By Amanda Cole

“Let’s try something different this time around,” we thought. My husband and I packed our two kids up and headed to the airport for my upcoming work trip to lead sales onboarding training for Quest Diagnostics. I usually left on my own, but we thought we’d get a little more time together this way.

About ten minutes from the airport, the trainer in me couldn’t help myself and I said we should go around the van and say what we love about each person. We came to me last, and my 5-year-old daughter says, ‘What I love about mom is that she lifts me up so I can see the stars’. Talk about gut-wrenching right before I’m about to board a plane and leave my family for days! We had recently been intentional about showing the kids the nighttime sky; the moon, the stars, the greater expanse of the world they know so little of in their young lives. I couldn’t remember exactly when I had lifted her up to see those stars better, but to her, it left a lasting impression.  

A few months later, as I entered the Flawless Consulting I workshop, I assumed I would walk away with a few ideas on better communication. And to be honest, I didn’t think I had much to learn. I was a natural talker, a charming person, and I got along with everyone so naturally that meant I was a good consultant, right?

Participating in the Flawless Consulting 1 workshop uncovered a whole new way of operating, both as an internal and external consultant. I didn’t just learn new and valuable frameworks for interacting with customers, I walked away empowered as a valuable asset to my organization. I realized that I was not simply an obedient order taker or helpful assistant to the executives, no, as an internal consultant utilizing these frameworks, I was vital to creating outcomes that actually moved the needle instead of just applying a band-aid.

Like any new way of thinking, it felt foreign at first. I reviewed my participant manual before heading into a meeting with the Sales Director. I came up with impactful questions and reminded myself to allow the Director and project team members to struggle through to the answer of the underlying problem. But after only a few weeks of re-wiring my brain to approach this vital role of mine, I noticed a shift. My confidence grew. I knew that the uncomfortable (sometimes even painful) struggle to solution was part of the process. I realized being useful was a lot better than being helpful.  

When we partner with our clients as trusted advisors, the goal is not to simply accomplish whatever they ask of us, it’s to uncover what’s possible. To unlock a solution they would never have considered, or better yet, to help them realize their ask was aiming too low.

Perhaps as a true flawless consultant, we can lift them up to help them see the stars.

You’ve likely heard the saying, “I’ll take the path of least resistance.” For those who want to avoid conflict, it often appears to be the best way forward. In consulting however, choosing the path of least resistance is often the one that will lead your project to broken promises or failed solutions.

To understand the value of choosing the path of most resistance, it’s important to understand what’s underneath it. Resistance is fear made visible. For consultants working with clients, it often represents the inability or reluctance to express some concern. In Peter Block’s Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used, it’s explained as such,

“There is no way you can talk clients out of their resistance because resistance is an emotional process. Behind the resistance are certain feelings, and you cannot talk people out of how they are feeling.”

How do we help our clients express their concerns, or feelings, more directly, without disguising? And, why is it so important to do?

Why we walk toward resistance is fairly obvious if you understand what drives it. Resistance is fear or some type of underlying concern. These fears or concerns, if left unexplored, are most certainly the things that will impede your ability to recommend a sustainable and impactful solution to your client. As consultants, it’s important to remind ourselves that the client’s behavior is not a reflection on us. We often have done nothing wrong to create resistance. The “wrong” happens when we fail to confront it.

Choosing the path of most resistance compels us to help the client express their concerns so they can pass. In Flawless Consulting, it’s referred to as “stating the reservations directly and stopping the subterfuge. When the client’s concerns are stated directly, the consultant knows what the real issues are and can respond effectively.”

There are three steps for handling resistance.

1. Identify in your own mind what form the resistance is taking. Pick up the cues and describe to yourself what you see or hear happening.
2. State in a neutral, nonjudgmental way, the form the resistance in taking. This is called “naming the resistance.” The skill is to find the neutral language. Simply state what you see or hear. Be careful to not place judgement on your observation. Describe the behavior … not what you think the behavior means.
3. Be quiet. We keep talking to reduce the tension we feel when we confront the client. Don’t keep talking. Live with the tension. Then, let your client respond to your observation and discuss what’s creating it and how best to move forward.

