CONSULTANTS' LEARNING WITHIN ACADEMIA Five devices for the design of university-based learning opportunities for management consultants Gerhard Smid SIOO: Inter-university Centre for Development and Education in Organization Science and Change Management, Admiraal Helfrichlaan 1, 3527 KV Utrecht, The Netherlands
appeared in: Studies in Continuing Education Vol 23, No.1, 2001 issn 0158-037X Abstract
This paper explores the ways in which it is possible for universities to design learning opportunities for management consultants. Drawing on a successful practice in The Netherlands and using the literature on learning, development of competencies and career theory, it investigates selected aspects of this particular ‘market’, comparing the conventions governing the practice of consultants with those of academic practice. Its subsequent argument for the successful design of learning opportunities for professional consultants is organized around a discussion of five learning “devices”: (1) a self-reflective design practice, (2) a design process operating along three dimensions - the acquisition of knowledge and/or techniques, development of professional competencies, personal and professional transitions - (3) treating knowledge as a process rather than a product, (4) building on learning experiences in work and on anticipated performances, (5) a prohibition of “ego” in consultants' learning. The paper concludes with some reflections on the use of these devices elsewhere.
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Introduction A fascinating development in universities today is the struggle to get more “in touch” with adult learners with work practices outside academia, such as professionals. Management consultants are a particularly interesting category of highly educated learners. Although their work itself constitutes a rich learning environment, consultants (and/or their firms) are constantly in search of learning opportunities elsewhere as a basis for innovation. Universities can function as partners in the development of these opportunities, but to do this successfully, they need to be aware of the peculiarities of this particular (semi) profession. This article explores some of those peculiarities. It is based on experiences in the Netherlands, where a number of universities have been cooperating for more than forty years in a joint venture delivering post-graduate programs for management consultants. Beginning with a description of the consulting firm and its players, concentrating on the conventions governing the practice of consultants, I will then examine the development of knowledge and competencies, as well as the career path of consultants. This in turn forms the basis of an outline of five “devices” for the design of learning arrangements. The consulting firm and its players Management consulting has been going for nearly a century (in the Netherlands; see Hellema & Marsman 1997; van Baalen 1995) and in the Netherlands, variety reigns, for a range of reasons, including work context, work content, educational and occupational background, and career paths. Consultants work for the large consulting firms 1 or in the large SME sector. Often they simply start out on their own or together with some colleagues, with the support of one or two clients. No formal accreditation is required. The kinds of problem this occupation or semi-profession deals with vary from clear, well-instrumented problems to messy, hardlyinstrumented ones. Some deliver well designed solutions (“servicing”), others focus more on the processes of defining issues and /or problems (“real consulting”). It is not a rigid business in the demographic sense (early entry is not required), it has quite permeable borders, sometimes it functions as a pool profession (Abbot 1988), and many enter the field with fresh experiences from other arenas. In my own work I encounter all kinds of highly qualified people, sometimes with a BA or MBA but often with higher degrees in fields like sociology, psychology, engineering, philosophy, theology, physics or even astronomy. Some consultants work for a couple of years as such and then take on a management position (Kipping & Amorim 1999), and many stay for more than 5 years. In the Netherlands only a minority (about 20%) are members of their professional association. Understanding the market When universities interact with this (semi-)profession, they need to understand the business and its players as a prerequisite for the development of adequate learning arrangements for consultants. This is not easy. Too often academics tend to loose touch with the underlying premises they work with. These premises and assumptions, all together “conventions”, tend to become “self evident”, as a large body of research has shown (Rip 1994; Latour 1987; Chia 1996). It is a permanent risk for designers of learning environments with an academic background to build into their pedagogic practices, unintentionally, tacit conventions that do not fit with the conventions of their new customers. To address this problem here, I use the method of a comparison that looks at the differences between the academic profession and people working in the consulting business. A useful way to approach these differences is to think in terms of a spectrum: at one end of the spectrum are the conventions governing the classic academic profession, and at the other end the typical conventions
