Twenty-second Eric Miller Memorial Lecture 2024: "Our kind of consultancy is subversive" Curiosity, agency, and the power of changing the stories we tell

The quote in the title is from Eric Miller, and this article—first given as the 2024 Eric Miller Memorial Lecture—considers the questions "What is our kind of consultancy?" and "What might be subversive about it?" Key is curiosity and the capacity to be surprised. A number of ways to retrieve this capacity are described, illustrated by case studies. These include organisation-in-the-mind drawings, role analysis in groups, reflective leadership, and a consultancy exercise designed to break through either/or thinking to find a "third position". All of these require containment of the anxieties unleashed by dismantling existing defences, so that we can begin to consider the possibility of alternative stories. At a societal level, existential anxieties are rising, and so too bipartisanship, as people defend against uncertainty by engaging almost entirely with people who think as they do. One result is that each person's version of "the truth" is constantly amplified in echo chambers and less available to examination, regardless of any evidence. Attempts are described of leaders trying to open up more space for dialogue, but these often meet extreme resistance as they pose a threat both to identity and to the need for safety that can come from belonging to an "us".