There is no way you can talk clients out of their resistance because resistance is an emotional process. However, there are specific steps a consultant can take to help a client get past the resistance and get on with solving the problem. As consultants that’s our goal … to help a client solve a problem so that it stays solved. Choosing the path of least resistance won’t get us there. Be flawless and walk head on into challenging conversations. Do so with real compassion for what the client is feeling and be authentic in your desire to help. When we do so, choosing the path of most resistance isn’t nearly as hard.

By Peter Block

The ways we get things done, the ways in which we organize effort, even towards the commons, are increasingly disturbing. Whether in our governance structures, the private sector indexes, the style of philanthropy, or wherever you spend your days, all are subject to patterns of control and commodification.

All of this calls us to seek an alternative. The first step in creating an alternative future is departure. Moving in small ways today, and large ways tomorrow. Away from empire towards restoring our humanity and authentic care for what matters most to us.

Much like ancient Egypt, our first step is to focus on departure as a political and spiritual act. Departure from habit, helplessness, resentment, from waiting for someone new to be in charge.

The moment we become clear about the dehumanizing side effects of a market, scale, and efficiency driven culture, the more we want to create an alternative. The first instinct is to move somewhere else. When we ask people about what crossroads they are at in this stage of their life, the most common response has to do with deciding whether to stay where they are or to go someplace else.

The problem is, where is there to go? So much of the organized efforts we inhabit––schools, higher education, government, social services, and health care––are run from the business perspective. When we call these organizations “not for profit,” we mean it. No different from the private sector, just no profit.

Before we change places and become mobile, there are ways to depart the existing culture wherever we are. In this moment. We call this departing in place. Departing in place is a very common term used in human resources to identify disengaged employees. Here we mean something different. We are not talking about departure as a form of resignation, but as a form of commitment.

The archetype of departing is Exodus. Crossing the Red Sea into the wilderness. Even with this dramatic mobility, it was way too likely, over time and generations, to re-create the patriarchy we left and consider people as objects to be maximized and production scale to be achieved. Soloman re-performed Pharoah, and he was one of us. He took pride in his number of concubines, soldiers, and chariots, and the compartmentalized and credentialing design of his temple.

One way we can depart the empire is to shift the way we meet. If you want a shorthand version of our daily version of the empire, consider “Robert’s Rules of Order,” written by a Civil War era Army officer, General Henry M. Robert. After the war, he was frustrated by noisy and chaotic public meetings. In the title of his solution is to put into practice the declaration of “Rules” and “Order” as its primary purpose and selling point.

In seeking an alternative way to depart in place we begin by looking at our everyday practices of meeting. Especially in those moments when we are not the host or in charge. Here “departure in place” is a gentler version from more traditional paths to transformation like protest, revolution, voting for people we believe in, holding dialogues of opposite opinions and faiths, visioning, and change-management programs.  All useful. We can also find smaller ways.

The idea of departure in place as an everyday practice came alive for me when I was talking to my friend Amy about the importance of connecting people as central to living together differently.

Amy is a very special organizational leader and organizer who commented that when she attends most meetings about things she cares about––like supporting candidates for public office or sustaining efforts for the social good––they are typically designed for persuasion and predictability, often using the practice of a version of General Robert, likely a PowerPoint presentation.

Sitting while participating in the absence of building relationships and connecting with those in the room, Amy said she is drawn to leaving early, and not coming back. Now she is thinking maybe she could stay and come back with the intention of shifting the tone and way of connecting among committed people, even as a participant.  This instinct of hers has a social meaning that is worth taking seriously.

This idea of departing the dominant narrative in small ways, simply by staying in the room and considering minor actions to take, is worth exploring. Here are three compelling voices about impacting the larger context through smaller actions possible in daily life.

Mike Chitty writes poetically about departing the empire, in this case encouraging us to focus on the personal choices we have in what he calls “relational disobedience.” This is from an August 2025 Substack offering:

There are times when obedience is deadly, when following the rules, sticking to the plan or hiding behind the institution means ignoring the subtleties of life as it unfolds in front of us.