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governing the professional in the consulting business. Concentrating on those aspects that structure the activities of both groups in practice, my discussion will address the organisational context, the clients they work with/for, the freedom of choice they have to decide on what content they work on, their aim, what they do with knowledge, how they develop knowledge, the scope of that knowledge, and their behavioural program. The suggestion is that this comparison can help us to understand more about the conventions that govern the practice (and learning) of consultants. Conventions governing academia The typical academic works in a task organisation, with both a product (education) and a capacity (research) function (Simon 1989). The government as the ‘principal’ decides that there should be education and research, and thereby defines the form. Academics work within this form as ‘agents’, although they can determine substantive aspects of their output themselves: their ‘field’ is the content and here ‘academic freedom’ reigns. However, they work in environments in which the norms of their academic discipline are not the only decisive element; government and other stakeholders also play a considerable part in determining the content. Politicians and managers, teachers, researchers and users, all have their roles to play in this process. The dominant work processes (teaching and research) make the world of the academic profession a relatively planned world. They are supposed to interact with a standardised ‘public’: with colleagues similar to themselves, with young people aged around twenty who still have a lot to learn. Often, then, they no longer really have to think very much about their ‘clients’ or ‘customers’. The consumers of their efforts are already ‘inside’, they are a non-problematic point in their cognitive map. Academics (teachers and/or researchers) work with existing knowledge, are supposed to develop new combinations and new knowledge, to pass on knowledge and to judge others’ efforts in this area. The goal is to build and provide knowledge that is considered 'true' within the scientific community. In this sense, academics are supposed to be truth-seeking, and they have to display a continually critical attitude towards their environment. The production of the desired cognitive constructions requires a permanent disjunction (or ‘mismatch’) with the outside world. Often people continue this disjunctive behaviour outside the academic work process: behaviour that generates success in one area is also pursued in other areas. This truth-seeking behaviour is guided by the empirical cycle. Academics are interested in the development of general explanations that are valid in a large number of situations (n = ∞ ∞). This entails, by definition, detaching the phenomena under investigation from their specific contexts, since otherwise no useful data would emerge. Academics stay within one field of knowledge, going as deeply as they can. They are supposed to become a specialist or an expert. They are meant to know all the nooks and crannies of their field, the arguments, the search rules, the methods, and to cultivate relations with their peers in the same field, because they need each other to acquire the ‘reputation’ which is the ‘currency’ in the academic world (Whitley 1984). Typical conventions in the consulting firm Professional consultants, on the other hand, are highly educated people working in market organisations with a capacity function. Some work with a standard ‘public’, but most work with a variety of clients. The forms they work in are far from fixed. Seldom are they simply implementers: they often design the forms and the content of their output themselves, on the basis of discussions with clients, sometimes within limits set by their professional group. Mutual interdependency between the client system and the professional is an important characteristic of these people’s work. The professional’s context is an unplanned, irregular world.
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like PWC, KPMG, E&Y, Andersen, Deloite & Touche Bakkenist.
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Consultants also work with knowledge; however, they are not supposed to develop new academic knowledge 2 , but to make new combinations. They are not oriented towards finding the truth, but towards adding value. They intervene in their “client system” to improve its functioning or its value. This kind of work requires a continual alternation of distance and closeness, of mismatch and match. These people must be very analytic (able to make a good diagnosis) and at the same time very empathic towards their client system. Empathy requires a special behavioural repertoire: instead of disjunctive behaviour, here ‘matching’ is required, that is, the ability to generate ‘rapport’. Value-adding behaviour takes place through the regulatory cycle. This cycle is not the sequence “theory-hypothesis-testingtheory”, but the sequence “problem situation-problem construction and diagnosis-design of intervention-intervention-evaluationassessment of new situation”. People in these practices are not supposed to be interested in general explanations, but in measures that work in a specific case (n=1). This entails phenomena being seen in their specific context, since possibly relevant variables might otherwise be lost sight of. Consultants often start within one field and might become an expert in it, but they also get the following message: “cross the boundaries of your knowledge domain frequently. Make new contacts with client systems, accept new tasks in new assignments, acquire new expert knowledge, new techniques, new skills and also develop new behavioural patterns”. University academics and professional consultants compared Of course, not everyone working within academia or the consulting industry will follow these conventions to the letter. For example, some universities have extensive experience with new markets, and some academics have turned themselves into consultants or trainers. Consultants also sometimes really look like academics, and they might mimic typical academic behavior as a positioning strategy. However, this initial comparison does tell us that people working in the consulting business generally have to comply with conventions that are quite different from those in academia, as we can see in table 1.
