by Edgar H. Schein

"The ability to build and maintain a helping relationship is applicable to a large variety of human situations. Such a relationship is central to therapy, to counselling, and to all forms of consulting. But it is not limited to those situations in which helping is the primary function of the relationship. The ability to be an effective helper also applies to spouses, friends, managers, vis-à-vis their superiors, subordinates, and peers, parents vis-à-vis their own parents and children and teachers vis-à-vis their own students."

For those of us engaged in any form of social work or change initiative this is an invaluable book. Schein's book considers in detail how to cultivate helping relationships. Process Consultation operates on the core assumption that one can only help a human system help itself, be that an individual, organisation or community.

While the book is written from the perspective of a client-consultant relationship, the ideas here have very broad applicability both in the workplace and beyond. The book is full of practical examples and anecdotes. At the beginning of the book Schein makes clear that many helping relationships fall outside formal consulting situations, such as a friend asking for feedback. His anecdotes reflect this as well as more formal consulting situations.

Development work, social work and even educational work all result in very complex and confusing relationships. Quite often these relationships result in power imbalances where one party is supposed to have a problem and the other party has the solution. A common example is in traditional education where the teacher is seen to be the expert who is helping the student by depositing facts and knowledge into them. This relationship of expert and student results in the teacher being in a clear position of authority and power.

Schein clearly articulates "the psychodynamics of the helping relationship" and outlines how the first task of the helper is to bring the relationship into an equilibrium, that is, as a relationship between two equals. This equilibrium ensures that the helping relationship is characterised by honesty and not by fear or defensiveness. Only once this has been done should information about the situation be solicited. All too often when someone presents us with a problem we rush to provide an answer. The weakness of this approach is that the information we base our proposed solution or answer on is very incomplete and often clouded by power imbalances.

Process Consulting makes very explicit use of dialogue (active inquiry) and listening in order to establish healthy helping relationships. In particular Schein stresses that listening is one of the best ways of addressing the initial status imbalance between helper and helped. Different types of active inquiry can then be used as a means of getting to the heart of the problem.

We tend to see dialogue used more for the purposes of information exchange such as in a meeting or during a brainstorming session. Schein demonstrates how dialogue and listening are active and key components of building helping relationships.

The book also explores wider issues of group facilitation and group interventions which is of particular interest to those making use of related group processes such as Open Space or Future Search.

As an author Schein is also very conscious of how cultures affect helping relationships - these vary from working cultures to national cultures and this is a theme that runs throughout the book.

Schein ends each section with a summary of the key points and adds a series of exercises which can be used to develop process consulting skills.

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• Reviewed by Zaid Hassan

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