Relational disobedience is the choice to refuse that deadening obedience. It is the courage to respond as a living sensing creative human being. It means listening more deeply than the policy allows. Caring when the system tells you to move on. Staying open to complexity when the institution demands a simple tick box. Choosing presence over prediction, relationship over regulation, creativity over compliance.

Adam Kahane, who has hosted and written about large-scale reconciliations in South Africa, Latin America, and more, now speaks to the small scale in his book “Everyday Habits for Transforming Systems.”  Here he quotes Naomi Klein:

We should stop treating a great many human-made systems––like monarchies and supreme courts and borders and billionaires––as immutable and unchangeable. Because everything some humans created can be changed by other humans (p. 13).

He then writes of how our actions in this moment, regardless of why we came together, become the seeds of the longer-term intentions:

These transformations don’t just require long-term strategies of daring initiatives. They require a particular way of being, thinking, relating and acting, day in and day out––a set of habits to disrupt ourselves and the systems we are a part of. Attending to changing small things that we can control enables us to contribute to changing larger things that we cannot control (p. xi).

A third set of powerfully expressed ideas comes from Atul Gawande and his book “Better.” He is a surgeon, a man of science. Evidence. Sacred practices, methodology, and what seems from a distance like magic. Yet the book offers a path to healing and well-being that––after immersing us in all of the challenging moral, legal, and institutional dimensions of the health care world––ultimately hinges on what is personal, human, and affirming to us as players in our own drama and vulnerability. Much of his writing is about small moments, an intimate relationship about life and death. Here is a taste of his wisdom:

Betterment is a perpetual labor. The world is chaotic, disorganized, and vexing, and medicine is nowhere spared that reality. To complicate matters, we in medicine are also only humans ourselves. We are distractible, weak, and given to our own concerns. Yet, still, to live as a doctor is to live so that one’s life is bound up in others’ and in science and in the messy, complicated connection between the two (pp. 8-9).

So, these short examples speak to whatever role we have in the world. What we do in the small everyday particulars may be more important than how we will later describe the importance and frustration of our work to friends and neighbors.

These examples lead us to consider ways of using small moves that turn this moment a step closer to moving from consumer to agent. From empire to the common good.

Before returning to Amy, and what she might have done differently fifteen minutes into a meeting, let’s hear two more voices that opened up my ways of thinking of the small moments of meaning.

Walter Breuggemann devoted a good portion of his biblical scholarship to the questions of departure. Here is a glimpse of his thinking from a series of conversations we had with John McKnight. Here is Walter:

I think that the master narrative of the Bible, or the metanarrative, of the Exodus doesn’t answer a lot of the questions that we might want to put to it, but I would think that what triggered the movement that led to departure and emancipation was a coming to consciousness. Pharaoh, with his ideology of endless productivity, worked very hard to keep the Hebrew slaves from coming to consciousness about their own place, and role, and agency in history.

It seems to me that if we want to leave the consumer culture, in a sense, that means that the world of consumption would have to be replaced, have an alternative. What is that alternative? At least one way of thinking about it is to say that we are moving from a culture of consumption to a culture of contribution. We, together, are the creators of our lives, rather than we are the objects of large systems that teach us life can be outsourced or purchased.

The really important question may be, how do we take the steps into the alternative by beginning to create a culture of contribution?

Here is how John McKnight offered his version of departure:

The work we have done is particularly focused on the idea that everybody has gifts … skills, abilities, capacities. That’s what we have to call on if we’re going to replace the proposition that our lives are bought rather than created.

I think you start on your own block and if you looked at all those households and said, “I’m going to actually take the first step to be a neighbor, maybe even a friend,” which you would do to begin intentionally, to meet your neighbor and to listen to them in terms of those things they value.

Now, I think that way of moving to the alternative can happen in 10,000 places. You know what a movement is? It is making visible the fact that in 10,000 or 100,000 places there were small groups of people who were creating a new kind of culture.

What John and Walter suggest is that where we are at the moment is to find small actions that honor the contribution and capacities of each person in this room, this moment. This becomes one of John’s ten thousand.

