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HUB RESEARCH PAPER 

Process consultation revisited: 

Taking a ‘relational practice’ 

perspective 

Frank Lambrechts, Styn Grieten, René Bouwen, 

and Felix Corthouts 

HUB RESEARCH PAPER 2007/44. 

DECEMBER 2007 

Hogeschool – Universiteit Brussel 

Stormstraat 2, 1000 Brussel, Belgium 

T: +32 2 210 12 11 F: + 32 2 217 64 64

Running head: PROCESS CONSULTATION REVISITED 

Process consultation revisited 1 

Process consultation revisited: Taking a ‘relational practice’ perspective 

Frank Lambrechts 1 , Styn Grieten 2 , René Bouwen 3 , & Felix Corthouts 4 

1 Postdoctoral researcher, Applied Economics, Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Hasselt University, 

Agoralaan 1, 3590 Diepenbeek (Belgium). Phone: +32(0)11 26 86 93, e-mail: frank.lambrechts@uhasselt.be. 

Corresponding author. 

2 Postdoctoral researcher, Centre for Corporate Sustainability, Ehsal, Stormstraat 2, 1000 Brussels (Belgium). 

Phone: +32(0)26098286, e-mail: styn.grieten@ehsal.be 

3 Full professor emeritus, Work and Organizational Psychology, Leuven University, Tiensestraat 102, 3000 Leuven 

(Belgium). Phone: +32(0)16 259502, e-mail: rene.bouwen@psy.kuleuven.be 

4 Full professor emeritus, Applied Economics, Work and Organizational Psychology, Hasselt University, Agoralaan 

1, 3590 Diepenbeek (Belgium). Phone: +32(0)11 26 86 93, e-mail: felix.corthouts@uhasselt.be


Process consultation revisited: Taking a ‘relational practice’ perspective 

Abstract 

The general philosophy or action principle of process consultation is very influential among 

scholar-consultants. The authors acknowledge the pioneering contribution of Edgar Schein in the 

development of the laboratory training methodology. Process consultation is framed as an 

ambiguous concept and practice that remained strongly linked with the contribution of Schein 

and faded away elsewhere. A relational practice perspective is introduced to offer a new 

theoretical grounding, language and action perspective to concretize and to actualize process 

consultation. Short descriptions of interaction cases, from experiences in a variety of settings, 

illustrate how relational practices work. The uniqueness of process consultation is documented 

and conceptualized as the essential core element of ‘what really works’ in ongoing interactions 

for change. It is argued that process consultation revisited as reflective relational practice in the 

here-and-now, is yet to be considered as the basic carrier of deep organizational and social 

change processes.

Process consultation revisited: Taking a relational practice perspective 


This article acknowledges the pioneering contribution of Edgar Schein in the 

development of the laboratory training methodology. Edgar Schein was indeed among the 

founders of the ‘laboratory training’ learning method, later called T-group, together with 

pioneers such as Kurt Lewin, Kenneth Benne, Leland Bradford, Warren Bennis, Ronald Lippitt, 

and, also Chris Argyris (Marrow, 1969). Stimulating reflection on joint here-and-now group 

experiences was considered as one of the core processes that made the T-group into an 

innovative educational approach. In an autobiographical essay, Schein (1993a) describes his first 

T-group experience as “an incredibly potent experience for me that forever changed my view of 

the field” (p. 8). From that moment on till present Schein has been focusing on how to build 

helping relationships between consultant and client(system). This focus is clearly present in his 

work on process consultation (Schein, 1969b, 1999a) and his more recent work on dialogue 

(Schein, 1993b, 2003b). 

In his seminal work on social change processes Edgar Schein conceptualized the 

unfreezing phase in the Lewin change cycle as the outcome of disconforming experiences or lack 

of conforming experiences among the actors involved. Throughout their interaction actors 

confirm or disconfirm the balance in the triangle ‘self-image’ – ‘perception by others’ – 

‘perception of the context’ (Schein, 1969a, 1999b, 2002). Interaction process reflection is 

considered to be at the heart of the change process. Beyond the interpersonal and group level, 

Edgar Schein extended this discovery into the ‘invention’ of organizational psychology as a 

research and practice field. Indeed, Bernie Bass and Edgar Schein wrote the first two textbooks 

with the title “Organizational Psychology” (Bass, 1965; Schein, 1965).


Making interventions that foster this process learning (e.g., Probst & Büchel, 1997) in 

interactive contexts can be considered as the essence of what Edgar Schein called process 

consultation, in training intervention as well as in mere management contexts. Edgar Schein 

made the first formulation of process consultation in the first Addison Wesley series on 

Organization Development (Schein, 1969b). He was co-editor with the late Richard Beckhard of 

the OD series which has published over 30 volumes thus far. With the concept of process 

consultation Schein tries to explain ‘what really works’ in intervention efforts during change 

processes (in interaction, in groups, in organizations). And this ‘what works?’ can be 

circumscribed as: being involved and engaging, observing, becoming aware and reflecting on the 

ongoing interaction, relationships and experiential processes so that the self steering capacity and 

ownership of the client(system) can be enhanced. Process consultation means working in the 

present reality, in the ongoing interaction (Schein, 1987) and understanding “the ebb and flow of 

that reality moment to moment, shifting roles as necessary” (Schein, 1999b, p. 70). 

