Consulting All Change 2 - What Change?

Jamie from Accenture commented on my first post on the Change in Consulting by making the point that there are many good people who do good work in the traditional big consulting firms. I agree with him. I promised him that I would expand on my argument for why I feel that the major consulting firms cannot help in the hardest and most important change work that is before us today.

If I was a CEO and wanted help in improving my on line sales, I would seek out a firm like Accenture. If I was a hospital administrator and wanted to set up a better logistics system I would hire someone like Accenture.

But if I was the CEO of NPR and wanted to find out how to change my enterprises' relationships with other producers, stations and the listeners - I might look elsewhere. Why? Because the issue before me is not simple, nor is it complicated: it is - as Jon also commented - Complex and hence only possible to explore by using the natural process of Emergence. Let's just have a quick look at what I mean by making this distinction. The Chart comes for "Getting to Maybe, How the World is Changed" by Westley, Zimmerman and Patton

Complex work is by definition work that is both natural and mysterious. It cannot be done by using the principles of engineering.

So why do I think that the key work today is Complex and not Complicated? I think that we are indeed living through one of the greatest changes that has ever faced our species.

The web is shifting our core metaphor from a Newtonian Machine to an Einsteinian Organism.
Time and Space are now relative in the world that we live in. As a result, power is shifting away from institutions and toward the individual and most of all to those individuals that are heavily networked.

We see this so clearly in the media world now - but this bifurcation will extend through all fields of endeavour. Every aspect of life that has been captured by the traditional mechanistic institution will fall to competitors that use natural principles.

The competitive issue for me then is this. How do you design start ups or how do you transform existing organizations so that they are imbued with this new metaphor and hence a radically different set of values?

The change process that is required is deeply personal. For many it demands a death of the old self. It cannot be taught, it can only be experienced. It can only in the end come from within a person.

So what then is a process that can help and why do I feel that the current leading consulting firms are at a disadvantage in this field?

More tomorrow...

technorati tags:Consulting, Change, Complex, Complicated, Getting Maybe, Jon Husband, Accenture

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