This month’s guest is consultant, superviser and speaker Steve Hearsum.

Steve is the author of No Silver Bullet: Bursting the Bubble of the Organisational Quick Fix and joins Phil to discuss the true role of consultants in a world where complex problems do not have easy answers.

You can get Steve’s book here.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Phil Lewis: Complex problems tend not to have easy answers. Easy to say, hard to accept for many consultants and clients alike. In a world where the silver bullet doesn’t exist, what are consultants for? And is that a role we want to play? Welcome to The Consultancy Business podcast with me. Phil Lewis, we are here to champion ethics and excellence in independent consultancy.

[00:00:29] Steve Hearsum: What gets missed in this is that both clients and consultants are all engaged in their own management of their own anxiety. And things like PowerPoint slides and methodologies and two-by-two grids are all just containers for anxiety. They’re a way of managing anxiety.

[00:00:44] Phil Lewis: That was Steve Hearsum, and he’s going to be joining us for the episode this month. Steve is somebody I was introduced to a while back by a mutual friend who thought we’d have a lot in common. Turns out we do. Steve’s written a brilliant book called No Silver Bullet, and it poses really interesting questions for those of us who are in consultancy. Questions like; well, in a world where that silver bullet doesn’t exist, what are we for? And how do we deal with the fact that we’re being employed to have the answers, and yet the answers aren’t that apparent to us in the same way that the answers aren’t apparent to our clients. I had a brilliant time talking with Steve and I hope that you find as much value in the conversation as I did. So let’s get into it. Here is my conversation with Steve Hearsum.

[00:01:37] Steve Hearsum: Lovely to be here, Phil.

[00:01:38] Phil Lewis: So you’ve written a book called No Silver Bullet: Bursting the Bubble of the Organisational Quick Fix, which I guess implies that most organisations are in some sense addicted to quick fixes. Give us a perspective on the organisational quick fix and what led you to write the book.

[00:01:57] Steve Hearsum: Well, if I start with the second question first, because I think that kind of gets us into the territory. So the first moment where I kind of thought; Ooh, there’s something I want to inquire into here was years ago when I worked at Roffey Park Institute. I met Pim and Joost, two of the founders of the Corporate Rebels in Holland. And I hosted them for a couple of workshops at Roffey Park and at the second one, one of them said as part of their session to the audience; so we started our kind of global tour of going to visit interesting people and organisations two years ago. And we thought we’d get the end of it. We’d find the magic bullet. But there isn’t one. And that, and that was obvious. I mean, that wasn’t what hooked me. What hooked me, Phil, was this; that two or three times after that, the audience populated by very experienced consultants and coaches effectively kind of went to these guys: but go on, there is one, isn’t there? Really? And I asked them, I said, do you notice that? And they said, yeah, we clocked that as well. And that’s what hooked me. If you talk to most people and indeed many consultants, and you ask them, is there a silver bullet, a magic bullet for complex problems, they will say to you intellectually — no, there isn’t. They know there isn’t. We know there isn’t. And yet there is a massive market, which effectively exists to sell certain solutions, quick fixes and silver bullets to complex problems. And the buyers are typically decision-makers and senior leaders in organisations. The sellers are everything from business schools through to providers and leadership development, large consultancy, small consultancies, independent consultancies, people who have methodologies, theorists, even the fields of practice. You know, all of them unconsciously collude with the idea that there is a guaranteed solution. And if you like, you know, the evidence for that is… you know, look at the certainty with which many services to organisations sold by, for example, consultants, it’s the certainty with which they’re coloured and flavoured. You very rarely ever hear a consultant say; I’m not sure whether this is going to work. Or if a client says, is this going to work, Phil? Does a consultant ever really say, well, I can’t guarantee it. You know, and another part of this is the… what the research shows is, is what clients look for in consultants. The number one thing is they’re looking for an expert. So they’re looking for somebody who knows what to do.

