Flawless Consulting

This module teaches the Three Consulting Stances from Peter Block's Flawless Consulting ??? Expert, Pair of Hands, and Collaborative ??? as a lens for how you respond when a stakeholder brings you a request. Participants first learn to recognize each stance and its failure modes, then practice spotting them live: they vote with their feet on real scenarios (recruiter requests, title changes, IT provisioning delays, benefits restructures) to name which stance is in play, and learn to catch "faux-collaborative" behavior that looks like partnership but isn't. The module also tackles the practical objection to contracting explicitly on work ("where's the time?") and closes with a team exercise mapping your own recurring requests across the three stances to build a shared decision rule for when to default to Pair of Hands versus when to slow down and go Collaborative.

This module teaches contracting: the explicit, spoken-out-loud agreement two parties reach about what they'll each do before work begins, as distinct from a project brief, a ticket, or unspoken assumptions. Participants learn Peter Block's five contracting elements from Flawless Consulting ??? Business Objective, Boundaries, Information & Access, Mutual Commitments, and Concerns ??? then apply them in small groups to a scenario built around an email request from an IT Ops lead (Marcus) needing help fixing a new-hire workflow. Groups draft a contract from the five elements, inferring what they can, flagging guesses, and writing the questions they'd still need answered, then compare drafts to see where assumptions should have been questions and where they'd hold a boundary. The scenario is specific, but the five-element structure generalizes to any intake conversation before starting client or stakeholder work.