MORE ON ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT or "OD" from WHEN THE LEADERSHIP LOST THE TRIBE -- PART THREE

MORE ON ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT OR “OD” from WHEN THE LEADERSHIP LOST THE TRIBE – PART THREE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2005






As is my wont, I've pruned this piece (WHEN THE LEADERSHIP LOST THE TRIBE -- PART THREE), and suddenly realized I had the kernel of a book here.

That is another subject I'll take up with my agent. For my purposes here, besides providing you with a more clearly written copy of this piece, I want to elaborate on organizational development psychology, more commonly known as "OD."

Perhaps the best way for me to explain OD is to recreate conversationally my career in OD going back to before I knew what it was. I start this process with five of my experienced OD situations here.

I have been practicing OD all my life, and the books I have read on the subject still don't get it. I say that because I was practicing it before I knew I was, or what it was.

OD does not fit nicely like a hand in a glove, nor can you make the eclectic discipline of OD into a silk purse.

OD is that delightful pull Darwin understood, and surely his chief interpreter of evolution, Stephen Jay Gould, and that is that it is not science, art, literature or pulp fiction, but all of these without being any of them in a growing evolutionary chain of awareness.

OD is that indefinable world beyond language, yet it is of language. There once was a television program called "What's My Line?" The celebrity participants had to guess the occupation of the mystery guest by asking, "Is it animal, fruit or vegetable?" Well, often it was all of these, and so is OD.

Since the advent of the Internet, people who visit my blog find it fascinating that it is "so conversational" about so many things. Others who write me formally by email, ask permission to use this or that; and still others just steal from me, as there is no price tag on my basket of goodies with my words coming up on their blogs as if they had written them themselves.

My literary agent thinks I am generous to a fault, and perhaps naively so. I've been trading on that assumed naivete all my life.

I'm getting older so I'm going to tell you a secret. I know exactly what I am about, only I hide my mercenary spirit better than most.

You see, I know I am saying important things, valuable things, useful things, and my reward is influence. So, there you have it.

I've never actually been interested in a career, a promotion, making money, and so on, but what I've always wanted is not youth as Faust did, but influence.

What drives me? Why am I so prolific? I'm asked that a lot. Where does my discipline come from? Only last night a lady asked me, "When did you get the way you are?" Does anyone really know? Anyway, I answered, "I've been this way as long as I can remember, maybe at age four or five it took hold."

In the afternoon, perhaps better still, the evening of my life, the Internet miraculously appeared and my ideas now have a theater, a center stage, even floodlights, and open doors with no admission charge, and they say there isn't a God?

I have friends who worry about not being taken seriously, who have fallen off the giving stage "because the world doesn't deserve their brilliance." They ask me, "Why bother?"

Well, I come back to influence again. There is a lot to that old saying, "When the student is ready, the teacher will arrive."

Now, the teacher may be dead and buried, but his ideas are preserved on the Internet or on somebody's hard disk, or perhaps in a book or two, and a surviving article or three.

Ah, that is influence! That is immortality! That is living and walking and talking and stalking alongside all the teachers that ever were. Now, that is influence!

In this revised regurgitated rewritten piece that is on my blog as DESIGN IS DESTINY under the rubric "Why the Leadership has lost the Tribe - Part Three," I say some things that are simple but clearly profound, starting with "design is destiny." In its most naked form, that is what OD is.

Because some of you will not have time or the inclination to download this piece or go to the blog, I am providing you with some of the OD gems in this particular piece.

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WHAT YOU WILL FIND ON OD IN THIS PIECE:

"OD is not interested in command or administration, staff or line, professional or working class workers, per se, but in assessing the relative wellness of organizational life, objectively, and then doing something about it. OD never owns the problem."

Translated: OD is not personal. To highlight this point, I wrote:

"As a specialist in OD, I was expected to behave like a corporate executive (when I was elevated to director of human resources planning & development for Honeywell Europe), while assuming my OD role as an unobtrusive observer, which amounts to an oxymoron."

Translated: Unfortunately, for my boss as well as me, when I had this position, he didn't have a clue as to what OD was, and I didn't take the time to educate him in the art form. He was most political, and I couldn't have been more apolitical. An OD specialist that is political is like the debauching priest who preaches continence.

