Reading ‘The Complexity of Consultancy’[1] got me thinking about the part courage plays in being an effective consultant, or facilitator, that is, in creating effective and sustainable change in people and human systems.
I’ve long been aware that the bolder I am, in my practice, the more impactful the intervention tends to be. But what does it mean to be bold and brave as a consultant? Where does it show up? How does this kind of courage fit within a positive psychology framing of courage?
Let’s start by looking at how we, as positive psychologists, understand courage.
How to understand courage?
To engage with this, I turned to Pury and Woodward’s excellent summary in the ever-useful Encyclopedia of Positive Psychology[2].
They open with a useful definition: Courage is the intentional pursuit of a worthy goal despite the perception of personal threat and uncertain outcome.
I think this well describes the more interesting organisational or personal change experiences I’ve been involved in over the years. However, since it is rare to encounter physical threats to our person (although I do wonder about some of the more extreme outward bound team building exercises!) we might ask what form personal threat might take in the more sedate world of dialogic interventions.
Pury and Woodward identify four key forms the exercise or display of courage might take.
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External facing |
Internal facing |
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Physical Courage: Such as soldiers on battlefield |
Psychological Courage: risking one’s psychological equilibrium to achieve a worthy goal |
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Moral Courage: Such as whistleblowers |
Inner World Courage: Coping with emotions, making sense of a developing self-image, reaching for meaning and authenticity |
In my work as a consultant, the courage challenge has been internal-facing; what is here called psychological, or inner world courage. It is this aspect of courage that I am interested to explore.
When might a consultant need to be courageous?
Three aspects of the consultancy process leap out to me as calling on a degree of courage.
1. Negotiating and contracting with the client.
This is where I first face the danger, as identified in Sarra and colleagues’ book, of experiencing ‘misrecognition’.
I hadn’t come across the concept before reading this book. It resonated with me immediately and I find it very interesting and useful. Misrecognition is when what we are offering is not recognised by others as legitimate, does not, we might say, fit with their ideas of how a consultant is supposed to behave.
Given the prevalent view that consultants arrive with a solution in mind, this can arise very early in the encounter with the organization, indeed in the early negotiations. From the beginning, I put more emphasis on helping them to frame the question and to design a way to find a way forward, than on offering them a preplanned path to a pre-determined end.
Commissioners and contractors can find this lack of certainty and predictability challenging and I draw on psychological courage to hold my ground in the face of expectations that should present as an omniscient saviour.
I’ve also had the experience of clients challenging me with how difficult or entrenched their challenge is and how, effectively, they eat consultants for breakfast. In these situations, I am called on to stand by the courage of my conviction that I can do better. I certainly experience a sense at times of ‘girding my loins’ in these encounters.
I might also mention here the courage needed to negotiate the terms and conditions, asserting the value of your contribution, establishing a partnership arrangement when they believe you to be commodity, and so on.
2. Designing and implementing
For larger interventions, this sense of frustration and disappointment arises again when working with the initial planning or design team and can produce a big pushback as it becomes apparent that I haven’t come with the answer and am instead offering hope of finding a path to an answer. Again, I can be misrecognised, seen as incompetent, withholding or unhelpful, all of which threatens my sense of self as a competent, helpful person.
I explore this experience in much greater depth in my dialogic organisational development book[3] with an extended case study that identifies a few of these moments on the journey towards a dialogic intervention.
Suffice it to say here that Sarra and colleagues identify emotions such as shame, guilt and embarrassment that can arise in these situations, which necessitate calling on the ‘inner world’ courage identified by Pury and Woodward to keep going.
3. In the moment courage
Finally, for me anyway, there is the exercise of ‘in the moment courage’ during the actual process of facilitation or intervention. For example, when homophobic, racist or other unhelpful stereotypes and assumptions suddenly become apparent, or could be suspected, as underpinning a contribution or a conversation.
Or when someone is in danger of dominating the conversation in an unhelpful way, harming any sense of psychological safety and so reducing system resourcefulness.
There are endless examples of the kind of ‘threats’, such as those above, that facilitators need to be alert to, as there is a risk that they might reduce the effectiveness of our attempts to produce helpful change. Each requires a situated judgement about when, whether or how to intervene in a way that will be productive.
At the same time as this cognitive assessment is being made, the emotions aroused by the unfolding scenario also have to be managed. Maybe it’s just me but I find ‘calling things out’ in these types of situations to be an act of courage. I suppose because of the danger of drawing direct fire if anyone involved feels unfairly treated or ‘told off’. And because of the risk or fear of introducing ‘disharmonies’ in the group.
Conclusions
I am finding this consideration of the role of courage in facilitating effective change in others very interesting and feel it could be explored a lot further. I’m particularly interested in what supports ‘being courageous’, which I suspect to be a sense of moral purpose, and the meaningfulness we ascribe to our approach.
For now though I might just say, let’s just allow ourselves to recognize that while we may not be firefighters or paramedics, we, as practitioners, can still be called upon to perform acts that take a certain kind of inner courage.
Lewis, S. (2024) Creating Energised Commitment to the Dialogic Approach: the change team's journey of discovery. USA: Bushe Marshak Institute.
Lopez, S.J. (2011) The encyclopedia of positive psychology. John Wiley & Sons.
Sarra, N., Solsø, K. and Mowles, C. (2022) The complexity of consultancy: exploring breakdowns within consultancy practice. Taylor & Francis.