ARTICLES

Relevant OD articles are also mentioned here in detail. These articles submitted illustrate the ways in which organization development interventions can benefit client organizations.                   

ARTICLE: 1

ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT
the management of change

Robert H. Rouda & Mitchell E. Kusy, Jr.

This is  originally appeared in Tappi Journal in 1995-96, to introduce methods addressing the development of individuals and organizations through the field of Human Resource Development.

WHAT IS OD?

                             Beckhard (1) defines Organization Development (OD) as "an effort, planned, organization-wide, and managed from the top, to increase organization effectiveness and health through planned interventions in the organization's processes, using behavioral-science knowledge." In essence, OD is a planned system of change.

·      Planned. OD takes a long-range approach to improving organizational performance and efficiency. It avoids the (usual) "quick-fix".

·      Organization-wide. OD focuses on the total system.

·      Managed from the top. To be effective, OD must have the support of top-management. They have to model it, not just espouse it. The OD process also needs the buy-in and ownership of workers throughout the organization.

·      Increase organization effectiveness and health. OD is tied to the bottom-line. Its goal is to improve the organization, to make it more efficient and more competitive by aligning the organization's systems with its people.

·      Planned interventions. After proper preparation, OD uses activities called interventions to make systemwide, permanent changes in the organization.

·      Using behavioral-science knowledge. OD is a discipline that combines research and experience to understanding people, business systems, and their interactions.

We usually think of OD only in terms of the interventions themselves. This article seeks to emphasize that these activities are only the most visible part of a complex process, and to put some perspective and unity into the myriad of OD tools that are used in business today. These activities include Total Quality Management (an evolutionary approach to improving an organization) and Reengineering (a more revolutionary approach). And there are dozens of other interventions, such as strategic planning and team building. It is critical to select the correct intervention(s), and this can only be done with proper preparation.

                      

  WHY DO OD?

·      Human resources -- our people -- may be a large fraction of our costs of doing business. They certainly can make the difference between organizational success and failure. We better know how to manage them.

·      Changing nature of the workplace. Our workers today want feedback on their performance, a sense of accomplishment, feelings of value and worth, and commitment to social responsibility. They need to be more efficient, to improve their time management. And, of course, if we are to continue doing more work with less people, we need to make our processes more efficient.

·      Global markets. Our environments are changing, and our organizations must also change to survive and prosper. We need to be more responsible to and develop closer partnerships with our customers. We must change to survive, and we argue that we should attack the problems, not the symptoms, in a systematic, planned, humane manner.

·      Accelerated rate of change. Taking an open-systems approach, we can easily identify the competitions on an international scale for people, capital, physical resources, and information.




WHO DOES OD?

To be successful, OD must have the buy-in, ownership, and involvement of all stakeholders, not just of the employees throughout the organization. OD is usually facilitated by change agents -- people or teams that have the responsibility for initiating and managing the change effort. These change agents may be either employees of the organization (internal consultants) or people from outside the organization (external consultants.)

Effective change requires leadership with knowledge, and experience in change management. We strongly recommend that external or internal consultants be used, preferably a combination of both. ("These people are professionals; don't try this at home.")

Bennis (2) notes that "external consultants can manage to affect ... the power structure in a way that most internal change agents cannot." Since experts from outside are less subject to the politics and motivations found within the organization, they can be more effective in facilitating significant and meaningful changes.

                     

   WHEN IS AN ORGANIZATION READY FOR OD?

                             There is a formula, attributed to David Gleicher (3, 4), which we can use to decide if an organization is ready for change:

Dissatisfaction x Vision x First Steps > Resistance to Change

This means that three components must all be present to overcome the resistance to change in an organization: Dissatisfaction with the present situation, a vision of what is possible in the future, and achievable first steps towards reaching this vision. If any of the three is zero or near zero, the product will also be zero or near zero and the resistance to change will dominate.