The concept of process consultation remained strongly linked with the contribution of 

Schein (revisited edition in 1999) and faded away elsewhere. Developed during the sixties, when 

memories about T-groups were still vivid, it hardly survived the new orientations in 

organizational development during the seventies and eighties, when the emphasis on problem 

solving, structural and strategic approaches were considered as more important than the mere 

processual or micro-approach. Process consultation was substituted during the nineties by 

eclectic coaching and facilitating approaches from very diverse perspectives. But the original 

process emphasis, originated in the T-groups, got merely lost in the functional and instrumental 

approaches, demanded by the business schools’ students and alumni. Indeed, today process 

consultation is predominantly conceived as one type of OD intervention method (Cummings &


Worley, 2005), or as a family of OD interventions (French & Bell, 1998), alongside many others, 

that is especially suitable when dealing with socio-emotional processes and problems in work 

groups and organizations (e.g., dysfunctional conflict, deficient group processes, poor 

communication, ineffective behaviours and norms, etc.). Defined this way, process consultation 

has become just one of the intervention techniques or instruments in the OD consultant’s tool 

bag instead of a general philosophy or action principle that underlies each intervention effort 

during change processes. 

Process consultation has always been and still is an ambiguous concept and practice. 

Schein himself stresses this point in the preface of the revisited edition of process consultation 

(Schein, 1999a) contemplating that colleague advisors and managers still don’t understand the 

essence of ‘process consultation’: it is not a technique or a collection of interventions for 

working with groups, it is not a model for non-directive counselling, and it is not an occupation 

or full-time job. Process consultation is essentially about building a helping (client-consultant) 

relationship through a continuous effort of “jointly deciphering what is going on” (Schein, 

1999a, p. 6) in the ongoing interaction, relationship and situation in order to make co-authored 

choices about how to go on. In the concluding chapter of Process Consultation Revisited Schein 

(1999) states that: 

The decisive factor as to whether or not help will occur in human situations involving 

personality, group dynamics, and culture is the relationship [italics added] between the 

helper and the person, group, or organization that needs help. From that point of view, 

every action I take, from the beginning contact with a client, should be an intervention 

that simultaneously allows both the client and me to diagnose what is going on and that 

builds a relationship between us. When all is said and done, I measure my success in


every contact by whether or not I feel the relationship has been helpful and whether or 

not the client feels helped. (p. 242-243) 

However, several reasons can be identified concerning the ambiguous nature of process 

consultation and its difficulty to survive the various developments in OD thinking. Firstly, the 

concept of process consultation is used in two different meanings by Schein (1987, 1999a). It 

both refers to the continuous process of building a helping (client-consultant) relationship and to 

a specific consultation role (doctor-patient model, expert model and process consultancy model) 

that is enacted during the process, depending on the joint assessment of which role is most 

helping at present. Secondly, empirical research on process consultation is rather scarce (e.g., 

Kaplan, 1979; Cummings & Worley, 2005). And thirdly, although Schein is championing 

clinical/qualitative approaches (1995) and is using a symbolic-interactionist approach (Schein, 

1999a), there seems to have been a lack of vocabulary and conceptualization of the relational 

processes that are at work. Maybe this lack of proper theorizing of what really works in ongoing 

interactions for change, makes the survival and diffusion of process consultation so difficult. 

A ‘relational practice’ perspective on intervention and processes (e.g., McNamee, 1998; Shotter 

& Katz, 1996; Bouwen, 2001; Shotter, 2004; Bouwen & Taillieu, 2004; Gergen & Hosking, 

2006; Hosking, 2006; Bouwen, 2007), as a variant of social-relational constructionist thinking 

(e.g., Gergen, 1994; Shotter, 1993; Bouwen, 1998; Bouwen & Hosking, 2000), can offer this 

kind of theorizing and can help to catch the dynamics going on in process consultation. An 

epistemological turn from the mere cognitive towards the relational aspects of social interaction 

made it possible to conceptualize in a new way the core orientation of social processes (e.g., 

Gergen, 1994). Where in the past reflection after the facts was considered as crucial, now the


simultaneous enactment of engaging, experiencing and reflecting can be conceptualized in the 

‘relational practice’ perspective. 

The work with these ‘relational practices’ – i.e., how people are doing ‘things’ together 

and how, by interacting, they bring about change – can be documented in intensive group 

training and professional development processes, interpersonal work and in all kinds of OD work 

and change efforts. The relational practice perspective is elaborated in the second part of the 

article. In the third part this perspective is illustrated and extended on the basis of vignettes (short 

descriptions) concerning social interaction and intervention cases, illustrating how relational 

practices work or are hindered to work. In the concluding section we reflect on the added value 

of taking a relational practice perspective. 

Taking a ‘relational practice’ perspective 

Seen from a ‘relational practice’ perspective, organizational and social change processes 

are practical accomplishments that take place among a diversity of actors. With the concept of 

‘relational practice’ we want to focus on the ‘how’ of change, rather then on the ‘what’ of 

change. We want to focus on the way a diversity of actors involved can work together to bring 

about change processes. A ‘relational practice’ is any communicative or task-oriented 

interaction, characterized by a certain quality of interacting, among at least two actors involved; 

it has a consequence for the relationship and some perceivable outcome (Bouwen & Taillieu, 

2004). With this concept we want to shift the attention from the content of the interaction to the 

process of interacting, i.e., how people are doing ‘things’ together and with each other, who is 

included/excluded and how this is done. The quality of interacting gives an indication of ‘what 

really works’ in ongoing interactions for change.


Some relational practices seem ‘to work better’ than others according to the actors 

involved. Every one of us has experiences of ‘working’ relational practices which we describe 

and cherish as ‘peak moments’ (e.g., Cooperrider, Whitney & Stavros, 2003) of cooperation, 

learning from each other, collective progression, ‘movement’, energy, enthusiasm, etc. And 

every one of us is also familiar with relational practices that ‘do not work’; we qualify those as 

low points, stagnation, blockage, ‘problems’, loss of energy, etc. 

