THE FISHER PARADIGM©™ OF ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT (OD) -- INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL & THE POWER OF THE PEOPLE!

The Fisher Paradigm ©™ of Organizational Development (OD)
Intellectual Capital & the Power of People

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 8, 2007



THOSE OBSTINATE QUESTIONINGS

Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realized
High instincts before which our mortal nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised.

William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850)
Sonnet: The World is too much with us.


REFERENCE:

This was presented in a two-day seminar to executives of the Conference Board of
Canada on February 21 – 22, 2002 in Toronto. The theme of the conference was “Intellectual Capital and the Power of People – The Next Competitive Advantage.” This is a brief introduction to The Fisher Paradigm™© of Organizational Development.

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THE POWER OF SIMPLICITY

The Fisher Paradigm ™© is very simple. It is so simple that once it is described the reader will say, “Why didn’t I think of that?” It is basically an intuitive model.

There are three basic spheres of influence in every group dynamic, between the person, place and thing. These spheres may be identified as:

(1) Personality (person) profile

(2) Geographic (place) profile

(3) Demographic (things) profile

Each sphere of influence is constantly in a state of motion interacting with the other two, and where they intercept is where the essence of the action or insight is registered. We do this all the time but are not consciously aware of the process. Consequently, some of us are better at it than others.

It is a case of thinking with your whole body, not simply your mind. I feel people. I can feel their anxiety; can feel when they are lying; even when they find me intimidating. I also can feel when I am in danger, and when the company I am in is self-destructive.

You know how your ears burn when you come upon friends, and know they have been talking about you, and not necessarily in flattering terms. Well, you are using The Fisher Paradigm™©.

As a professor, lecturer, and seminar presenter, I can tell almost immediately whether the audience will be receptive or not to what I have to say. Their collective feelings register as if taking a hot bath.

Likewise, as a consultant, I can go into a strange place and wander around and glean what is wrong without yet having words to describe the feeling. The words always come later.

This sense, a sense that we all have without exception, became the most powerful factor in my successful selling career. I knew nothing about the art of selling, nothing about the language of "penalty of delay," and all that stuff salesmen paint the air blue with, not even selling benefits to overcome objections.

All of that was learned later by reading selling books so that I could communicate with other salesmen so programmed and trained in such nomenclature. I was trained in chemistry and engineering.

Even so, I found I did not need “selling strategies,” yet I wasn’t sure why. I was selling by simply listening and identifying in the conversation the customer’s precise need.

My mind was not centered on winning by intimidating or finessing. I was thinking on how I might satisfy a need.

Such feelings, not stated, I realized much later were communicated and resulted in connection. It was a matter of trust without polluting the idea with words but rather demonstrating it with actions. I write about this in "Confident Selling" (1970), a book that is as relevant today as it was forty years ago, a book that captures the essence of The Fisher Paradigm™© long before it occurred to me.

Twenty years after its publication, and finally out-of-print, the idea having gestated over those many years, and having become fundamental to my organizational development (OD) perspective, it was published as "Confident Selling for the 90s" (1992). This treatment expanded on the initial idea, and became essentially confident thinking. The book was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction for 1992.

* * *

Confident thinking is primarily creative thinking, and creative thinking is largely intuitive thinking. Intuition is a little like catching a handful of wind, and saying, "see!" Well, you can't see it, but you can certainly feel it. Feelings, I have discovered, as I’ve grown to understand my disposition, drive my thinking rather than the other way around.

The Fisher Paradigm™ © is therefore more art than science, more impressionistic than real, more driven by perception than reason, more qualitative than quantitative. It does, however, cut through the narrow box of our confinement in convention and traditional programming to breathe the air beyond and think with the whole body, not simply the mind.

* * *

Reality is complex, ambivalent, ambiguous, and elusive, as much a matter of the play of the mind as of concrete experience. But we live in a scientific age and if you cannot quantify it than it does not exist. The Fisher Paradigm™© does not refute the importance of science. It simply is not limited to it.

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Those in the practice of organizational development (OD) are usually of a cognitive turn of mind with little appreciation of the value of their affect or feelings. I have no problem with this because statistics and demographics are important indices for The Fisher Paradigm™© as well. They are, however, not enough.

OD practitioners must constantly bear in mind that most behavior is irrational, inconsistent, and illogical. Trying to understand an organization as a rational ordering model or in terms of a straightforward, naturalistic description of action will invariably miss what is actually going on in that “real world.”