Insert table1 here
This will certainly produce a variety of learning demands. Let us look now at some aspects of the situation of consultants in more detail, in order to understand this variety. Knowledge and competencies One of these aspects is the issue of knowledge and/or competencies. Why? Academics often stay within one field of knowledge. They know quite well what they have to do to stay competent (and employable): do some teaching, not only undergraduate students but also postgraduates, including PhD students, read the discipline's journals, do research, publish, and travel, giving papers at international conferences. But consultants have to do something different. The have to play on a larger field, do research, provide training, talk to a variety of clients and cross boundaries frequently. This raises the following questions: What is the consultant's specialty, when is his 3 knowledge at a sufficient level, and when should he invest in further education? To answer these questions, 2
In fact they develop new knowledge, although under certain circumstances. We might call it situated knowledge, socially produced and often expressed in simple carriers or artifacts like matrices, drawings, maps and models. They produce ‘models for’ and not 'models of’. To produce these outcomes, consultants need their professional competencies, as described in this article. These professional competencies encompass the capability of getting enacted and related to another social system. See: Simon (1969), Schön (1983; 1987) and the Dutch psychologist van Strien (1986) in his work Practice as Science; they develop a specific epistemology of professional practice. 3 For he, read he/she, although in the management consulting business, consultants are generally male.
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the professional associations have developed some tools that can help us understand the demand for the learning of consultants, like a descriptive T-shaped model (see Barcus III & Wilkinson 1986; extended by the author). It consists of four fields: expert knowledge, skills and techniques, reference knowledge and professional competencies.
Insert figure 1 here In the area of expert knowledge, the model identifies a management consultants’ expert knowledge base. It is the intellectual capital he uses when he supports his clients. This capital can be subdivided in themes like general management, strategy and planning, production techniques, quality management, facilities management, finance and accounting, logistics, marketing, human resources, research and development, branch relationships, internal and external relations, legal questions and/or information systems and information technology. Often consultants master more than one theme. In skills & techniques, the model refers to basic techniques such as mathematics, research and statistics, quantitative methods, information techniques, handling computers etc., communication techniques, educational techniques, policy techniques, project management technique. Most consultants have entries to other knowledge fields, and we call this reference knowledge. These are the areas the consultant is a little familiar with but relies on colleagues or other entries that can help him). In professional competencies, the model identifies the methods a consultant uses when he: •
gets in touch with the client system, builds a relationship with that system, makes a contract (legal, financial and psychological) and a proposition, defines his own role and the role of his fellow practitioners and supports colleagues, manages the relationship with the client in the long term (relation between systems)
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makes a methodical diagnosis, making inferences, trying to develop an analysis and preparing an interpretation or judgement of the processes in the other system, not for the sake of the analysis itself, but with an eye to intervention and turning it into a tool or ‘product’(diagnosis)
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plans and implements a strategy or an intervention in the other system at individual, group or organisational level and turn it into a ‘product’ (strategy & intervention)
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reflects, maintains his own learning capacity, monitors his own development and provides assurance that he works according to the state of the art (learning & development and professional quality).
A management consultant will cover a number of themes in the expert knowledge area (not just one, like the academic). He also covers the areas of techniques and skills and reference knowledge. The most important field is that of professional competencies. The range here is not static (like the academic) but develops during their career. Careers Careers, or rather career scripts, can be seen as the way organisations or even branches design the sequence of occupational roles (Latack 1989).
