The Challenges of Practicing Organization Development
Many people who are interested in the art and science of organization development believe that it is easy based on what they have seen and heard OD practitioners do. Those of us who have built successful practices —internally or externally—know that its practice presents many challenges.
Challenge #1
We collaborate with organization leaders and their groups. Such an easy word to use, “collaborate.” Yet, it presents powerful challenges. In the positive sense that it means working with someone as a an equal. It’s that sense of equality that collaboration requires that get us into trouble.
Challenge #2
We create systemic change on behalf of root-cause problem-solving. This challenge is what makes organization development the most powerful strategy for managing change in human systems! It’s a challenge because we live in a larger society that values linear rationality when human systems rarely move in straight lines and operate rationally only occasionally.
Challenge #3
We are focused on improving productivity and employee satisfaction. The challenge here is to accomlish both. The effective OD practitioner understands that in the long run productivity and employee satisfaction are systemically correlates. Yet, many practitioners are challenged by their preference for one over the other.
Challenge #4
We strengthen the human processes through which work gets done. The list of challenges here is even longer! We (practitioners and our clients) want almost desperately to avoid any conflict that might lead to contention and hurt feelings (particularly our own).
What to do to handle all of these challenges? We offer the eight disciplines of planned change.
For more information on the challenges of OD, check out our upcoming webinar!
The Meta-Model of Planned Change
We have defined organization development as “collaborating with organizational leaders and their groups to create systemic change and root-cause problem solving on behalf of improving productivity and employee satisfaction through strengthening the human processes through which they get their work done.” We have looked at what OD practitioners do, the results they are after, and how OD works, and we have looked at some of the ideal characteristics of a successful practitioner. Without a useful framework, however, even the most conscious and skills practitioner will have trouble achieving the triple impact that is ideal.
The Meta-Model of Planned Change
This Meta-Model of Planned Change offers a structure for understanding and practicing organization development. It is based upon the classic perspective of OD described above and as developed in the NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Science. That perspective holds that the tasks of an organization—from planning to production to delivery—are accomplished with the highest level of productivity through processes that are highlighted by a high quality of relationship among those responsible for those tasks. It is a model that believes in the empowerability of human systems and the people that live and work within them. Accordingly, the Meta-Model calls for collaborative strategies and tactics aimed at open and thorough communication and consensual decision-making.
A model is a descriptive system of information, theories, inferences, and implications used to represent and support understanding of some phenomenon. Meta-, in the sense used here, is a context or framework. A meta-model could, then be understood as a framework or context of a model—albeit, a model of a model. A meta-model of planned change, then, is a framework from which any number of more specific models of how to manage change in human systems can be understood and developed. Organization development is dynamic field able to contain many models, strategies, and tactics malleable to the system and individuals—the leader, her groups, and the practitioner—involved.
Our model (click the picture to enlarge) is a three dimensional matrix. The horizontal and depth axes describe the traditional model of organization development including five iterative stages of the planned change process and the five levels of human systems. The iterative stages are contracting, data-gathering, intervention, evaluation, and disengagement. The five levels of human systems are personal, interpersonal, group, organization, and community—across which the stages must be carried out as necessary. The vertical axis describes our addition of eight disciplines of critical thinking which, when each is consistently adhered to, enable the stages across the levels to support the success of any particular change management effort.
We will explore the stages, levels and disciplines in our next series of posts. Stay tuned!
How OD Works
When we defined “Organization Development (OD)” in Part One of this series, we stated that the work of OD is “collaborating with organizational leaders and their groups to create systemic change and root-cause problem solving on behalf of improving productivity and employee satisfaction through strengthening the human processes through which they get their work done.” We went on to look at What Practitioners Do, and The Results that OD Is After. In this entry we will consider the third part of the definition: How OD Works.
How OD Works
OD works “through improving the human processes through which they (people in organizations) get their work done.” All tasks get done through some set of processes, some series of actions that some one or more persons have to do. The quality and productivity of the result of those processes is directly related to the quality of the processes. And, the quality of those processes is directly related to the quality of the relationships between and among those who are carrying out those processes. Think back to the issue in the second post regarding delivery of product to customers. Organization development is very much a task-oriented field. It provides its value through enhancing the achievement of organizational goals. That is the only reason for the existence of OD. It supports such achievement through improving how the people tasked with accomplishing those goals collectively go about their business. In that process, OD involves those who carry out said processes to determine how they might be improved. Such processes include those needed for high-level strategic planning, teaming between and among work units, and performance management.
A core OD process is inquiry. As I ask leaders and their groups to explain to me their business and what works and doesn’t work in how they get their work done, we discover the holes in their thinking and then we fill them in. In fact, our willful ignorance is our most important tool. As leaders—often after much collaborative, direct, bottom-line coaching from us—bring everyone together to share data, ideas and knowledge they discover—with the help of our deft facilitation—that they have collected enough good information to invent effective root-cause solutions. That is, of course, over-simplified, but still a generally accurate description of how OD works.
This description of how OD works points to what sets it apart from other consulting processes. For example, there is the subject-matter expert who can help solve a difficult engineering, marketing, or computer problem that the organization wants solved without the expense of hiring such expertise full-time. Then there is the “management consultant” firm (often of engineers or accountants) who will study the organization’s problems, then present their findings and “expert” recommendations in a report. Such solutions too often do not get implemented due to too little ownership of the solutions within the organization. Another reason they don’t get implemented is that such recommendations often deal only with the technical aspects of the situation at hand and only a little—or not at all—with the critical human process aspects. Also, people will implement solutions that they have invented and in which they, thereby, believe. The process of experts recommending solutions does not create enough buy-in for effective implementation. The implementation of solutions generated by those who have to implement them—assuring buy-in—is part and parcel of organization development.
