Moving from healer to revealer

Chris Mowles reflects on the question of whether the consultant/leader is a healer or revealer and offers his thoughts that the second position is better:

To take the second position is to work alongside the client/team in a way which is open to exploring what might be going on in the team, where the consultant/leader also considers themselves to be a part of the inquiry. This is an acknowledgement that the consultant/leader is unlikely to have special insight into the truth, may or may not have specialist knowledge or wisdom, along with everyone else in the team. In the words of the psychotherapist Donald Winnicott, the aim is to show the limits of the consultant/leader’s understanding, but still to encourage exploration and interpretation, to try and make some kind of sense together about what might be going on. The principal value of the consultant in particular is that they bring difference: they only have a temporary stake in the game. To inquire together is to do so speculatively and fallibly and the method is to work with grain of the dynamics of the team. Whatever insight emerges is the responsibility of everyone to do something about. Or not. There are always power relationships, but the idea is to lessen dependency on the consultant/leader and to support the group in becoming more mature.

My posts of the last few days on the sources of constraints that define the field of dialogic containers are leading me to see these questions everywhere. There is a reaching for what the right role should be. That depends on what is needed, what is being asked, and what is ethically demanded of the practitioner. But the question persists and the role of the practitioner is the one which folks are asking account of.