[00:04:23] Phil Lewis: So the interesting question that rolls off that is why is that the case? Because I think about that assertion… There is absolutely, as you rightly say, ample evidence out there and I find myself wondering; what’s it down to? Is it down to the power dynamics that are inherent in consulting relationships? As in, we need to get the experts in. So the idea of getting an expert in means that there must be some sort of wonderful magic resolution that we haven’t yet arrived at. Or is it down to incentives? You know, most organisations have a heavy bias towards action and people are supposedly paid to be problem solvers and consultants. Certainly are paid apparently to be problem solvers. You know, is it down to that? Is it down to some sort of psychological need, Steve, that exists within us that we need to hope that the issues that we’ve got aren’t as intractable as we experienced them to be.

[00:05:20] Steve Hearsum: In a sense, what we’re talking about here is what actually drives the need for certainty. And these are psychological processes. So in no particular order, we have the expectations that we place on leaders, but also the expectations they place on themselves. And there’s a lot of weight within that that’s placed on things like clarity on certainty, on coherence, add to that pace. The need to be seen to do something ‘right now’ that kind of fuels this tendency towards seeing still the dominant archetype that we need of leaders to be heroic. There’s a kind of laziness as well, because if I was to be really honest, it can be hard work to stop and think a bit more deeply. It’s a lot easier if somebody offers you an apparent silver bullet or solution to say, yeah, I’ll just buy that. There’s what’s sometimes termed the myth of fixability, which is a lovely phrase coined by Mark Cole and John Higgins a couple of years ago.
This talks to this laziness that’s underpinned by assumptions about the nature of change that collude with the idea that it’s a lot simpler to deal with than it actually is. This fear and anxiety, of failure. You know what if I actually don’t know what to do? What if what I’ve decided to do fails? What if the solution I bought doesn’t work? A really huge one Phil is just the inability at an existential level to cope with not knowing… not knowing what to do. So there’s many things wrapped up in this. All of which kind of feed into this pattern of behavior that leads to what I describe in the book is as a form of functional collusion. A kind of unconscious decision making, patterns of decision making that are fuelled by shame and anxiety that’s unattended to.

[00:07:01] Phil Lewis: Is there also something, Steve, which is… most senior people in most organisations have two jobs. They have their actual job, and then they have the job of managing other people’s perceptions of how well they’re doing their actual job. And you know, if we think about politics, for example, one of the great challenges of, well, contemporary politics in the UK, but it’s not just over the last five years, is the fact that there’s a huge disincentive to actually fix problems by virtue of the fact that it might take you five years to fix a problem, but if you’re only actually in office for something like 18 months to two years, what matters more is the perception rather than the actuality of the work that you’re doing. So I’ve often wondered that, you know, is the appearance of being seen to take meaningful action in some sense, more important than actually taking meaningful action. And that’s not by the way, a cynical question, I don’t think. It’s a question that’s really grounded in sort of organisational realpolitik.

[00:08:07] Steve Hearsum: Yeah, well, my immediate response to that is, to anybody listening, is go and buy Rory Stewart’s autobiography, because if you want an insight into the pattern you’ve just described, Stewart does a wonderful job of describing that within, within, um, UK government. We’re also talking about the way in which… let’s, let’s see if I can give you a very specific example. And there’s, there’s a story that I, I’ve got in the book, which was from a UK, uh, consultant who’s now based in North America. And he describes how in 2019 he’s asked by the CEO of a massive US retailer, one of the biggest ones out there, to spend two years… come in, spend two years with us, be a VP of something or rather, and help us out. We’ll pay you a fortune and then you go back and run your consultancy business. And this guy says, look, I’m really flattered. I’m enjoying what I’m doing. So I’m going to respectfully decline, but tell me what’s the problem. And the client says, um, well, two years ago we spent $200 million with a big global consultancy firm to help us with the threat faced by Amazon and online retailing.
And it was a disaster. So a year ago, another big consultancy and they wanted, uh, that we paid $400 million and that was a disaster. So this consultant said to them, well, why didn’t you sue them? And the CEO said… the story that unfolds, he said, well, I couldn’t really. And also I would never work again. And as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the anxiety of engaging in inquiry in a conversation around; what can we learn from our mistakes and what went wrong was greater than writing off $600 million. And that I think is kind of part of the problem here is, is that in order to not be driven by fear and anxiety and stuff like that, you have to get curious and be willing to inquire into your assumptions and your stories and engage with the possibility that you might be wrong.

