Consultancy and the Excluded
Organisational consultancy can (and must) utilise the organisational memory with great focus, in order to facilitate changes. How does this work?
It becomes the ‘advocate’ for the forgotten! This actually means:
bringing the forgotten back into validity,
naming the possibilities which have been excluded in the current state of the organisation and letting them emerge,
bringing into play that which is disadvantaged in the prevalent structures,
pointing out the consequences of their decisions to the decision-makers, who never allow the important possibilities to count,
examining communication channels and competences about which counter-interests are never allowed expression,
offering for observation another possible world, for example, other organisations, and thus stimulating the organisation to discover how little their own state is self-evident,
supporting the organisation to seek other purposes (=considering other poles of the guiding distinctions),
using the guiding distinctions to make visible the questionability of everything in the status quo.
Attention: the accompanying change process, for its part, always makes something (different) invisible and hinders other possibilities! Those responsible for ‘change’ (and consultants) are thus not necessarily on the side of ‘better’ or improvement! No organisation can change without also creating a loss.