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In the academic career within a university we are used to a relative uniform script. We see the student-assistant helping the professors and building networks, the PhD student hard working to produce his entrance ticket to the academic profession. If he has displayed his talent to do research and to publish, he generally starts lecturing, and later also acts as an expert or consultant. Still later, on gaining tenure, he might start playing a role in management and administration. After a phase as a Senior Lecturer or Assistant Professor, he might become Associate and later a full Professor. Then he is responsible for the development of his particular knowledge field, but also for the development of the students and lecturers that work for and with him. As said before, he stays within one knowledge domain. The career script of consultants is different. Looking at the various schemes used within the large companies, as well as the career trajectories of consultants working as soloists, the "average" script can be captured with one that I found in a medium-sized consulting firm. This script consists of 4 stages: junior, medior, senior, strategist (van Delden 1993; Dalton 1989). A beginner or junior has knowledge of a limited professional area. He works autonomously on problems, and produces solutions. Juniors are thus practically engaged with a specialty. In the course of time, at the so called ‘medior’ level, they can go out and talk with clients, advise, do research, interact with other disciplines, and so on. After about five years the consultant goes out autonomously for acquisitions and make new contacts with clients. He is a senior now, and also engages in internal coordination, takes responsibility for professional quality, working methods and procedures, and coordinates a number of disciplines. After some ten years experience, the consultant plays a role in boardrooms, exercises influence on complex situations, and helps steer the strategy of the consulting firm. He is a strategist.(see table II)
Insert table II here
Both career scripts seem to consist of stages, and at each new stage one embarks on new activities. The path of the academic is relatively gradual, but consultants have to jump around more, they regularly cross boundaries. They have to, because the problems they meet in their client systems or in a project cannot be dealt with within one’s own discipline. Their career is often described as a 'spiral' as opposed to the 'steady state' of the academics (Driver 1982). Crossing boundaries: transitions There are a number of boundaries in the script of consultants. The junior practitioner works within the safe boundaries of a specialty, but when he becomes a ‘project leader’ after a number of years, he must learn to deal with ambiguities as he enters into relationships with clients. Content and focus on the ‘how’, becomes less centered, and he must become more sensitive to contexts. The medior is a kind of ‘specialist-plus’, and still derives his identity from his specialty as such; later on as a senior he derives it from the effects he produces in the world of the client (system). He must understand the deep structures and meta-rules of the client system, which are the preconditions of the problems that hamper clients. The senior must stand above his own discipline, and understands the limitations of his own domain and the peculiarities of its methods. Consultants who have traveled this far now get, or take, responsibility for the big projects. This is a quite a change for those who have been accustomed to operate basically as a ‘soloist’ with minor managerial responsibilities. He must understand now various knowledge domains, must handle his own and others’ ambiguities generated by hybrid roles (Causer & Jones 1996).
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Some consultants move completely out of their original domain: they discover that they are completely responsible for a complex business and are a behavioral model for their colleagues. They face the question of how to manage a variety of knowledge bases, professions and client relations. They now become decision-makers or organizers of decision-making processes, and act mainly in the field of leadership, strategy and management. Crossing these boundaries is fun, but not unproblematic. Management consultants indicate that throughout their career they go through quite a number of crises, and not only through a mid-life crisis. It appears to be a considerable transition for, say, the junior practitioner to become a ‘project leader’ after a number of years. When existing behavioral patterns are no longer adequate and are ‘rebuilt’, this can be difficult at the level of the individual. As I have observed at close quarters, for many people in management consulting it is a wrench to break loose from content, to stop focusing on the ‘how’, and become sensitive to the context. It seems that the longer one has worked as a specialist, the harder it is to become more sensitive in this sense. 