Different starting points
Participants brought internal and external consulting, public-service work, education, technology, and organisational change. The opening question was practical: how do we help without defaulting either to expert answers or unquestioning delivery of a brief? The discussion drew on varied experiences rather than working through a slide deck.
Joining and audio difficulties, organisational device restrictions, and limited use of breakouts affected the session. These are reminders that the conditions for participation are part of design. The account below follows themes rather than reproducing every exchange.
Expert, pair of hands, collaborator, and the quiet fourth role
The opening role exercise distinguished telling the client what to do, doing what the client asks, and working collaboratively. Several people recognised a fourth position: doing useful work quietly within a constrained brief. That opened questions about tact, transparency, agency, and whether indirect work can become manipulation.
A Steve Jobs clip raised a challenge about consultants’ accountability for advice. The discussion considered staying to help deliver and taking a more direct leadership role. The useful distinction was whether responsibility and authority had been made explicit. Read the roles chapter.
The pressures in the consulting relationship
The consultant’s wish to be accepted and useful can prompt premature expertise or compliance. The client brings their own knowledge, uncertainty, and exposure. Oshry’s space of service helped describe these pressures without reducing them to personality.
Mutual responsibility and co-learning offered an alternative. The 50/50 and 100/100 language was about participation in the relationship, rather than equal tasks or formal authority. Internal consulting made the additional relationships with managers and sponsors especially visible.
Contracting keeps happening
The group discussed contracting as an explicit agreement about the relationship as well as the task, including wants, offers, access, and what happens when things become difficult. A relationship ‘prenup’ was one memorable description. Internal work may need a triangular or rectangular agreement between the consultant, client, line manager, and a separate sponsor.
A practical veto question was: ‘If we both agree this is the right thing to do, who can still say no?’ Recontracting becomes necessary when the useful work differs from the initial request or the agreed conditions are unavailable. Read the contracting chapter.
Inquire before solving
The client behind the client and the problem behind the problem prompted exploration of wider relationships and purposes. The discussion also challenged a consultant’s temptation to claim superior knowledge of the ‘real’ problem. Political context, the client’s own judgement, and the management of the issue all matter.
An anonymised example showed that holding a justified professional position can leave space for more useful work later. Other examples explored how a consultant can be recruited into existing tensions or asked to carry responsibility that belongs elsewhere. Read the inquiry chapter.
Authenticity, access, and power
Examples concerned unavailable sponsors, distracted senior leaders, contradictory expectations, and the difficulty of challenging powerful people. The central move was to describe an experience or pattern and its effect on the work, then make a request. Authenticity was discussed as putting relevant experience into words, not saying every thought or emotion.
The conversation recognised economic dependence, limited exit for internal consultants, and the risks of scapegoating or collusion. Agency cannot simply be demanded from a person whose choices are constrained. Support, timing, scope, and escalation all affect what is possible.
FONT, interpretation, and concerns
The chat introduced FONT and Nonviolent Communication, separating observation, thought, feeling, and need before a request. Another contribution asked what meaning we had placed on an event and what else it might mean. Both helped distinguish an observation from a story about someone’s intention.
Repeated objections led to discussion of when to name the pattern itself. The first task remains to understand and respond to the concern. A later pricing example showed how an unexpected reaction can have an explanation the consultant has not considered, including loyalty to an existing relationship. Read the conversations chapter.
Outputs, outcomes, and learning
The group distinguished producing a report from helping create an outcome, while recognising that a report may have an honest and necessary purpose. Sometimes the first useful achievement is understanding. The conversation also touched on organisational performance that looks like progress without changing much.
A question about protected co-learning asked whether learning itself could be contracted as a deliverable, especially when a commission expects predetermined outputs. Transformative outcomes were mentioned, but no evaluation method was agreed. The new contracting-for-learning chapter develops that open question into a proposed agreement, example, and evidence framework.
Risk, accountability, and the unsaid
A pre-mortem was suggested as a way to reveal risks before the work proceeds. One hypothesis was that repeatedly avoiding small interpersonal risks can leave a larger project risk unaddressed. This was an idea to examine, not a conclusion demonstrated by the session.
A participant’s ‘three Ds’, disadvantage, dysfunction, and demise, offered another prompt for considering consequences. A Dear John comedy clip illustrated the social conventions around naming an uncomfortable shared experience. The clips and heuristics were discussion prompts, not evidence for a general law.
What the session left us with
- A wish for a visual organiser and a map connecting problems with possible responses.
- A request for the internal consulting and triangular contracting material.
- An unresolved question about contracting for learning.
- A practical recontracting sentence to use on a live assignment.
- A need for rehearsal and replay: the planned triad practice was not completed in this online session.
- A reminder that ‘flawless’ concerns conscious choice in the relationship, rather than perfection.
This guide supplies the visual organiser, a practice map, the internal consulting note, worked situations, and the developed learning material. The resource directory retains the chat links and earlier reading routes.
About this account
The account synthesises the session transcript, Teams chat, facilitator notes, and earlier teaching material. Participant examples have been generalised and anonymised. The raw transcript and recording are not published here; the session closed with an explicit statement that the transcript was not intended for circulation. Publicly authored resources retain their attribution.
This is a learning resource, not verbatim minutes or a claim that the group endorsed every subsequent development. Corrections and alternative interpretations are welcome.