Let’s return to Amy, sitting in a meeting that is not working for her. Thinking that she will not come to the next event of this kind. PowerPoint is in front, the purpose and outcome are made clear, and next steps are on their way. The whisper for a change comes when one member of the group interrupts and says, “It would be nice to know better who else is in this meeting.” The leader says, “We don’t have time for that, we need to stay on task.”

My friend Amy let this go the last time they met. She is now thinking it was a moment to shift their way of meeting, even though she was just a participant. Might she have asked to stop for a minute? To state that our connection to each other will make a difference? Might Amy have said, “Could we stop, sit with two other participants for ten minutes, and discuss why it is important to each of us to be here, in this moment? This will determine, at least for me, how accountable I decide to be in following up on our purpose.”

Pause. Perhaps she stands and starts to move. (Radical disobedience. Everyday habit. A life attending to others. Seeking contribution. Space for the gifts of each.)

Will it work? Yes or no? Not the point. Is it enough? No. Is it important? Yes.

The point is to engage in a seemingly small way to depart from the efficiency and control of our habitual way of being together. An everyday habit in Adam Kahane terms. Complicated connection in Gawande terms. Radical disobedience in Chitty language. A step towards consciousness for Brueggemann. The beginning of a gifts movement for McKnight. A small pause for General Robert and his rules of order––he needs the rest.

There is a moment in which each of us, Amy this time, chooses to depart and move towards connection and agency. Which underlines the idea that departing in place is simply to take the ordinary and make it significant.

Transformation can be thought of in different ways. A shift in story, in narrative, in worldview, in science, in consciousness. It means that something in our life and world and community is profoundly changing.

For each period of change it is useful to find artifacts that capture the meaning of that moment. For some it is a tattoo on the body. A song or work of art to remind us of that phase of our life. Statues in a town square, quotes over an entranceway.

A simple, yet profound, marker of meaning is to find quotes that hold our attention over time. We are calling these Tattoos of the Mind.

Moments of transformation are fragile, so it reinforces our aspiration when we share them with others, quotes or mind tattoos are one easy way of doing that. In sharing them we are reminded of who we are, who we aspire to be, and how we find our commonality. They are not just what I may post on my mirror, or screen or wall, but quotes, in the sharing, claim our humanity and bring us together.

Here is one that I am unable to erase.

“All consciousness begins with an act of disobedience.” ––Carl Jung

It was a radical thought for me that disobedience could be useful. I knew it was satisfying, but it created labels: “counter dependence,” “issues with authority,” “not on board,” or “not a team player.” In a compliance-driven, empire, and colonial culture, saying no is considered a problem to be solved.

The option is to consider disobedience, or what can be called dissent, a pathway to belonging and creating a more powerful way of being together.

When we say no, put our doubts into words, are willing to be disobedient, and accept that we are not here to meet the expectations of others, a quality of aliveness is present. When we invite the disobedience and dissent of others, especially about what we are up to, we can listen without needing to react, answer, explain. No response, other than understanding, is required. We can also take the dissent of others as an invitation for expressing our own disobedience or dissent.

This quote also opens us to the idea that saying “No” is the beginning of a conversation, not an exit strategy. And that if we cannot say “No,” our “Yes” has no meaning.

Article by Peter Block

We live — and work — in a world that feels increasingly complex. Organizations are stretched thin, trust is extremely fragile, and it seems like every day, leaders are being asked to do more with less.

In the midst of uncertainty, it’s easy to slip into survival mode. Solve the problem. Meet the deadline. Move on.

But what if consulting — whether internal or external — could offer something more? What if it could be a stabilizing force in chaotic times?

In over 40 years of doing this work, we have witnessed how Flawless Consulting® is more than just a workshop for consultants—it’s a compass for anyone trying to lead with clarity, integrity, and courage, even when things feel uneasy.

When Everything Feels Urgent, Relationships Should Still Come First

Especially in fast-moving environments, it’s tempting to skip over relationship-building in favor of jumping straight to the solution. However, as Peter Block teaches, the most effective consultants and leaders understand that building relationships and trust is foundational to genuine progress. 