4 What sometimes makes these transitions difficult? Psychology teaches us that adaptation to new occupational roles (Trice & Morand 1989), like other life events, can produce stress (Latack 1989). If we accept this view, the difficulty seems to stem from ineffective coping behavior. This point needs some elaboration. We can also understand consultants' occupational role transitions as a conversion of habitus (Windolf 1981; Bourdieu 1990). Habitus is the socially-produced set of behavioral competencies acquired in a biography as an “internalized grammar”. This “grammar” can produce an ‘in principle’ unlimited number of actions, symbolic conceptions and strategies. It consists of consistent schemes built up in the process of learning throughout life. These schemes can be made functional in various situations. They are attainments built up mainly through non-formal learning processes, and are acquired one after the other throughout one’s lifetime. Linked together, they form an internal structure with a certain consistency and complexity. This structure in turn forms the basis upon which new schemes can be integrated, or not. Sometimes conversion of habitus takes place: the basic structure of the internalized grammar is rebuilt to provide responses to new situations. Production of the new means destruction of the old. The established grammar has to be abandoned, and this can produce crises. This concept of conversion of habitus is a good metaphor for some of the transitions in the working life of consultants. Its relation to the idea of ‘grammar’ suggests the depth of the behavioral programs concerned, and the effort needed to change: not only the words, not only a new language but also a new deep structure. The concept also emphasizes the effort needed when one has to deal with new ambiguity: learning to work in hybrid roles means not only changes in the occupational identity and the locus of authority but also learning to speak in various languages (Causer & Jones 1996). Such transitions are an essential part of learning processes of advanced consultants. If such a transition is not properly managed or simply ignored, it can make the professional temporarily insecure, unproductive, or even ‘burned out’. To prevent a fixation on such negative outcomes, I would propose describing these transitions in terms of ‘learning tasks’, so that if these tasks are not fulfilled or completed, the cause of the negative outcome can be detected, and a proper educational intervention can be planned. More interesting is the case where we build opportunities that induce the appropriate conversion of habitus.
The work of Thijssen (1998) supports this observation, he describes it as ' experience concentration'. The longer this process goes on, human talent will not develop and career step will become difficult.
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Five devices for design It simply makes no sense, then, for universities to approach the learning demands of professional consultants with the same (selfevident) beliefs, rules or principles normally used for undergraduate students. In the process of designing their activities they need to draw on the very different assumptions described so far, but descriptions in themselves are not very handy as a practical form. So, let us organize these descriptions in the form of a device, 5 since this form is better suited to the situations where it will actually be used. The devices presented here have been constructed 6 in a process of reflection on my own practice of designing programs for consultants, testing them in new situations and consulting for academics, and they are part of a larger set (Smid 1999; Smid 2001). I have chosen these five as an initial orientation basis (Engeström 1995) for designers of university programs; my experience suggests that five is a good number, and that the presentation of any more devices will result in the use of none.
Device 1: build a self-reflective design practice If universities want to support partners aiming to innovate on the basis of knowledge, they should not ignore the conventions governing those occupations. Therefore, universities cannot afford to allow the conventions of academia to become or stay selfevident. If they do, designers of curricula assume that their “clients” have, for example, the same aims, that they are also interested in the development of knowledge, in finding the truth, and are searching for general explanations, detached from contexts. Programs based on these assumptions clearly do not fit. If universities do not understand the fundamental elements of this misfit, conflicts will not be addressed adequately. I have encountered many situations where academics tried to defend their approach and formed an alliance with the people resembling them the most, such as those who straightforwardly apply general knowledge, in our case the junior consultants. They seem to converge around a definition of ‘hard, scientific knowledge’, and others acquire a label: as being ‘soft and non-scientific’. This is a non-productive situation and will contribute neither to the expansion of universities nor to the innovative or expansive learning (Engeström 1995) of, say, medior or senior consultants. We need a design practice that is self-reflective and digs underneath hidden conventions and assumptions.
Device 2: design along three dimensions When universities negotiate with consultants or their firms and design learning tasks, they have to think not only of their main strength, that is, the area of content (expert knowledge, techniques), but also of professional competencies and transitions. Any design of a learning environment for management consultants should encompass learning tasks along these three dimensions: •
the acquisition of knowledge and/or techniques (the y-axis);
•
the development of professional competencies (the z-axis);
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transitions (the x-axis).
These elements can be combined into a single diagram with three axes of learning tasks.
