Support me.

Trust me.

Respect me.

How many times have we said these words? Heard them from others? They sound really good. After all, who doesn’t want support, trust, and respect? I’m curious though, how often do we feel we get it or give it to others?

It would be easy to blame the lack of support, trust or respect on the person who isn’t giving it. I might suggest, however, that the person may not be the problem. It might instead be in how we are asking for it.

In Flawless Consulting, we talk about the importance of asking for what we want in partnering with others. Often, what we want is represented with these types of statements, but there is an inherent problem with them. They are result of what we hope to feel when working with others, they are not the path to get there. In short, these are what we call “goodness words.” They sound really good but are not particularly useful.

Why?

What is takes to earn my support, my trust and my respect may be different from the person I’m sitting across from. And sadly, whether at work or in our personal life, we expect others to just know.

In a recent conversation with one of my children, they said, “I just want your support.” To which I responded, “I thought I was giving it.” Imagine my surprise when I discovered I wasn’t. The conversation then turned to a testimony of all the ways I thought I was offering support to which they responded, “Well yes, but you didn’t do this.” And they were right. I didn’t do the thing they mentioned. I did a lot of other things I thought were important but, in the end, those things were important to me, not to my child.

Herein lies the problem with these “goodness words.” Turns out, they are not all that good. The feeling we get when we feel supported, trusted, and respected is good, but saying them alone is not enough. We need to tell people what we want to see or hear that will help us feel that way and in turn ask them what we want to see and hear as well.

So, the next time someone says to you, “I want your support.” Say, “I would love to offer my support. Tell me what that looks like for you” and don’t be surprised when they look at you with confusion. Chances are, no one has ever asked for clarity but that is what we are seeking. Yes, I want to support you. Tell me what I can do, that will help you feel that way. Challenge them, and yourself, to be clear and specific. Ultimately, “feeling supported” is the result of a series of little and big actions. The challenge is to know what specific actions matter and matter to the person seeking the support, trust, or respect.

This coming week, ask one person what support, trust or respect actually looks like to them and be ready to answer the same question yourself. If we want stronger partnerships, we have to stop asking for vague ideals and start defining the behaviors that build them.

The post The Problem with Goodness Words appeared first on Designed Learning.

At Connecting for the Common Good, we asked the question: What becomes possible when we treat connection not as a prelude to the work, but as the work itself?

Hosted alongside a growing circle of partners and community builders, the gathering brought together people working in civic engagement, journalism, education, faith, philanthropy, economic development, organizational leadership, and neighborhood transformation. Yet titles and expertise quickly became secondary.

Beyond the Conference Model

There were no keynote speakers. No panels of experts answering for everyone else.

Instead, participants engaged in conversations designed to foster ownership, possibility, dissent, commitment, and gifts: practices deeply rooted in the work of Peter Block and the relational frameworks that have shaped Designed Learning for decades. Small group conversation became the delivery system for learning.

Participants reflected on questions of place, longing, creativity, accountability, and the future of community. Open Space sessions allowed people to convene around what mattered most to them in real time. Community correspondents captured stories emerging from the room, while music, poetry, and art helped anchor the gathering in something more human than information exchange.

The result was not simply engagement.

It was participation.

Connection as a Civic Practice

Many people arrive at conversations about community looking for strategies, frameworks, or scalable solutions. Those things matter. But what often goes unnamed is that fragmentation itself is relational.

Isolation, distrust, polarization, disengagement- these are not only political or organizational problems. They are symptoms of disconnection.

Connecting for the Common Good explored a different possibility: that rebuilding community begins with rebuilding our capacity to be with one another differently.

Not performatively or transactionally but relationally.

Again and again throughout the gathering, participants spoke about the relief of entering a space where they did not need to posture, brand themselves, or prove their expertise to belong.

In a culture increasingly organized around speed, certainty, and performance, the gathering became an experiment in slowing down enough to notice each other again.

What Participants Created Together

What emerged over the course of the gathering was difficult to reduce to a single outcome because the value was not only in the sessions themselves but also in the relationships they formed.

People left with new collaborations, renewed clarity, deeper courage, and a stronger sense that they are not alone in the work they care about most.

Some participants explored new approaches to local journalism.

Others convened around youth engagement, economic participation, neighborhood resilience, or organizational culture, even the best and worst ways to eat a potato!

