3 ideas
Every interaction with a client, no matter how small, either helps or hinders the relationship, so the consultant must treat each moment as an active helping intervention. The goal is not to deliver expertise but to build a relationship in which the client can solve their own problems, which means even diagnostic questions are themselves interventions that change the system.
The consultant should default to pure inquiry — drawing out what the client sees, feels, and means — before shifting to exploratory or confrontational questioning that introduces the consultant's own ideas. Choosing the type of inquiry deliberately controls how much the consultant biases the client's thinking while still surfacing usable data.
Because the consultant can never fully understand the client's reality, ownership of both the problem and its solution must remain with the client throughout the engagement. The consultant's job is to add to the client's capacity to diagnose and act, not to take over the problem, since a transferred problem leaves no learning behind.