It is one of the failures of organization to realize that nature knows best and nature tells us everything is connected and that the artificial connections that defy the natural only exacerbate the situation.

What is on display in an organization is not what the OD professional must see. He must see beyond this to the metaphorical significance of behavior. Now, before that word throws you off, or turns your attention elsewhere, permit me to present a simple illustration. It may seem I am waxing like Sherlock Holmes, and if I am, so be it, but the point is what you first think you see is not what you see but what you are expected to see.

* * *

Recently I was accompanying my wife to a large discount department store. As she was trying on clothes, I spent my time watching a man, woman and child shop. The man was six-foot, athletic looking, dressed in shorts, tee shirt and sneakers. He had a trim tan physique and prominent calves that indicated that he probably did a log of jogging. His salt and pepper goatee beard gauged his age at about 46.

The woman was also trim and athletic looking. She was dressed in a firm fitting blouse, shorts and sneakers, and also was quite tan. I gauged her age at mid-twenties. The boy was dumpy, about twelve or thirteen, a little on the heavy side and dressed in jeans. He wore a pastel colored shirt loose at the waist hiding his girth with the collar turned up and what appeared a new pair of sneakers.

The man kept bringing more and more clothes for the boy to try on until the cart was overflowing.

The woman didn’t participate in the excitement between the two males, but maintained a bored expression with folded arms across her chest, constantly looking at her watch, and forcing a waxed smile whenever the man looked at her.

When my wife acquired the sweater she wanted, I said, “Wait! Look at that couple and the boy over there and tell me what you see.”

“I see a mother and father buying their son school clothes. Why?”

“Look again,” I insisted. “Study them a second. Now tell me what you see.”

“This is ridiculous,” she said, “I could stalk them if that’s what you want and it wouldn’t make any difference, okay? So, tell me what you see?”

“I see three spheres intersecting in my paradigm,” I answered.

She rolls her eyes, “I’m sure you do.”

“No, I’m serious. The personal sphere tells me that he is the father of the boy but she is not the mother. The geographic sphere tells me the boy is from up north visiting his father with his trophy wife. She is not at all that happy about the whole business.”

“Okay, smart guy, I’m going to see if you’re right.” She goes over and starts a conversation with the woman, who is even younger looking up close, probably no more than twenty-two, a clue to the demographic sphere. My wife says, "Your son is quite handsome. You don’t look old enough to be his mother."

The woman nearly shouts, "I'm not. He's," she hesitates as if the words are stuck in her throat, "he's my stepson." Then she goes on to explain that he is visiting them from Chicago. “We don’t have any children,” she adds mournfully, and looks at her husband threateningly.

My wife comes back to me, “How did you do that?”

“You already know. You were too busy shopping. The personality profiles were all skewed. The man was enthusiastically interacting with the boy; the woman held herself aloof and apart calculating how much longer this would take. The geographic profiles were also diverse. The man and boy were in one space shopping with a vengeance, the woman in another space with folded arms constantly looking at her watch, wanting to be somewhere else. The demographic profiles were also quite unique. The man clearly was of an age to be the father of the boy, but not the woman. In fact, the husband was old enough to be his wife’s father, come to think of it. The man and woman reflected similar physicality, but not the boy. He was pudgy, out of shape, and seemed disinclined to exercise. His pallid complexion compared to the deep tans of the adults suggested he must live in a climate with less sunshine, especially in the fall of the year."

My analysis complete, I smiled at my wife waiting for her reaction.

She smiled back, then buffed me in the head. “Do you ever give it a rest?”

We both chuckled. We knew the answer.

* * *

OD is concerned with the integrity of the group and that capacity depends upon the ability to see through the prestidigitations to what is truly going on. The Fisher Paradigm™© allows this.

With The Fisher Paradigm™©, there is no need for reams of psychometrics, statistical indices, or longitudinal studies to make meaningful assessments. These tools can be helpful in confirming or refuting intuitive insights, but they are not enough. The reason is quite basic: today studies drive the insights rather than the insights driving the studies.

The purpose of The Fisher Paradigm™ © is to provide an intuitive framework for gauging and interpreting the problem situation in terms that executives can understand without confusion.

Executives are often quite intelligence, but since the emphasis is prone to be operational – meeting schedule or keeping costs down – behavioral factors are missed, or disregarded as significant. Specialists can be equally remiss. Systems analysts may get caught up in their algorithms and detach themselves from those dependent on their output.

