Resource-ful Consulting: Working with your Presence and Identity in Consulting to Change

Consultants and practitioners working with change can feel at a loss as to how to help their clients move forward. Organisations get stuck in routine ways even when they have innovations in mind. Consultants get stuck in familiar interventions which no longer prove stimulating or effective. Such challenges to practice can preoccupy and reinforce these stuck positions.

Drawing on the authors’ experiences of working with the professional development of consultants and change-agents over many years, this book provides an asset-based approach to consulting, where the resources to work at this 'stuckness' come from the way that we think about and use ourselves: our Identity and our Presence. The authors propose that developing capacities to recognise and analyse who we bring into our consulting, and how we bring ourselves is central to resource-ful practice. Without a skill-ful integration of these resources, the potential for change can be compromised.

In handbook format, the book is structured in seven sections: Potential Space, Identity, Presence, Role Space, Practice, Change, and Future Developments. Focussing on practitioners’ preoccupations, the authors offer models, theories, tales and activities to help describe and analyse your Identity and your Presence. They tell stories which question how your Practice supports or compromises change, and suggest playful experimentation as a route to Change, and the development of a more resource-ful approach to your consulting practice.