Many simply rediscovered what it feels like to be in conversations where curiosity matters more than certainty. Perhaps most importantly, people experienced what happens when hospitality, invitation, and ownership are treated as design principles rather than afterthoughts.

The Work Ahead

Connecting for the Common Good reminded us that transformation rarely begins with large-scale systems change. More often, it begins with small groups of people willing to gather differently, listen differently, and imagine differently together.

The gathering may have ended, but the work continues in neighborhoods, inside organizations, across communities, at dinner tables, within local economies, online at events like Journeys of Growth and Belonging. Through acts of invitation and generosity that rarely make headlines but quietly reshape the social fabric around us.

The future of the common good will not be built by individuals acting alone; it will be built through connection.

And connection, as we were reminded all week long, is not separate from the work.

It is the work.

The post Connecting for the Common Good: What Happens When Connection Becomes the Work appeared first on Designed Learning.

The technology works: It can write, analyze, predict, and produce at a speed that would have seemed impossible only a few years ago. Organizations have invested heavily. The tools are here.

And yet, something is not happening. The expected gains are not showing up.

The most recent State of the Global Workplace report tells a quiet but important story. Despite widespread investment in artificial intelligence, most organizations report little to no measurable improvement in productivity. At the same time, global employee engagement has declined for a second consecutive year, and managers, those closest to the experience of work, are becoming less engaged themselves.  

We might say the implementation is incomplete. Or that adoption needs more time. But there is another possibility. Perhaps we are asking the wrong question.

What is the work now?

The dominant question has been: How do we implement AI?

A more useful question might be: What is the work now that AI is here?

Not the technical work. The human work.

Because organizations are not machines into which we insert better tools. They are social systems, shaped by the quality of the relationships within them.

We have treated connection as something that sits alongside the work. A support function. A cultural layer.

But in moments of uncertainty and change, connection is not peripheral.

Connection is the content.

It is in the quality of connection that people decide:
• whether to trust what is being introduced
• whether to offer their curiosity or their caution
• whether to engage or quietly withdraw

No technology, however capable, can substitute for this.

The role we have underestimated. There is one place where this becomes visible very quickly. The manager.

Not as a position, but as a function. The person who sits closest to the daily experience of work. The one who turns strategy into conversation, and conversation into action.

We often describe managers as responsible for execution. A different way to see them is this: They are responsible for the quality of connection in the system. And that quality shapes everything.

When managers actively support the use of new tools, people are far more likely to find value in them. When they do not, the tools remain present but unused, or used without meaning.  

People do not adopt change because it is available.
They adopt it because it is made safe, relevant, and meaningful in relationship.

Yet managers themselves are less engaged than they were just a few years ago. Their spans of control are growing. Expectations are rising. We are asking them to hold the center of the organization while quietly removing what supports them in doing so.

Engagement as a signal.

We often speak about engagement as if it were a result. Something to be measured after the fact.

But engagement is also a signal. A signal of whether the system is alive.

When engagement declines, something important is being communicated. Not through words, but through energy. A lack of attention. A reluctance to contribute. A quiet form of resistance.

The data tells us that engagement is falling globally and that this carries a high economic cost.  

But the financial impact is only part of the story. Disengagement tells us that people are not finding meaning in what is being asked of them. And without meaning, change becomes something to endure rather than something to shape.

The emotional experience of work

There is another layer that is easy to overlook.

People report slightly improved well-being, yet their daily experience still includes high levels of stress, anger, and loneliness.

Leaders, in particular, seem to carry a quiet burden.

They report higher life satisfaction, and at the same time, more strain, more isolation, and more difficult days than those they lead.  

This is not a contradiction. It is a reflection of what leadership has become. More visibility. More responsibility. Less space for honest conversation.

We have created roles that ask people to hold complexity without always offering them connection in return.

What makes work worth doing

Across all of this, the findings point to something simple.

People are more likely to thrive when:
• they enjoy what they do
• they believe it matters
• they feel they have some choice in how they do it  

These are not new ideas. But they are easy to forget when the focus turns to efficiency, scale, and optimization.

AI will not remove the need for meaning. It will make the absence of it more visible.

If work becomes more automated, then the human experience of that work becomes more important, not less.

An alternative stance

There is a familiar response to moments like this. We create new initiatives. We design better training. We look for ways to accelerate adoption.

All of these may have value. But they leave something untouched. The way we show up with each other. What if, instead of asking how to drive adoption, we asked:

What conversations are we not having?

