Ten Fundamentals of Process Consulting: Fundamental #2

Dear friends,

Born from the foundational texts of the humble inquiry and process approach, the Ten Fundamentals of Process Consulting are designed to help us understand the theory and practice of being in the Process Consulting mindset.

Whether you are a Process Consultant helping a Client, a CEO leading a team, a department head bringing together leaders to solve an emerging challenge, embodying these fundamentals can be helpful to you in charting your course. For the sake of this series of blogs, we will be using the profession of Process Consulting as our lens. Knowing full well that these fundamentals are practiced by anyone seeking to help another human.

Expressed in the triad below, the ten fundamentals form our DNA as Process Consultants. They are a starting point in our work with others and our traits as we prepare to show up in service to them. In this way, they are distinct and set apart from the core competencies of Process Consulting.

Integrating the ten fundamentals into your leadership is a lifelong journey that will help you become exemplary in their practice.

Leading up to the Society for Process Consulting’s inaugural conference later this fall, we offer these fundamentals for your use, iteration, and adaptation, modeling our willingness to improve, learn, and grow as humans through this publication.

Process Consulting is a philosophy about and attitude toward helping individuals, groups, organizations, and communities. It is not merely a set of techniques to compare and contrast with other techniques. Process Consulting is the fundamental philosophical underpinning of organizational learning and development. Most of what the consultant does in helping organizations is based on the central assumption that one can only help a human system to help itself. [1]

Ed Schein's eloquent words are true now more than ever. As helpers, no matter what field or vocation you are in, we are present with the one we serve, whether that is a person, a team, an organization, or a community. When we are called in to deliver help, we support the one we serve and are not there to "fix them." They (again, a person, a team, an organization or a community) are the only ones who can change their internal systems, culture, and leadership. 

This fundamental reminds all of us that we must see, consider, and work to adjust the underlying systems that are creating the challenges being experienced. A Process Consultant is able to do this by deeply listening to their Client, co-creating helpful process with their Client, and deepening the Client's learning through the entirely of the process.

In this way our thinking, being, and doing can offer help to the entirety of the human system by supporting the humans within that system transform it themselves.

If you have any comments about fundamental #2, please don’t hesitate to email me. I’d love to learn your prospective. Please watch this space for the 3^rd fundamental next Monday.

We will be reviewing all ten fundamentals at the Society’s upcoming conference on 11 November 2024 in Philadelphia. Please sign up through this link today!

As always, if you’d like to learn more about the Society for Process Consulting, please don’t hesitate to give me a call.

Best,

Lon Swartzentruber

Interim CEO Society for Process Consulting

[1] Process Consultation Revisited. Edgar H. Schein, page 1. Addison-Wesley, 1999.

Please take a moment to learn more about the Society's upcoming conference in Philadelphia PA 10 - 12 November 2024!

If you'd like to write a blog post for the Society for Process Consulting, please please send an e-mail to admin@societyforprocessconsuting.com.