[00:10:05] Phil Lewis: I find conversation like this actually really not only interesting, but in a sense, quite liberating because I come from a place, Steve… I have quite a benign view of human nature, I suppose, and I feel like most people get out of bed in the morning to do the best job that they know how for the organisation that they work for or with, regardless of level of seniority. It’s not that people are conspiring to do a bad job, or they’re conspiring not to change their organisation in some meaningful sense, it’s that there’s a whole array of levers, psychological, emotional, social incentives, financial incentives… whatever, that are actually conspiring for people to be at leaders or the consultants that serve them, to go after these silver bullets, go after these quick fixes. At best waste money, in the worst case, actually produce a whole load of negative unintended consequences. And on the things go, you know, but it isn’t about incompetence or it isn’t about bad faith. It’s simply an organisational reality. And it’s one that is consultants we need to embrace.

[00:11:28] Steve Hearsum: One of my friends and colleague at times, Eva Applebaum, who had a long history of working in the digital transformation space. I remember her telling me a lovely story of one of the biggest challenges of working with senior leaders when it comes to technology is if you’re working with a board, you know, There’s wrestling with the impact of digitalisation, one of the hurdles you have to get over in some instances is the fact that they’ve spent millions of pounds on technology they don’t actually understand. You actually have to get them to the point where they admit that they don’t know. We’re back to the, you know, getting comfortable with, with not knowing. I should have just, yeah, I’ve signed this up. I don’t understand it. That’s, that’s what we’re talking about here. Um, if you then talk to people who work in consultancies, you know, there’s no coincidence that the vast majority of people I interviewed were ex… from a consulting space, were ex consultants from big firms. And the pattern is consistent that in many instances the moment they left was when they could no longer bear the ethical tear of being asked to carry on building dependency rather than building capability and yet clients equally… will still effectively engage in a relationship where they are disabling themselves and often they’re not actually making things better because they’re continually creating the conditions for further dependency on the third party.

[00:12:54] Phil Lewis: This brings to light though something else which is the, I guess what you might call the kind of competency needed to be an effective consultant. Because what I heard in what you just said was; not only do consultants need to be very, very good at the actual business of consulting, which you might say is, you know, problem identification, problem solving, that kind of stuff… but there are other skills that are needed as well. So, for example, a skill of being able to create psychological safety for a client to be able to have a conversation in which they say; I don’t know, and that’s okay. Or the emotional intuition, I guess, to be able to understand that actually, there are conversational areas that really do need opening up here that might feel a little bit more tentative or a bit more raw for people, and you’ve got to be able to help people navigate safely through those. And it also seems like there’s a kind of ethical thing underneath all of that, which is, you know, are we selling silver bullets or are we actually prepared to do what Seth Godin calls the ‘emotional labor’ of creating those psychologically safe spaces, helping clients navigate through them and so on. So it feels like what you’re actually posing really is a challenge to consultants, which is; we have to become masters of the kind of emotional landscape and psychological landscape as much as we have to be masters of the sort of understanding of business and commerce and organisational decision flows and all that sort of stuff.

[00:14:32] Steve Hearsum: I found myself wanting to dive in at multiple points there, Phil, because you’re, you’re talking to some of the stuff I think I notice in me is the most important. So let’s cut to the chase here. Fundamentally, if you’re a consultant, your primary role is to be a helper. And I would say, if you’re not helping, then what the bloody hell are you doing as a consultant? Then we can have a conversation about what the nature of the help is. If you look at the way in which consultants sometimes contract, how are they contracting and on what basis and for what services? One of the things that I picked up from multiple people… they were describing to me one of the key things that some of the large consultancies look for in new recruits. And the key phrase here, Phil, is they look for insecure overachievers. And these are the people, you know, the fungible junior consultants, the people who are rolled out in their hundreds and sometimes thousands to do the grunt work, bright, fiercely intelligent, often first or second job was at university with good degrees who you know, you’re asking, as you rightly say, they, they need to do the work sometimes to create the appropriate conditions for clients to inquire into whatever it is that’s going on. But the entire business model, certainly when it comes to, I would suggest medium to large consultancies, works against that. They exist, particularly the large consultancies, based on the model of finders, minders, and grinders. Which means they need to sell bodies in, in order to sustain the business model. It breaks down if you don’t have enough bodies sold in. So there’s an inbuilt need to build dependency now added to this is something else in a sense. What you’re hinting at is, is that we’re talking about underneath all this, about the fragility of the consultant. How often do we ever really talk about the fragility of the consultant? We’re quite comfortable talking about the fragility and the, you know, the upset of the client. But actually we as consultants can be a bit fragile. But in the consulting industry, there is a really weak culture of supervision. There are only three places I’ve found where you can do a qualification in consulting supervision and no one in the UK will accredit you as a consulting supervisor. How on earth does that indicate that we have an ethical profession, if it is even a profession?

