When The Leadership Lost The Tribe: Part Three DESIGN IS DESTINY!

When The Leadership Lost The Tribe

Part Three

Design is Destiny!

The structure of work determines the function of work; the function of work creates the workplace culture; the workplace culture dictates organizational behavior; organizational behavior establishes whether an organization is going to succeed, fail, vegetate, flounder, expire, or survive.

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
AQP Journal, Winter 2002


In the previous two parts, I developed my thesis that the professional has not been adequately integrated into organizational life. Consequently, most organizations are not operating as effectively as they might.

It is now time to cite examples that illustrate this unhappy fact. First, a word of caution. This is not meant to impugn the motivation of organizations “to do the right thing.” It is rather an indictment that they are culturally strapped down as Gulliver was by an army of self-created Lilliputians.

THE ANATOMY OF A POLICE RIOT: Account No. 1

She comes! She comes! The sable Throne behold
Of Night primeval, and of Chaos old!
Before her, Fancy’s gilded clouds decay,
And all its varying rainbows die away.

Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744)


During the 1970s, one of the preoccupations of American society was “law and order.” The explosion in self-indulgence, hedonism, narcissism and permissiveness had taken society to the wall. And typical of society, without seeing the implosive duplicity to such strategy, it turned to police to make order of chaos, harmony of conflict, and peace of neglect without changing anything, except cosmetically.

As an organizational development (OD) psychologist, I was frequently called on to assist police with crisis intervention tactics, always unfortunately after the fact. Law enforcement during the 1970s was a major theme of national and local politics.

Fairfax County Police Department (FCPD) in Fairfax County, Virginia, the county adjoining Washington, D.C. was and is one of the most affluent counties in the United States.

As urban populations increased, so did police departments. FCPD had some 240 sworn officers in the 1950s, but more than 840 in the 1970s. Approximately eighty percent of these officers lived outside Fairfax County, as housing and living expenses exceeded their police salaries. In the 1950s, many officers lacked high school diplomas. In the 1970s, everyone was at least a high school graduate, and many held college degrees. However, no member of the command staff was a college graduate.

FCPD operated much as it had always operated with a modus operandi consistent with a distant past. This included routinely expecting all officers to submit to the same ritualistic training whatever their credentials. This meant that every officer had to spend a mandatory three years on patrol.

Officers with credentials in such disciplines as accounting, computer science, planning, administration, public relations, personnel and psychology had to first complete this line function before being considered for positions more compatible with their respective educations.

Veteran police officers manned these infrastructure positions, hand counting complaints, and manually developing demographics and geographic crime statistics, while IBM computers sat idle, as officers most familiar with their operation were in the field writing traffic tickets.

As Alexander Pope suggests, “the gilded clouds decay, and all its varying rainbows die away.” That happened when more than a thousand African Americans were relocated to Herndon in Fairfax County from Washington, D.C.

This was an experiment to redistribute the population and address over crowding in the national capital. Unfortunately, there were not enough jobs in the new location for this population. There were no skills training programs to address the problem. Nor were recreational facilities constructed in the short term to ease the transition for these people to their new surroundings. They were literally hung out to dry and to fend for themselves.

It was not simply a problem of seeing the forest for the trees, but of being lost in an Atlantis of the past. The command staff of FCPD micromanaged to the extreme. This was evident in my conferences with it. An officer would interrupt the proceedings to report on a burglary, highway pileup, a fire, and other crimes and misdemeanors that could and should be handled at the functional level.

While the command staff’s attention was focused on such petty matters, there was little or no attention given to the rising discord in the Herndon community.

Two months before I arrived local Herndon politicians had imposed a curfew on blacks and shut down their shopping center at 10 p.m. This ordinance was imposed because of loud music blaring into the parking lot from the strip stores, and the constant circling of automobiles in and out of the shopping mall. The shopping center had become by default their community center. It is where they met, socialized, and entertained themselves with music from loud speakers.

Once the curfew was imposed, once the music stopped, the modest rights that they had enjoyed were now taken away. It was only a matter of time before social unease would fester into an social combustion.

American Management Association (AMA) sent me to Fairfax County after a white police officer unloaded his service revolver on a young black man in a convenient store in this strip mall. There had been a running feud between the officer and the young man. The officer thought he saw him drive into the convenient store parking lot, knowing the man had a suspended license. The young black taunted the officer saying, “You see me driving anything?” This so angered the officer that he pushed his mocker into a refrigerated cooler, breaking the glass. The man grabbed the officer’s nightstick to defend himself, according to witnesses, causing the officer to shoot and kill him. A riot followed.