This may be referred to as one-dimensionalism (Personality). The other two-dimensions are there (Geographic and Demographic) but are not put into play. It is the responsibility of the OD practitioner to gently, patiently and carefully integrate them into the operational matrix.

This phenomenon provoked philosopher Herbert Marcuse to write “One-Dimensional Man” (1964). He saw a growing war between production and destruction. He writes, “We are confronted with one of the most vexing aspects of advanced industrial civilization: the rational character of the irrational.” That is precisely the province of OD.

* * *

Perhaps the best way to demonstrate this is to illustrate how I have used it throughout my career. As readers familiar with my work know, my research laboratory is the workplace. Three of my books are testimony to this and an expression of The Fisher Paradigm™ ©:


(1) Personality (Person) Profile

“The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend” (1996) deals with the “acquired self” or the personality of the workplace and the people as persons in it. Every workplace has an acquired personality that distinguishing it from any other. It is also called its “culture,” or mindset for doing business.

Many companies have gotten into trouble by merging without proper consideration to this detail of operation. A clash of cultures can derail a merger and often does. Likewise, if the culture is wrong for the individual, it can derail a career. It is best for that individual to leave and find a more appropriate workplace. One thing is certain. The workplace culture will not change for the individual. If he cannot or will not change, it will be an unhappy standoff, and will cause much pain, ultimately leading to poor health or dismissal, or a combination of both.

The idea that a company can ignore its social, cultural and psychological construction and conditioning, its history, and seek an alternative to better operations by “searching” for the perfect replaceable model has proven costly. Many companies have been caught up in the hysteria of “excellence.” You don’t search for and purchase excellence, you build excellence from the ground up by creating excellence out of what you already have and already are.

“The Search for Excellence” was a popular idea a few years ago. The country went mad for the idea, and company and company quickly internalized the whole package of other successful companies, and then attempted to implement that success into their operations, only to fail miserably in the end (see Business Week (November 5, 1984: “Who’s Excellent Now?”). Why?

You don’t “search” for excellence by imitating someone else’s operation, you “create” excellence out of what you know and what is unique and germane to you, or to your operations as opposed to any other.

(2) Geographic (Place) Profile

“Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge” (1998) deals with the geographic or “social termites” that invade and burrow silently into the infrastructure of the organization weakening its support system to the point that when discovered it is too late for damage control. The social termites are passive dissident behaviors of workers.

Passive behaviors cripple operations by workers coming in late and leaving early and doing as little as possible to get by, doing only what told then standing around waiting for orders, always having an excuse why something doesn’t get done or done on time, accepting assignments but never finding time to complete them, spreading rumors and disinformation about the company or others, and being obsessed with what they don’t have and aren’t at the expense of what they do have and are, which is a job.

These behaviors cost companies more than $10 billion every year, and they are essentially invisible behaviors, as the insects (termites) they emulate.

The “geography” of how an organization is set up to work can prove a culprit. It, too, is seldom detected because “it is how we have always operated.” Another geographic factor is the psychological practice of favoritism. One group is treated as special, say engineering, and another group is not, say administration. Engineers retreat into jargon and fail to be user friendly when working with administration because they can.

Sometimes the geographic factor is blatantly physical. The Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A & P) once set the standard in the supermarket grocery business. It is no longer operating.

A study was made after its demise. One of the indicators of its falling out of favor with the public was not its pricing, but its failure to keep its stores clean.

Other 100-year-old companies have had a similar fate. The signs of entropy were there long before they disappeared, Montgomery Wards for one. Stores came to have a worn out look, displays looked tired, lighting seemed dim, and service, which was its hallmark, became unreliable.

A company, a country, or an individual has to embrace negative entropy by constantly renewing and reinventing itself in order to maintain viability. Nothing is permanent and the Geographic Profile makes this quite apparent.

(3) Demographic (Things) Profile

“Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership and Dissonant Workers” (2000) deals with the essence of the workplace and the people who run it. In recent times, they have been running it into the ground.

The Industrial Revolution is more than 150 years old, and yet most workers are treated as if well-paid serfs, when they represent the most professional workforce in history.

The role of manager and worker has changed from superior-subordinate to one of synergistic partners. The whole matrix of corpocracy is all wrong for the professional workforce and the times. With corpocracy:

(a) Managers demand and workers react;

(b) Internal politics are played at the expense of productivity;

(c) Privileged communication is shared with the few to the exclusion of the many;

(d) Reports and reporting are an obsession;

(e) Endless routine meetings are the mantra of meeting for meeting’s sake;

(f) Internal preoccupation is the focus at the expense of external markets demands;

(g) Excessive planning masks short-term thinking;

(h) Initiative is discouraged as you never know where it might take you;

(i) Management is isolated physically, also psychologically in ivory tower thinking;

(j) Covert hostility is shown to innovation while being praised overtly.


