ABSTRACT
This chapter is about learning the important skills that are developed before starting out to do consultation, about reorganizing the previous and on-going experiences to become part of a consultant's identity, and about creating small-scale opportunities to practice consultation. The people who are becoming interested in systemic consultation are mostly social workers with a background in family counselling and psychologists with a clinical background. Becoming a skilled systemic consultant depends on trying it out and learning from the successes and mistakes—that is, learning by doing. In this cumbersome process or gathering experience, it useful to drag tasks originally formulated as teaching tasks into consultancy, with a positive outcome for all the participants involved. The organization gets the benefit of an intervention specifically directed towards its needs, and the possibility of ending up with decisions about new actions; the consultant gets useful experience in working with systemic methods.
