Decolonising and Queering: Executive Coaching and Organisational Consultancy

This article aims to add some decolonising theoretical and practical scaffolding to our coaching and organisational consultancy practices. I hope to provide coaches and consultants with some conceptual tools to manage the myriad of complex issues related to working within diverse workforces and markets in the historic context of empire, colonisation, and slavery and the contemporary manifestation of these historic dynamics that are now present in the emergence over the last ten years of the alt-right populist movements who spout the most horrendous homophobic, misogynistic, and racist troupes from powerful online social media. The alt-right populist movements reflect a “location of disturbance” by way of a backlash to the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements. Left unaddressed, we risk turning a blind eye to such destructiveness, alienating and devaluing parts of our workforce by ignoring their lived reality over many generations. This article examines how a consultancy cycle aims to decolonise organisational and team dynamics, thereby mitigating the impact of these destructive dynamics and enabling more cooperative working practices. A failure to do so leaves organisations vulnerable to anti-task practices, which wastes the richness and creativity of diverse human resources.