Accord Advisory Group

As a business psychologist, reading Keynes’ “General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money” is a thrilling ride. Its like discovering that James Joyce’s “Ulysses” takes Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams” on the road to the living, breathing, web of a city and its people, going about their daily business.

And its not just Keynes’ brilliant Chapter 12— perhaps the best thing ever written about the psychology of speculative versus enterprise market approaches– its in his keen observation of how the world really works in what people really do.

Clothed in the language of economics, Keynes spells out the temporary nature of business organization as it exists in a moment of evolution from past to future. He writes, “past expectations, which have not yet worked themselves out, are embodied in today’s capital equipment with reference to which the entrepreneur has to make today’s decisions, and only influence his decisions in so far as they are so embodied.”

Translation? We work with what we’ve got; and that is the present value of everything, completed and unfinished, that we bring to our current decision making.

This is the recognition at the core of successful process facilitation: creating with the client, a working relationship built both of client experience and facilitator expertise. The collaboration is necessarily temporary— a temporary work organization from which the client benefits through clarification and expansion of her ideas and actions.

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