Consulting methods
General
- Graduate
- 15 learners; teams of 3
- 15 hours per learner
- Dates set by experience
- Learners self-assign
Preferred companies
- 5 projects wanted
- Canada
- Academic experience
- Startup, Social enterprise, Non profit, Small to medium enterprise, Family owned, Incubator
- Hospitality, Education, Environment, Non-profit, philanthropic & civil society, Individual & family services, Human resources & recruitment
Categories
Project timeline
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January 31, 2022Experience start
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April 7, 2022Experience end
Overview
- Details
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Is your organization currently grappling with internal challenges that prevent them from performing at their best?
Are you looking to improve your organizational capacity to collaborate and work on complex issues?
Our students in the Masters in Human Systems Interventions are currently looking for projects to apply their skills in process consulting: an iterative form of humble inquiry and guidance in which the consultant works alongside the client to co-create solutions.
A process consultant’s purpose is not to provide ready-made solutions but to advance the client’s growth and learning through an authentic discovery process. Our students bring a wide variety of skills:
- work with you to gather perspectives on your situation
- facilitate dialogue to find common ground
- co-define some action steps to address the issue you are working on
- consider the ethical implications of consulting work
Their systemic approach focuses on building your capacity and autonomy to address similar future challenges.
- Learner skills
- Community development, Organizational development, Strategy, Research, Facilitation
- Deliverables
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The deliverables will be agreed upon with the organization, as part of a contract with the students.
Participating organizations can expect:
- Some initial conversations with the consulting teams to refine the framing of an issue hindering your team or organization's efficiency in delivering it's work;
- A qualitative research process to gather data on stakeholders' perspectives on this issue;
- A dialogue session involving said stakeholders to collectively consider and make sense of the data;
- The formalization of some action steps in order to address the issue in the future
- A final feedback conversation.
Project Examples
Examples of past problems explored by students:
- A lack of organizational structure is resulting in poor communication, unclear roles, and interpersonal conflict
- The organization is fragmented in ways that produce uncertainty about the mission and individual roles
- The organization’s non-hierarchical structure has resulted in poor communication and inadequate feedback about job performance
- The organization has reached a point where more formal structuring is needed, but this appears to be in conflict with their underlying values of egalitarianism
- Poor communication and high levels of employee dissatisfaction
- The board of directors lacks a shared vision for how it will operate (there are differingideas about the board’s health and focus, and about the roles of staff)
- System members have differing ideas about the organization’s vision and mission and are afraid to talk about it for fear that they will not be able to reach agreement
- System members are unclear about the roles and responsibilities of members, and poor internal communication processes is exacerbating the problem
- The organization’s administrators are unable to work collaboratively, and feel overloaded, with too much work and not enough time. So far they have created new administrative positions, but this has not solved the problem.
- The nonprofit organization’s Executive Director believes that the current centralized decision making process is not working well, and wants to create a stronger sense of community that will support a new democratic decision-making process.
- There is a lack of clarity around employee’s roles and responsibilities. The problem shows up in various ways such as: outdated and overly broad job descriptions; people act as “jack of all trades”; people often do not offer to help those who are struggling; roles and responsibilities overlap; Executive Director tries to pick up the slack, and is close to burnout.
- There is a high level of employee and volunteer turnover, and a low level of employee and volunteer engagement and commitment to the organization. The project will involve a collaborative process to investigate this problem and explore possible solutions.
Additional company criteria
Companies must answer the following questions to submit a match request to this experience:
Provide feedback to the team of students in order to assess the completion of objectives.
Provide the team of students with access to the members of your organization
Provide a dedicated contact who is available to answer periodic emails or phone calls over the duration of the project to address students' questions and work with them to co-design a process tailored to the needs of the organization
Sign an institutional consent form.