| | The Value of Multi-Disciplinary Thinking
A few months ago, we were asked by a large professional organization to speak to its members about the critical knowledge disciplines required to achieve both successful and lasting business results. At Suntiva, we refer to this as a multi-disciplinary consulting approach. And given the positive response from this event, we thought we’d share some highlights from the presentation in this newsletter that may be helpful to both business leaders and consultants.
What is a multi-disciplinary consulting approach?
Simply put, a multi-disciplinary consulting approach involves applying various areas of deep expertise to help identify, understand, address, and resolve business challenges and achieve desired business outcomes. In this case, we spoke specifically about the following:
In addition, particular emphasis is placed on helping clients learn and develop skills so they can become better adept at assessing their own business challenges, and thus developing solutions. Note also that we are talking about deep expertise – meaning decades of practical experience, combined with advanced, often doctoral-level degrees.
So, why is each of the three disciplines important and what are the potential impacts if each discipline is not effectively brought to the table? Read on to discover some of our answers.
Organization Development (OD)
OD consultants work with organizations from a holistic, systems perspective to help clients identify business challenges and determine appropriate actions to strengthen the organization and achieve desired business outcomes (e.g., improved strategic alignment, cost savings, improved process efficiency and effectiveness, enhanced customer service). What is a holistic, systems perspective? This involves assessing and considering the impact of all organization elements on one another, and how each may be contributing to the client’s challenges. Organizational elements include strategy, leadership, culture, organization structure, rewards, processes, skills, team dynamics, and the impact of marketplace demands.
Another critical component provided by OD consultants is a focus on client involvement, participation, and ownership, with the consultant serving as the catalyst in helping the client determine what is best for the organization.
If elements of the OD discipline are not applied in the consulting process, then certain contributing factors or root causes within the business may be overlooked. In addition, deep OD expertise ensures that final solutions are not just thrown “over the wall” but in fact engenders client engagement and ownership of the problem-solving process. This helps everyone avoid the development of reports and deliverables that become “shelf-ware.”
Psychology
The use of psychology in business, although quickly gaining in acceptance, still can elicit surprise from some who equate it to simply “therapy.” The strength of a consultant with deep expertise in psychology is their ability to understand and facilitate communication that gets to root cause issues that are the true barriers to achieving business goals. Specifically, organizational assessments that focus on “below the surface” data are more robust as a result of identifying and paying attention to subtle cues that may block progress with leaders and teams. Consultants with this expertise are also more differentiated about their sense of self. The result is the consultant’s enhanced awareness of personal reactions to the client and ability to highlight those reactions with the client as data for use in collaboratively assessing impacts of the client’s behavior on the organization.
In addition, consultants possessing psychology expertise have an increased ability to put people at ease and lower defenses, enabling clients to be more specific and open to receiving and sharing feedback. Finally, these consultants are more skilled in remaining unmoved by any one perspective or opinion. Their training in the importance of objectivity and confidentiality results in clients feeling they can share opinions and beliefs that they might usually keep to themselves. This high sense of trust developed with clients results in the ability to get all thoughts, opinions, and biases on the table which facilitates the consultant’s delivery of powerful root cause analysis.
When psychology expertise is missing from a consulting engagement, there is potential that root cause issues may be left uncovered, and clients may jump to conclusions or fail to consider subtle data which will negatively impact the project. Often, suggested changes will have a short-term impact, but eventually people and processes revert back to the “norm.”
Business Domain Expertise
It goes without saying that consultants typically bring domain expertise to their client engagements. Deep domain expertise is the consultant’s extensive subject matter expertise in areas that may be inside or outside of the client’s knowledge base. In other words, in addition to applying OD and psychology expertise in identifying root cause issues, domain expertise is applied in working with clients to develop and implement specific and actionable recommendations.
What happens if business domain expertise is not properly applied in the consulting engagement? Potential consequences include the development of “pie in the sky” recommendations that are not practical or easily implemented, recommendations that are not aligned with short-term and long-term business strategies, or implementation plans that do not consider competing priorities.
Summary
So how does this relate to you? We hope that enhanced knowledge of the disciplines described in this newsletter can be applied in real situations. For example, when leading organization or department-wide change efforts, consider how effectively you are building involvement, engagement, and ownership from employees, stakeholders, customers, and executive management so that the change will actually “stick” on a long-term basis. When trying to get buy-in from your team on new ways of working together, reflect on whether you are finding the right balance of telling the team how to operate versus allowing the team to develop the solution themselves to increase ownership. Ask yourself whether you are considering the “beneath the surface” issues that may be holding your team back from reaching higher levels of performance. In addition, when engaging consultants in helping to address your business challenges, knowledge of the multi-disciplinary approach provides you with new perspectives and questions to consider in your selection process.
Have a great summer!
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