Management Consultants' Colourful Ways of Looking at Change: An Explorative Study under Dutch Management Consultants

Abstract

Questionnaire data collected from 71 management consultants is used to gain insight into their preferences and assumptions regarding organizational change. The main question is: ‘how do management consultants think about change and which preference do they have regarding the use of intervention methods?’. The research is based on a framework in which five perspectives on change are conceptualized and in which each perspective is divided in thinking and doing and as a whole is associated with a colour. These perspectives are: yellow-print thinking which is based on processes of power, coalition formation and coercion; blue-print thinking is synonym with planned and programmed change; red-print thinking concerns Human Resource Management; green-print thinking lines up with organizational learning; and white-print thinking stands for emergent processes of self steering, chaos and sense making. The results suggest that the method used produces useful insight in consultants' attitudes and preferences.

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