DBAX 9103C Week 7 Meeting Remarks Paper Example

What Was Said in Progress Meetings and What the Evidence Shows: Separating Confident Remarks From Findings in a Consulting Study of Late Sign Installations, One Remark at a Time

Student Name

Walden University

DBAX 9103C: Business Consulting Research Project Stage 3

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

What Was Said in Progress Meetings and What the Evidence Shows: Separating Confident Remarks From Findings in a Consulting Study of Late Sign Installations, One Remark at a Time

The Temptation

Progress meetings generate a steady supply of confident remarks, and a consulting report is tempted to cite them. They come from senior people, they are vivid and they often seem to confirm what the data show. But a remark in a meeting is neither an interview conducted under consent nor a record. It is said for a purpose in that room: to defend a decision, to reassure the owner, to push a colleague. Schein (1999) describes how what clients say in early meetings reflects their theories of the problem, which a consultant should treat as data about the client rather than about the problem. This paper lists the remarks made in six progress meetings while I studied why an Oklahoma sign maker's installs were running late, and sets each against the evidence.

Remarks and Evidence

Table 1

Progress Meeting Remarks Compared With Study Evidence

Remarks recorded in the consultant's meeting notes on the day; none were quoted to participants as findings.

How the Remarks Are Used

None of the remarks appears in the findings as evidence. They appear in a separate section on how the problem is understood inside the company, because the gap between belief and evidence is itself useful to the client. The owner's belief that the evening crew is the cause has shaped staffing decisions for a year. The operations manager's confidence in engineering has kept a second engineer off the budget. Showing those beliefs beside the evidence helps the client see why the problem persisted.

Why Not Cite Them as Support

Two remarks did match the evidence in part. The sales manager's remark that permits cause delays is partly true. It would be easy to quote it as support for the first finding. But doing so would let a remark made to deflect responsibility stand in for evidence, and would hide the part that is not true: the company's own scheduling template assumes permits arrive in ten days. Block (2011) cautions consultants against borrowing a client's language for a finding when that language carries the client's defense of its own choices.

Fairness to the Speakers

The remarks were made in meetings where people felt free to speak loosely. Reporting them by name would punish candor. The report attributes them to roles and frames them as working beliefs, not errors. Edmondson (1999) linked team learning to a shared belief that speaking up will not bring embarrassment or punishment; a report that exposed offhand remarks could make future candor less likely, at the client and in any later engagement.

Remarks That Led to Evidence

Not every remark was idle. The owner's comment that the booth "only went down once" sent me to the maintenance log, which showed two outages. The sales manager's comment about permits prompted the comparison between the template's ten days and the actual median. Remarks can be useful as leads, pointing to where evidence should be sought, without being cited as evidence themselves. Keeping a column in the meeting notes for "what this remark suggests checking" made that use routine and kept leads from turning into findings by accident.

What the Separation Adds

Separating remarks from findings protects the findings from borrowed confidence and turns the remarks into evidence of a different kind: evidence about the beliefs that will decide whether the client acts on the report.

References

Block, P. (2011). Flawless consulting: A guide to getting your expertise used (3rd ed.). Pfeiffer.

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Schein, E. H. (1999). Process consultation revisited: Building the helping relationship. Addison-Wesley.