Waiting till the consulting market gets better is useless-ask yourself 4 questions to ensure relevancy

Samuel Beckett’s play “en attendant Godot” (Waiting for Godot) is about people waiting for someone who never shows up. The play illustrates that while meaning may exist in the world, we human beings are not too good in discovering it. It is not strange that Beckett’s genre is the Theatre of the Absurd.

OD consultants are waiting for the market to improve. The goal of this short post is to show absurd this is, and propose an alternative.

In one of my previous posts this week, I focused on the growing irrelevance of OD as currently practised. This irrelevance has caused a drop in demand for Organisational Development. Add to this, the universities keep churning out OD consultants at an alarming rate. Perhaps (in Israel where I live) we may soon have more OD consultant than lawyers, or even more OD consultants than Middle East “experts”.

With the lessening of demand and the growth of supply, there is not only a problem on the horizon, it’s here.

The OD consultants who are waiting for the clouds to pass over and waiting for the economy to improve need to wake up and smell the coffee. Godot never comes. The cheese has moved. OD is moving forward, not going back.

What is to be done instead of Waiting for Godot?

OD consultants get work if they are relevant.

Here are 4 questions  you need to ask yourself (and have superb answers) to be remain relevant , which will ensure a backlog of work.

Invest

1) What relevant value do I need to provide to enable effective functioning in a global organizational configuration? What are the situations of global organizing which clients can come to me to solve?

Divest

2) From which beliefs do I need to divest, i.e. present beliefs  which limit my relevance and make me sound absurd?

Focus

3) Since OD services do not have universal appeal, upon whom should I be focusing on to provide the value I create?

Reputation and Position

4) How do I build my position as a content expert (not only facilitator) in the domain in which I work?

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