[00:16:51] Phil Lewis: Well, I think as soon as you say we recruit insecure overachievers, the only response to that is; well, quite frankly, if that’s your recruitment strategy, then you’re screwed. And the clients that you serve are screwed. Because everything that we’ve just been talking about — the lack of silver bullets, the need to navigate clients through uncertain psychological and emotional terrain — suggest the one thing that you would need in a consultant is really strong grounding; that you would absolutely need somebody who is secure in themselves and in their own perspectives. And I guess also secure in the fact that they may not be right. I want to get onto the supervision point, but before we get onto that, it was just what came to mind, Steve, as I knew you and I were going to get on when we first met, and I think I said to you, I have no interest in being right with my clients. And you laughed and you said, that’s funny, I often think that’s my superpower with the clients that I work with. And I think it’d be good just to sort of reflect on that for the benefit of the listeners of this podcast, because a consultant that doesn’t feel the need to be right is I think a) a rare consultant but b) actually, in what we talk about when there’s no need to be right, I guess is a different understanding of the nature of the work we actually do with clients in which the point is not to be right; the point is to help them get somewhere they couldn’t get without the input and involvement.

[00:18:30] Steve Hearsum: I think it’s really important to say, firstly, there are some brilliant people who work in consultancies, but that’s not the issue. I don’t have an issue with them so much. I think there was an issue with the business model, systemically. I mean, that’s the issue. And I think there’s a, there’s a vast human cost in terms of, I know, I know several consultants who literally burnt out, chewed up, spat out as they kind of colluded with the expectations. If you think about what consultants are asked to do, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong here with asking a consultant to be an expert. If you genuinely don’t know how to, for example, do a Microsoft Dynamics implementation and roll out, you probably need a consultant with really good technical skills to do that if you haven’t got it in house. The boot, where it starts to get sticky, and I have had clients exactly that technology is where the behavioural stuff then means that it doesn’t matter how good the technical implementation is, you need to work at a cultural level and a behavioural level. And then we’re into; do you have a practice as a consultant that enables you to work effectively and well in that kind of messy reality? And then we’re in the space of, how are you in your own messy reality? Because some of my work with developing practice with the consultants, I use the phrase, you know… the better you are at your job as a consultant, you will be one of the nodes through which the crazy flows. Because if you’re really good at what you do, then by definition, your clients will either suddenly start talking to you about their anxieties and things that are freaking them out, or their shadow will come out as you hold the mirror up and challenge them. In which case, how are you with Phil, the CEO of business x freaking out and projecting onto you all his anxiety, because you happen to have pointed out that that rather large grey thing in the boardroom is in fact is there.

[00:20:22] Phil Lewis: Listening to you talk. I find myself… something I’ve reflected on privately, actually quite a lot over the years. I have no problem sharing it publicly. I have been in and out of psychotherapy personally for 20 years. I’m a huge advocate of it as a process. I also have psychotherapy qualifications. And while from an ethical standpoint that work doesn’t find its way into my consulting work directly — you know, I’m not here to be a therapist to my clients — I do often find myself wondering… the skills that I have both picked up as a client, I guess, through osmosis and also as a practitioner of some of those sort of counselling and psychotherapy skills, how well do they actually serve me in my work? And I think there’s one thing that they have given me is the ability and the willingness actually to sit and hold a really uncomfortable space. And exactly what you said, and I was laughing when you said it, Steve, that idea about you’re the node through which crazy flows. It’s not a bad leading indicator of performance, is it? In one sense, which is; when you actually start to hear from clients, what’s really going on for them, and you start to be in a space where clients will really open up to you about that stuff, that’s often where the real work actually exists to do. You know, it reminds me of something else I heard years ago. There’s no such thing as a boring person. There’s only a person that you’re not listening to properly, because if you listen to anybody properly, they’re going to be saying some really wild stuff, you know? But I think that also comes back to your point earlier on, that I wanted to revisit as well, which was this point around supervision. It is a really, really smart point I think. If you were in coaching, for example, and you were a coach of any sort of professional standing, meaning for professional standing, or indeed, you were a counselor, psychotherapist, and you are, you know, BACP accredited or whatever, then you would absolutely have a supervisor.
So, can we talk about why, in your experience, supervision for consultants is vanishingly rare and there seems to be such a limited appetite for it? And can we also talk about what does really good quality consulting supervision actually look like?