The practice of management has come to treat leadership as if it is the business of giving orders expecting consensus compliance. This is anachronistic. We have entered the new day of the professional. This makes management and managers, per se, atavistic. The failure of the complex organization to realize the balance of power has shifted from position to knowledge power, and to act accordingly, has crippled American enterprise, and those that would copy its outdated construction.

The stalemate has resulted in leaderless leadership in the management function and dissident behavior of the production function of workers. The slack, the depth and breath of this dysfunction, has been less apparent as it has been masked in the short term by the introduction of information technology. .

The Fisher Paradigm™ © is a trilogy that unmasks and then deals with these discrepancies. For our purposes here, this should suffice as an introduction into its process and function.

EMPIRICAL VERIFICATION

Now some references to how it has worked in my life, starting with how it saved my life.

In 1974, I was contracted by the Professional Institute of the American Management Association (AMA) to investigate a riot, which occurred in Fairfax County Virginia in a community called Herndon. A white police office killed an unarmed 27-year-old black man in a convenient store in that community, which led to a riot.

My job included interviewing all senior officers, detectives and command personnel. While spending a nine-month period doing this intervention, I was also periodically conducting executive seminars for AMA across the country. In the course of this work I had the Secretary of State of Iowa, my home state, as a participant. He said that when he next came to Washington, D.C. he would like to take me to dinner and attend a play. He was as good as his word.

D.C. is about twelve miles from Fairfax City, and I was driven there by a Fairfax County police officer. He said he would pick me up when I called to return me to my motel.

It was after midnight when the Iowa Secretary of State and I parted. But when I placed the call to the officer, he said it would be about an hour before he could pick me up. I said that was okay, as I am a walker.

It is about 1:15 a.m. and I’m walking along briskly down Pennsylvania Avenue. There is practically no traffic, and a chill in the November air. I am dressed in a dark blue Hickey Freeman cashmere topcoat, and a gray three-piece Hickey Freeman suit, wearing leather gloves.

Suddenly, I notice three black youths across the street that are jiving and walking parallel to me. I pay them little mind as there are eight lanes of traffic separating us, that is, until they race ahead, cross the street, and start hanging out at the corner under the light ahead of me.

Not yet a year ago, Senator John Stennis of Mississippi was mugged and shot in Washington, DC and nearly died in an early morning attack. That crossed my mind when I was about fifty yards from the boys. Without breaking my stride, I processed this information:

(1) Personality (Person) Profile – they are three and I am one.

(2) Geographic (Place) Profile – this is no time for young school aged boys to be out at night.

(3) Demographic (Things) Profile – they are teenagers; I am at least twice their age. They are black, all slender, one about six feet tall, the other two about five-six or so, short. I am white six-four and two-ten and in good shape.

I see them up to no good (Personality Profile), but how do they see me?

I sense danger (Geographic Profile), but somehow do not break my aggressive stride and have an incongruous sense of calm, why?

I know I can’t take the three of them (Demographic Profile) if they have a knife or gun as I have no weapon. No weapon! Is that true?

My intuition kicks in. I remember what I observed every time I asked a plainclothes detective a sensitive or embarrassing question in my one-on-one interviews with them. They would adjust their should holsters! Yes! Every one of them did without exception (Personality Profile)!

I am now less than thirty yards from the boys, still walking with authority. Am I fatalistic? I don’t think so. When I am ten yards from them, I see the excitement in their faces. I make an elaborate move to adjust my phantom shoulder holster and roll my shoulders like those detectives do.

Not a boy misses this. Their expressions change. They look uncertain, then a bit terrified. What to do? They open a path between them to allow me to pass.

Without looking back, I hear nervous giggling in my ear, and then, “There go the fuzzzz!”

Not leaving it at that, I hear myself say, looking back over my shoulder, “Going to be a hard to get up for school, boys.” They laugh hysterically, “Yeah, man, sssccchoool what we is all about! Dig it!” They retreat in the opposite direction yelling taunts with false bravado.

* * *

When I explained this all to the officer who picked me up at 2 a.m., he said, “Partner, I think you just may have saved your life.” I don’t think so. I think it was OD.

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