What are we not saying about:
• uncertainty
• capability
• fear
• possibility

What if we treated implementation not as a rollout, but as an invitation? An invitation for people to participate in shaping what their work is becoming.

The choice

The AI revolution is often described as a technological shift. It may be more useful to see it as a relational one.

We can continue investing in tools, hoping they will deliver the outcomes we want. Or we can invest in the quality of connection that allows those tools to matter.

Because in the end, performance will not be determined by what the technology can do. It will be shaped by the conversations people are willing to have, the trust they are willing to extend, and the meaning they are able to create together.

Connection is the content.

The post The AI Revolution has a Human Question appeared first on Designed Learning.

Why Flawless Consulting Matters for Human‑Centered Design

While Flawless Consulting® was originally created for consultants working inside organizations, its core principles align beautifully with what HCD needs to thrive: clear expectations, shared ownership, honest dialogue, and relationships built on trust rather than authority.

Below are the essential ways Flawless Consulting will strengthen and accelerate your human‑centered design efforts.

1. A Human‑Centered Process for Building Trust: At its heart, HCD is about understanding people—their needs, motivations, constraints, and lived experiences. But people will only share openly when trust is present. Flawless Consulting offers a repeatable, human‑centered process for quickly establishing that trust. By focusing on intention, partnership, and authentic engagement, it gives teams the groundwork to build meaningful connections with stakeholders and end users alike.
2. Partnership Over Power: Human‑centered design rejects the idea of the “expert designer” who hands down solutions. Instead, it elevates co‑creation. Block’s philosophy mirrors this beautifully. He reminds us that influence without authority is central to modern work—and that true partnership comes from transparency, curiosity, and shared decision‑making. This mindset turns design from something done to people into something created with them.
3. Authentic Conversations as a Design Tool: Honest dialogue isn’t just a soft skill; it’s a strategic design input. Flawless Consulting helps practitioners ask questions that get below the surface, surface real concerns and resistance, create psychological safety, and build momentum through shared understanding. These conversations deepen insight and uncover the emotional, cultural, and relational factors that shape user behavior—critical elements often missed in traditional research.
4. Clear Contracting Enables Effective Co‑Creation: Co‑creation requires clarity: on roles, boundaries, expectations, and success metrics. Flawless Consulting’s contracting process provides that clarity. When teams start with explicit agreements, HCD work becomes more focused, collaborative, and sustainable. Misalignment fades. Accountability strengthens. And design moves forward with confidence.
5. Shared Accountability Creates More Sustainable Design Outcomes: Too often, beautifully designed solutions fall apart in implementation. Block’s emphasis on joint accountability closes that gap. When the people who must implement a solution have been partners in shaping it, the work sticks. This is the essence of both organizational change and human‑centered design: people support what they help create.
6. Practice‑Based Learning Reinforces Human‑Centered Habits: HCD is experiential. So is Flawless Consulting. Both rely on practice, reflection, iteration, and real‑world application. Block’s model builds the relational muscles needed to make HCD effective: facilitating dialogue, navigating resistance, giving and receiving feedback, and holding space for diverse perspectives. These aren’t just design skills, they’re human skills.

Great design requires great relationships. Flawless Consulting gives teams the tools to build those relationships with intention, clarity, and humanity. When organizations pair the flawless partnership-based approach with human‑centered design methods, they unlock better insights, more trust, stronger collaboration, shared ownership, and higher‑quality, more sustainable solutions

As Block affirms, “Relationships are the mechanism for getting anything done” and it’s a powerful reminder that design becomes human‑centered when our relationships are human first.

The post Elevating Human‑Centered Design Flawlessly appeared first on Designed Learning.

We often stop at inspiration – great ideas, renewed hope, vivid envisioning – but nothing changes until inspiration is translated into behavior. Moving from inspiration to inspirACTION … not just feeling it but embodying it.

Inspiration is the why.

Action is the how.

Inspired action is when the why fuels the how.

As a facilitator of training programs, I often see people leave the room inspired. To help, we encourage SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound) goals as a place to start. I realized early on that being SMART wasn’t enough. You need to make your goals REAL SMART.

What is a REAL goal? It’s the difference between the knowing and the doing. It is the why. It is Realistic, Enticing, Attainable, and Leverageable. It is a goal that you care about, that excites you, that is within reach and sets you up for more … more of what you want not necessarily what others want for you.