Relationships require clarity. They require certainty about our wants and the courage to express them fearlessly. Building relationships isn’t a process that can necessarily be expedited. It can be slower, but that steadiness can lead to sustainable outcomes that make all the difference. 

Flawless Consulting provides us both a methodology and a mindset to: 

    •    Slow down enough to contract clearly and openly

    •    Name what we want and invite others to do the same

    •    Manage resistance without overpowering or avoiding it

These skills enable us to build relationships that can withstand complexity, tension, and change, especially in times of crisis.

Control Is a Myth. Partnership Is the Alternative.

Chaotic times often prompt our instinct to control outcomes, people, or processes. Flawless Consulting offers an alternative stance: partnership.

Rather than trying to fix others or carry the burden alone, the Flawless methodology is about shared responsibility. Flawless Consulting invites us to co-create clarity, even when outcomes are uncertain. That shift — from being a pair of hands or an expert to being a partner — is what makes work meaningful. In other words, the way through the storm isn’t control — it’s connection.

What You Want Matters Too

In the midst of these chaotic times, it can be easy to put the needs of your organization, your coworkers, and your clients first. Sure, it’s important to understand how you can be useful to others as the world around them is changing. It’s equally important to consider yourself too.

Whether you are partnering with someone else to get work done or rescoping work that’s already been in progress, these chaotic times should prompt you to consider: What do I want? Flawless Consulting teaches you to ask for what you want – not merely to satisfy your own personal whims and wishes but enable you and the people you are supporting to succeed. By putting your wants into words as simply and directly as possible, you are treating your relationship as a true partnership.

Why Flawless Still Matters (Maybe Now More Than Ever)

We get it, consulting skills aren’t the first necessities that come to mind when times are tough. But the truth is, this is when they matter most.

At Designed Learning, we operate at the intersection of meaning and methodology. Flawless Consulting doesn’t just give you steps to follow — it gives you a way to show up with integrity, even when everything feels uncertain.

By Peter Block

We live in a culture where our attention is fixated on what is not working and who is winning and losing. The narrative is filled with polarization, conflict, wrongdoing. This is the major substance of headline news and a good portion of social media, which carries within it a negative bias. We begin to think this is who we are.

Some particular themes hold consistent and endless arguments over whether we should:

• Further liberate capitalism or consider it being in a late stage.
• Embrace or watch out for “social” as an ism or an adjective.
• Have more or less government regulation and oversight.
• Have progressive or conservative legislation.
• Have more or less government funding.
• Inhabit, celebrate, or occupy Wall Street.

In addition, the stock market is headline news and a popular measure of well-being. Inflation, the consumer price index, unemployment and inflation rates are central measures used to evaluate our condition. These conversations occur at every level: city, state, nation, world. The focus on these dimensions of life is sold as essential to preserve our freedom, democracy, well-being, and historical legacy.

Suppose that these versions of who we are and what matters had a purpose other than freedom and democracy. That these storylines were mostly driven by our religious devotion to a market economy. That we have simply internalized the idea that it is the market economy that best serves our progress and well-being. That the typical debates are really about whose point of view can make the market economy work the best. That the market economy, more than the well-being of our collective, benefits from endlessly focusing on the stance of government, the distribution of wealth, who is in charge of the rules. Not that these don’t matter, but are they really decisive?

These debates and objects of our attention do us a great disservice. They actually distract us, by design, from most of the human values which more authentically define us, our lives, our enduring culture, what really matters most. There are places the market economy, how it is funded and regulated, cannot take us: simply put, the collective well-being of us all.

The existing immersion in the market context, no matter whether progressives or liberals run things, has produced way too little reduction in our suffering. Our social and economic isolation grows. The climate crisis has been growing. Wealth disparity grows. Fear grows. Housing and family security are a struggle. Injustice thrives. The number of human beings who struggle each day is too many. The actions by urban or national military forces are growing. Perhaps the only decisive outcome of the current debates within the market context is which ruling class is in charge.

