Edgar H. Schein - Humble Consulting: How to Provide Real Help Faster

More Praise for Humble Consulting

In this book, Ed Schein has looked back over his long and distinguished consulting experience and come up with an important book. Those who are called upon to give help or advice, be they boss, consultant, parent, or friend, should start by reading this.

Charles Handy, author of The Age of Unreason

Chock-full of useful case examples, Humble Consulting is about establishing a relationship with the client that is collaborative, personal, and empathetic rather than prescriptive. Schein has once again contributed significantly and creatively to our field of organization change and development.

W. Warner Burke, PhD, E. L. Thorndike Professor of Psychology and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, and Editor, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science

Ed Scheins books on consulting have always been the most professionally useful things I read. And this book could once again reshape the consulting industry. It shifts the place from which effective consultants operate from the head to the heart and from the heart to the hand. Essential reading!

Otto Scharmer, Senior Lecturer, MIT, cofounder of the U.Lab, and author of Theory U

Humble Consulting pulls the curtain back on the pretense that the vast majority of consultants and consulting organizations put forwardthat they have the answer. I plan on keeping a copy in my office to hand out to consultants as they continue to show up and ask that I tell them what keeps me up at night and they respond with the solution that they uniquely have to address it.

James Hereford, Chief Operating Officer, Stanford Health Care

Long a critic of ODs overreliance on process, Ive always admired Ed Scheins insistence that process consultation be relevant. Now, in his new book, Humble Consulting, he shows us how. In his usual and clear style, he calls OD practitioners to account and to help in powerful and integrated ways.

Chris Worley, Professor and Strategy Director, NEOMA Business School Center for Leadership and Effective Organizations

In Humble Consulting, master consultant Edgar Schein shows us how to escape the limitations of a traditional consulting practice to vastly improve both the impact and the meaning of our work. This book is at once brilliant and incredibly practical.

Anthony L. Suchman, MD, MA, consultant, Relationship Centered Health Care

Humble Consulting is a book every leader and every consultant should read. Using numerous cases from his own experience, Schein describes the specific components of a true helping relationship and shows the powerful impact when consulting rests on curious questioning that honors and unlocks the knowledge held by the other.

David L. Bradford, PhD, Eugene D. OKelly Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Emeritus, Stanford University Graduate School of Business, and coauthor of the bestselling books Influence without Authority and Power Up

Finally, a consulting process that demonstrates and emulates the type of culture toward which organizations and their leaders aspire.

Robert Cooke, author of Human Synergistics Organizational Culture Inventory

Ed Schein once again moves the needle in refining the essence of consulting. Schein invokes a shift from considering clients as objects to considering clients as living, dynamic beings. The artistry of balancing formality and intimacy, dancing with the dynamic client system, paying attention to the environment, and engaging in endless reflective learning makes for a potent model and process.

Sarita Chawla, President, Metalens Consulting; Senior Faculty, New Ventures West; and Diamond Approach teacher

In Humble Consulting, Ed Schein weaves the cultural and process consulting threads of his lifes work into a masterpiece of emotional, cultural, and methodological insight. Read this book and be prepared to change your mind, heart, and practice.

David E. Goldberg, author of The Design of Innovation and coauthor of A Whole New Engineer

This senior icon in the field continues to make meaningful and significant contributions that could only be realized through years of experience and reflection. I have been reading Edgar Scheins work for almost fifty years now, and I have learned from each of his works. But somehow, this, his latest, is special.

Peter F. Sorensen, PhD, Director, Master of Science in Management and Organizational Behavior program, Benedictine University

Humble Consulting

Humble Consulting

How to Provide Real Help Faster

EDGAR H. SCHEIN

Humble Consulting

Copyright 2016 by Edgar H. Schein

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First Edition

Paperback print edition ISBN 978-1-62656-720-7

PDF e-book ISBN 978-1-62656-721-4

IDPF e-book ISBN 978-1-62656-722-1

2016-1

Produced and designed by BookMatters, edited by Mike Mollett, proofed

by Janet Blake, indexed by Leonard Rosenbaum, and cover designed by

Susan Malikowski, DesignLeaf Studio.

I dedicate this book to my late wife, Mary, who practiced humble consulting long before I realized its importance.

This book brings together various insights and ideas I have acquired over fifty years of research, teaching, and consulting and, at the same time, reflects how the kinds of problems that organizations face in our rapidly changing world have forced the evolution of those ideas.

As I began my career as a human relations trainer and part-time consultant in the 1960s, I evolved the model of Process Consultation (introduced in my books