Consulting, Education, and Transference

I had such an overwhelmingly positive experience working with a client yesterday. It is one of those experiences that brings to mind that we are involved in an ongoing shift of thinking about management practices that is truly eye-opening for many people. Perhaps it is a sort of grandiosity that I allow myself to think that management practice will change significantly over the next 50 years and that I am contributing to this.

Regardless, it is such a pleasure to see people recognize a large field of action and to see ways in which growth includes not only financial performance but human relationships that support this. It reminds me that as a consultant, I am not only in the business of advising, but education. It is an amazingly positive feeling to observe, as I have in so many cases, the learning that occurs when people begin to see other perspectives in an organizational system.

My colleague Yutaka Yamauchi writes about this process in a recent paper that describes this transference[1]. I also see the work that Phil LeNir is doing at CoachingOurselves and see this as a direct attempt to catalyse the local learning experiences of leadership in organisations. I see Cognitive Edge processes also incredibly valuable in facilitating this kind of transference and am interested in better understanding exactly what conditions support it.

[1] Yamauchi. Power of peripheral designers: how users learn to design. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technology (2009) pp. 13