Walking upstream, it is time to more seriously question the impact of all these conversations confined within the context of a market economy. Perhaps they are a very narrow view of reality and are the wrong conversations. Perhaps there is an alternative to the market economy that would better serve us. Engage us in conversations and debates that truly have the capacity to create a more just, enriching quality of life and culture.

The Soul of the Market Economy

The market economy holds that we live in the midst of scarcity. This becomes the rationale that justifies too many of our actions. This recurrent debate is based on the myth that our well-being is best served by being more competitive. Which starts in the first grade with the grading system. It reflects the Adam Smith adoration of self-interest. It sustains the neoliberal belief that global scale and dollar volume are the real measures of success. Both sides of the debate are really concerned with how to make scarcity, competition, and scale work best.

This conversational drumbeat relegates the common good to the sideshows of collateral damage and externalized costs.

The power over our existing culture is described by Ellen Meiskins Wood who, in her classic book “The Origin of Capitalism,” defines the contemporary focus of the market economy quite simply:

“Material life and social production in capitalism are universally mediated by the market. This unique system of market dependence means that the dictates of the capitalist market –– its imperatives of competition, accumulation, profit maximization, and increasing labor productivity –– regulate not only all economic transit actions but social relations in general” (p. 7, emphasis mine).

Wood explores the idea that the market economy has spread beyond commerce to define and shape our way of living. This includes how we school our children, how we value the arts, who manages our health and aging, what stories we highlight, our love of screens, how we manage our judicial system, taxation, and who keeps us safe.

An Alternative in Plain Sight

There is an alternative economy. We have a choice where our attention goes and we might be better served if we shifted our primary attention to what can be called the creative economy. This is an economy based on the conviction that there is enough. It replaces scarcity with imagination and memory and relatedness. If we shift the context from market to creative, it changes our patterns of solutions. We will still argue, but why not over something that cultivates our humanity? This can become the center of our attention. We have the choice to relegate commerce to something that is incidentally interesting. The Dow Jones average becomes a human-interest story.

The creative economy better honors the original definition of “economy”: Economy is “the management of a household, stewardship of a household’s resources.” It also arises from the original definition of “creative”: “to beget, give birth to.” The creative economy rests on a belief in stewardship for all that a household both inherits and produces. A household can be you, your family, your neighbors, your community, a nation, a planet.

“Creative” is not just about what we call art. It encompasses our local ability to innovate, make, and produce. This includes social relations and local memory and culture and preservation rather than commercialization of the land and nature. It incorporates local production. The arts are included, but extend to sustaining a creative culture. The creative economy focuses on the capacity of a neighborhood to give people access to and control of most all they need to survive and prosper. This encourages a career not dependent on schooling or class rank. It means keeping dollars circulating locally. Art becomes a way of bringing people together for the larger purpose of well-being.

The creative economy is dramatically distinct from the market economy. The market economy is where what matters most is surplus and profit. Convenience, cost, self-interest are driving forces. The market economy is used to justify what is sometimes called a command economy. They both call us to give structure and priority to the market-driven way of being. Corporations, central agencies, or government, under the lobby of corporations, control all major aspects of how we function as a society. This includes what goods and services are produced, how they are produced, and how they are distributed. The market economy is used to justify foreign relations strategies and agreements. Essentially, central entities, often monopolies, dictate most economic decisions.

The creative economy reports and puts attention and control of material and social well-being into aggregated local entities: households, streets, or a neighborhood. It exists in co-ops, urban farms, local production. Local enterprise. In rural communities, it means that farmers are connected. Cooperation thrives as a core function of rural communities.

A creative economy does have a place for competition, but competition is not a driver. It has more interest in sustainability than scale. In the quality of work more than its efficiency. It is more interested in restoration than accumulation, local circulation of dollars rather than profit maximization, spreading labor opportunities rather than increasing labor productivity, distributed rather than centralized control of production. Care for the soil.