[00:22:43] Steve Hearsum: So the rare, rarity comes from… this is a hypothesis because it’s not talked about that much. So about 10, 15 years ago, my supervisor, Jean Newman, who comes from the Tavistock tradition, the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, she, uh, OD conferences that I was involved in, I vividly remember her basically saying to the community, can we talk about supervision? How is it different to shadow consulting? And it used to be called shadow consulting. That was, in a sense, the kind of thing we’re talking about. And, and there has been a kind of growing trend within coaching for there to be supervisory spaces. As you rightly say, in therapeutic spaces, it’s there. My own hunch is that consulting has somehow rather… we’ve all colluded in this… we’ve somehow or other created this idea, this mythology, that consulting is a profession (inverted commas) and we don’t need to do that work. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s… what is the professional development path for consultants? Well, you may go and do a consulting skills programme. And you might go and do an MBA, you know, some of the things that, you know, that’s one of the ways into certainly big four, big six consulting. You need a business qualification. But there is no real language about supervision when it comes to consulting. So firstly, it’s just not really talked about. I’m going to make one other point that the conditions here are set by some of the big beasts in the market. And these are the large firms. And if you listen to the BBC radio series, it was on last year called The Magic Consultant — it’s only five 15 minute programmes — in the last episode the presenter says; we invited six of the biggest consulting firms in the UK to either contribute or comment on themes from this series. They either all did not respond or declined the invitation. And he leaves that comment hanging. The only representative from within the industry was the CEO of the Management Consulting Association in the UK, who presented a relentlessly positive narrative about the industry. Now, the issue is not whether or not there are good or bad practices there. There will be both. The issue is the utter unwillingness to engage into an inquiry about the light and the dark and what works well and what doesn’t between clients and consultants. There is a need to maintain this artifice that this thing just works. So that then brings us to the question of what makes for good supervision. It’s… to my mind, a space where you can bring your shadow and you can bring, you know… so when I take my stuff to my supervisor, it can be everything from, I’ve had a massive emotional reaction to something, I’ve got crushing self doubt, having had something, did I do the right thing? It could be, I’ve got this client I was just started working with and I need to make sense of something… And that is maybe the crucial thing. It’s a place to make sense of things. But it needs to be a place where you make sense of things at not just an intellectual level. It needs to be genuinely reflexive. What I mean by that is it’s not enough just to be critically reflective and think deeply. How do you apply it? How are you going to go back out in your practice with your clients to practice what it is you’ve noticed, and you’ve said you’re going to experiment with, and then go back and then talk about how it worked. We need to be in our own inquiry as practitioners.

[00:26:25] Phil Lewis: I agree with that. I also find myself wondering as it relates to the big four and the big six, if there’s also something here about a sort of conception of consulting, which actually relates to our conception of business, you know. There’s a convenient fiction, I think, that pervades contemporary business, which is the idea of businesses as machine. That actually what we need to do is to kind of work on optimising the machine, you know, and you see a lot in, even in sort of a phraseology, I think, like human capital, you know, it’s sort of put some distance between people running businesses and the flesh and blood reality of those who work within them. And I think if you examine a lot of business language, it has that kind of machine like background and you think about the history and heritage of management consultancy and a lot of it, it seems to me anyway, grew out of that kind of very factory-like view of work that pervaded in the 20th century. So you’d have your time and material studies and the job really became how do we squeeze inefficiency out of the machine. Whereas if you skip forward to 2024, we’re in a world where actually that view of business doesn’t really have anywhere near as much credence as it ever had to the extent it had credence at all in what is now very knowledge economy, uh, driven world. Where actually it is our ability to think creatively and innovatively to be problem solvers at work that actually mark the difference between organisational success and failure. So within that, I do wonder, cause I’ve often felt this in my own relationship with the big consultancies, and I agree with you, there’s some very smart people in them, by the way. But is there something about… you know, I have a conception of the world, which is fundamentally grounded in the sort of creative innovative potential of human consciousness and the fact that businesses require imperfect, brilliant human beings to care for each other and collaborate in order to be successful with a very different or as paradigmatic view of business, which is this thing’s a machine. We just need to make sure we’re squeezing out any of the inefficiencies from it. Because the former would imply as consultants, we do need to do important work, like understanding our own shadow and getting good at holding an uncomfortable psychological space and all the rest of it. The latter, that machine view of business would imply we don’t need to do any of that at all.