African Americans burned down the shopping center, and held the police at bay with bricks and Molotov cocktails. This went on for several days.

FCPD command staff was impotent to quell the situation. The black leadership refused to deal with it, finding it insincere and ignorant of its grievances. Then, a remarkable thing happened, something that you might expect in a novel but not in a real situation.

A college-trained officer, who was persona non grata in the eyes of the department, stepped forward. He had done a terrible thing; he had stolen a hunting knife out of police property, which was evidence in a crime. Since that transgression, he had been ostracized from departmental activities. Police show amazing tolerance for ambivalent behavior among the rank and file, but it stops at stealing police property.

Incredibly, when the riot became chaotic and increasingly an embarrassment to the department and county, this police officer crossed the line between the police and the rioters, and walked into the rioters’ camp, unarmed. He did it without instruction, putting his life in jeopardy. The command staff was struck dumb. He talked to the rioters by listening to their grievances. He helped them formulate these grievances into reassuring language, and then presented them to county officials. By the accident of circumstance, he was the acting chief of police, the only one the rioters would negotiate with, and why?

They trusted him. He had been a regular presence amongst them and had listened to them before. He knew the legitimacy of their complaints, pouring calm water on the fires of their contempt, and ended by settling the riot with dignity. Regrettably, once order was restored, a concerted effort was made to minimize his role.

Over the nine months I spent in Fairfax County after the riot, it was clear little learning had taken place. My report included what is here, along with an outline of more progressive policies to better utilize personnel, and anticipate future potential explosive situations. They were largely ignored. I wrote my master’s thesis on this subject titled, “A Social Psychological Study of the Police Organization: The Anatomy of a Riot” (1976).

THE ANATOMY OF A POLICE MUTINY: Account No. 2

Doubtless the pleasure is as great
Of being cheated, as to cheat
As lookers-on feel most delight,
That least perceive a juggler’s sleight,
And still the less they understand,
The more th’ admire his sleight of hand.

Samuel Butler
(1612 – 1680)


Again, during the 1970s, reality more resembled fiction, as folly became a bizarre dance of self-deception. I was contracted by the Public Safety Institute to investigate the “walk off” mutiny of a substantial segment of the 550 sworn officers of the Raleigh Police Department (RPD) of Raleigh, North Carolina.

A group of renegade officers formed a bogus union demanding better working conditions, and a more equitable pay and promotion system. This was only window dressing for what they actually demanded: the immediate removal of the chief of police with a voice in his replacement.

The situation had already become a fiasco by the time I arrived. Print and television journalists couldn’t have dreamed of a better scenario. A media blitz featuring the rift between the chief and his officers was big news. Newspapers and nightly television news featured the rift as the lead story. Spokesmen for the bogus union paraded before the city council, gave print and television interviews, and campaigned throughout the community. No one seemed to appreciate how bizarre this was.

The mutineers were flying in the face of North Carolina law, which did not allow police officers to unionize. Yet, they remained quite brazen and disruptive in the face of this.

The officers still serving would share their angst with me as I rode with them on all three shifts. It was on the graveyard shift that I discovered where the "sleight-of-hand juggler" resided. He was a soft spoken, articulate and crafty captain who held the duty roster for the graveyard shift as a permanent assignment. I found that odd because I had never encountered it before in all my police work. What made it even odder is that this captain seemed competent, respected, and definitely in charge.

No shift was better organized, or the officers more attentive to their roster assignments. The climate was open, cordial, relaxed and electric. Then something hit me. His phraseology was precisely the same as that of the mutineers being interviewed. They were his clones!

He would compliment the troops for hanging tough in these difficult times, and then add, “you deserve leadership that not only protects you, life and limb, but gives you a sense of dignity and identity on the job,” the exact words I had heard coming out of a clone on television.

“What’s going to happen, captain?” someone ventured that first night. “What would you like to happen?” he answered with a sensual grin. Like a rowdy college crowd, they roared, “Everything!” Foot stomping followed. Now serious, he added, “Only if you let it.” On that note, police officers would head for their cruisers, hitting the streets walking on air. I saw this a number of times, and the impact never varied.

