Andrea Markowitz
Consultants are always dealing with those aspects of a client's knowledge or experience that they cannot handle by themselves. So by definition we are immersed in situations of complexity and doubt. In this essay, Andrea creates a context for all that follows. The context is one of paradox, contradictory truths, and the impossibility of there being only one answer that is true. Who better a source than Shakespeare, what more bittersweet role model than Romeo? In the modern film Shakespeare in Love, whenever the theater owner staging Shakespeare's plays is confronted with how he plans to solve a difficult problem, he replies, “It's a mystery!” Some action plan.
O loving hate!
O anything, of nothing first create!
Misshapen chaos of well-meaning forms!
Feather o lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!
This love feel I, that feel no love in this.
William Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet
When Romeo uttered these paradoxical phrases in response to his unrequited love for Rosalind (before he met Juliet), he could very well have been offering a job description for consultants. Our jobs are inherently paradoxical. We wish for clarity and find contradictions. We want answers and find dilemmas. We expose helplessness to encourage hopefulness. We paint the power of suffering to promote fulfillment. We tear down in preparation to build. And we want to be friends to our clients but brand them as the enemy when they resist change—and us.
We serve our clients well when we acknowledge the constant tug of war between opposing forces that are remarkably similar to those Romeo catalogued. Still struggling to break the tradition of patriarchal systems that were modeled after the church and the military, and rounded out with the industrial age's requirement for predictability and reason, we are mindful that we cannot continue our attempts to create “order” during an age in which “chaos” reigns. We try to encourage “healthy” attitudes toward work and life despite the malaise and “sickness” promoted by workplaces in which authentic conversations are rare and telling the truth is a radical act. We try to “awaken” employees to concepts like taking responsibility for their own thoughts and actions while their employers, who do not value consciousness and consider time for reflection as lost production, foster “sleep.” But organizational structures that interfere with truth, health, and consciousness, fortunately, are unsustainable and break down over time. We bring our humanity to work.
Romeo's jolting use of contradiction reveals the depth with which Shakespeare understood both the conflicts in human nature and the nature of human conflicts. In his compelling and convincing Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom explores how the bard essentially created our modern understanding of the complexities and inconsistencies of personality. The essence of Shakespeare's poetic inward glance at our humanity is our ambivalence, the ironic and paradoxical nature of human events. He raised the oxymoron from being a mere literary device or an inadvertent linguistic mistake to a way of capturing the paradoxical quality inherent in each person and in the human condition.
At its simplest, the oxymoron is a phrase that contradicts itself (a popular example is “peace-keeping force”). But in a larger sense it is an expression of what it means to live in modern times. Modernism represents the end of tradition, or a predictable world, one in which you knew from the circumstances of your birth the rough outline of your future. As recently as thirty years ago the workplace was knowable. As a new employee, you knew the steps of advancement and the progressions in salary. You knew that management was in charge and believed that large companies would stay large. But that world has disappeared, and now much of what we deal with is turning in on itself. There are no safe places anymore, if there really ever were. Yet we still wish for predictability and consistency. We want managers to be leaders. We want them to walk their talk and to send clear, consistent messages about their expectations. We believe that leaders should establish a strong mission and values and that change can be cascaded down through the organization. But these wishes are in vain in a world in which the oxymoronhas metamorphosed from a figure of speech to a convincing description of our paradoxical reality.
We deal with the complexity of opposites every time we consult. Paradox is built into our roles from the moment clients come to us to seek advice rather than mine the wisdom they need from their own people. This paradox is compounded by the fact that in many cases we inadvertently disable the people whom we were hired to help. The more we try to solve their problems, the more our clients become dependent on us, when our real goal is to encourage self-sufficiency.
Romeo's cry, “O anything, of nothing first create!” conjures up another intriguing and apt paradox in our lives as consultants. Our work requires us to face a kind of emptiness, or nothing, before something new is created. If consulting is about change, then we must face the truth of our current reality, its limitations, its futility, before anything new will occur. If we are truly capable of seeing our situation in a stark and unvarnished way, it creates a void, a nothing, a space for something new to enter.
“Serious vanity” eloquently captures our hubris in believing that we deserve the credit for outcomes that were actually accomplished by the client. Equally ironic is the “lightness” we feel after we have encouraged new conversations and possibilities for organizational members who worked through problems that were inordinately “heavy.”
Our “love-hate” relationship with consulting arises from the frustrating limitations of our ability to influence others. Romeo's love did not move Rosalind. Our love and care and hope may not move some clients. There are saving moments when our clients have genuine conversations with one another, when they come to see themselves as powerful, and when they become, in the words of large-scale change consultant Kathie Dannemiller, of “one brain, one heart.” But these moments do not alter the reality that paradox and ambivalence are at the heart of the consulting process.
Romeo's tumultuous outcry is a tribute to the complexity of people's relationships with other human beings, a complexity that consultants must address in order to be effective in their work. Paradoxes and conversations are our tools. Through authentic conversations about the extremes of existence, people learn how to make something out of nothing, to extract order from chaos, to inspire hope, and build enduring futures. These conversations invite others to express how they see their worlds today, and what they believe these worlds can be in the future. As Joel Henning, a contributor to this book, says, we must “avoid making conversations a means of manipulation and make them instead events that involve others in deciding how to use their freedom.” Paradoxically, when we try to push others toward something, we end up pushing them away from it. Manipulation and force backfire and create resistance. That is why neither coercive nor cajoling language inspires sustainable change. The most effective way to catalyze change is to open it up to discussion and get everyone possible involved in the process. We must engage our clients through conversations that confront them with the choices they have made in the past and the choices they still need to make, and hand them the baton that allows them to be responsible for their own decisions. In this way we help them follow the path of the hero's journey from dependency to choice, growth, and self-reliance.
One of Shakespeare's greatest gifts to us is the insight that our freedom comes from understanding the conflicting nature of our inner world and our relationships. “Loving hate” summarizes the human condition. When we blame our clients because they send mixed messages or do not walk their talk, and when we wish that the world were simpler and more rational, we expose our naivete as well as our unease in dealing with paradox. Mixed messages and the unwalked talk are to be expected. They are part of the nature of being alive. This insight is our gift to our clients, and to express it is to express our affection for them, though our poem may pale slightly in contrast to Romeo's.