Kaarst-Brown (1995) together with a fellow consultant set up what was to be a five-year consultancy project with a client. However, at the end of the first year, the chief executive terminated the project even though there was much work outstanding. Nevertheless, the client expressed satisfaction with project, progress, cost, behaviour and relationship. It was Kaarst-Brown’s perception that the project had failed, and she set about a retrospective participant observation and analysis. As a result she found that consultants had a symbolic role to play and that these roles matched Lewin’s stages of unfreezing, transition and refreezing (Lewin, 1951. So, for example, just the arrival of a consultant was symbolic of change yet to come. If the wrong symbolic role was played, then the consultant might give out signals inconsistent with the stage of the project. Kaarst-Brown concluded that at one stage the two consultants had played a symbolic role that implied the project was coming to a successful conclusion, which the CEO had perceived as success and so had concluded the consultancy.
The research questions that I would want to follow up are:- Are the consultant’s symbolic roles to be found in project documentation?
- Is there evidence of Kaarst-Brown’s symbols at various stages of the project?
- Can these symbols be seen in the project documentation or heard in the discourse?
- Do the symbols reveal existence of project governance?
Kaarst-Brown, 1999, Five symbolic roles of the external consultant: Integrating change, power and symbolism, Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol 12, no 6.
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