What I found incredulous is that the captain allowed me to see his naked contempt and obvious biased laden indoctrination of the troops. I finally got the courage to ask an officer I was riding with, “What goes with the captain?”

He said, “You know that expression the enemy of my enemy is my friend? Well, we complete the circle for the captain. He hates the chief and so do we!”

”Are you sure of that?”

“Oh, yeah! Absolutely!”

“You know what you’re saying?”

“I know. He’s using us. We’re his heavy lifters. That’s why I’m still on the job and not waving placards and giving television interviews. ”

But why were others playing the captain’s game? This still didn’t compute. The chief and the command staff were not helpful. The more questions I asked the more evasive they became. I was getting nowhere.

Then one day I was in city hall, and I stopped at an office without a nameplate on the door. I knocked and was greeted by a cherubic white haired man with an easy smile. “Come in,” he said, “take a load off your feet. You don’t have to tell me who you are. I already know.” Then he added, “Have you solved our mystery?” I confessed I hadn’t. “Well, that is because you don’t have the right information.”

He put his feet up on his desk, lit a cigarette, blew a smoke ring in the air, and then told me an amazing story. Three years ago, this gentleman retired as the city manager, persuading the city council to appoint his deputy to his post.

“I would have retired earlier,” he confided, “but I was holding out to see that the police chief, a good friend of mine, retired with his full pension. He no longer could function as the chief, his heart was that bad. But I felt we owed him after thirty years of service, and I wanted to see that he got it.”

Then he elaborated on a convoluted plan he devised to do just that.

“My friend was the first chief of police with a college degree in Raleigh history.” He let that register, and then continued. “Where we once recruited anybody who could walk, the chief insisted on upgrading the force with college people. It changed the place, or was changing the place until he got sick.

“So, when his health gave out, I kept him on the job, but rotated the department’s three majors as acting chief on a four month rotational basis. We did this for three years, or until my friend died, and then I made the senior major the permanent chief and retired.” He paused and looked to see if I was following him.

“His death took a lot out of me. Perhaps I acted impulsively, I don’t know. In any case, that is the can of worms I gave my deputy to sort out.”

I sat there nearly in shock. “You know what you did, don’t you?” I said caustically.

With a sigh, he said, “You’re going to tell me I created a monster.”

“I don’t know about that, but you did create three separate police departments. Now, I understand when a sergeant tells me he was once a major, and a major tells me he was once a sergeant.”

“Yes, it’s true. Each chief had his own gang.”

Everything fell into place. Once the senior major was given the chief’s job permanently, he neutralized his competitors. He placed one majors in charge of administration, the other in charge of community affairs, both positions of limited clout. He then elevated his duty sergeant to major in command of all line operations with the two former chiefs reporting to him.

The captain on permanent nights had been a constant aggravation to the chief over the years. He must have enjoyed sticking him on permanent nights to get him out of his hair, when what he had actually done was ensure that 90 percent of the force would be exposed to the captain’s bias as shifts rotated.

Every college-trained officer in the department was eventually exposed to the captain’s ritualistic indoctrination. He would remind them as they came into the department that the chief had little simpatico for college-trained officers when it came to advancement, which, as it turned out, was actually true.

In this climate, I published my findings with a surprising outcome. Once the community knew the origin of this mutiny, it was as if a boil had been lanced, the poison released, allowing healing to take place.

Even the chief saw where he had allowed his clouded bias to master his better judgment; the men saw how the captain had manipulated them; and everyone could see how the former city manager’s love of a friend had colored his misguided strategy.

The rotating majors had created three separate police departments leading to division and separate identities. Now, it was obvious to all what had happened, and why it had stoked so much antipathy.

The mutineers, once the source of the problem came out, were old news. The chief made a prudent move welcoming them back into the department without recrimination. Some didn’t return. The chief, himself, served out his days to retirement leaving with dignity a few years later. The new chief was a college graduate.

THE MIT AND HONEYWELL AVIONICS DISCONNECT:

The Head Has No Body, The Body No Head! Account No. 3

Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate. Be not wise in your own conceits.

The Epistle of Paul to the Romans


In the 1980s now as an OD psychologist with Honeywell Avionics in Clearwater, Florida, a paper of mine was presented at the National Conference of the Institute of Printed Circuits in Dallas, Texas (1981) on “Motivation through Participative Management.”

