Conference Board of Canada Highlights!

Conference Theme:
Intellectual Capital and the Power of People –
The Next Competitive Advantage

Theme of Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr.’s Presentation

February 22, 2002, Toronto, Canada

The Power & Efficacy of Organizational Development

Presentation Highlights

The aim of this presentation is to acquaint executives with the power of organizational development or OD, not in the theoretical or academic sense, but to the empirical reality of this discipline. OD can leverage an organization to maximize the utilization of its most critical resource, people.

Executives will have an opportunity to judge for themselves the efficacy of this approach as they are exposed to and ask to resolve several case studies in Dr. Fisher’s experience, and to compare their reasoned interventions with the actual outcomes of his interventions.

These case studies are not generic episodes or composite experiences, but specific outcomes of wide and diverse conflict resolutions. What executives will learn or be provoked to consider is that:

0 Organizational conflicts are not to be avoided but to be embraced. Conflicts expose the inner frustrations of the work force, and represent a cry for understanding and relief from pent-up anxieties.
Executives in the name of expediency often attempt to go from the honeymoon of employee politeness to communication, cooperation and collaboration without encountering and dealing with the natural suspicions and the unexpressed anger of the troops. What executives realize for this relational breach is compliance, not cooperation. Compliance is always coercive. Cooperation is always voluntary. To realize cooperation requires the ability to embrace, deal with and resolve pent-up issues. Managed conflict, not superfluous harmony is the glue that holds an organization to its mission. An organization free of conflict suggests a climate of comfort, conformity, complacency, and submission to arbitrary standards. This is a climate ripe for human combustion.

0 Organizational development is as important to an organization as financial management. Care and concern for financials are givens. Care and concern for organizational efficacy are often left to rhetoric. Financial management is an outcome. Organizational development is a process. Without the right process in place, crisis management is the management of choice. This puts internal stress and strain on an organization, crippling its ability to deal effectively with changing and accelerating external demands.

0 Executives schooled in OD will have the tool kit to change the organizational focus from creative complaining to constructive contribution. These tools include (1) awareness of things as they are, not as they are expected to be; (2) acceptance of the situation as it exists; (3) mechanisms for intervening to isolate the central social trauma of organization; (4) coaching skills; (5) counseling skills; (6) presentation skills; (7) reading and interpreting the demographic profile of organization; (8) determining risk taking with people, and (9) placing workers in the center of operations in lieu of management occupying this space.

0 Elitism is endemic to organizations, which revolves around a formula of compare and compete. When one internal function, discipline or group is forced to compete against another internal organization for recognition, the result is invariably divisive. This is the antithesis of communication, cooperation and collaboration. Systems researcher Russell Ackoff puts it poetically: “If you take a system apart to identify its components, and then operate those components in such a way that every component behaves as well as it possibly can, there is one thing of which you can be sure. The system as a whole will not behave as well as it can. Now that is counter intuitive to Machine Age thinking, but it is absolutely essential to systems thinking.”

0 The organization is in a renaissance forced on it by the changing character of the work force, along with the changing challenges and demands on organization to maintain its viability. Forty years ago the only likely person in the organization with some college training was the manager. Now, often the manager is the least educated in the group. Moreover, position power has had to accede to knowledge power, and decision making from the so-called ivory tower to the level of consequences. For a problem to be pushed up several hierarchical levels of organization, interpreted, then sent back down through several bias filters makes for crisis management. Crisis management makes for polarity, we/they confrontation, worker passivity, and a pivotal decline into entropy. Against this reality, the structure and function of work has changed little in the past forty years. The evidence is in the workplace culture – from large bonuses for executives to small merit raises for employees, from private offices to cubicles, and so on. Answers today are seldom with management, less seldom with consultants, but much more often with workers in the bowels of organizational life. When these answers are not encouraged because of programmed passivity in workers, workers are apt to embrace Six Silent Killers (see Dr. Fisher’s book of the same), which destroy the organization from within. Too often when the malady is discovered, it is too late for damage control.

0 For an organization to move forward, it must accept a step backward to appraise the situation, before rallying the troops to respond positively with problem solving input. Appraisal should then be followed by a plan. It is not enough to plan, but to implement the plan. Too often planning is an end instead of a means. Once implemented the plan needs to be monitored and reviewed periodically. This is not something that can be delegated anymore than financial management is delegated. Executives need to be involved in the process as well as committed to it.

0 Most routine activities of organization are counterproductive and morale-sapping because of the stubborn persistence to maintain them. This extends from traditionally generated reports to routine established meetings. Most generated reports are not read, and most meetings are a waste of time, and a drain on energy and resources. A thorough re-examination of policies & procedures, the scheduling of routing meetings, the efficacy of the performance appraisal process, and the quality and level of decision-making are called for if the organization desires to get off the dime and on the same page as its people.

0 The most important asset of organization is the professional worker who continues to behave mainly as a spoiled brat. These spoiled brats want the perks of management but not the accountability. They no longer want to follow but do not know how to lead. This is not their collective fault. It is the fault of the structure and function of work, which produces the culture, and the organizational culture dictates organizational behavior. There is a need for professionals to grow up, but that will not happen until they are forced to suffer the consequences of their actions. Too often they rest on their pedigree campaigning for the next job with the focus on making an impression.

These issues and circumstances have been endemic to Dr. Fisher’s forty-year career. Executives would especially benefit from this seminar if they were to pre-read at least one of these three books from this author: Confident Selling for the 90s (1992), Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge (1998), or Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership & Dissonant Workers (2000).

These books cover in consummate detail what the Dr. Fisher will only be able to outline in broad empirical terms at this conference. Dr. Fisher’s books are available on www.Amazon.com.


James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., organizational development psychologist
The Delta Group Florida
6714 Jennifer Drive
Temple Terrace, FL 33617
United States of America
Phone/Fax: (813) 989 –3631
E-mail: TheDeltaGrpFL@cs.com