Are you ready to get REAL? Below are some steps and questions to get you started.

Clarify Your Intention: What is the inspiration or idea that’s calling for your attention right now? Why does this matter to you? What would be meaningfully different if you acted on it?

Notice Inner Cues: What feelings, nudges, or sparks have you experienced around this idea? Where in your body do you feel certainty, energy, curiosity, or resonance? Does the idea feel aligned, exciting, or quietly “right”?

Identify Small, Immediate Steps: What is one tiny step you could take in the next 24 hours? What would be the simplest, easiest version of action you can begin with? What step feels natural—not forced?

Lower the Stakes: How could you experiment with this idea in a low‑risk way? What “safe room” or small audience can help you test or explore it? What would progress – not perfection – look like?

Reconnect to Your “Why”: When motivation dips, what truth or purpose do you want to return to? Who benefits – yourself or others – when you follow through? What impact do you hope this action creates?

Stay Open and Receptive: What practices help you hear your own guidance (journaling, quiet thinking, walking, stillness)? What signs, ideas, or intuitive hits have surfaced recently? What might you explore if you trusted those signals?

Build Support + Accountability: Who could you partner with to deepen accountability? Who can reflect the truth back to you when you hesitate? What kind of structure would support consistent inspired action?

When inspiration becomes action, possibility becomes momentum. Perhaps it’s time to let your intentions guide you, your inner cues steady you, and your small, courageous steps carry you forward. Progress isn’t about grand gestures; it’s about showing up with purpose. Trust that each REAL step you take is building the life, the work, and the impact you’re meant to create.

The post Moving from Inspiration to InspirACTION appeared first on Designed Learning.

In Flawless Consulting, we understand why that happens. It’s geometry. And while you may have questioned why you needed to learn that stuff in high school, understanding a little about some basic shapes can help you navigate one of your most pressing issues.

At a minimum, there are three essential parties in any consulting engagement or contract:

• Consultant: The person offering expertise and guidance.
• Client: The individual or group seeking help.
• The Consultant’s Boss: The person directing the consultant’s activities.

“Often consultants must both serve the needs of the client and fulfill a contract with their own management to implement these priorities,” says Peter Block, author of Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used. “This forces the boss into the contracting process and means internal consultants are always in at least a triangular contract.”

Each side of the triangle represents a relationship that must be clarified and managed. Contracting is not just about the consultant and client agreeing on deliverables; it’s about ensuring all three parties understand their roles, expectations, and boundaries.

To add another layer of complexity, consider what happens when you have to navigate a rectangular contract. This contract begins first with a general understanding between the consultant’s boss and the client’s boss. This means the consultant and often their client are showing up for work in a situation in which neither of them has particularly chosen the consultation and yet they have a given commitment to begin by their respective bosses.

No matter where you find yourself, each side of the rectangle or triangle needs to be explored before the engagement can begin. Otherwise, misunderstandings and resistance can arise. You can do something about it. Here are three tips to help you manage expectations and consult more flawlessly, no matter how your engagement takes shape.

1. Clarify Roles and Expectations Early: Before starting any engagement, map out the “contracting triangle or rectangle”: consultant, client, and the consultant’s boss (client’s boss). Make sure each party understands their role, expectations, and boundaries. This prevents confusion and ensures everyone is aligned from the outset.
2. Address All Sides of the Agreement: Don’t just focus on the consultant-client relationship. Explore and clarify each side of the triangle (or rectangle, if more parties are involved). If the manager’s expectations differ from the client’s, surface these differences and resolve them before work begins. This avoids the consultant being caught in the middle.
3. Surface and Resolve Misalignments Early: Use contracting conversations to identify any unaligned expectations or resistance. If parties have not chosen the engagement or have conflicting commitments, bring these issues into the open. Addressing them early helps prevent misunderstandings and resistance later.

In the geometry of consulting, clarity is the shortest distance between confusion and collaboration. Whether your contract is a triangle or a rectangle, Flawless Consulting starts with drawing the right lines and inviting everyone inside.

The post The Internal Consultant’s Dilemma appeared first on Designed Learning.

Sometimes, avoiding assumptions is best.

A swirl of leaves circles our feet as my two sons and I walk down the sidewalk near our house on a beautiful, crisp fall day. My four- and two-year-old boys’ legs have carried them an extra-long way, so I know we’re getting close to a meltdown from the youngest.