The Research Director of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratories (CSDL) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had read the paper, and was visiting Clearwater and asked to see me. He invited me to Cambridge, MA to meet with his scientists and engineers to discuss a “teaming problem” they were having with Avionics production workers.

CSDL designed a ring laser gyro that Clearwater built in its production facility. In other words, there was a thousand miles between the design and building phase of this device.

Each considered the other the source of the problem, and not their operation. Arriving in Cambridge, I was shown how perfectly the design of the ring laser gyro performed in the laboratory. CSDL personnel insisted that the design should be easily replicated. “Obviously,” they chortled, “it must be shoddy production methods in Florida.”

Since my role was team building, I conducted a series of seminars with systems analysts, mathematicians, physicists, chemists, engineers, and their managers. Although not qualified to assess the legitimacy of their claims, I was not intimidated by their conceit, having worked in research as a chemist, and knowing something of the mindset.

Anticipating this attitude, I had developed a manual beforehand titled “Teaming: Productivity Through Cooperation” (1983). It included a team building process, assessment of team building competence, choosing a leadership style, knowing how to read people and run a team, effective communication skills, active listening, motivation through cooperation, how to run a meeting, effective stress management, and an expose on the changing nature of organizational life.

It was amusing to watch these brilliant people struggle to make contact with their right brain or intuitive nature. They were like fish out of water and sometimes became quite irrational in declaring their rationality. I let them rant without comment until they finally worked their way through their insecurities and could act like normal people. Incidentally, it was hard work for them.

This was a multi-phase two-week process. They resisted at first, attempting to focus on me, but that failed because everything was built around them and their participation. I was merely a bystander. As competent and confident as they were in their respective technologies, they were anything but when it came to relating to each other.

One of glitches that surfaced was that the teaming difficulty of the MIT scientists wasn’t only the separation of 1,000 miles, or “a bridge too far,” but the office or laboratory next door.

CSDL is housed in two imposing twin circular towers of several stories. A bridge high above the ground connects these structures. The offices and laboratories are designed so that work is always “right around the bend” from a colleague. No one can look into a co-worker’s office. This might have merit if creative work were done in a vacuum, but this ergonomic design magnified division, separation, and isolation.

Many interviewed confessed that interaction was uncommon rather than common. Perhaps because of this many were found to be shameless gossipmongers, while others were quite paranoid, sensing all kinds of plots against them and their work. In a word, cut through their polish, and they were quite normal.

One physical chemist stated with considerable pride that he hadn’t spoken to the biochemist next door in twenty years. “Don’t you have to work together?” I asked innocently. “Of course,” he sniggered, “but we have messengers to handle that.”

It was obvious to me at this point that CSDL looked down its nose at the body, in this case the Avionics clean room production workers in Clearwater with their high school diplomas, and working class minds, and with supervisors who were no better.

The question was how to bridge this disconnect.

Fortunately, a CSDL scientist came up with a proposal: “Why don’t we visit Clearwater and see what the problems are with replicating our design?” Another scientist echoed these sentiments, adding, “I think it would be helpful, too, if a team of Clearwater people paid us a visit.”

Within a matter of weeks, it was learned that the CSDL design was, indeed, too pure for Clearwater to replicate. CSDL provided some helpful suggestions to make the design more production friendly, while Clearwater engineers and production workers were equally helpful in their visit to Cambridge with suggestion to make the design more pristine. And that is what happened.

Regarding the bridge too far between offices and labs next door to each other at CSDL. That is a work in progress.

LEARNING THE HARD WAY

Europe attempts to escape its own shadow! Account No. 4

Ill fares the land, to hast’ning ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay;
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,
When once destroy’d, can never be supplied.

Oliver Goldsmith (1728 – 1774)

In the late 1980s, I found my OD shingle now hung out in Honeywell Europe’s headquarters as director of human resources planning & development. Honeywell was attempting to bring its European operations into the twenty-first century without fully appreciating that Europe had not yet left the nineteenth century.

As fixated as corporate America continues to be on the nostalgic 1950s, Europe had maintained fidelity to its magnificent nineteenth century culture with reluctant concessions to modern and postmodern demands. If anything had changed since WWII, it was that work in Europe had been reduced to a welfare system with social and economic guarantees not necessarily tied to performance. Now, in the 1980s, there were courageous attempts to change that.