So there you have it – our definition of Organization Development. Beautifully simple, isn’t it? In our next installment, we will look into why something so elegantly simple isn’t as easy as one might think.
The Results OD Is After
This is the third in a series of blog posts on the subject of The Technology of Organization Development, The Most Powerful Technology for Managing Change in Organizations and Ourselves. In the first two, we looked at our definition of OD and the first of three aspects of that definition: What practitioners do. Now we will discuss the results practitioners are after.
Practitioners “collaborate with leaders and their groups.” For what purpose? OD is after “systemic change and root-cause problem-solving toward improving productivity and employee satisfaction.” This is the most powerful aspect of organization development. Systemic change focuses on the total organization or organizational unit to get at the root cause of organizational problems that stem from the relational dynamics among multiple issues.
Human systems are not like machines. When machines malfunction, the process of choice is to locate the malfunctioning component(s), then fix or replace them. In human systems, such faultfinding processes tend to promulgate more problems, rarely solutions. In human systems a “malfunctioning component” can only exist over time with the support and collusion of the rest of the system. Remove the “malfunctioning” person and colluding aspects of the system that are still in place will create the “malfunction” someplace else.
A leader, on noticing that her/his manufacturing area is delivering product consistently behind schedule, might blame the head of that area and ask for their resignation when the problem is related to the sales area under pressure to produce revenue, the engineering area under pressure to increase design quality, and the manufacturing area under a “zero defects” edict being in conflict over promises to clients, design specifications, and production time. All three area leaders are actually strong leaders of their respective units. The problem lies neither within their areas of their expertise, their units, nor their leadership. It lies in the area of their ability to solve problems with each other when their leader is managing them individually. Their collective problem lies within the “system” of their human dynamics. A root-cause analysis can only occur when all four are in the same room to solve a “delivery problem” that belongs to them all.
When a leader suggests to us a single-point solution (such as, “please train my supervisors”), I respond with something like… “I see what you’re after. It would probably be a good idea to find out what’s going on that has so many of your supervisors demonstrating poor management skills. Things like poor hiring practices and poor accountability management are often behind such problems. If we can get at the root causes the problem will go away forever. What do you think?” The leader now has a broader perspective from which to begin to create a broader solution, rather than one that not only may create other problems but won’t solve the initial issue.
OD solutions improve productivity and employee satisfaction in a couple of ways. One is that it can help minimize the waste of productivity caused by miscommunications, misunderstandings, contention, hostility, turf-battles, and other forms of power struggles. Just ending such waste would improve productivity and morale a minimum of twenty-five percent. Another twenty-five percent can be gained through improving the amount of teamwork, creativity, and synergy generated throughout the organization. Just how all this can happen will be explored throughout the chapters of this book.
Many who call themselves OD practitioners only want to focus on the human relations aspects, the employee satisfaction aspects of OD. Then there is another group of practitioners who are bottom-line oriented to the exclusion of employee satisfaction. Neither recognizes that bottom-line productivity and employee satisfaction are systemically related. To deal with either to the exclusion of the other is to risk losing both.
The systemic orientation of organization development practitioners can provide solutions to even the perennial problems that many organizations have become accustomed—like meetings that waste time, conflicts between departments, and too much turn-over. That’s powerful!
Next time we will look at the third part of our definition of OD: How it works.
What Do OD Practitioners Do?
OD Practitioners “collaborate with leaders and their groups.” Two key words here: “collaborate” and “leaders.” OD starts from the top of an organization or organizational unit—its leader. Working together—albeit collaboratively—the practitioner and the leader come to agreement about the change goals of the project, the basic strategies to be used, and other important perspectives that will be explored when we discuss Contracting and Re-contracting.
Many potential users of OD have the notion that we will fix whatever their issue is for them. After all, we are “the experts.” And, we are experts! We are experts who understand how to create and facilitate the human processes that drive all organizational work regardless of how automated that work may be.
A core element of those human processes is, of course, the leader her or him self. Accordingly, the work of OD calls for the leader to lead the project, not the OD practitioner. We do work in partnership with the leader to facilitate effective goal identification, and problem-solving processes toward root-cause solutions. In other words we collaborate with leaders and their groups to identify and solve their own problems. We work from the perspective of the Chinese maxim, “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.” In the world of OD, leaders lead their own projects in collaboration with OD practitioners as designers and facilitators of the human processes involved.
Maintaining these roles (client as project leader and practitioner as process consultant and facilitator) can be problematic. Practitioners have been known to acquiesce to leader requests to take over project leadership. Practitioners have been known to take project leadership from acquiescing clients. Both are risky as the leader becomes a bystander and practitioner carries both roles. Even if the project is successful on it face, future successes become uncertain as a key success factor (the practitioner) moves on to other projects. To combat such happenstances, leader and practitioner must distinguish the two roles during their initial contracting. Both, then, must recontract whenever necessary to reestablish the appropriate roles. This is not to say that the practitioner cannot lead some aspects of the OD project such as leading a conflict management portion of a team-building session. Still, that should only be done to demonstrate how it can be done so that the leader can do his or herself at later opportunities.
We will address the rest of our definition of OD—the results OD is after and how OD works—in the next two blog posts. Stay tuned!