Consultancy System
How is consultancy possible? No coach can change the thoughts and feelings of his clients by thinking and feeling inside them! No team developer can change the relationship patterns of a team he does not belong to and no organisational consultant can alter the decision-making patterns by way of the guiding processes. If one cannot do and undo nuts and bolts in the client system as one can in a defective machine, how, then, can one offer consultation to support change? (Nevertheless, this assumption of a ‘sustained causal effect’ (Durchsgriffskausalität – Luhmann) is the secret foundation of many consultancy approaches, which promise effects, which they cannot deliver on). The alternative is: consultancy must be understood as a separate system! A system, which forms out of a consultant’s system and a client’s system. This system is, for a period, coupled tightly or more loosely and consists of a special form of asymmetric communication: the communication deals with what the client system finds worthy of dismissal, wrong or irritating (past), what the client system considers normal, given or self-understood (present) and what the client system views as worthy of pursuit, having promise of success or being strategically necessary (future). In all these areas, one seeks subconscious, latent, implicit processes, responsible for generating the current situation of the client system, which, by the unfavourable devaluation of the current position, create intrinsic resistance within the system, choose dysfunctional goals and thereby, threaten, in an attempt to improve matters, to exacerbate the situation, which stands in the way of a desired (functional) change. The consultancy system provides the client system with all observations, pertaining to the seven points above and then, jointly, evaluates which responses are invoked by these irritations.