Keep the distinctions useful
| Body of practice | Its particular question | Connection to consulting |
|---|---|---|
| Systemic consulting | How can I help within this relationship and wider situation? | Role, contract, inquiry, responsibility, power, and ownership. |
| Facilitation | How can people work together on what matters? | Design and hold a process that enables participation, disagreement, decisions, and learning. |
| Workshop design | What sequence and conditions will enable the intended work? | Translate purpose into preparation, participation, environment, activities, outputs, and follow-through. |
| Four dynamics | Which forms of differentiation and connection does this situation need? | Notice what is being overused, neglected, or kept apart in the group or organisation. |
| Five core practices | What everyday practices make purposeful adaptation possible? | Connect an assignment to conversations, clarity, learning, culture, and intent. |
| Intervention and OD skills | How can people change patterns of organising and sustain the change? | Combine inquiry, relationships, process, structures, action, reflection, and capability over time. |
The same piece of work can draw on all of these. They are connected practices with different questions, not interchangeable names for one model. This guide concentrates on consulting; the links below lead into the adjoining work.
Facilitation and workshop design
Facilitation begins before people enter the room and continues after they leave. The consulting contract clarifies the purpose, sponsorship, authority, and relationship. Process design then asks who needs to work together, what information they need, how they will participate, and how the work will be used.
The design canvas used in the wider material considers people, preparation and inputs, environment, pitfalls and assumptions, intent, the container, outcomes, outputs, agenda, and reflection. Use it to test the design rather than fill boxes mechanically. Support and challenge, permission and protection, and the facilitator’s own authority all deserve attention.
Facilitation and systems consulting materials · Large-group processes · Search and compare participatory methods
Four dynamics
My four-dynamics account develops connections with Oshry’s work on differentiation, homogenisation, individuation, and integration. The practical language is segment, blend, empower, and harmonise. Each enables something that the others alone cannot provide.
| Dynamic | What it enables | Consulting question |
|---|---|---|
| Segment | Specialised groups develop distinctive knowledge, experience, and capability. | Where do differences need space to develop and be heard? |
| Blend | People share knowledge and experience across boundaries and develop commonality. | Who needs to learn from whom, and where are experiences kept apart? |
| Empower | Individuals develop and use their own talents, judgement, and agency. | What can each person decide or contribute without waiting for permission? |
| Harmonise | People align around shared purpose and coordinate their contributions. | What agreements connect the different contributions into useful action? |
These are continuing dynamics, not personality types or stages to complete. A workshop may blend experience while the organisation still prevents empowerment. A common purpose can help harmonise without erasing the differences that make the work intelligent. Ask what combination is needed here.
Five core practices
| Practice | Meaning in this work |
|---|---|
| Productive conversations | Tell the truth, surface disagreement, test reasoning, and make commitments people understand. |
| Clarity practices | Keep purpose, priorities, roles, decision rights, ownership, and scope sufficiently clear to act. |
| Learning as practice | Try, notice, reflect, adjust, and repeat as part of the work. |
| Culture shaping | Attend to repeated experiences: behaviour, systems and structures, and the symbols and stories that make expectations credible. |
| Good and clear intent | Connect action to value for people and communities; make purposes and trade-offs clear enough for responsible judgement. |
The first three form a learning system: conversations make experience discussable, clarity makes action and responsibility possible, and learning changes what happens next. Culture shaping attends to what repeated experience teaches people. Good and clear intent gives the work direction without trying to specify every action.
For a learning contract, ask whether these practices will exist after the assignment. Who convenes the conversation? What is clear enough to decide? How does the next cycle happen? What organisational signals support or contradict it? Whose interests does the intent serve?
Five core practices collection · Clarity practices teaching deck · Productive conversations
Intervention, OD, and systems practice
The wider intervention material adds ways to examine service demand and flow, operating arrangements, leadership, culture, boundaries, and the capacity to adapt. Technical changes and adaptive work may both be needed. A new process can fail because its conditions of use have not changed; a conversation can be useful without being sufficient.
Select methods against the situation and your competence. Different approaches illuminate different relationships. Avoid a toolbox display that asks the client to admire your range. Explain what a method helps people do, what it requires, and how you will know whether it is helping.
Systems leadership and change · Viable System Model · Systems thinking practice tools
Relational and place-based public services
This is a related field of application. The consulting question is how we help; the public-service question includes how relationships, judgement, organisational arrangements, and place make useful service possible. Keep attention on the people whose lives are affected, not only the commissioning organisation.
Relational public services collection · SysPrac26 follow-up sessions