[00:28:59] Steve Hearsum: What gets missed in this is that both clients and consultants are all engaged in their own management of their own anxiety and things like PowerPoint slides and methodologies and two by two grids are all just containers for anxiety. They’re a way of managing anxiety. And where, where I was going as I was listening to you talk.
So in one sense, I agree with you about the machine metaphor; you know, Frederick W. Taylor. Yeah. He was arguably the first management consultant. But the metaphor that I think works for me better when I, when I occurred to me whilst you were talking was, I think that all organisations are a form of theatre. And the relationship between consultants and, and their clients is theatrical. I’m not quite sure whether it’s a daytime soap opera, um, and whether that’s a US daytime one or Doctors from the UK or it’s a Latin American Brazilian one with a bit more, you know, flamboyance. But it strikes me as it’s profoundly performative. So one of the critiques of leadership development I talk about in the book, which is something that a guy called Richard Hale beautifully put, is that, you know, leadership development is inherently performative; the learners turn up, they perform their role of being good learners, they listen to all this stuff, they swallow it, and then they go off. And we as consultants, or as facilitators, you know, we sometimes actually, we hope we’re going to be liked, because God forbid our clients don’t like us, and we want to be seen as credible, we share our knowledge, and then we head off. That is not the same as helping clients deal with a messy reality of their workplaces and their organisations. And I wonder whether or not what we get hooked on, we miss is the… is that consulting can also be profoundly performative. I go in to see my client and I perform in my role. And that then raises the question, what is the role I am performing? So we have a language for this in consulting, which is the expert consultant, the pair of hands and the collaborative consultant, but there’s some other ones because I’ve got my own ego ideal as a consultant. And what role do I need to play so that I’ve… so that my own sense of self and my own ego is actually sufficiently nurtured? How okay am I showing up as a version which, as we talked about earlier on, says I don’t know, Phil, not sure what the problem is. How does that fit. Am I okay playing performing that role or do i need to perform a role that is more… so I start to wonder about and I touch on this right at the end of the book what happens when the fragility of the consultant meets the fragility of the client.

[00:31:22] Phil Lewis: It’s back to that point about work as a big popularity contest, really, where how you are seen to perform is actually in some fundamental sense, way more important than how you actually perform. And I can feel the pull of that as a consultant, because, you know, here we are, we’re in a service industry, we are being paid hourly rates or project fees or whatever it is to try and go and add value to clients who are often in pretty challenging circumstances. As you rightly say, I have my own ego ideal of how I want to perform in that space as well, or how I want to be seen to perform in that space too. I have a reputation to manage and of course I have bills to pay and so I’ve got a whole load of incentives that are going on for me that are financial as well as social in those moments. And it becomes very tempting to perform and, you know, very tempting to start playing various roles. And I think back to your point about supervision and the whole idea of supervision being about being able to bring in your shadow… Well, it seems to me anyway, that the real role of supervision is to help you understand that is the temptation that exists within you, if it does, learn to manage that in the moment and continue the journey towards authenticity in the role that you do play with clients. In the same way that actually the job of therapy in some important sense is to help you become a more authentic and embodied version of who you really are as a human being. So I feel like there are direct parallels between those two things there and that feels like really important work in the context of… actually if we are engaged in emotional labour with clients, which is to say we have to be able to engage with some of the messy stuff in order to be able to support them in the right ways as well as being able to do the more sort of you know, functional stuff, as I might call it, so solve some of those commercial challenges or whatever, then this starts to feel like very essential work I think.

