What is this?
This is a handbook and also a harvest: a tangible trace of the final conversation that took place in a planning and consulting course I hosted with 18 students completing their first year in the MA in Human Systems Interventions, on May 3rd, 2025.
In this day long conversation, students were invited to share stories from consulting projects they had done during the year-long course: stories about building relationships with clients, finding out what it took to be “helpful”, experiencing collusion, the struggles of navigating resistance and the joy of seeing humans humaning together.
As a framework to make sense of these experiences, we used Jamie Conklin’s four balancing acts: four core tensions in the practice of process consulting in human systems. As process consultants, we engage in all of these four balancing acts at the same time.
They are:
- cultivating psychological safety and psychological success,
- offering diagnostic and inviting dialogue,
- participating and observing,
- planning and opening to emergence.
This document is the compilation of all the pieces of advice these students gave themselves to maintain a good balance as they practice this tricky art of Intervening in Human Systems.
This harvest was compiled as a final artefact for this course, a trace of the collective sensemaking process we all engaged with that day, and as a gift to them as they strive to do good work with their clients, in their organizations or in their communities. Today, this is also a gift to this field and the communities of practice that hosted me as I grew as a practitioner, in the hope that these wise and often beautiful words will provide some guidance.
In the end, it is not all that complicated. It all comes down to practicing Love.
ici - ailleurs 