Concrete examples of a relational practice are: a project starting event, a management 

team meeting, a group training session, a large group summit, a joint field visit, an occasional 

meeting between coworkers and/or supervisors,…any moment of ‘joint acting’ (Shotter, 1993, 

2004). Hence, an organization can be conceived as an assemblage of relational practices with a 

certain quality of interacting (Bouwen, 2007). Indeed, since the emergence of social-relational 

constructionist approaches (e.g., Gergen, 1994; Shotter, 1993; Bouwen, 1998; Bouwen & 

Hosking, 2000) – and related appreciative (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987; Cooperrider, Withney 

& Stavros, 2003) and collaborative (Reason, 1994; Reason & Bradbury, 2001) action research 

activities – there is a renewed interest in ‘relational practices’ as the essential constitutive 

elements of social-organizational life (e.g., McNamee, 1998; Shotter & Katz, 1996; Bradbury & 

Lichtenstein, 2000; Bouwen, 2001; Shotter, 2004; Gergen & Hosking, 2006; Hosking, 2006). 

“With a relational intelligibility in place, we can shift our attention to what transpires 

between people, not what is contained within them” (McNamee, 1998, p. 102). By interacting, 

actors involved position themselves and others in a specific way, they create meaning (Weick, 

1995), they define each other and they build relationships with a certain quality. The quality of 

interaction, and the quality of relationship, as it emerges during interaction, is the most active 

carrier of the quality of organizational and social change processes (Shotter, 1993; Bouwen,


1998). The quality of relational practices “opens or closes possibilities, constructs exclusion or 

inclusion, enables reflexivity, or limits learning” (Bouwen & Hosking, 2000, p. 273). Similarly, 

during a joint conference of OD-practitioners and family therapists who were inquiring into the 

critical characteristics of a successful intervention Sheila McNamee used the expression: “there 

is no method, just watch the relationship”. After comparing different approaches, she concluded 

that the quality of the relationship between client and facilitator made the difference; not the 

method, context or theoretical principles. Learning and changing become possible if one keeps a 

sharp eye on the (here-and-now) quality of interaction and relationship (e.g., McNamee, 1998; 

McNamee & Gergen, 1998; Bouwen, 1998; Bouwen & Hosking, 2000). 

To characterize the quality of the relational practice, one can describe to what extent the 

following concrete and observable qualities are present: (a) reciprocity in relationship (Bouwen 

& Taillieu, 2004), (b) joint ‘authorship’ (Shotter, 1993, 2004) and ‘co-ownership’ (Schein, 

1999a, 1999b) of the task or project; (c) ‘talking with’, that is sensitive, engaged, involved, 

responsive interaction that ‘moves’ speakers and possibly evokes actionable knowledge (instead 

of monologic ‘talking about’) (Shotter, 2004, p. 205); (d) mutually open and illustrated 

communication, the possibility of mutual testing and contradicting allowing for double loop 

learning (Argyris & Schön, 1978); (e) mutually energizing conversation through joint 

appreciation, active engagement and the continuing possibility of being authentically present 

with others (Block, 2000; Dutton, 2003; Quinn & Dutton, 2005); (f) mutually appreciative 

inquiring (instead of focusing on problematizing) (Cooperrider, Whitney, & Stavros, 2003); 

(g) joint reflection on the here-and-now group interaction and relationships that are developing 

(McNamee, 1998; McNamee & Gergen, 1998; Bouwen, 1998; Bouwen & Hosking, 2000),


(h) dialoguing, that is opening space to learn to think together, to reflectively listen to ourselves 

(self-analysis) and others, to mutually question own and others’ perspectives and assumptions 

(also called ‘frame reflection’ by Schön & Rein, 1994) possibly leading to more mutual 

understanding (Senge, 1990; Isaacs, 1993, 1999; Schein, 1999a, 2003b), generative reframing 

(Bouwen & Salipante, 1990; Barrett & Cooperrider, 2001) and/or ‘frame-breaking’ interaction 

(Fry & Pasmore, 1983); etc. 

A major task for scholar-consultants is to identify and inquire into the quality of 

relational practices, and design interventions for high quality relational practices that facilitate 

mutual learning. The difference between knowing/inquiring and acting/intervening is not 

relevant within a ‘relational practice’ perspective. Reflecting in dialogue to make sense of the 

ongoing events during a meeting, for example a meeting between researcher(s) and actor(s), is an 

act of inquiry that adds to the joint construction that was going on before the reflective moment 

started (Bouwen, 2007). Similarly, Bradbury and Lichtenstein (2000) state that “relationality 

transcends the traditional separation of knowledge and action through participatory, action- 

oriented methods that link researchers and participants in a learning journey that supports both in 

making good use of the insights gained from research” (p. 554). Hence, the scholar-consultant(s) 

and other actors involved are challenged to co-create high quality relational practices that open 

space for joint learning. The contribution of the researcher in this learning journey usually 

consists in stimulating joint reflection and mutual understanding (Schön, 1994; Bouwen, 2007). 

Hence, process consultation (Schein, 1999) could be considered as reflective practice (brought in 

by a consultant or third party) in ongoing relational practices to enhance the interactivity and 

reflexivity and therefore the quality of the ongoing process.


Relational practices are “multi-voiced” (Engeström, 2001), since actors engage in 

relational practices from their membership to occupational cultures (Schein, 1996) and 

participation in communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). Hence, 

different accounts and perspectives have to taken into account. 

