In Mid-Air

As a practicing consultant for over 40 years, in fields as diverse as technology, community development, innovation, business and organizational change, I've undoubtedly made at least as many mistakes as most people and surely many more than I should have. But I don't seem to be making much progress. Although I've continually been thinking about how to do it better, that list gets longer and longer, for a very simple reason. Every time I examine either what I was just doing or what I'm trying to do, it coughs up a couple of headline problems or errors that I think I should have caught. It would be easy to conclude that I simply hadn't thought things through carefully enough. . In retrospect, I could easily have set up a personal “WikiErrors” site that would list every misstep, slip, catastrophe, etc, all the way to the ultimate unhappy category – the one where I say, “What was I possibly thinking?” I nevertheless still tend to suspect that I should have caught most of those mistakes.

I also know beyond any doubt that I am not alone in this situation. When I talk with colleagues, or participate in on-line groups and exchanges, I discover that the same thing is happening to them and others. We have dozens of magazines and journals, enough “how-to-do-it-better” conferences and workshops to go to a different one every day for years. Most visibly, we have now many social media programs which contain groups devoted to consulting (and virtually every other profession), and many of them, in sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, have tens of thousands of members. I am morally certain that if I (or you) looked at similar files or conferences in the past, I (or you) would find exactly the same complaints and questions. I thought – and I continue to think – that despite an awful lot of talk and writing to the contrary, we don’t seem to be learning much.

But Maybe Not.

There’s another way to look at all this, and it’s pretty much the way we mostly encourage our clients and colleagues to look at their experiences. I have been participating in a number of organizational consulting groups on LinkedIn and I see that virtually everyone using these sites at root agrees with the others. There are some outriders to be sure – some of them are undoubtedly mine – but the thing that stands out is that almost all of us agree, even though that fact doesn’t seem to translate into demonstrated effective action. Why not? How can we be convinced we’re right and yet so wrong?

Here’s how. The discussions among us are both correct and unhelpful because they are addressed at the wrong level; wrong for recognizing the need for action and understanding the characteristics of effective action on that topic or in those circumstances. It is as though we’re in mid-air. We feel as though we’re on solid ground and we act that way, but we’re really not. For example, when someone says “We need to communicate better,” or “We agree on greater communication,” there is usually broad agreement. But, there are no genuine action implications in that statement. I call this “misplaced concreteness” because although it sounds useful and actionable, it is not.

Consider just a few of the options if someone sets out to  follow such a prescription. Communicate how?  Should we write, call by phone, send emails, walk to another office and talk, convene a meeting of everyone involved (and who should that be), walk around and tell “everyone” one at a time? Etc. But these are the realities, these and many other specific possibilities, to say nothing of what the message should be and whether there are expectations as to future behavior. The choice of these and the details of actually following through makes all the difference in the world. So we can all agree that “Better communication is needed,” without at all agreeing on what should actually happen or carried out by whom. We tend to disregard these choices on the grounds that they are trivial, or that we all know what is meant, but these assumptions are emphatically false. The choice of method, the details of execution, the support or reinforcement (if any) that accompanies those actions, all make a great and even deterministic difference.