Process consultants ask questions

Content consultants, experts provide answers. They assume the client knows what he is asking and knows what to do with the information. Process consultants ask questions. Their mission is to help the client understand the problem, arrive at the solution, and implement it.

I started my consulting career as a content consultant. I researched markets with beginner eye; and I looked at trends in customer needs and competitive response and made recommendations about new products or sales channels. 

I quickly learned that the success or failure of the project depended on leadership. In short, if the client was engaged and interested in learning he would implement; if not, the report sat on the shelf gathering dust.

To be fair, I drew this conclusion on two data points. Extrapolating from incomplete data is a danger in all consulting, but this observation proved to be true over thirty-seven years in consulting. My initial conclusion pushed me to get more education in leadership and organizations development at Teachers College Columbia under Dr. Warner Burke,  and to work behind Dr. George Litwin for ten years including working with many well-known OD consultants that George partnered with.

I don’t hold myself out as being in that league, but I did work for a long time as a process consultant, a change guy, and so developed this list of favorite questions. I never used them all with one client; the objective was to get the client talking.

Engagement

1. I am excited/ pleased/ intrigued/ concerned to be here because______; how do you approach this project? This question starts the engagement process. It works if you authentically express your feelings about the project (hopefully more pluses than minuses) and allow the client to express emotions around the engagement).

Problem definition

2. What problem are we trying to solve? Be aware that some clients will recoil at tge word “problem.” Allow for the redefinition to “opportunity” or “initiative,” but you are really trying to get the client to describe why they want to hire you.

3. What is happening? This is especially helpful if the client is having difficulty describing the problem or if you sense that there are many problems. Prompts include:
   1. What is happening that should be happening?
   2. What isn’t happening the shouyldn’t be happening?
   3. What is happening that shouldn’t be happening?
   4. What isn’t happening that should be happening?

These prompts are from the Is/should matric, which I often use to visibly  display the answers. I start with the positives because those are constraints for the project – i.e. , “don’t mess these up!”

4. What is your part of this problem? This is a disarming question to many clients. I use it early, especially if they client as defined the problem as caused by “them.” If they continue to blame others, I say, “OK I get their part of the problem, what is your part of the problem. If that still doesn’t work, I knew I had a controlling client and I could adapt my approach.

5. If you found a brass bottle in a cave and released a genie, what three outcomes would you wish for this project? This is a classic “vision of success” question. I like the fanciful set-up because it is engaging and the ‘three wishes” because it moves beyond the – “fix the problem dammit” answer often to move qualitative outcomes

6. What is your worst nightmare about this project? Or alternatively “What keeps you up at night about this project?” This surfaced concerns that guided me at all stages in the project.

7. Whose help will we need? Alternately,  what person or group of person’s (besides you) is critical to the success of this project? I often asked this earlier because it mapped the  client system. Another place to use it is after diagnosis, before solution implementation planning.

Pre-implementation

8. What are the forces that will support or encourage this solution?/ What are the forces constrain or oppose this solution? Many will recognize these questions are Kurt Lewin’s Force Field Analysis. While force field analysis is usually conducted as a facilitated group process, it can be used informally in discussion. Remember to create next steps especially for forces against.

9. What is your part of this solution? I always came back to engaging the client personally pre-implementation of the solution.

10. How will we know this is working? Mid- implementation? At project end? In one year? In five years? This is a metrics question and you are looking for process metrics to know if the implementation is on track, end of project results metrics, and sustainability metrics.

The point of all these questions is engagement, to get the client thinking and talking about the project and outcomes. Notice that they are all open-ended question (what, where, how), which require more than one word answers and not closed ended questions (do, Is,, should), which shut down conversation and feel like interrogation if overused.

Leadership and client engagement turns out to be one if not the primary success factor in change. Many leaders approach change with a “think – talk – act” paradigm. Your questions can help them move to action.