Resource-Ful Consulting: Working with Your Presence and Identity in Consulting to Change

Resource-ful Consulting: Working with your Presence and Identity in Consulting to Change. Karen Izod and Susan Rosina Whittle. London: Karnac, 2014The Introduction to this book opens with "This is a book about consulting to organisations ..." (p. xvii). It is clear from the outset that the authors' focus is on the "I" and the "me" within the change process, seeing "all consulting work is mediated through my sense of self" (p. xix). This requires attention to be paid to identities (who I am/am not at any time); presence (described as behaviour regulation when experiencing anxiety or complacency); and preoccupations (what I habitually latch on to, ignore, or avoid).The book has grown out of the authors' extensive experience as professional development consultants and practitioners, notably their time developing and leading The Tavistock Institute's "Practitioner Certificate in Consulting and Change" (P3C) programme and reads almost as a workbook for the programme. It is clearly written for a consultant-practitioner readership and wears its depth of scholarship lightly. Written in the first person, it is a slim volume, clearly structured and including a wealth of "analytic" checklists and questions about practice that invite the reader to put the ideas to which they have just been introduced into practice. Most of these are clearly explained and provide helpful templates for encouraging critical selfreflection in pursuit of sharpening our consulting practice.In identifying a perceived need for their book, Izod and Whittle suggest that "stuckness" is just as likely to be experienced by consultants as their clients. And since its offer of encouragement to work through consulting dilemmas in what they describe as an "asset-based approach to consulting" (p. xviii) is of practical value to consultants seeking to effect change. The text includes plenty of short, pithy vignettes that help to keep the focus on the "practical and vital" (p. xviii). Much of the book is written in the first person and to accord with its spirit and avoid "clunky" sentence constructions, I have stayed with the first person when summarising these sections.The book contains seven chapters, the first of which explores "potential space" (Winnicott, 1971), a playful place of transition between "reality" and "fantasy" where creativity and change can happen and where I am neither "me" nor "not me". "Play does not lose touch with reality, but creatively reinvents it" (p. 7), and is seen as a space to experiment free of judgement (phrases such as "I'm only playing at it" give me a licence to experiment without claim to striving for competence), but this space can quickly lose its "potential" in the presence of a judgemental figure. Games, in contrast to play, tend to have pre-established rules, and with them, offer less scope for creativity.The chapter goes on to outline how the authors use co-creation as a form of disruptive learning, encouraging both participants and facilita tors/consultants to "step out of their routines" (p. 8). Taking a risk and not being drawn into "over-designing", requires "real time" feedback between the course directors (and, Weick (1998) would argue, good levels of trust and shared experience of "playing" together) to keep open the "potential space".The notion of holding open "potential space" underpins the subsequent chapters, including Chapter Two, which explores how identities support and constrain the work of change practitioners and consultants, and outlines three dynamic aspects of identity-recognition; regulation, and revelation-that the authors have found typically preoccupy consultants.Identity signifiers may be descriptors of characteristics that I have little or no choice about-my gender, the colour of my skin, my ages, where I was born, etc.-or they may be signifiers that I have chosen how much to reveal for myself-for example, the age and sex of my children, the football team I support, or my political inclinations. …