An occupational culture is conceived as a ‘state-of-mind’: the shared assumptions, values 

and norms based on members’ similar educational backgrounds, formal training and similar 

practical experiences in pursuing the occupation (Schein, 1996, 2003a). Occupational cultures 

typically form around the functional units and hierarchical levels of an organization but also exist 

beyond the organization as occupational communities (of executives, operators, engineers, etc.). 

Schein (1996) states that until occupational cultures “discover that they use different languages 

and make different assumptions about what is important, and until they learn to treat the other 

cultures as valid and normal, organizational learning efforts will continue to fail” (p. 18). 

Actors also participate in communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 

1998). Lave and Wenger (1991) have conceptualized apprenticeship as legitimate peripheral 

participation in a community of practice. A community of practice is a group of people “who 

share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge 

and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis” (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 

2002, p. 4). Following Bouwen (1998), actors constitute through continuous relational practices 

“groups of members, which serve as basis for social validation, social identity, and continuity” 

(p. 306). A community of practice is an intrinsic condition for the existence of knowledge and 

learning, because it provides the necessary support for making sense of context and history. 

Following Lave and Wenger (1991), a community of practice can be delineated by analyzing its 

reproduction cycles and its relations. It has a particular language, which is an important element


of identity. Through their shared active participation, the actors involved act out their 

differences, discover common ground, and constitute their knowledge and their perspectives 

mutually (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Different communities of practice interact, bringing continuity 

and variation. Following Bouwen (1998), “openness towards outside is the source for change and 

innovation, whereas the belongingness to a family group is the basis for continuity”. Hence, an 

organization can be thought of as a community of communities of practice, that continuously 

interact (1) to adapt to ever-changing requirements in the environment and/or (2) to become 

better as a system on a continuous basis (e.g., Senge, 1990). It is only when the relational 

practices get stuck and when the perspectives of the occupational cultures and communities of 

practice get reified, that change and learning becomes a difficult task (Bouwen, 1998). 

Relational practices are continuously embedded in a specific historical-relational context 

which is always partly actualized in the interactions actors engage in. Similarly, Hosking (2006) 

states that “relational processes have a local cultural-historical quality such that discourses of the 

past and future are constructed and reconstructed in an ongoing present” (p. 272). Pettigrew 

states that “the past is alive in the present and may shape the emerging future” (1997, p. 341). 

The relational embeddedness of relational practices is the source of new possibilities but also 

constrains what can follow (Hosking, 2004). The relational context is also discoursed as “broader 

networks of relationships” (McNamee, 1998, p. 102), “organizational culture” (Schein, 2004), 

“the smell of the place” (Ghoshal & Bartlett, 1999), “the inner and outer context” (Pettigrew, 

1995), “lived relationships” (Bouwen, 2007), etc. Following Bourdieu (1980) on ‘The Logic of 

Practice’ and Giddens (1984) on ‘Structuration’, the relational practices and the context in which 

they take place are separately identifiable but exist in duality both as medium and outcome (e.g., 

Udochi, 2007). Interaction and relational context are co-produced (Lave, 1993). As indicated,


various authors have theorized the importance of relational context, but their main focus almost 

exclusively stays on high quality interactions as necessary constitutive elements of a change 

process. What relational context can mean and, especially, ‘do’ to emerging relational practices 

that bring about organizational and social change is hardly elaborated in literature and is scarcely 

studied empirically. Hence, more attention to relational context is needed. 

Summarizing, a ‘relational practice’ perspective focuses mainly on four aspects of 

organizational and social change processes: (i) on the ongoing interaction of actors involved, (ii) 

on the way of interacting or quality of interacting, (iii) on the relational context in which the 

ongoing interaction is continuously embedded, (iv) and on how, by interacting, actors involved 

bring about change. In the next part this perspective is illustrated and extended on the basis of 

vignettes (short illustrations) concerning social interaction and intervention cases, from 

experiences in a variety of settings, illustrating how relational practices work. 

Illustrations of different forms of relational practices 

We distinguish between illustrations from (a) social interaction settings in which the 

functioning of relational practices is highly visible but in which ‘process consultation’ remains 

implicitly present, in the background, and (b) intervention settings in which process consultation 

is explicitly present as (inter)action and intervention perspective. 

Social interaction settings: relational practices in which process consultation remains implicit 

Organizing of differences. One of the authors has been experimenting with the metaphor 

of polyphonic music to set up an international conference on multi-voiced organizing, the 

organizing of differences. The polyphonic singing and the attunement of the choir were 

introduced as a metaphor for collaboration and dialoguing. The most exciting session of that 

conference was a public rehearsal session of this group of singers. Standing around one standard,


holding the music score, they showed to the public how they went along learning together by 

exercising on this new piece of music. The learning by doing, engaging, starting, holding and 

joining in again, without one being the conductor, illustrated impressively how they went about 

accommodating each other’s contribution into one attunement of shifting sounds. The reflection 

afterwards with the public was in itself a very rich relational practice of singers and scholars 

searching together to give concepts to the process of attunement they went through. The first 

organizing principle of the practicing group that emerged from the discussion was: “listening and 

feeling each other’s breath”. 

Doing research and even theorizing in itself can be considered also as a relational practice 

with a similar potential for being creative and innovative, if scholars can engage in high quality 

joint practices. Research work among colleagues has certainly those potentials and threats. But 

more specifically in inter- or trans-disciplinary projects the relational practice demands are very 

similar to learning or intervention activities. Working across disciplines requires indeed the 

crossing of boundaries between disciplines or communities of knowledge. Different languages 

are being spoken and a new language has to be developed. An important lesson learned in one of 

those projects was: go to the practice field as early as possible in the project and share your 

languages around common experiences and joint practices. 

