plans, including short- and long-term goals.
Eighteen months later, attendees had reached a number of important goals that had been discussed at the conference. Not only had they been able to increase funding for a farmworkers housing loan program and create a rental assistance fund, but they were on their way to building a $5.5 million low-income housing project. Participants addressed a number of nonhousing issues as well. They embarked on diversity training in their stakeholder groups, created a citizen action corps, invited other community members to participate on additional task forces, and created a plan to revitalize a local downtown area. “Did the future search conference work?” one participant wondered. “No question about it. It provided a living model of democracy.”
Example 5: A Long-Term Strategic Change Engagement
ABA, a German trading company with 15,000 employees, embarked on a major strategic change initiative driven by stiff competition (Sackmann, Eggenhofer-Rehart, & Friesl, 2009). A global expansion prompted the company to reorganize into a three-division structure. A decentralized shared services model, comprising 14 new groups, was created for administrative departments that would now support internal divisions. To support the culture of the new organization, executives developed a mission and vision statement that explained the company’s new values and asked managers to cascade these messages to their staffs. This effort was kicked off and managed from the top of the organization.
The director of the newly formed shared services centers contacted external consultants, suspecting that a simple communication cascade to employees would not result in the behavioral changes needed in the new structure. The new administrative groups would have significant changes to work processes, and the lead managers of each of the 14 new groups would need assistance to put the new values and beliefs into practice. The consultants proposed an employee survey to gauge the beliefs and feelings of the staff and to provide an upward communication mechanism. Survey results were available to managers of each center, and the external consultants coached the managers through an interpretation of the results to guide self-exploration and personal development. Internal consultants worked with the managers of each of the new centers to facilitate a readout of the survey results with employees and take actions customized to the needs of each group. Consultants conducted workshops for managers to help them further develop personal leadership and communication skills, topics that the survey suggested were common areas of improvement across the management team. Over a period of 4 years, the cycle was repeated, using variations of the employee survey questions, a feedback step, and management development workshops covering new subjects each time.
Interviews and surveys conducted late in the process showed that employees had a positive feeling about change in general. Leaders reported noticing a more trusting relationship between employees and their managers characterized by more open communication. Center managers took the initiative to make regular and ongoing improvements to their units. Sackmann and colleagues (2009) noted the need for a major change like this one to include multiple intervention targets. This organization experienced “changes in strategy, structure, management instruments, leadership, employee orientation, and the organization’s culture context” (p. 537), which required a broad set of surveys, coaching, and workshops to support. “These change supporting activities helped implement the change with lasting effect” (p. 537), they conclude.
As you can see from this and the previous examples, OD is concerned with a diverse variety of issues to address problems involving organizations, teams, and individuals. OD is also conducted in a diverse variety of organizations, including federal, state, and local governments (which are among the largest employers in the United States, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics), public sector organizations around the world, health care organizations, educational settings, and nonprofit and private enterprises. Interventions can involve a single individual, a small team (such as the cancer center team described earlier), multiple teams, or a whole organization. It can also consist of multiple targets of change, such as in the Vodaphone initiative that involved not only large-scale culture change but also the implementation of teams and individual coaching. OD can also deal with multiorganization efforts, such as in the case of Santa Cruz County, or it can involve multiple national governments. The target of change can be something as seemingly simple as increasing employee involvement or developing coworker relationships, or it can be as potentially large as creating the vision or strategy of an entire organization or documenting the 10-year future of a large county.
Profiles in Organization Development
Marvin Weisbord
Marvin Weisbord had a 50-year career as manager, writer, researcher, and consultant to corporations and medical schools. He was a founder and co-director of Future Search Network, a global nonprofit whose members manage strategic planning meetings for communities worldwide. He received a lifetime achievement award from the Organization Development Network, which voted his book Productive Workplaces one of the “Top Five Most Influential OD books of the Past 40 Years.” For 20 years, he was a partner in the consulting firm Block Petrella Weisbord, a member of the NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Science, and a member of the European Institute for Transnational Studies (ITS).
1 How did you get started in OD? What favorite lessons stand out about your work with people and organizations?I learned to do organization development (OD) by doing it. I became an advocate for projects to help people learn from their own experience. Most people know more about their work than they realize. They rarely have a chance to discover it. Given time to educate one another, people always learn more about the whole than any one person knew before. Given influence over policies and work systems, people perform better than they think they can. This has occurred for decades regardless of culture, age, class, gender, ethnicity or “personal style.” I learned that “sustainable change” was an oxymoron! The best we could hope to sustain was peoples’ commitment from one meeting to the next. That is a priceless change worth having. If you want a new culture, make every meeting congruent with the culture you want. You’ll never do better than that.I learned the power of applying systems thinking to complex tasks. Getting from Point A to Point B means paying attention all at once to economics, technology, and people. Such was the origin of my 6-box organizational diagnosis model. I imagined it as an aircraft’s instrument panel. I likened leadership to scanning the dials, keeping all the instruments in balance, mindful that you never can change just one thing.For two decades after leaving the consulting business, I ran and taught a three-day planning event called “Future Search.” Indeed, Sandra Janoff and I showed more than 4,000 people around the world how to do effective large group strategic planning for themselves. I liked that work because it required all the key players in the same room. Whatever did or did not happen was up to them. We saw people who had never worked together do things in a few hours that none believed possible. We documented positive results from Future Searches all over the world.
2 What other jobs or experiences helped you as an OD practitioner?I could not have become an OD consultant had I not worked for a decade in a business forms company. I could not have written up my OD cases had I not been a magazine writer. Nor would I have gotten into the NTL Institute, a group dynamics pioneer. I could not have learned to function in groups, nor how to do action research, without being an NTL workshop leader for 20 years. I could not have learned the nuts and bolts of collaborative consulting without partnering with Peter Block and Tony Petrella. Had it not been for research in medical schools with Paul Lawrence and D-I (differentiation-integration theory), I might never have got how behavior change follows structural change more often than vice versa.I could not have appreciated the unity of human experience but for Sandra Janoff’s and my shared interest in applying D-I theory to strategic planning. Nor could I have freed myself to work easily anywhere in the world without John and Joyce Weir’s gift of owning my experience without needing to deny anybody else’s. In the long run, I integrated everything I learned into a dance that included human relations, socio-technical systems design, and personal growth.
3 What
