of OD to develop?If you want to help others, do what they never did before: Start with yourself. You cannot get too much self-knowledge. That requires finding parts of yourself you didn’t know existed. There is a lifetime of work for each of us in finding our “shadows,” harmonizing inner voices that tear us apart. We’re never finished, and the right time to do it is every day.When you walk into a meeting, imagine everyone doing their best with what they have. Then deal with people the way you find them. Realize that you can’t change them. You can learn to do things you never did before—even accepting others the way you find them. You can give people opportunities they never had. You will not discover this in power points and executive summaries.4 Can you comment on the future of organizations and the field of OD?After 30 years of Future Searches, I believe that the best way to manage the future is to understand that it happens now. Both past and future exist only in the present. Today is yesterday’s future. It’s dissolving into the past by the second. Learning that is the best asset a consultant can acquire. Look around you. Whatever people are doing today was yesterday’s future. We cannot solve novel problems before we have them. Improving companies and communities can be satisfying work if you avoid thinking you build for the ages. You can only do “future” work in today’s meetings. You can only capitalize on the expertise, experience, hopes, fears, and dreams of those doing the work. Figure how to get everybody improving whole systems. If you put energy into doing that you can make a difference, not someday, but every day.
What Organization Development Is Not
Despite this seemingly expansive definition of what organization development is and what issues and problems it addresses, it is also limited. OD is not any of the following.
Management Consulting
OD can be distinguished from management consulting in specific functional areas such as finance, marketing, corporate strategy, or supply chain management. It is also distinguished from information technology applications. Yet OD is applicable to any of these areas. When organizations attempt a conscious change, whether it involves implementing a new IT system; making changes in strategy, goals, or direction; or adapting to a new team leader, OD offers relevant processes and techniques to make the change function effectively. An OD practitioner would not likely use expertise in one of these content areas (for example, best practices in financial structures of supplier relationships or contemporary marketing analysis) to make recommendations about how an organization does this activity. Instead, an OD practitioner would be more likely to assist the organization in implementation of the kinds of changes that management consultants would advise them to make. Thus, OD makes a distinction between partnerships with a client where the consultant offers content advice and those where the consultant offers process advice. Consulting where the practitioner offers content advice falls under the heading of management consulting, whereas OD offers consultation on the process used to reach a desired goal. Most management consulting also is not based on OD’s set of foundational values (a topic that we will take up in detail in Chapter 3). In Chapter 5 we will discuss OD consulting in particular and differentiate it from management consulting activities with which you may be familiar.
Training and Development
While individual and organization learning is a part of OD and a key value we will discuss in a later chapter, OD work is not confined to training activities. OD is not generally the context in situations in which learning is the sole objective, such as learning a new skill, system, or procedure. OD deals with organizational change efforts that may or may not involve members of the organization needing to learn specific new skills or systems. Many training and development professionals are gravitating toward OD to enhance their skills in identifying the structural elements of organizations that need to be changed or enhanced for training and new skills to be effective. Other aspects of the training and development profession, however, such as needs assessment, course development, the use of technology, or on-the-job training, are not central to the job of the OD practitioner.
In addition, most training programs are developed for a large audience, often independent of how the program would be applied in any given organization. While some OD interventions do incorporate training programs and skill building, OD is more centrally concerned with the systemic context that would make a training program successful, such as management support, job role clarification, process design, and more. As Burke (2008) writes, “Individual development cannot be separated from OD, but to be OD, individual development must be in the service of or leverage for system-wide change, an integral aspect of OD’s definition” (p. 23).
Short Term
OD is intended to address long-term change. Even in cases in which the intervention is carried out over a short period (such as the several-day workshops conducted at the cancer center described earlier), the change is intended to be a long-term or permanent one. OD efforts are intended to develop systemic changes that are long lasting. In the contemporary environment, in which changes are constantly being made, this can be particularly challenging.
The Application of a Toolkit
Many OD practitioners speak of the OD “toolkit.” It is true that OD does occasionally involve the application of an instrumented training or standard models, but it is also more than that. To confuse OD with a toolkit is to deny that it also has values that complement its science and that each OD engagement has somewhat unique applications. As Feyerherm and Worley (2008) write,
Too many clients ask, “How do I do x?” or “What tools are available to change y?” and too many OD practitioners, in an effort to be helpful, give the client what they want instead of what they need. The “tool” focus ignores assessment and risks, providing a band-aid in organizations without attacking core problems. (p. 4)
Students of OD who seek out tools without being knowledgeable about the OD process and the reasons for the use of the tools are likely to find themselves having learned how to use a hammer and enthusiastically go around looking for nails (only to realize that not every problem looks like the same nail). As Schein (1999) puts it,
Knowledge of many different kinds of interventions does not substitute for the knowhow of sensing what is needed “right now.” . . . In fact, having a skillset of interventions “at the ready” makes it harder to stay in the current reality because one is always looking for opportunities to use what one believes oneself to be good at. (p. 245)
OD is more than a rigid procedure for moving an organization, team, or individual from point A to point B. It involves being attuned to the social and personal dynamics of the client organization that usually require flexibility in problem solving, not a standardized set of procedures or tools. In Chapter 3 we will discuss the values that underlie OD to better understand the fundamental concepts that explain how and why OD practitioners make the choices they do.
Who This Book Is For
This book is for students, practitioners, and managers who seek to learn more about the process of organizational change following organization development values and practices. We will use the term organization development, as most academic audiences prefer, over the term organizational development, which seems to dominate spoken and written practitioner communication. We will also refer to the organization development practitioner, consultant, and change agent in this book as a single general audience, because these terms emphasize that OD is practiced by a large community that can include more than