An Economy Serving the Common Good

Among economists, the term “creative economy” increasingly refers to all economic activity that depends on a person’s individual creativity for its economic value. In this usage, the creative economy occurs wherever local individual and collective effort is the main source of value and the main source of a transaction. John Howkins developed the concept in 2001 to describe economic systems where value is based on novel imaginative qualities rather than central organizational control of the traditional resources of land, labor, and capital. It gives first priority to the question of how we can produce with each other what we were in the habit of seeking from government, institutions, and large global or national enterprises.

The most radical shift towards the creative economy begins with where we place our attention. With what we consider important news. Headline news reports on where we, together, are producing the care required for all that matters most to us. It lets self-interest be present but not as our organizing principle. The neighborhood or community sector –– not the government or private sector –– becomes central and defines our social relations.

Government becomes a convening agent and protects the rules and limits needed for communities to function. We always need institutions like we now have, but their attention shifts away from growing the private sector and growing their services; it shifts towards building community agency. Private enterprise with its market economy remains nearby, but it does not define who we are.

Luckily the creative economy already exists. It is all around us, waiting to be valued and made central to our way of seeing and speaking to and about ourselves. Tune into the next column for proof of concept, evidence, and things practical.

By Beverly Crowell

As organizations continue to face unprecedented times, internal consultants are facing significant challenges that require not only technical expertise but also exceptional interpersonal skills and strategic insight. And it doesn’t matter if your job title includes the word consultant. If you are helping others inside your organization to manage all these challenges, you are most likely consulting.

During these times of change, one of the core tenets of success is the importance of building trust and credibility with internal clients. When uncertainty is high and resistance to new ideas can be strong, establishing a foundation of trust becomes even more crucial. In our Flawless Consulting^® programs, we emphasize the need for consultants to be authentic, transparent, and empathetic in their interactions. By demonstrating genuine concern for their clients’ well-being and success, they can foster a collaborative environment where open communication and mutual respect thrive.

Another key aspect of our flawless methodology is the concept of effective contracting. This involves clearly defining the roles, expectations, and responsibilities of both the consultant and the internal client at the outset of the engagement. During periods of significant change, this clarity is essential to ensure that all parties are aligned and working towards common goals. Our program advises consultants to engage in honest and direct conversations about the scope of work, desired outcomes, and potential challenges. This proactive approach helps to prevent misunderstandings and sets the stage for a successful consulting relationship.

Even with good contracting, resistance is likely and as such internal consultants must be adept at managing it. The Flawless Consulting framework provides valuable strategies for addressing resistance in a constructive manner. Consultants learn to acknowledge the emotions and concerns behind the resistance rather than dismissing them. By validating clients’ feelings and involving them in the problem-solving process, consultants can transform resistance into engagement and commitment.

Facilitating meaningful conversations is also particularly relevant during times of extreme change. Consultants must create spaces where clients feel safe to express their thoughts and fears through the use of open-ended questions, active listening, and reflective feedback to deepen the dialogue and uncover underlying issues. These conversations help to build a shared understanding of the challenges at hand and generate innovative solutions that are informed from diverse perspectives.

In addition to being a valuable resource for internal clients, we believe that consultants should also strive to build their clients’ capabilities and confidence, rather than fostering dependency on external expertise. During periods of change, this empowerment is critical as it enables clients to take ownership of the transformation process. Our programs advise consultants to transfer knowledge, skills, and tools that clients can use to navigate future challenges independently. This approach not only enhances the immediate impact of the consulting engagement but also contributes to the long-term resilience of the organization.

Finally, our programs underscore the necessity for consultants to be adaptable and flexible in their approach. Change is often unpredictable, and consultants must be prepared to adjust their strategies and methodologies in response to evolving circumstances. Flawless Consulting advocates for a mindset of continuous learning and reflection, encouraging consultants to seek feedback, evaluate their performance, and refine their practices. This adaptability not only enhances the consultant’s effectiveness but also models the resilience and agility that clients need during times of change.

Flawless Consulting is the robust framework which helps develop a consultant’s agility and resilience. To help make it accessible, we offer 90-minute intensives on key topics from Flawless Consulting, four-hour overviews on the basics and multi-day learning experiences where participants not only learn the key concepts but put them into practice. If you are interested in learning more, let’s talk.