Insert figure 2 here
Device 3: consider knowledge a process, not just a product A university that offers learning opportunities consisting only of content (knowledge), poses its offering prominently on the Y-axis. It offers to support the expansion or deepening of (access to) context free knowledge, according to the systematics of a knowledge 5
A ‘device’ is a representation of knowledge that comes close to a ‘rule’, ‘ principle’ or ‘imperative’.
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domain, unrelated to any particular context. This might be correct in a learning and teaching practice where the learner is not yet a member of any occupational practice, such as at a pre-junior level of development. However, consultants' demand for learning is embedded in their work context. Their demand emerges in the context of the diagnosis of specific client systems, the production of a judgement, making plans for interventions, or building relations to a specific client system. These are all new 'n=1' situations, in which consultants require situated knowledge. It is important that the provider does not work according to the systematics of a single knowledge domain, but matches to this n=1 situations, acts consistent with the dominance of context and connects to the outcomes of situated learning. The provider has to move away from knowledge as a product, away from the stabilized facts, away from knowledge operating within its own systematics, and instead take the primitive scientific process as a starting point. This ‘upstream’ part of the process of knowledge development (Chia 1996) concerns speculations, the gathering of indications that lead to a provisional finding, a concept or an argument. It does not yet contain strategies for persuading one’s colleagues (Latour 1987). If relevant, the provider demonstrates the discipline's characteristic strategy for inquiry or heuristics in a 'n=1' situation. What works is not the presentation of the results, but the way the researcher reaches his results. Advanced consultants are certainly more interested in the bits of reconstruction of the inquiry process that led to a new insight, rather than just the knowledge product itself. They can use these heuristics to improve their own diagnostic process. They can also use it as a means of intervention. For instance, management consultants often help their customers to ‘reorganize’ their mode of reducing complexity. Playing together with a new heuristic will work better than presenting another knowledge product, or persuading them with another insight.
Device four: relate designs to zones of proximal performance Consultants are interested in an external learning environment in order to achieve better performances in the future. To a certain extent we can forecast these future performances by consultants (van der Heijden 1996; Smid 1999) and identify zones of proximal performances and roles (Engeström 1995). The model of a career script can help here, because it helps to identify the kinds of work in the various zones. When we understand the sequence of work and work roles, to a certain extent we also understand the consultants' learning experiences and the competencies required for future work. This can provide the basis for the design of the external learning environment. Learning experiences at work will be inputs, with outputs being the conditions (acquisition of knowledge, techniques and skills, and the conversion of habitus) enabling consultants to develop the anticipated competencies in future work projects.
Device five: no "Ego" The learning environment must be carefully designed with respect to transitions. It must be flexible, because one never knows exactly where and when a conversion process will come to the surface. Frequent attention to the progress of consultants on this dimension is an important factor in their satisfaction (and also in marketing). This starts immediately at the junior level. Even junior practitioners convert habitus, for example, from exact analysis to learning, to make judgements based on incomplete information. Frequent attention presupposes a design that provides space, respect, mutual trust and psychological safety (Edmonson 1999). This has consequences for the selection of teachers. In programs provided by universities, we also need reflective practitioners as teachers. They are important to support the conversion of habitus. They can demonstrate, for example, how they went through such 6
They can be considered as abductions (Cunningham 1996; Thagard & Shelley 1997).
