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–Action planning requires the best talents to be mobilized and all good ideas to be examined; it will be ineffective if the talents within the client organization do not contribute.

–As with diagnosis, the client’s personnel can do a great deal of the design and planning work with back-up from the consultant, thus reducing the cost of the project.

–Participation in action planning generates commitment that will be necessary, and put to the test, at the implementation stage.

–Lastly, action planning provides a new range of learning opportunities for the client; these opportunities are even more interesting that those offered by diagnosis, but will definitely be lost if the consultant is left to proceed alone.

Section 4.5 describes various intervention techniques for assisting change. Some of these techniques can be used in working on action proposals in a team with the client and his or her staff.

Time may have become a constraint. In many assignments too much time is spent on collecting and examining facts, and when it comes to the development of proposals there is a general desire to finish the project as soon as possible. The consultant is left with little time to prepare alternatives and rapidly develops only one solution. Even the work on one proposal may have to be concluded short of perfection. This can be avoided by properly scheduling the assignment and making sure that enough time is left for a creative search for the most appropriate solution.

9.1Searching for possible solutions

The client expects the consultant to recommend the best solution to the problem, or suggest the best way of taking a new opportunity. However, it is seldom possible to point immediately to an obvious best solution. Most business and management problems have more than one solution and in some cases the number of alternative solutions is high, especially if the purposes pursued are complex. The consultant may already be aware of some possible solutions, but unaware of others. Often the complexity and the originality of the situation are such that no clear-cut solution comes to anybody’s mind immediately. New situations cannot be dealt with using old approaches, and management consultants operate in a field which is changing extremely rapidly.

The action-planning phase starts therefore with a search for ideas and information on possible solutions to the problem. The objective is to identify all interesting and feasible alternatives and subject them to preliminary evaluation before starting detailed design and planning work on one proposal.

Orienting the search for solutions

The main factor to be considered is the nature of the problem, especially its technical characteristics (functional area, techniques or methods to be changed),

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complexity (technical, financial, human and other aspects, importance to the client organization, need to respect sectoral technical standards), and degree of newness (whether the consultant and the client are familiar with the problem, whether a completely new solution has to be developed or an established solution can be applied with or without adaptation).

The consultant, in collaboration with the client, will have to decide whether to direct the search towards solutions that may be commercially available (e.g. purchasing a standard software package from an IT firm, or towards a new original solution (developing new software using the client’s own resources, or commissioning such work from a specialist software house). It is necessary to decide how far this search should go. Should it be limited to the client organization? Could possible solutions be found in other organizations, sectors, or countries? Is it necessary to screen technical literature? Should a research establishment be involved? Box 9.1 provides a checklist of some questions to consider in deciding how to focus the search for feasible solutions to the problem.

Box 9.1 Checklist of preliminary considerations

(1)What should the new solution achieve?

•what basic purpose?

•what other purposes?

•what level of performance?

•what quality of output?

•what new product, service or activity?

•what behaviour?

(2)How will the new situation differ from the present?

●different products, services or activities?

●different method?

●different system(s)?

●different equipment?

●different location?

●different way of managing?

(3)Are the effects likely to last?

●are the client’s business and market changing rapidly?

●is competition likely to come with better solutions?

●is there a possibility that people will revert to present practices?

●should further developments be foreseen?

(4)Where could solutions or ideas be found?

●in the same unit?

●in the same enterprise?

●from business partners or friends?

●in literature?

●in a research institution?

●in the consulting firm?

●from other consultants?

continued overleaf....

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●in different sectors?

●anywhere else?

(5)What difficulties may arise?

●technical problems?

●resistance of managers and staff?

●work hazards?

●quality problems?

●over-production?

●shortage of materials?

●customers’ reactions?

●shortage of finance?

(6)Who will be affected?

●are employees receptive?

●is management receptive?

●what should be done to prepare them?

●how should they be involved?

●do matching changes have to be made elsewhere?

(7)When is the best time to change?

●at the end of a season?

●during holiday time?

●at the close of a financial period?

●at the beginning of a new calendar year?

●any time?

●as soon as possible?

●in several stages?

Using experience

In devising ways of improving the client’s situation, the consultant often draws on experience. He or she considers methods successfully used elsewhere, using knowledge derived from a variety of sources:

●previous assignments and clients;

●the consulting organization’s files and documentation;

●colleagues in the consulting organization who have worked in similar situations;

●professional literature (books, periodicals, research reports, etc.);

●producers of equipment and systems software, who may be developing or have developed improvements;

●staff in other departments of the client organization, who may have knowledge of the particular process;

●organizations that are prepared to communicate their experience.

