A handbook about process consulting – Concordia University, 2026

What is this?

Every year, through my involvement in Concordia’s Masters in Human Systems Interventions, I get the privilege to teach a course called planning, consulting and interventions. In that course I work with a cohort of about 20 students to help them develop skills in helping human systems become more conscious of themselves, all this in service of a better capacity to think, decide and act together.

This is a course that examines the “what” and the “how” of helping with human systems: what is an intervention and how it is designed and held. For 6 months, we explore together the art of engaging with clients and systems. Students get to work with a “real” human system (a client) to establish effective client-consultant relationships based on collaborative approaches. In that process, we all hope to learn and build capacity to design, plan, and facilitate interventions that supports a human system’s capacity to do the work it aspires to do, while fostering contexts where people can contribute and flourish. It builds on theories of organizational dynamics, human systems worldviews and learning and change frameworks. 

At the end of this 6-months process, I host a day long conversation with the students to process the full experience and harvest the insights from their engagement with their clients and with the learning community we foster over the year. Here is an artefact from this harvesting process. It is a tangible trace of that final conversation that took place on May 2rd, 2026. This is the second time that I do this, initiating a little tradition – I am not sure where this is going, but we shall see. And if you are curious about last year’s handbook, well here it is. Feel free to compare!!

We wanted to leverage this day to achieve several intentions: share stories, mutualize the learning from the diversity of projects that the cohort worked on this year; connect practices and insights across projects; and practice public reflection and dialogue as a community that learns together. Students were invited to share stories from their consulting projects : stories about building relationships with clients, finding out what it took to be “helpful”, navigating confusion and uncertainty, experiencing collusion, finding out what it feels like to be in that seat of the host, consultant, participant, leader, helper. What does it mean to work with real human systems involving real individuals with real emotions, expectations, experiences, struggles? How do you navigate resistance, learn to recognize the unique constraints and affordances of a system? What shifts as you witness both the challenges and the joys of humans humaning together in service of something bigger than the sum of their individual contributions?

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.

To work through these intentions, we experimented with several processes:

1. The Fishbowl Method is a participatory process that enables a group to make meaning of their experience through dialogue around some predetermined practice questions. One group engages in the dialogue in the middle of a circle (i.e. the “inner circle”), while the outer circle supports the sensemaking process through focused listening (“holding space”). Participants are empowered to move fluidly from one circle to the other, thus experimenting with both participation modalities.
2. Arts based methods were leveraged to invite students to access different modalities of their own experience of knowing. We wanted to invite students to step back from relying primarily on the cognitive (which academia tends to over-focus on) and to experiment with other sites for wisdom, such as the body, the imagination, the emotions, the environment. Like the cut-up approach developed by Beat poets in the 1960s, arts-based and creative methods help us to cut through our usual pathways of recognizing and making sense of the world, to let new, creative possibilities and meanings emerge.
3. Self-reflection: formulating practice-based work principles. After the move from the dialogical (the fishbowl) to the imaginal (an art-based practice), students were then invited to synthesize the meaning they assign to these experiences into short statements that could support action when working with clients in a process consulting role.

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 sense-making 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.