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processes themselves. Although consultants sometimes want to be impressed by 'ego', and it is tempting to respond to this desire, the exposure of a large ‘Ego’ or other mismatching behaviors by teachers is generally dysfunctional. It is better to investigate together what factors produce this desire. We might then discover that the desire to be impressed is a psychic strategy to deal with the insecurity and ambiguity accompanying conversion of habitus. Such a strategy can obstruct the learning process because one loses realism about oneself. Conclusion Any entry into a new market (or a response to a question of a new client) is an interesting challenge. Many people are inclined to meet the new with a pattern that has proved its value. Why would one change a winning formula? I have argued in this contribution that universities must not use their standard repertoire when they design programs for management consultants. A learning environment that consists of knowledge as a product, research techniques and academic skills, will not be successful, it will produce dissatisfied clients. Something else has to be done. If universities have an ambition to innovate successfully, they must manage the risk of unintentionally reproducing tacit conventions that do not fit with the conventions of the new customers. If one understands this fully, one can start innovative activities, and that means: start to learn. The five devices presented here intend to support this. They have proved their value in a lot of projects in the Dutch context. We have learned that attention for other dimensions than the usual is a critical factor for success. Colleagues in other countries report a similar experience (Ballou et al 1999). We have learned to design highly appreciated programs that are quite different from the programs that are offered by competing universities. We have learned to cooperate with advanced practitioners and university professors and invited them to work in a different way as facilitators and teachers. They are important in the learning environments for the advanced learners. Our professors enjoy working within our concepts and designs, although it takes some time for them to get used to the different educational conventions. I do not claim that the use of these five devices will guarantee success. They provide a basis for experimentation and learning, in a form that intends to support ‘far transfer’ (Dixon 2000). Their use is a necessary, but certainly not sufficient condition for success. They need to be completed with attention for institutional conditions. The absence of this aspect this reflects the practice they were derived from: a joint venture of universities organized in the periphery of the universities in an independent school. We are a typical example of a rather silent innovational practice, a ‘free place’ for more than forty years. This has provided favorable circumstances for learning and development but also some negative side-effects. I certainly do not want to recommend this institutional format. I think academia is more served by innovations and entrepreneurship in full daylight with full support from the leadership, and I hope our devices will stimulate colleagues in other contexts to develop new programs for new categories of students. Adress for correspondence: Gerhard Smid, Director of Studies at Sioo, Interuniversity Centre for Development & Education in Organization and Change Management. Admiraal Helfrichlaan 1,3527 KV Utrecht The Netherlands. E-mail:
[email protected]
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Table 1. University academics and professional consultants compared Academics Task organisation Product and capacity Planned world Fixed public Fixed form Content = area of freedom Truth seeking General validity Find general explanations Knowledge processing Empirical cycle N= ∞ Expert within one domain Disjunction, mismatch & distance Detachment from context
Context Function Degree of planning Working with/for Form Content Aim Extent of validity Conceptual object What they do with knowledge How they develop knowledge Scope Playing field Behavioural orientation Relation to context
Å Å Å Å Å Å Å Å Å Å Å Å Å
Æ Æ
Æ
Å Å
Consultants Market or task organisation Capacity Æ Irregular world Æ Unknown public Æ Form to be determined Æ Content to be negotiated Æ Adding value Æ Local validity Æ Find a good measure Æ Knowledge based interventions Æ Regulatory cycle N=1 Æ Crossing borders of domains Alternation of match & Æ mismatch, closeness & distance Æ Context-related
Figure 1. Model of knowledge & competencies
General management Strategy & planning Production techniques Quality management Facilities management Finance &accounting Logistics Marketing Human resources Research & development Branch relationships Internal & external relations Legal questions Information systems & information technology
Reference knowledge
Techniques
Skills & techniques
Expert Knowledge
Professional competencies
Diagnosis Strategy & intervention Relation between systems Learning & development, professional quality
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Table II. The career of a management consultant
Specialist, Junior, 0-3 years
Medior, 3-5 years Senior >5 years
Expert knowledge Knowledge in restricted area, works autonomously on problem, produces solution himself, practically engaged with specialism ‘Neat work’ Knowledge in more areas, works with other disciplines, researching Knowledge in more areas, works with other disciplines, responsible for methods and quality
Strategist/ Knowledge in many areas, manager >10 understands various years disciplines
Clients Does not work directly with external clients,
Management No roles
Leadership & strategy No roles
Consulting/advising to clients
No roles
No roles
‘Counseling’ Consulting/advising to clients & business contacts with clients at a strategic level
Internal coordination, monitors quality, coordinates teams
Seeking a role
Influence in complex relationships, partner of decision makers
‘Project Leader’ Monitors other managers
Office policy, businessstrategy ‘Strategist’
Figure 2. Learning tasks areas of expert k n ow ledge an d t ech n iqu es
y-axis
t ran sit ion s x-axis
z-axis
areas of profession al com pet en ce
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