Including and excluding voices. One of the authors was involved in rural natural resource 

development projects in the southern highlands of the Andes in Ecuador. Bio-engineers and 

social scientists from the university of Cuenca (Ecuador) and the University of Leuven 

(Belgium) co-facilitate local community projects dealing with soil conservation, soil fertility and 

cultivation methods, more specifically methods to plough on slope land that cause a lot of 

erosion. In one community there is close collaboration among the local heads of the villages, a


local agricultural school and an indigenous non-governmental organization. The engineers, in 

close collaboration with local facilitators, are working with demonstration fields and even 

simulations of plowing in experimental sandboxes. Farmers, assisted by young students of the 

local agriculture school, discuss with the technicians their experiences and problems with 

plowing on those difficult slope lands. They talk about the occurrence of erosion and fertility 

problems and discover new ways of fertilization and soil conservation. A remarkable event 

happens, when the farmers start to speak their local language, Quichua. The European 

coordinator in this project showed a deep interest to learn this language instead of Spanish. By 

learning Quichua, he made ‘real’ contact that opened a broader conversational space. The 

farmers have far more words in Quichua to distinguish different types and qualities of soil, 

depending on the land use and the cultivation of the land. They have in their local language 

different words for soil appropriate for wood or grass or farming land, taking into account the 

slope and the characteristics of the soil. This ancestral knowledge seems never to have been 

translated into Spanish, but it still belongs to the ancient community of practice (e.g., Wenger, 

1998) when they start to interact about their practices in the fields. 

This experience contrasts with another irrigation project where water engineers had been 

developing irrigation pipes for slope landing isolation of all stakeholders involved. Here the 

farmers could only be convinced to use the pipes when they got special financial support for it. 

The technology was not developed jointly but straight from the irrigation laboratory. A ‘multi- 

voiced’ joint learning space in which all stakeholders/voices could engage in social learning for 

interdependence (e.g., Bouwen & Taillieu, 2004) and become co-owner of the problem/project 

isn’t created. Hence, after the experimental period the farmers turned back to their non- 

sustainable existing practices of spraying the land.


A relational practice perspective is a very appropriate perspective to document the 

process of how these actors are doing "things" together and with each other. The relational 

practice perspective directs our attention towards ‘who is included and how?’ and ‘who is 

excluded through what kind of activity’? There is a specific match between a particular activity 

and the kind of actors that is going to be included or excluded. This quality of interaction among 

the actors has a direct connection with the kind of activities they are setting up with each other. 

Engineers intending to bring ‘new developments’, can do this to the extent that they engage with 

the other actors in reciprocal and lasting relational practices. If one party is pushing too hard and 

is proposing too many one sided practices, then the consequences of hesitation and even 

rejection are very evident. Those relational practices offer in fact two main opportunities to the 

actors. They offer the actors the possibility to be active and to engage into some activity, and by 

engaging they actualize their so much desired membership at the same time. 

The meaning of relational practices is in their relational context. One of the authors has 

been involved in a multi-disciplinary and international study project about the family care system 

of mentally ill people in Geel, under the supervision of the American anthropologist Leo Srole 

from Columbia University. As method, participant observation and the writing of biographies 

was used. Geel, a small rural town in the north of Belgium, has a centuries long tradition of 

family care of psychiatric patients in the local families. For inhabitants of Geel this situation is 

‘things as usual’. Geelians used a complexity of practices to interact with psychiatric patients in a 

way that these people could be a member of a family and a community. What is considered 

deviant behavior - so conflicting and intolerable that the home family could no longer deal with 

it - is accepted by the Geelians. They know how to involve these patients in activities in their 

homes, farms, markets, pubs, churches, streets and many other community situations. We would


say now that they have the ‘social capital’ to deal with all kinds of deviant behavior. The 

research consisted of describing the kind of interactions patients and Geelians engage in and how 

boundaries and interaction spaces were set. It was very difficult to draw general conclusions. 

Care givers were not directly controlling deviant behavior but they acted through offering tasks 

and roles that were feasible. Most patients had a unique kind of role, somewhat at the edge or as 

a growing up child. The attitude and capacity of the Geelians is very implicit and passed on from 

generation to generation in the care giving families. People who move into Geel from outside 

will not have patients. 

Here is a typical, for outsiders very humorous, interaction event in a church. Felix is a 

middle aged tall patient, who sits among the schoolboys in the nave of the church during the 

solemn mass on Sunday. The sermon of the parish dean is lasting far too long for all those 

present and the schoolboys are getting impatient but keep quiet under the close supervision of 

their attendant teacher. Suddenly Felix rises up from his chair and stretches his arms slowly high 

up in the air and sits down again. The schoolboys don’t bother about the gestures of Felix, but 

the supervising teacher who only recently moved to Geel, cannot succeed in suppressing an 

audible laughter. All the boys turn backwards towards the teacher, who turns red out of shame 

for being the only ‘deviant’. 

This is a vivid illustration that the meaning of an activity is in the patterns of lived 

relationships. By interacting, people position themselves and others in a specific way. By doing 

this they exchange meaning depending on the experienced relationships through practices in 

‘contexts’. The schoolboys relate to Felix as Geelians dealing with patient behavior in their 

‘traditional’ and tolerant way. The supervising teacher is struck by the daring spontaneity of 

Felix in expressing his impatience right in front of the preaching priest.