As we head back home, I notice my son’s gaze peer over to two kids in the backyard. I assume he’s going to ask to go play with them. He opens his mouth to say, “Mom, look, the kids are out…” and I immediately interject, “No, we’re not going to play today. We’ve gotta get home for Charlie’s nap.” My son responds, “I wasn’t asking that, I was just saying I saw the kids out.” “Oh, I’m sorry. Yes, I see the kids out, too.”

It dawned on me in that simple interaction how often we, as consultants, assume we know what our client is thinking before we do the important work of listening. When we don’t intentionally step outside our box and stay stuck in our assumptions, we relegate ourselves to the “expert” role. While being the expert can serve a purpose, it’s rarely the most effective way to serve our clients, especially when we want to solve the real problem and not just the symptoms of one.

Before taking Flawless Consulting, I was naïve to the difference between the presenting problem and the underlying problem. As a National Training Manager for a major healthcare organization, I remember conversations with a Sales Director who complained that Legal and Compliance were on his case about his team not completing contracts correctly in the CRM. I immediately went into problem-solving mode, reviewing training dates and building an outline.

After some additional conversations, I quickly realized the problem wasn’t training, but the operational processes within the system. It was clunky and took a lot of time to complete, with too many redundancies. At this point, training sessions were already scheduled, and planning was underway. Yet, we forged ahead and trained the team on the clunky processes, while working to update them in the background.

In retrospect, if I had completed a true discovery process with the key stakeholders BEFORE I assumed the solution, I would have saved all of us time and frustration.   

Think about your most recent conversations as a consultant. Maybe you heard your client explain their problem and jumped right to a solution for the presenting problem like I did. Perhaps you’ve heard a similar situation before and offered the solution you did in the past without really listening for the underlying problem. It feels good to be the expert; to be the one with a quick answer, the one people rely on, but being the expert comes with a cost. Too often in the expert role, we miss the chance to solve the underlying problem because we’re too focused on being the one with all the answers.

Let’s challenge ourselves as consultants to be quick to listen and slow to speak. Step out of your box of assumptions, ask the hard questions, and find the underlying problem before offering a solution.

The post Avoiding Assumptions as a Flawless Consultant appeared first on Designed Learning.

We live in a moment with low levels of trust in government and the institutions that serve society.  There are rising concerns about safety, accessible health care, livelihood, higher and lower education, the land and environment. This indicates that our existing structures for supporting the common good, democracy, and community are not working well.

The instinctive response is to spend more money on what we are now doing and find better leadership. When we seek better leadership, we are seeking more consistency, control, and predictability. This pattern adds to the task of leaders to build our well-being by delivering more convenience, speed, and cost savings. If we are committed to the common good, and the institutions we have counted on, it is not leaders and their mandate that will help; in fact, it is our affection for leaders that likely stands in the way of real change.  Consistency, convenience, speed rarely serve the common good or create positive change. Technology, even offered as a social good, is simply an extension of the control, speed, and convenience impulse.

It is time to question our attention to leadership. Not to improve it but to give it a rest. If we are serious about creating an alternative future for the commons, perhaps we need less leadership. Since the first step in creating an alternative future is departure, let us depart the idea that leadership is important or decisive. We reclaim control of what we care most about when we redecide where to place our attention. This may be to move away from conventions of the American Dream, streets paved with gold, and move towards restoring our humanity through relational solutions.

Much like the exodus from ancient Egypt, our most powerful strategy may be to focus on departure as a political and spiritual act. Departing is an alternative to protest, programs for change, anger at what seems wrong. Departure is an act of agency, departure from waiting for our leaders’ transformation, departure from our resentment, departure from waiting for people in charge or new people in charge to make a difference. In Exodus terms, it is leaving Pharoah for the common good and the neighborhood which is the modern wilderness.

Departure

Departing leadership is giving up a lot. We hold a strong belief that leadership is what produces outcomes. In every domain of society––work, politics, churches, baseball––when things turn bad, we want to change leaders, hoping that this will better serve the public, build churches, grow institutions, win games.

In our faith in better leadership, we cultivate it, train for it, invest in it, research it. There is a world of executive development believing that to get the organizational outcomes of our choosing, the people in charge––whom we have forever called leaders––need to not only know the business we are in, but be more human, better coaches, stronger motivators, finer role models, clearer visionaries. Human. Coach. Motivator. Role Model. Visionary.

