Consulting is a relationship
A consultant seeks to influence a situation without having direct control over all the action. This includes internal advisers, organisational development practitioners, business partners, specialists, coaches, and external consultants. A job title does not settle the relationship. An external consultant may become a manager; an internal specialist may be consulting in one conversation and exercising delegated authority in the next.
Be clear about the role you are taking. If you accept responsibility for running something, contract for the authority and accountability that go with it. If you are advising, do not quietly take over the client’s decisions. Staying to help implement can be valuable; obscuring who owns the consequences is the problem.
Three familiar positions, and a fourth temptation
| Position | What it can offer | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Expert: ‘I can tell you’ | Specialist knowledge, judgement, or a technical answer. | The client may surrender contextual knowledge and ownership; the expert may answer the wrong question. |
| Pair of hands: ‘Tell me what to do’ | Reliable delivery of a genuinely defined task. | The brief may go unexamined; useful challenge and professional judgement may disappear. |
| Collaborator: ‘Let us work on this together’ | A relationship in which both contribute knowledge, choices, and responsibility. | Collaboration needs explicit work, time, and authority; the label alone changes nothing. |
| The quiet fourth position | Working indirectly when a direct challenge would close down useful work. | An unspoken alternative agenda can become manipulation. Ask whether the client could knowingly agree to your approach. |
The September exercise surfaced the attraction of this fourth position. Sometimes timing and tact make a difference. Keep testing your purpose, your accountability, and whether the client can make a meaningful choice. Collaboration can include a direct expert recommendation; it does not require pretending to know nothing.
The space of service
Oshry’s account of systemic position helps explain a recurrent pressure. The client has a need and knowledge of their context. The consultant has something to offer, but may feel exposed: will I be accepted, useful, or paid? Anxiety can drive us to demonstrate expertise immediately, or to agree to whatever is asked. Either move can narrow the relationship before we understand the work.
Notice the pressure without treating it as a personal defect. Slow down enough to ask, listen, and state your own requirements. The client’s uncertainty and your uncertainty can become material for joint inquiry. They do not have to be concealed beneath confidence.
‘Before I suggest an approach, I need to understand what you are trying to change, what you have already tried, and what you need from me.’
Shared responsibility
Block’s 50/50 formulation is a practical challenge to over-responsibility: both parties contribute to the relationship and the work. The September conversation also used 100/100 to express wholehearted participation. Neither phrase divides tasks, authority, or legal liability into equal shares. Specify the actual responsibilities.
- The consultant owns the quality of their contribution, their methods, honesty about limits, and the commitments they make.
- The client owns decisions and actions within their authority, access, participation, and the consequences they retain.
- Both own the work of making the relationship usable: surfacing concerns, checking understanding, and renegotiating when necessary.
Do not use shared responsibility to blame someone who has little power. Ask what each person can actually influence, what constraints they face, and who else must join the agreement.
Assumptions and values become practical choices
The earlier Flawless material stresses valid information, free and informed choice, and commitment grounded in people’s own interests. Valid information includes what can be observed and what people experience; keep the distinction clear. A feeling is information about experience, not proof of another person’s intention.
State what your practice asks of people. If you value participation but only meet the sponsor, or value learning but reward agreement, your method contradicts your claim. Useful consulting makes those contradictions discussable.
The consultant is in the situation
Your presence changes what people say and do. Your confidence, status, identity, commercial interests, favourite methods, and need to help all affect what you notice. Systems thinking does not give you a view from nowhere. It offers ways to make your framing explicit and to test it with others.
- What am I treating as the problem, and what have I left outside?
- What answer would make me feel competent or commercially secure?
- What would I find hard to hear?
- Who experiences the consequences of this work but is absent from the conversation?
- What support or supervision do I need to stay useful?