The European Economic Community (EEC) was taking hold, but reluctantly so, and Honeywell Europe’s operation was consistent with that. As a specialist in OD, I was expected to behave like a corporate executive, while acting as an unobtrusive observer, which amounts to an oxymoron.

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.

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.

Unfortunately, politics were center stage, and most interventions were of cosmetic construction. I would detail this in “Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches” (1990) after this experience, and add subsequent iterations to the same theme in several other books and articles over the next two decades.

It was clear that the tribe in Europe had retrogressed back into feudalism, with leadership acting as princes of principalities with work a casualty of enterprise.

To site an example, Honeywell Europe’s Residential Division was making record sales but losing money. A demographic study revealed that only 10 percent of the Honeywell Residential sales force had college degrees while 90 percent of the buyers it called on were college trained. Translated, the sales force was being finessed by its buyers.

A program designated “upgrade the skills of the work force” was created with an emphasis on hiring, training and retaining college graduates. Competency profiles for Honeywell Europe’s principal job categories were used for the purposes of hiring, developing career tracks, and coaching workers. This was more easily formulated than promulgated.

What made the effort most difficult is that only a minority of European students has easy access to a college education. Formal education in most European countries can end as early as fifteen years of age. Such students may have an opportunity for trade school training, but many attempt to find their way to a paying job while still being very much underaged children.

Another common problem was that highly skilled nationals of one country were either unknown to another, or were reluctant to work in that country. The scars of war sometimes heal slowly.

A computerized European talent bank was developed. It graded the readiness of professionals across Europe in several disciplines and this was made available to all nationals. Less than 10 percent of Honeywell affiliates took advantage of this manpower tool.

Typically, manpower management was a sideline for the finance director, a discipline concerned with “profit and loss statements,” which is far a field to the management of “people.” A performance management system was created to familiarize finance directors with people management, including a comprehensive guide to organization culture, human resources practices, and feedback to management.

You would think that these complementary interventions would make a difference, that they would dovetail, that is, that upgrading the workforce, creating a talent pool, and monitoring performance would provide a handle on people management. It didn’t.

They made an impression; they got people promoted, and they even fueled the elevation of Honeywell Europe’s president to CEO and Chairman of Honeywell International, Inc., and my boss was made a vice president. Otherwise, nothing on the ground changed.

Honeywell would decline on this new CEO’s watch; break up into another company while retaining the Honeywell name, with my boss moving on to greener pastures. I would retire to write books about this disconnect between leaders and workers.

With the retrospective of nearly twenty years, I see the EEC still in crisis. European countries such as Germany, France, Spain and Italy are still experiencing massive unemployment and mounting deficits, while Great Britain is not far behind in this muddy wake.

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.

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, change management is not about making power point slides to impress management, or to launch interventions that look good on paper but seldom pan out in fact.

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.



CLOSER TO HOME

When a conveyor belt stops running. Account No. 5

Hast thou betrayed my credulous innocence
With vizor’d falsehood, and base forgery?

John Milton (1608 – 1674)

In the 1990s, and now as a writer-consultant, I observed the transparent arrogance of leadership with little regard for the tribe. Take the case of good intentions giving birth to unintended consequences.

An independently owned beverage bottling company in Sarasota, Florida maintained a successful business with several major corporate soft drink companies. A conveyor belt salesman persuaded management that by installing a computer controlled electronic conveyor system it could reduce its workforce by 25 percent and increase its profits by 50 percent in the first year.

Management was ecstatic. So, without hesitation, it scheduled the installation over the Christmas holidays when its one hundred production workers would be on vacation. When the workers returned, and found the workplace totally changed with new light fixtures, glistening new metallic conveyors, and intimidating workstations wrapped in Christmas ribbons, they stood in shock horror.

Management unaware of their discomfiture smiled broadly and exhorted, “Happy New Year!” Still not getting it, the chorus added, “Surprise, a belated Christmas present!”

The workers were beyond being dismayed. They were disoriented, confused, with the confusion unable to connect to feelings. Adding to the incongruity, piping hot food was wafting with steam on decorated tables, while the climate descended from cold to hostile.

“How could you do this to us?” somebody cried. “How could you?”

Now, it was management’s turn to register disorientation.

A manager shouted, “What did you say?” There was now anger in his voice.

