The Change Agent As Diagnostic Advisor
How to be an Effective Diagnostic Advisor
The most basic question any change agent might ask is: "What are these people or this group trying to do?"
In other words, what are their goals?
- Are there many goals?
- Is there agreement on goals?
- Is there an order to the goals?
- What is most important?
- What is most immediate or urgent?
- Is there a relationship among goals?
But we know from what has been said under Stage 3 that it isn’t that simple. The articulated 'goals' may not be the real goals, and the goals of some may not be the gals of others. The diagnostic change agent helps a system sort through this morass to gain clarity and thus move forward, knowing better what direction it should be headed in.
The diagnostic change agent must be able to think about the system in many different ways because there are many different ways to think about what a system really is, as suggested by the following figure, which recaps previous analyses provided on this web site. Most immediately past, we considered the Human Relations Expert role, wherein we viewed the system as layers of people in a quasi-hierarchy. Earlier, under the “What is change?” section, we also viewed the system as a connected series of compartments, each with its own barriers and points.
In Stage 3.3 we also provided a functional way to describe any system as a connected and coordinated sequence of inputs, throughputs, and outputs.