Humble Consulting by Edgar H. Schein

Author:Edgar H. Schein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2016-04-14T04:00:00+00:00

MY ADAPTIVE MOVE

Just after coffee and dessert had been served, I called the group to attention and said the following:

“To get our discussion going I would like to ask us all to do something that some of you might find a little different, but I consider it very important to start in this way. I would like each of us, in the order in which we are sitting, starting to my left, to take a minute or two to tell us, from the heart, why you belong to Mass Audubon. I would like no discussion or interruptions until we have heard from all of us. We can then proceed with our formal agenda. This will take us a while but it is important that we hear this from everyone. Roger, why don’t you begin? Why do you belong to this organization?”

The logic behind doing this kind of check-in was to get everyone to say something introductory even though the group members knew one another from being on the board. The logic of choosing to ask people to talk “from the heart” about their membership was to personalize that membership and, at the same time, to gather necessary information based on what people said and with what intensity, from which we could infer how committed the members of this task force might actually be to a capital campaign. If enthusiasm in the task force was weak, we would have to consider postponing the whole idea.

What happened could best be described as “magical.” Each person, especially Norma and Louis when they took their turns, spoke with great passion about how important Mass Audubon was in his or her life, how important its role was in conservation and nature education, and how enthusiastic each one felt about helping the organization grow and prosper. By the end of a half hour, everyone had spoken, and we knew that this task force was ready to proceed with the details.

As I could observe, and as was confirmed later in conversation, the unanticipated benefit of asking everyone this question was that Norma and Louis for the first time heard in detail how committed the board members of this task force were. It was important that each person had spoken with feeling and had given details of his or her commitment, because that provided information to Norma and Louis that they did not have from just knowing these same people in their board meeting roles, where they often spoke very little.

As the planning developed over the next months, we realized that the next issue was whether the staff of the organization would be ready to do the extra work that a capital campaign inevitably entailed. Instead of second-guessing this, my task force decided that the first event at our dinner had been so meaningful that we should do something comparable with the staff. We decided to have a lunch meeting of fifteen or so senior staff at which we repeated a version of what we had done at our dinner.

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