[00:33:31] Steve Hearsum: It’s essential work and it’s not for all the time and it’s not for everyone. You know, that’s one of the things that I guess we need to accept, which is… let’s speak from I for a moment. You know, my relationship with conflict comes from my own experience of being the son of an alcoholic and my experiences around the dinner table as a child, as a teenager. My comfort with working with conflict and emotional organisations improved in direct proportion to my willingness to inquire into that stuff. And I think what gets missed in all this, in the kind of sanitisation of organizational life, which is what happens when we rely on things like silver bullets, you know, the neatening of the mess, but the neatening of the mess to the point where it edits out all the stuff that’s really uncomfortable that we can only really work with if we move towards it, and actually are willing to get a bit more uncomfortable because it’s not comfortable stuff, Phil, I mean, some of this. You know, if, if we’re working with, for example, an organisation which doesn’t know why its leadership team is not functioning and there is conflict, how on earth do you imagine you can work in that space without there being some useful discomfort? And that’s what one of my own beliefs is… it is what I say in my, my work with clients, you know, I set out with an intention to create useful discomfort in service of learning. On the basis that anything I’ve ever learned, that most people who’ve ever learned in their lives, if it was of any merit or worth, is normally being preceded by a bit of a wrestle and a bit of discomfort. So how is it we expect the important stuff in organisations sometimes to be done in a very scientific way, in a very neat way?

[00:35:22] Phil Lewis: So not to prejudice the end of your book, which I’m going to encourage all of our listeners to go out and buy a copy before we round out this conversation, Steve. But just to close this out here, if not a silver bullet, then what? I mean, I guess my version of it would be something like positive, if sometimes painful progress, but where do you land on it? If not a silver bullet, then what?

[00:35:47] Steve Hearsum: I think one thing to say about the book is, it’s stuffed full of many other people’s observations and ideas, and I make no claim to being the definitive voice on this. It’s really important to say that. And if I ever describe myself as a thought leader, shoot me Phil. There’s a whole chapter on thought leadership as well, and why I think it really needs to, to be taken, taken apart and deconstructed. But when I asked people in, as in, when I interviewed them, nobody said they had a silver bullet. So I asked them, so what’s the next best thing? And the answer was consistent in different language, but the same response, the answer is inquiry and co inquiry. The answer is get as many people together in the organisation, or certainly a representative of every part of the system that’s impacted, with all the key stakeholders with permission to ask any question. And through that inquiry, you might work out what the problem is, and you might work out the next wise move with no guarantees. But fundamentally it was about inquiry. Absent that, you run the risk of repeating the patterns you’ve already got. But that then cuts against the anxiety that’s often in the system, quite understandably… what you see happens is, is that senior leaders start to move towards command and control as their anxiety goes up, and that works against inquiry. So paradoxically, they’re making things worse for themselves.

[00:37:11] Phil Lewis: We will put a link to your excellent book, No Silver Bullet: Bursting the Bubble of the Organisational Quick Fix in the show notes to this episode. But Steve, if any of our listeners would like to get in contact with you, talk about, for example, consultancy supervision or any of your other excellent work, where might they find you?

[00:37:32] Steve Hearsum: If you want to talk to me about supervision or anything else, Steve at Hearsum dot com. So it’s my first and surname. And I should also say that I made a point of making this book accessible. So it’s, it’s only £15.99 for the paperback, which compared to most business books and organisational books is an absolute bargain.

[00:37:50] Phil Lewis: And compared to most business and organisational books, this one is actually worth reading. So that is also a key differentiator. Steve, thank you for coming on the podcast.

[00:37:59] Steve Hearsum: Pleasure, Phil. Thanks.

[00:38:03] Phil Lewis: So there you have it. That was my conversation with Steve Hearsum, and a big thanks to Steve for taking the time to chat. If you found value in this episode, you can support the podcast very easily. All you need to do is click like and share in your podcast player. Or perhaps recommend us to a friend or colleague, client-side or in consultancy. Every single like, every single share, makes a huge difference to a relatively young podcast like us. So thanks in advance for doing that. This podcast is always out the first Monday of every single month. So we will see you again very soon. And in the meantime, thanks for listening to The Consultancy Business.

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