Setting aside our belief in leadership may be uniquely useful in the domains of the common good. Education, health, safety, government, local enterprise. These are worlds where service and the collective––instead of profit––are the point. In the commons, we are better served if we ramp down our attention to the concept of leader and ramp up our attention to the role of connectors.

This means we focus on an alternative to the market economy. We focus on an economy built upon peers and citizens and neighbors trusting one another and thereby making the place better. We replace the dominant cultural focus on the market world and focus on what we can call the creative economy. This is the economy where better outcomes occur when people are agents and produce their own well-being. The foundational shift is from a market narrative built on scarcity, competition, scale, speed, and control to the communal and common good building blocks of gifts, relationships, cooperation, imagination, and small-and-slow efforts.

This alternative narrative focuses on the common good as a third way outside the polarizing attention to top or bottom, left or right. Redirecting our primary attention from leaders to connectors is based on a belief that citizens, employees, neighbors can be trusted to deliver the particular outcomes we seek. Again: Youth. Safety. Health. Planet. Economic equity. Local circulation of the dollar.

This shift is not about self-managing teams, or bottom up, or grassroots or managing from the outside in. Those concepts still hold on to the idea of leader and only shift what we want from them. The required shift is to retire leadership as an organizational principle and make room for connectors to be the center of our attention.

Connectors for Community

The connector has expertise in bringing together any group of people––peers, strangers, neighbors, activists, congregations––to create trust and make a place better. The essence of that effort can be usefully called building social capital. It produces all the common good outcomes we seek, including winning baseball games. In the common good version of what the market economy calls productivity, social capital outranks financial capital, venture capital, return on investment.

What is encouraging is that there are connectors within ten feet of where we are standing. They are currently making the world work. They produce what humans need to get by. They welcome youth that believe they do not belong. They produce health and an extended life. Safe streets. More accountability among citizens. Care for the land and the water and the air. The outcomes we thought better leadership and management could deliver and have not. Their work requires we acknowledge that the focus on the people we look to as leaders has created more isolation, a breakdown of democratic values, and growing economic disparity. The problem is not the knowledge and skills of our leaders; it is our exalted version of their importance. It becomes tragic when citizens believe that the culture does not work for them and they seek leadership in the form of a dictator. An extreme version of a belief in the people at the top.

The invitation here is to flood our attention, our news, our philanthropy, our validation onto connectors. The uncredentialled people who make community, the common good, the creative economy work and know that peers, neighbors, and lateral relationships deliver the collective outcomes the market and political campaigners promised.

One step is to shift our attention about what we consider news. We need to let go of the people and events we currently consider newsworthy. Lose interest in what fails, whose fault it is, who is in power, what role the people at the top are playing and promoting. Let us consider connectors to be the heart of the news. A new storyline for the front page and above the fold is about high impact connectors and where connection is changing lives.

Instead of investigating conflict and crisis, let us investigate the fundamental methodology of connection and how bonds are constructed, and where there are struggles. This is not about good news; it is simply about where social capital is in play. An example is our concern for safety. Most urban violence turns out to be from people experiencing both abnormal isolation and often living in an outsider street culture. Accepting this takes our attention to where social capital is being built among neighbors. Where strangers are being brought together, not to resolve differences or talk emotionally about religion and politics, but to trust each other. This is a determinant of safety. One storyline will be about how vulnerability with each other produces safety. Where people attend to each other not as charity or generosity, but as a daily habit. Where connectors on a block are letting us know what is needed and how we can help.  Where people know the names of all the children and the elderly and the vulnerable and the newcomers. This is what produces safety. The police are good in crises; they don’t prevent them.

Departing our attention to leaders means we focus on those not traditionally credentialled.  Connectors know how change happens and have the methodology to bring more life to our institutions and peace and care to our civic spaces.  Stories of where churches, educators, health care workers, enterprises, art centers, and architects are creating an alternative future are waiting for us to recognize many times a day how important they are.  The eyes have it.

The post Departing Leadership: Welcoming Connectors appeared first on Designed Learning.

“Let’s try something different this time around,” we thought. My husband and I packed our two kids up and headed to the airport for my upcoming work trip to lead sales onboarding training for Quest Diagnostics. I usually left on my own, but we thought we’d get a little more time together this way.