An obvious purpose is to avoid reinventing the wheel. An even more important purpose is to make sure that all available experience is identified and

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considered, so that the client gets advice that could be qualified as “state of the art”, or a solution reflecting the best experience.

This is an acid test for the consultant, who must not cede to the obvious temptation to choose the most comfortable way – suggesting what he or she has done in similar situations with previous clients, or choosing the first solution that comes to mind. For example, a solo practitioner may have completed a thorough diagnosis of the client’s problem, but finds that, when it comes to proposing a better system, there is clearly a need for expertise that he does not possess. What will he suggest? Will he go for a second-best solution or admit that another professional should be brought in? The same problem exists in large consultancies, where the partners and other managers do not always appreciate the need to back up the operating consultants with the collective expertise and information sources of the firm.

Creative thinking

In current consulting, there are more and more situations where experience cannot offer any satisfying solution and where both the consulting team and the client organization have to come up with a totally new approach. In this connection, it may be useful to review some principles and methods of creative thinking.

Creative thinking has been defined as the relating of things or ideas that were previously unrelated. It combines a rigorous analytical approach with intuition and imagination. The purpose is, of course, to discover or develop something new. Nothing is taken for granted. The history of science and business is full of examples of discovery based on creative thinking, and there is no reason why the consultant cannot approach many practical industrial and management problems using the same method. Creativity can be learned, and is worth learning.

There are five stages in the creative thinking process, and all need to be practised consciously to get the best results:

1.Preparation: Obtaining all the known facts; applying analytical thinking as far as possible; defining the problem in different ways, i.e. restating the problem and the purposes pursued.

2.Effort: Divergent thinking, to generate multiple ideas, concepts and approaches. This will lead either to possible solutions or to frustration. Frustration is an important feature in the effort stage and in the full creative thinking process. It is usually followed by the production of good ideas.

3.Incubation: Leaving the problem in one’s subconscious mind while one gets on with other things. This also gives time for inhibitions and emotional blocks to new ideas to weaken, and gives opportunities to pick up additional ideas from what one sees or hears in the meantime.

4.Insight: The flash of illumination that gives an answer and leads to possible solutions of the problem.

5.Evaluation: Analysing all the ideas obtained in the previous three stages so as to find possible solutions.

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Two of the stages – preparation and evaluation – require analytical thinking. The three central stages – effort, incubation and insight – require suspended judgement and free-wheeling. Wild ideas are deliberately fostered, the aim being quantity, not quality. Large numbers of ideas are obtained, new ideas being sparked off by earlier ideas. The key to successful creative thinking is the conscious and deliberate separation of idea-production and idea-evaluation.

Techniques of creative thinking include, among others, the following:1

Brainstorming. This is a means of obtaining a large number of ideas from a group of people in a short time. Typically a group of eight to 12 people take a problem and produce ideas in a free-wheeling atmosphere. Judgement is suspended and all ideas, particularly wild ones, are encouraged. In fact the wildest ideas can often be stepping-stones to new and very practical ones. Ideas are displayed on sheets of paper and are produced very quickly; a session may produce over 200 ideas in an hour. Brainstorming is the best known and most widely used of the techniques. Its main disadvantage lies in the fact that all ideas are to be evaluated. Many of them will be foolish or totally irrelevant and have to be discarded to arrive at a few really good ideas. Also, the term “brainstorming” is often misused, to describe any discussion about an existing problem.

Synectics. In this technique, which is similar to brainstorming, a group of about nine people takes a problem. The “client”, whose problem it is, explains it, and participants put forward a suggestion for solving it. After a few minutes the client analyses the suggestion, saying what he or she likes about it before touching on the drawbacks. Then new suggestions are put forward and analysed until possible solutions are found.

Attribute listing. This technique lists the main attributes of an idea or object, and examines each one to see how it can be changed. It is normally used on tangible rather than intangible things. For example, a screwdriver has the following attributes: round steel shank; wooden handle; flat wedge end; manual operation; torque by twist. Each attribute is questioned and changes are suggested. Some modern screwdrivers, i.e. with ratchets or a cruciform head instead of the wedge end, are examples of improvement.

Forced relationships. This technique takes objects or ideas and asks the question, “In how many ways can these be combined to give a new object or idea?” For example, a manufacturer of furniture could take the items he makes and see if two or more could be combined to give a new piece of furniture.

Morphological analysis. This technique sets down all the variables in a matrix and tries to combine them in new ways. For example, if a new form of transport is required, the variables could be as shown in box 9.2. Although the matrix does not give all possible alternatives, the various combinations of the variables listed give an impressive number of forms of transport, many of which

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