We use this model as an easy, quick diagnostic aid to decide if change is possible. OD can bring approaches to the organization that will enable these three components to surface, so we can begin the process of change.

                       

OD IS A PROCESS

                             Action Research is a process which serves as a model for most OD interventions. French and Bell (5) describe Action Research as a "process of systematically collecting research data about an ongoing system relative to some objective, goal, or need of that system; feeding these data back into the system; taking actions by altering selected variables within the system based both on the data and on hypotheses; and evaluating the results of actions by collecting more data." The steps in Action Research are (6, 7):

1.    Entry. This phase consists of marketing, i.e. finding needs for change within an organization. It is also the time to quickly grasp the nature of the organization, identify the appropriate decision maker, and build a trusting relationship.

2.    Start-up and contracting. In this step, we identify critical success factors and the real issues, link into the organization's culture and processes, and clarify roles for the consultant(s) and employees. This is also the time to deal with resistance within the organization. A formal or informal contract will define the change process.

3.    Assessment and diagnosis. Here we collect data in order to find the opportunities and problems in the organization (refer to DxVxF>R above.) For suggestions about what to look for, see the previous article in this series, on needs assessment (8). This is also the time for the consultant to make a diagnosis, in order to recommend appropriate interventions.

4.    Feedback. This two-way process serves to tell those what we found out, based on an analysis of the data. Everyone who contributed information should have an opportunity to learn about the findings of the assessment process (provided there is no apparent breach of anyone's confidentiality.) This provides an opportunity for the organization's people to become involved in the change process, to learn about how different parts of the organization affect each other, and to participate in selecting appropriate change interventions.

5.    Action planning. In this step we will distill recommendations from the assessment and feedback, consider alternative actions and focus our intervention(s) on activities that have the most leverage to effect positive change in the organization. An implementation plan will be developed that is based on the assessment data, is logically organized, results- oriented, measurable and rewarded. We must plan for a participative decision-making process for the intervention.

6.    Intervention. Now, and only now, do we actually carry out the change process. It is important to follow the action plan, yet remain flexible enough to modify the process as the organization changes and as new information emerges.

7.    Evaluation. Successful OD must have made meaningful changes in the performance and efficiency of the people and their organization. We need to have an evaluation procedure to verify this success, identify needs for new or continuing OD activities, and improve the OD process itself to help make future interventions more successful.

8.    Adoption. After steps have been made to change the organization and plans have been formulated, we follow-up by implementing processes to insure that this remains an ongoing activity within the organization, that commitments for action have been obtained, and that they will be carried out.

9.    Separation. We must recognize when it is more productive for the client and consultant to undertake other activities, and when continued consultation is counterproductive. We also should plan for future contacts, to monitor the success of this change and possibly to plan for future change activities.

It would be nice if real OD followed these steps sequentially. This rarely happens. Instead, the consultants must be flexible and be ready to change their strategy when necessary. Often they will have to move back and repeat previous steps in light of new information, new influences, or because of the changes that have already been made.

But for successful OD to take place, all of these steps must be followed. It works best if they are taken in the order described. And, since learning is really an iterative, not a sequential process, we must be prepared to re-enter this process when and where appropriate. 

ARTICLE: 2

The ethics of organizational interventions

Many people are suspicious of organizational consultants, and for good reason. Many change efforts fall into three categories:

·      The fad or fly-by-night initiative, which takes up a lot of time and, often, energy, sometimes engaging the enthusiasm of a number of people, only to disappear when managers become interested in the next new thing. These pick up the reputation of being great for consulting firms, but a waste of time for everyone else. They may be well-intentioned efforts by well-trained HR groups who do not have the power or resources to get the results they need; they result of a close relationship between a consultant and an executive; the outcome of an executive with a short attention span and an interest in increasing performance; or ineffective processes of a large consulting firm.

·      A subgroup of this is the initiative which really does produce good results - but whose outcome is not well publicized, so that employees think nothing has happened.