Intervention settings: relational practices in which process consultation is explicitly present as 

(inter)action and intervention perspective 

The functioning of ‘relational context’ in relational practices for change. A striking 

illustration of the crucial role of the relational context in more complex intervention settings 

originates from the authors’ research on (the quality of) relational practices that bring about 

organizational change. When comparing two ‘contrasting’ change processes, one in a Dutch 

health-care agency and one in a Belgian consulting organization, numerous relational practices 

were characterized by similar indications for high quality interactions: shared ownership; 

mutually open and illustrated communication; reflection on joint here-and-now group 

experiences; etc. Moreover, the managing directors of both organizations participated in the 

same advanced professional development program for group and organizational consultants (see 

further on in the text). They are very sensitive to the quality of interactions in their organization 

as an indication of the overall organizational health and vitality. 

By using de-contextualized discourse analyses of conversational episodes during both 

change processes, one would have concluded that both change processes were similarly 

successful because in both so many high quality interactions occurred. However, in-depth 

interviews with various actors involved (from different perspectives) revealed that in the health- 

care agency, people enthusiastically perceived the change process as being successful. In the 

consulting organization however, people tended to have a general lack of energy and a negative 

perception about the whole change process. 

What is going on here? Different historical-relational contexts ‘do’ different things to the 

same kind of interactional quality (in terms of observable behavioral characteristics) of relational 

practices. For example, the managing director in both organizations is perceived as quite


differently. In the change process of the health-care agency, the managing director is seen as a 

legitimate authority figure. He is appreciated and accepted by nearly all members of the 

organization. When interviewed, one caregiver expressed this common feeling as: “he is a warm- 

hearted managing director, do you know that he knows every persons’ first name, we are an 

organization of approximately 450 people, amazing, isn’t it?”. In the change process of the 

consulting organization, the mutual perception of the relationship among the managing director 

and a large number of the organizational members is characterized by no ‘real’ contact, distrust, 

defending reactions, none acceptance, mutual blaming and complaining, etc. Over time, this 

feeling has spread over the entire organization. The relational context of the consulting 

organization in which interactions are embedded is furthermore characterized by uncertainty 

about the future of the company, a lack of a clear vision, a culture of ad hoc coping with 

problems, of unlimited autonomy and freedom, and of not keeping one’s commitments to each 

other without there being consequences. The overall mutually perception of relationships and 

intentions is “she/he wants to make progression at the expense of me, I cannot trust her/him”. On 

the contrary, the relational context of the care giving agency can be described as a ‘basic 

enthusiasm and energy’, high job satisfaction, a strong inspiring mission and vision that is 

understood, subscribed to and enacted in the daily work practices by the critical mass of the 

organizational members (“the talk is walked”), accepted leadership on all levels, problems that 

emerge are consequently translated into possibilities and actions for improvement, the shared 

practices of working on learning and development on all levels as enactment of a strong 

organizational value continuously stressed: “personal development is organizational 

development and vice versa”. The overall mutually perception of relationships and intentions is


“we are here to help each other to develop and in doing so, we simultaneously develop our 

organization”. 

Hence, relational practices are continuously embedded in a specific historical-relational 

context which is always partly actualized in the interactions actors engage in. Interactions have 

to be considered in their relational context to assess whether they can bring about successful 

organizational change. From the ‘relational practice’ point of view, it becomes very clear that the 

meaning of a situation and the type of membership in that specific context is socially constructed 

between the actors right on the spot. Actors complement each other’s activity into meaningful 

episodes. The practice and the quality of the relationship are enacted simultaneously. 

A distant researcher’s perspective would be able to identify a large amount of ‘variables’ 

to describe this particular context and to make interpretations, but it is only through looking into 

the joint practices and interaction patterns that the meaning making among the actors can be 

described and understood. The narratives of the joint practices were the most important output in 

this (and the Geelian) study and can be considered as ‘knowledge in context’. During academic 

training in psychology, the emphasis was mostly on the outsider’s perspective from a distance. 

The illustrations makes very clear the difference between academic knowledge and actionable 

knowledge. Academic knowledge is distanced, generalized and de-contextualized. It has big 

difficulty to inform skilled action in context. Actionable knowledge is embedded in relational 

practices that are enacted among the key actors involved, building on existing meanings and 

memberships in the actual contexts. 

Mutually negotiating a joint learning space. In a two year long advanced professional 

development program for group and organizational consultants of our universities (in which the 

managing directors of the care giving agency and consulting organization have participated), we


are still using a close variant of the T-group as a first week residential workshop to build a 

learning community. The aim there is reflection and consensual validation of the “here and 

now”; the ongoing interactions and relationships among the participants (as in process 

consultation). This level of reflection is negotiated with the participants when the common goal 

is to learn about interdependence and group development towards further maturity levels 

(Bouwen & Fry, 1996). The quality of interacting can enable the reflexive dialogues about 

mutual feedback and social sense making. Continuously keeping an eye on the level of 

authenticity, transparency and reciprocity enacted in the ongoing interactions is an important 

working principle. In this kind of training and development groups, the task is the relational 

work itself. Participants give feedback on each others’ being and acting in the group and 

experiment with new forms of interacting that are more supporting the joint learning goals. The 

being together is learning together. The essence of this process is so closely relation and context 

bounded that it becomes difficult to speak in general terms about it. 

