Saturday, November 1, 2014

Conflict Issues and Special Topics of Invention in Business Consulting

Conflict Issues
Many points of conflict arise in the work place, especially in that of business consulting. Among the most critical is the plan of action that will be taken. In business consulting the majority of work is done within a team setting. As a result of this team or group setting many opinions arise causing much debate in regards to the most “advantageous” way to proceed with a specific client.

Within the team a conversation could go something like this:
Consultant 1 – Looking at the past financial statements it looks as though our original theory was incorrect. We need to reconsider the issue that is stopping the client from growing.
Consultant 2 – What did you see in statements that cause you to believe that?
Consultant 1 – (Providing some level or reasoning to his change may say) the original forecasts we predicted were based on falls pretenses.
Consultant 2 – What do you suggest we do from here?
Consultant 1 – Well from the information that we have thus far it appears that (some plan of attack) would be the best way to proceed.
Consultant 2 – That is a good idea, but I have dealt with clients such as these before. I have made the mistake of following your idea. The end result very rarely ends the way planned so let’s do this approach instead. (Consultant 2 may then offer a different option and the conversation would continue until an agreement was made.)

Analysis
Almost all of the dialogue between the two consultants refers to the options they have that will affect the future in an advantageous or disadvantageous way. This is often done through the use of documents as consulting firms often times refer to past financial statements. An important topic of invention that is often used in this field is that of past fact and future fact. This is often used by those consultants who are the “team leader” (in this case consultant 2) as they typically have more time and have attained more experience. This could be created into its own topic of invention (we could call it experienced vs. experienced).

2 comments:

  1. Interesting post for me to read, because your example applies to actuarial consultants working together as well. I chose to give an example about consultants and their clients, but I recognize and mentioned that this dialogue and point of conflict arises often in the world of consulting. I think it is interesting that in both situations we identified advantageous/disadvantageous as the special topics of invention at work here. From this analysis I now see how both situations complement each other and help the consultants become better at both situations.

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  2. Nice post. This highlights the importance of team work and communication. I also think it's good that you mentioned that the consultants need to be able to support their opinions with their experiences or facts.

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