·      The false front, where a change effort purporting to help everyone turns into a traditional time and motion study or an excuse to eliminate jobs or speed up the line (whether the line is real or figurative).

·      The less common, but still damaging, false front, where employees' reactions to an initiative are used against them - perhaps by supervisors or unscrupulous managers, without the knowledge of well-meaning people in HR.

There is a long history of management consultants being used to eliminate or demean jobs. Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose name has been attached to Taylorism, was famous for being able to extract more performance by "scientifically" determining the best work processes. For example, he would change the size of a coal mover's shovel, provide frequent rest breaks, train the mover in the best way to shovel coal (based on experimentation), and set up a pay-for-performance system. Unfortunately, Taylor's system - which, while it robbed the coal mover of some control over their own work, did at least make their job easier and less physically damaging - was abused by many managers and consultants to follow. Pay-for-performance systems were constantly adjusted so that the faster people moved, the less they made per unit - Taylor, to be fair, fought this sort of thing. The frequent rest breaks somehow didn't often make it into practice, but taking away the individual worker's ability to make even the simplest decisions did.

For decades, managers, sometimes in the name of scientific management, used every possible means to take away individual decision-making, pushing it upwards through the organization. Even in the heyday of job enrichment and empowerment, many companies were actively, and to their own detriment, pushing power upwards instead of downwards. Some of these stories are outlined in Brave New Workplace, a good book for those wishing to hear the less-told, non-management side of the story.

Organizational development should be beyond reproach. Based on the idea of working with organizational culture to bring out the best in people, the goals and ethics of organizational development are certainly laudable from a human perspective. It's hard to argue with the financial results, either. We have yet to hear of a true "OD" intervention being abused, though of course components of OD - the various tools used by OD practitioners - can easily be subverted or ineffective in the wrong hands.

Generally speaking, the ethical consultant or manager can do many things to make the lives of employees and managers better, and not just in financial terms.

Often, consultants and leaders start out their discussion of a major project by saying that, up front, they decided nobody would lose their job as a result of the initiative. Amazingly, it is possible to achieve great efficiencies without job loss or massive unpaid overtime. For example, in John DeLorean's 1960s overhaul of Pontiac and Chevrolet, jobs were eliminated via attrition - no layoffs - while both divisions increased their sales and profitability. The main formula was breaking down blockages between levels and departments, while increasing communication and pushing authority downwards. Not surprisingly, the same formula allowed Bob Lutz to perform miracles at Chrysler in the early 1990s. Full-scale organizational development turned British Airways around without layoffs, as well, by turning low-quality service into world-class service - using the same employees.

A successful organizational transformation has several key components, whether it is called job enrichment, organizational development, continuous improvement, or quality.

First is empowering employees to do their jobs to the best of their ability. That requires pushing authority, responsibility, and information downwards.

Second is empowering employees to change the system. Drucker is famous for noting that most problems are caused not by employees, but by systems, technologies, and processes. Since those are designed by people, it only makes sense that allowing people to fix problems in systems, technologies, and processes will have a tremendous impact in increasing productivity and quality.

Third is providing a clear vision to people and helping everyone to understand the organizational strategy. Giving people a common vision and strategy motivates people, because they are not working at cross purposes, and it avoids wasted effort. This may be the primary role of the organizational leader.

Any organizational initiative should be measured against whether it has these three components. Does an employee survey result in managers chastizing employees for poor performance, or empowering managers and staff to do something about areas where there are gaps? Does a technology effort provide another way for managers to keep close tabs on employee performance and enforce detailed regulations, or does it allow employees to see and improve their own performance, while spreading or learning from best practices?

Effective organizational consultants and corporate leaders may not speak in these terms, but their perspective is clear to see. A "Chainsaw Al" Dunlop may be great at cutting costs for a year or two, but bankruptcy tends to follow. On the other hand, a Herbert K. Kelleher can empower his employees while maintaining low costs - a win-win situation.