The worker shrugged his shoulders, and said, almost in a whisper, “Nothing. It was nothing.”

“Then I suggest we get to work.” Anger had tabled all the prepared ceremony. “We have a major deadline to meet by the end of the week.” Then as if an afterthought, “There’s food if you want it.”

Quickly, the managers disappeared from the scene, while a quiet hiss buzzed through the group like swarming insects. Some nibbled at the food, others wandered about attempting to get their bearings. The New Year was not starting well.

The week ended and the deadline wasn’t met. Management assumed that it was a fluke, that it was simply the workers being unfamiliar with the new control panels, operating systems, and all the buttons. Few were computer literate. Management resisted panic, instead displayed executive patience.

But the following week, production volume was not only low, but also below the normative standard of the old conveyor system. This was repeated over the next several weeks with management becoming increasingly frustrated. The company had never lost money. “This calls for draconian measures,” stated the production manager angrily, “I’m fed up with them.”

One of the managers said, “You’ve got to be kidding, right? This place has worked like a charm until we got the new system, or have you forgotten that? When was the last time we failed to meet a deadline? I’ll tell you when, never!”

The senior partner in the firm declared, “I think we need help.” The other managers nodded in agreement.

When the consultant was contacted, the first question he asked the management team was this: “Did anyone ask any of the workers what was wrong?” No one had.

The consultant insisted, “I’m not talking about action, accusations, or intimidation. I’m talking about simply asking the workers how they feel about the new system. Enough time has passed for them to be able to qualify their passive behavior. There is absolutely no point in going to them with mea culpas. It is time for dialogue.”

“Well, we know that,” someone offered, “they don’t like the new system; they don’t like us, and we’re losing money hand over fist.” Then as if he needed justification for his frustration, added, “Anything new they reject; they are fixed in their old ways.” Nods of agreement.

“If you believe that, you are worse off than I thought. It is not the newness of the system. It is the surprise. It is the sense of betrayal, the sense of being taken for granted, of not being included in a monumental decision. It drives home the point that they don’t count for anything more than bodies doing a job.”

“We don’t feel that way,” someone named Tim said, “I’ve worked with these people for more than ten years and I know them like family.”

“Then start treating them like they count.”

Silence.

Playing the Devil’s Advocate, the consultant continued, “I sense that you knew they would react negatively to the new system. So, why didn’t you consult them?”

“You want to know the truth?” someone confessed, “We could see greater profits and bigger bonuses. They weren’t a blip on our radar. ”

“As damning as that is, I don’t think that is the whole picture.”

Again silence. Everybody waited.

“I think you were angry because they didn’t appreciate the risks or the investment you were making. What do you say to that?”

“I was a little miffed,” admitted one, “but I felt a tinge of guilt, too. I’ve worked with these guys and gals almost as long as Tim, who has been here forever.” Everyone laughed with relief. “You used the word betrayal before. I think I felt a bit of that, too.”

“Tell them!”

“You’re kidding!”

“No, I’m not. They can see that this new system used to capacity will eliminate jobs, jobs they now have. But it could just as likely create jobs as the company expands. Training programs would need to be launched. Workers love to learn new things once they get past their insecurities.

"Instead of seeing the company shrinking, sell them on its expansion. Make them a partner to new opportunities. That is, after all, why you made this investment, right?”

Then the senior partner chimed in. “That is true. It has happened to bottlers across the country. I think we took the wrong message from the salesman’s pitch,” then he paused, “and now our silence is giving the wrong message to our people.”

At this point, there was no longer a need for the consultant.

The talk grew animated. Worker-manager teams would be formed to look at ways to get through the bottleneck. A management-employee team would be created to explain anticipated changes.

The senior partner told the workers it was not management’s intent to blindside them, but it had to admit that it had. There were time constraints in making the decision, but that did not justify bypassing the workers. The senior partner took responsibility for the faux pas and promised it would not happen again. And it didn’t.

The consultant organized a joint worker-management team to discuss new training programs to improve communications, feedback, conflict management, and decision-making. That was in the 1990s. The company has grown. It is now more than twice its original size, and continues to grow.

ONLY THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG

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 are three easy words that roll off the tongue, but how profound when all passion has been spent.

If there is a common theme to these five accounts, 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.

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This is one in a continuing series of articles by Dr. Fisher on "When the Leadership Lost the Tribe." See his books for more details.