During the two years, a series of residential workshops is set up, where the learning is 

around the here-and-now ongoing relational practice, the jointly created role plays, simulations 

of life cases and the joint practicing in the field in common organizational change projects. A 

group of participants in a similar program from abroad, joins in for a week to create common 

practices for cross-cultural exchange learning and multi-party collaboration experiences. The 

learning context becomes also the context for meaning creation. The learning experience can 

directly be connected to meaningful practice and the classical problem of transfer does not 

emerge because of the richness of the learning context itself. Enacting, experiencing and 

reflecting on common relational practices is the continuous learning ground for organizing 

processes on all levels.


The importance of creating such a ‘joint learning space’ with a prominent role for process 

consultation is also evident from our experience with setting up and inquiring into ‘bridging 

practices’ in organizational development settings. An illustration of such bridging practices is the 

functioning of ‘intervision’ groups installed at and between various hierarchical levels of the care 

giving agency just mentioned. There are intervention groups among team leader and team 

members, among team leaders that work at different locations, among team leaders and their 

manager, and among members of the management team. In the monthly (three hour lasting) 

relational practices of doing ‘intervision’ actors involved come together and take time to jointly 

reflect on, and work with, issues concerning the daily work, (here-and-now) interactions, 

relationships and emotions, “how we are functioning as a group” and the organizational change 

process. Again, important is that intervision is mutually negotiated and accepted among the 

actors as a legitimate space in which learning from each other is the explicit goal. 

During a conflict episode between the managing director and a member of the 

management team, which was felt as a heavy burden on the change process by most people, 

actors closely involved reflected on each other’s perspectives, framed and reframed the ongoing 

situation, shared ‘what it did to them’. By doing so, they gradually developed a more 

differentiating image of the situation that opened space to go on constructively. 

In the beginning intervision practices were facilitated by external consultants. However, 

they made themselves gradually superfluous by stimulating the group to become owner of their 

own learning process and by stimulating actors to become each other ‘process’-consultant/helper 

(e.g., Schein, 1999a). Reflecting on their ‘team leader – team members’ intervision practices, 

team leaders accentuate a number of interventions of the consultants that made this possible. On 

one occasion a team leader notices that the consultant sits down in the beginning of a session and


remains silent. Everybody remains silent. The consultant observes “we are all here around the 

table”. Silence follows. After a little while a group member articulates his hopes and fears 

concerning the ongoing change process as it relates to his own job. Others join in the 

conversation and actors frame and reframe their and others’ concerns, mutually and respectfully 

explore thoughts and emotions, reflectively inquire into here-and-now group dynamics, and give 

advise to each other. The consultant remains ‘low key’ (e.g., Schein, 1999b), in the background, 

and only intervenes (with a content, procedure or process intervention) if he or she feels that this 

is helping to foster learning and helping relationships. Also, the consultant, as a behavioral 

model, frequently puts aside his own judgments or reactions to create space for input of the 

actors involved. This is an important working principle of dialogue as helping conversational 

form (e.g., Schein, 1999a, 2003b). Acting in this way is another exemplary behavior of the 

consultant that is experienced by the team leader as a ‘high quality’ intervention because it 

facilitates mutual learning and co-ownership of the process. The team leaders, and the team 

members, gradually incorporate this consultation behavior through closely observing the 

consultant, jointly reflecting on her-and-now interactions and relationships, experimenting with 

own interventions, and getting feedback from the consultant and co-actors. In doing so, they 

expand their (inter)action repertoire to enhance the interactivity and reflexivity, and thus the 

quality of the ongoing process. One team leader expresses “that what works” in intervision as 

“now, we are talking directly to each other instead of talking about each other behind someone’s 

back” (e.g., Shotter, 2004). 

Assembling relational practices. As mentioned earlier, the process of including and 

excluding voices in a certain relational practice is a very central concern when taking a relational 

practices perspective. It is also a central concern in the organizational change process of the


health care agency. Little by little all actors (from various occupational cultures and communities 

of practice) become involved in the change process. In a first step, external consultants are 

approached to give expert advice about the further development of the company. After a limited 

number of interviews among the consultants, managing director and a few managers, a report 

was made and presented to the top of the organization. The quality of this relational practice can 

hardly be called ‘high’ at this point because up to here most voices have not been included into 

the process. However, a large group intervention with all actors occupying a leading function 

(team leaders) is organized. Here the recommendations of the consultants are discussed: “can we 

agree on the directions of change and if so, how do we proceed?”. By involving actors this way, 

co-authorship is created. As a result of the large group meeting a mixed design group is 

composed to coordinate and watch over the quality of the change process. Especially, attention is 

given to the way all relevant stakeholders (e.g., care givers, parents and relatives, supporting 

staff, clients) can be involved. 

This design group (in which the managing director, two members of the management 

team, two team leaders, an external consultant and two care givers are involved) organizes a 

second large group meeting in which every stakeholder of the organization is literally brought 

together. The goal is to create involvement and ownership, to energize and engage participants 

and to celebrate and strengthen a sense of solidarity and unity. Using the action principles of 

appreciative inquiry (e.g., Cooperrider, Withney & Stavros, 2003) participants enacted 

energizing and reciprocal practices through appreciative interviews and group reflection. In 

subsequent relational practices conversations for action and evaluation (e.g., Ford & Ford, 1995) 

are enacted to ensure consolidation of the change process.


