior, present, and future actions. The consultant
is guiding the thought process toward action and toward the future.
d) Confrontive inquiry: Have you considered that this happened for the
following reason? Could it be that you were ..... ? wonder whether they did that
because.......
This intervention is labeled "confrontive" because it forces the client to
think about content that the client may never before have thought about.
Whereas the other interventions interfere with the client's thought process, this
intervention interferes with the content. The client must now consider some
thoughts that the consultant is having. Suggestions, advice, and other more
directive interventions are all in the category of "confrontive" by this same
definition.
The reader will recognize that part of the skill of helping is to know how to
move through these various kinds of interventions in such a way that the client
is stimulated to tell his or her story with minimal disruption of either the process
or the content. Why is it important to hear the client's full story? Because the
client will typically not tell the helper what is really the problem until he or she
trusts the helper to be helpful. One of the first tests of that is whether the helper
is willing to listen without being too intrusive.
The major implication of this line of thinking is that in the training of
consultants/helpers far more emphasis needs to be given to the clinical skills of
"on-line" intervention. Right now the training is heavily biased toward the skills
of data gathering and toward academic theories of large and small system
interventions. In that process the consultant may learn all about how to gather
information as a prelude to designing the grand intervention and, in that very
process, lose the client or, worse, damage the client by thoughtless inquiry
processes.
A second implication is that if clients are more likely to reveal what is
really bothering them as they come to feel more like a team member in the
inquiry process, more valid data will surface for a theory of what goes in
organizations. One reason our organization theories are weak is that they are
based on superficial data gathered from reluctant "subjects." A clinical inquiry
model that stimulates real openness on the part of clients will reveal a set of
variables and phenomena that will make it possible to build far better theories of
organizational dynamics.
In conclusion, if we go back to the original question posed in the title, it
should be clear to the reader that I view "Process Consultation" and "Clinical
Inquiry" to be essentially the same, but that the concept of "Action Research"
has come to mean two quite different things that should not be confused. Action
research as defined by researchers involves the client in the data gathering but
is driven by the researcher's agenda. Action research as defined by the
clinician involves the helper consultant in the client's inquiry process and the
process is driven by the client's needs.
I have tried to argue that the clinical model is the more appropriate one
for consultation and organizational development projects because its
assumptions fit better the realities of organizational life and are more likely to
reveal important organizational dynamics. It is time we took the clinical model
of action research more seriously and trained consultants to implement it
appropriately.