About ten minutes from the airport, the trainer in me couldn’t help myself and I said we should go around the van and say what we love about each person. We came to me last, and my 5-year-old daughter says, ‘What I love about mom is that she lifts me up so I can see the stars’. Talk about gut-wrenching right before I’m about to board a plane and leave my family for days! We had recently been intentional about showing the kids the nighttime sky; the moon, the stars, the greater expanse of the world they know so little of in their young lives. I couldn’t remember exactly when I had lifted her up to see those stars better, but to her, it left a lasting impression.  

A few months later, as I entered the Flawless Consulting I workshop, I assumed I would walk away with a few ideas on better communication. And to be honest, I didn’t think I had much to learn. I was a natural talker, a charming person, and I got along with everyone so naturally that meant I was a good consultant, right?

Participating in the Flawless Consulting 1 workshop uncovered a whole new way of operating, both as an internal and external consultant. I didn’t just learn new and valuable frameworks for interacting with customers, I walked away empowered as a valuable asset to my organization. I realized that I was not simply an obedient order taker or helpful assistant to the executives, no, as an internal consultant utilizing these frameworks, I was vital to creating outcomes that actually moved the needle instead of just applying a band-aid.

Like any new way of thinking, it felt foreign at first. I reviewed my participant manual before heading into a meeting with the Sales Director. I came up with impactful questions and reminded myself to allow the Director and project team members to struggle through to the answer of the underlying problem. But after only a few weeks of re-wiring my brain to approach this vital role of mine, I noticed a shift. My confidence grew. I knew that the uncomfortable (sometimes even painful) struggle to solution was part of the process. I realized being useful was a lot better than being helpful.  

When we partner with our clients as trusted advisors, the goal is not to simply accomplish whatever they ask of us, it’s to uncover what’s possible. To unlock a solution they would never have considered, or better yet, to help them realize their ask was aiming too low.

Perhaps as a true flawless consultant, we can lift them up to help them see the stars.

The post How Flawless Consulting gave me confidence to be useful rather than helpful appeared first on Designed Learning.

You’ve likely heard the saying, “I’ll take the path of least resistance.” For those who want to avoid conflict, it often appears to be the best way forward. In consulting however, choosing the path of least resistance is often the one that will lead your project to broken promises or failed solutions.

To understand the value of choosing the path of most resistance, it’s important to understand what’s underneath it. Resistance is fear made visible. For consultants working with clients, it often represents the inability or reluctance to express some concern. In Peter Block’s Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used, it’s explained as such,

“There is no way you can talk clients out of their resistance because resistance is an emotional process. Behind the resistance are certain feelings, and you cannot talk people out of how they are feeling.”

How do we help our clients express their concerns, or feelings, more directly, without disguising? And, why is it so important to do?

Why we walk toward resistance is fairly obvious if you understand what drives it. Resistance is fear or some type of underlying concern. These fears or concerns, if left unexplored, are most certainly the things that will impede your ability to recommend a sustainable and impactful solution to your client. As consultants, it’s important to remind ourselves that the client’s behavior is not a reflection on us. We often have done nothing wrong to create resistance. The “wrong” happens when we fail to confront it.

Choosing the path of most resistance compels us to help the client express their concerns so they can pass. In Flawless Consulting, it’s referred to as “stating the reservations directly and stopping the subterfuge. When the client’s concerns are stated directly, the consultant knows what the real issues are and can respond effectively.”

There are three steps for handling resistance.

1. Identify in your own mind what form the resistance is taking. Pick up the cues and describe to yourself what you see or hear happening.
2. State in a neutral, nonjudgmental way, the form the resistance in taking. This is called “naming the resistance.” The skill is to find the neutral language. Simply state what you see or hear. Be careful to not place judgement on your observation. Describe the behavior … not what you think the behavior means.
3. Be quiet. We keep talking to reduce the tension we feel when we confront the client. Don’t keep talking. Live with the tension. Then, let your client respond to your observation and discuss what’s creating it and how best to move forward.

There is no way you can talk clients out of their resistance because resistance is an emotional process. However, there are specific steps a consultant can take to help a client get past the resistance and get on with solving the problem. As consultants that’s our goal … to help a client solve a problem so that it stays solved. Choosing the path of least resistance won’t get us there. Be flawless and walk head on into challenging conversations. Do so with real compassion for what the client is feeling and be authentic in your desire to help. When we do so, choosing the path of most resistance isn’t nearly as hard.

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