Also, in this piece:

"Methodologically, OD calls for the study of patterns, the evaluation of trends, the relationship of demands to their discharge, and the assessment of the consequences of various interventions with little interest in corporate or national politics outside these constructs."

Translated: The client isn't the guy who pays you but the organization under study. If the guy who pays you thinks that you will protect him or make him look good, than the fee is a bribe.

I had a client in which the cover title of my report was, "Why the agency can't get its work done." The director "short changed me" $3,750 because she could, only because the report didn't show her walking on water. On the contrary, it showed she wasn't walking at all.

What did I do about it? What I am doing right now, reminding myself that the client that pays you thinks he/she owns you, and if he/she does, then you are in the wrong discipline. In other words, I did nothing; licked my wounds and went on.

In yet another place in this piece, I write:

"The function of OD is to enable organizations to calibrate their health, not to manage change; to get inside another's culture and understand it from the inside out, not the outside in, and share that with the client."

Translated: The answers are always in the problem, not in the OD specialist's head.

What OD does is what the leadership could do if it hadn't lost the tribe.

Now, I read where Microsoft with its 60,000 people is struggling to hold on to its brains. The complaint? Corpocracy has won out. Microsoft is now a closed rather than an open system.

Believe it or not, General Motors was once far more open than Microsoft ever was. Look at GM today and you see Microsoft tomorrow.

Success is a slippery slope, and the more the skids are oiled with stentorian hubris the faster the slide into decline.

Also in this piece:

"Change is client specific and not client relative as some writers would suggest.

"Change is built out of the existing culture, and therefore is indigenous to it. This is not clear when cosmetic change is substituted for real change.

"You do not search for excellence, and attempt to duplicate the success of another company. You build excellence out of the indigenous culture. Ergo, leadership is not about making power point slides to impress stockholders or management, or to launch interventions that look good on paper but seldom pan out in fact."

Translated: The corporate culture took a very wrong turn when it was mesmerized by Japan's success with quality control circles (QCCs), and this was then compounded when it made "Search for Excellence" the bible to corporate success.

QCC's fit the Japanese culture of group think and feudalistic obeisance, not American individualism and entrepreneurialism.

As for "Search for Excellence," this book became the corporate bible and gave the impression that if you did "a,b,c,d & e" that ABC did, then XYZ would likely enjoy the same success.

What was left out of the equation was culture, which is the genetic code of an organization.

Quality circles never took, not only because of the different mindset and culture, but the different composition of the workforce. Japan and the US were opposites: Japan 80 percent blue collar, 20 percent white collar: US 80 percent white collar, 20 percent blue collar. As I've recorded in my books, going back to 1990, Total Quality Management consequently has been a charade.

As for search for excellent imitators, the results two years after this book was a sensational best seller, as reported by Business Week, indicated that companies that had attempted to morph themselves into clones of those profiled invariably rejected the transplant, many of them floundering or on life supports.

Also included in this piece:

"An OD psychologist is physician to the organization and can be no more successful than a medical physician who has identified a disease, shared his prognosis with the client, and then left that client to manage his own destiny."

Translated: To go from illness to wellness, the person or the company cannot expect to make the transition by taking placebos or resorting to cosmetic change, and expect to get well.

Moreover, if the prognosis is not taken seriously, and the behavior that led to it continues, all bets are off.

A physician can say, "Quit smoking or you will die," as he did to a friend of mine. She told him she quit, but she didn't, and she died of emphysema.

Again, OD, as it is with the physician, cannot get personal. In the end, it is always up to the individual or the organization to choose the design of their destiny.

The piece concludes with this:

"If there is one thing OD interventions reveal, it is the human nature of the human group. Sometimes the problem is as simple as how the office space and plant facilities are laid out; sometimes it is the territorial imperatives that the design allows elite groups to exercise; sometimes it is only a matter of simple senility that charts an organization's destiny.

"Organizations die if they don't constantly reinvent themselves. Nor is it only individuals who play fast and easy with existence. Organizations have been known to do so as well. We are often shocked when brilliant people do stupid things. Brilliant companies do stupid things everyday, especially when they forget 'design is destiny.'

"These three easy words, 'design is destiny,' roll off the tongue, but how profound when all passion has been spent.

"If there is a common theme to these five accounts (covered here), it is events didn't make or break these organizations. It was the misreading of events and inappropriate reaction to them that caused the unraveling. In any case, it is the reason for sharing it with you."

Translated: none needed.