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© 2004, Coert Visser & René Butter Nowadays many organizations find it important to go about hiring consultants critically and consciously. Hiring them too easily or uncritically can lead to too high costs and possibly to becoming too dependent on consultants. Furthermore, carelessly choosing a consultant can lead to disappointment about his approach and its results. This article offers you a few ideas to help you determine whether a consultant fits well or not with your organization. The article first outlines our view on successful consultancy projects. Next, you will find a checklist to help you select a consultant on the basis of an intake conversation. And finally, we offer some practical tips about how to evaluate the effectiveness of running or finished consultancy projects. Successful consultancy Roughly three factors cause the effectiveness of consultancy. Those are – in decreasing importance -: Client-specific factors: the most important category of factors has to do wit...

Barry Duncan and Scott Miller are with Marc Hubble directors of The Institute for the Study of Therapeutic Change (...). These people play an important role in improving and renewing therapy. In this book, the authors explain how therapy has for too long been been neglecting, ignoring, and depersonalizing clients, by its over-emphasis on methods and techniques, by following the medical model, by its emphasis on pathology, by hegemony of biological approaches, and so on. The authors first debunk the myths of: PSYCHIATRIC DIAGNOSIS: a) it lacks reliability, b) it lacks validity, c) it puts the blame on the client, and d) it is often motivated by self-interest, fueled by greed, and blows with the winds of fashion, DRUG TREATMENT OF MENTAL PROBLEMS: a) they work no better than therapy in the short term, b) changes brought about by medication are less likely to persist over time, c) there often are severe adverse effects, d) drug studies often look better than they are because they rate im...