This experience contrasts with the change process in the consulting organization. Here 

also a two-day long ‘strategy-meeting’ is organized that was facilitated by an external consultant 

in order to create a common vision and strategy for the company. The action principles of 

appreciative inquiry (e.g., Cooperrider, Withney & Stavros, 2003) were similarly used. At this 

meeting participants also enacted energizing and reciprocal practices. This resulted in setting up 

three task forces that were mandated to elaborate on important strategic issues identified. All 

participants agreed to organize a follow-up session six months later. However, the quality of 

interacting during the task force meetings was characterised by monologic talk, dominance of 

certain ‘voices’ and often lack of engagement. As a result every task force faded out. In the 

follow-up meeting six months later only half of the actors who participated at the strategy 

meeting were present. Interactions were characterized by low energy, ‘aboutness’-talk, no 

possibility for mutually testing assumptions and by a problem-oriented self-reinforcing discourse 

that made actors get stuck in mere analysing without progression. Eventually a steering 

committee was established and the decision was made to monthly meet with the whole 

organization. In the continuation of the change process, the original goal, creating together a 

vision and strategy, and acting on it, is put on the agenda several times, but no real progress has 

ever been made. The pattern here is that change initiatives remain isolated without qualitative 

coupling. Several relational practices are set up but fade quickly without a sustainable 

connection to other change activities. 

By looking through a ‘relational practice’ lens, one can see that organizational change 

generally implies that a diversity of actors bring about a variety of change initiatives at various 

places in the organization (e.g., reformulating the company’s vision, creating new tasks and 

functions, generating new structural arrangements, setting up new training activities, etc.). All


these change initiatives have to be aligned in order to bring about successful organizational 

change. It has become clear that it is not only the quality of separate relational practices that 

matters but mainly also the quality of how a diversity of relational practices are assembled. 

Successful organizational change needs a high-quality assembling process. 

Conclusions 

A relational practice perspective is a very appropriate perspective to document the 

process of how actors are doing “things” together and with each other. The relational practice 

perspective directs our attention towards the sharing of languages around common experiences 

and joint practices, towards how voices can be included or what kind of activities exclude voices, 

and to the importance of relational embeddednes of practices. This is particularly evident from 

the illustrations concerning the social interaction settings in which process consultation remains 

implicit. 

However, a relational practice perspective is also very usable to understand and to frame 

process consultation practices which are explicitly present in intervention settings. Concrete 

illustrations document and conceptualize the uniqueness of process consultation, or “the 

continuous joint ‘consultation’ of here-and-now relational practices” as the essential core 

element of ‘what really works’ in ongoing interactions for change. We have illustrated how 

relational practices work or are hindered to work. The quality of interacting always gives a very 

concrete indication of ‘what really works’ in organizational and social change processes. 

However, the working of relational practices can only be understood from within (e.g., Shotter, 

1993, 2004) the specific historical-relational context which is continuously actualized in the 

interactions actors engage in. This was especially evident in the Geel study and in the contrasting 

cases of organizational change. Also, when studying and intervening in all sorts of change


processes attention should be given to how relational practices, with a certain quality, are 

assembled. High quality relational practices that aren’t assembled constructively are not 

sufficient to bring about sustainable organizational and social change. Simultaneous attention to 

the quality of separate relational practices, the relational embeddedness of practices, and the way 

practices are assembled is necessary. This seems especially relevant in all settings of 

organizational and change and development in which relational practices have to be (re)created 

and assembled (also with stabilized ‘daily’ relational practices) to bring about new 

interdependencies, new knowledge, new tasks and roles, new memberships, new communities of 

practice, new structural arrangements, etc. 

A focus on relational practices for sustainable organizational and social change processes 

can be considered as a recent actualization of the inspiration of the founders of organizational 

psychology. In the sixties, organizational psychology developed from the theoretically and 

practically strongly developed domain of group dynamics (Schein, 1965). The training group 

tradition generated the process consultation practices and principles, and developed further into 

the organizational development methods (cf. Addison-Wesley series on Organizational 

Development, edited by Edgar Schein and Richard Beckard). The seventies saw a worldwide 

spread of these organizational approaches, but from the eighties on, what was called the value- 

laden basis of organizational development (Neilsen, 1984) became a hindrance for consulting 

and research practices, looking mainly for even more global forms of competitive advantage. 

The functional restructuring turn in the nineties could not preserve so well the process 

consultation orientation, and the crucial role of values and vision on organizational change 

theorizing became even polarized (Beer & Nohria, 2000).


In the broader domain of work and organizational psychology there is actually a tendency 

to return, at one side, to individual measures of work and organization life experiences, often 

with an instrumental purpose. At the other side there is a lot of emphasis on the structural and 

instrumental side of organizational functioning to align with a more demanding competitive 

environment. In between both streams there is a need for re-emphasizing the relational and 

process-oriented dynamics that continue the original focus of process consultation and 

organizational psychology. The organizing activities nowadays are emigrating from within the 

organizational context to inter-organizational activity spaces and multi-party collaboration 

contexts. In the not for profit sector the involvement and membership discourse on organizing 

seems to have better chances for surviving. 

At the same time there is growing interest in social-relational constructionist approaches 

in social sciences and in social psychology in particular (e.g., Gergen, 1994). Maybe it was a 

lack of theoretical grounding that made the process consultation and organizational development 

approach problematic to settle? The really active mechanisms were difficult to describe and 

change was attributed to experience and context. This article illustrated how a relational practice 

perspective, as a variant of social constructionism, can play a role of grounding in more sound 

theoretical and epistemological reasoning, the active relational practices that constitute the 

essence of the process consultation and organizational development approach (Hosking, Dachler 

& Gergen, 1995). A relational practice perspective can offer a new language and action 

perspective to concretize and to actualize the ‘invention of the T-group’ and ‘process 

consultation’. Although recently Schein (2003b) has concentrated his attention more on 

‘dialogue’ as being at the root of all effective group action, we argue that process consultation


revisited as reflective relational practice in the here-and-now, is yet to be considered as the basic 

carrier of deep organizational and social change processes.

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