1. Always try to be helpful. Process consultants must be mindful of their intentions, and each interaction must be oriented toward being helpful.
2. Always stay in touch with the current reality. Each interaction should produce diagnostic information about the current situation. It includes data about the client’s opinions, beliefs, and emotions; the system’s current functioning; and the practitioner’s reactions, thoughts, and feelings.
3. Access your ignorance. An important source of information about current reality is the practitioner’s understanding of what is known, what is assumed and what is not known. Process consultants must use themselves as instruments of change.
4. Everything you do is an intervention. Any interaction in a consultative relationship generates information as well as consequences. Simply conducting preliminary interviews with group members, for example, can raise member awareness of a situation and help them see it in a new light.
5. The client owns the problem and the solution. This is a key principle in all Organization Development (OD) practice. Practitioner help clients solve their own problems and learn to manage future change.