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THE FISHER PARADIGM ©™ OF ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT (OD) -- Intellectual Capital & Power of People1
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 10, 2010
Noun. Grammar. Any of a class of words naming or denoting a person, place, thing, action or quality.
Intuition. The direct knowing or learning of something without conscious use of reasoning; immediate understanding.
Webster’s New World College Dictionary (2001)
ABSTRACT
The Fisher Paradigm © ™ is a diagnostic tool of organizational development (OD). It is primarily an intuitive rather than cognitive model. There are no algorithms to master, no mathematical verifications, yet it is an authentic tool of the discipline.
OD grew out of a need to bring some order and comprehension to the complex organization, which grows more incomprehensible with the passing of time. Management attempts to give it direction and purpose while management itself becomes increasingly anachronistic.
OD is currently being underused if not misused as a subset of human resources management (HR).
The function of HR is instrumental (operations) while that of OD is terminal (cultural).
HR is dedicated to the management of things (hiring, placement, training & development), while OD is an assessment tool of organizational health and the integrity of organizational leadership.
HR is an insider discipline with its client senior management. OD is an outsider discipline with its client the collective called, organization.
HR reflects the values of senior management. OD assesses the culture and integrity of the organization vis-à-vis its mission.
HR is primarily cognitive; OD is cognitive and intuitive.
HR reflects position power. OD reflects the mindset and moral authority of organization. Position power meets operational and tactical requirement. Moral authority sees that the organization stays the course.
HR revolves around expediency of demand and is driven by instrumental values, or the means-to-ends commitment of resources.
OD revolves around the mindset, or shared culture and history of the organization. It is expressed in unconscious behavior.
The main task of OD is to demonstrate mnemonic obligations through intuitive leadership. The past gave integrity and purpose to the organization. Corporate memory is corporate identity. OD assesses this identity as to whether it is functional or in crisis.
The corporate memory draws on the will of workers to commit to a common purpose. This depends on qualitative values (culture) and spiritual vitality. This leads to the counterintuitive idea that the less instrumentally driven the organization the more terminally relevant it is. Permit me to explain.
Total reliance on vertical thinking and cognitive reasoning has placed the organization at risk. This is demonstrated in crisis management, circular argument, and critical thinking employed exclusively to solve problems. In an imperfect world, it calls for the complement of lateral thinking, intuition and creative thinking.
OD engages intuition while still utilizing its cognitive arsenal. The Fisher Paradigm © ™ suggests that the unconscious is key to moving beyond rational explanatory limits.
INTRODUCTION OF AN IDEA
We are in a 2,000-year-old cognitive funk. It is doubtful the empirical evidence of the Fisher Paradigm©™ will prove convincing to the obsessively cognitive.
Yet, I would suggest that most leaders are using the Fisher Paradigm©™ but are unaware of the fact. The efforts of this brief is to encourage them to apply its wider use. It is a diagnostic tool everyman as well as trained professionals use every day.
The Fisher Paradigm©™ argues everything revolves around learned experience. Formal education can either enhance or impede that experience as a product of cultural programming. Learned experience has two components:
(1) Immanence – something “inside the individual.”
(2) Transcendence – something “outside the individual.”
Consciousness contains more than what it is assumed to be apparent. There is something felt which has no language. The feeling can be misinterpreted because of cultural programming. The inclination is to explain feelings rather than to acknowledge and use them to advantage.
We talk too much and think too little. Instead of allowing feelings to speak to us, we rush to describe them. This has resulted in an explanatory society. It imposes limits to our understanding.
We seem obsessed with what has occurred rather than why it has occurred and what it is bombarding our senses to tell us. Consequently, we are better at developing explanatory models than determining causation, better at generating data than producing ideas, more inclined to deductive rather than inductive reasoning, more given to critical than creative thinking, more disposed to defend sacred biases than to interpret them in terms of modern challenges, more apt to search for rather than to create solutions, more driven to imitate success than to create our own, and for reason.
We are in constant flux and desire stability and predictability both of which have an instrumental means-to-an-end focus. Our senses constantly alert us with feelings that confound this arbitrariness.
That said we prefer rule-of-the-thumb justifications to thinking through our problems, to assume what is evident rather than question its validity because we have been programmed with such assumptions. Meanwhile, our senses struggle to breakthrough this barrier:
“Did I really sense what I believe I sensed, or am I fooling myself?”
When faced with this dilemma, the tendency is to reject the intuition instead of mounting some type of action falling back on what is accepted and expected in order to be consistent with what everyone says, “is.”
This is a pardonable offense in most cases, but not for OD practitioners. OD by ignoring intuition forces itself “outside itself” at the expense of insight. In that posture, OD would have been unable to grasp the significance of the experience because “it was just too weird or unreal.”
CONSIDER THE CUBE AS ILLUSTRATION OF THIS PHENOMENON
A cube has six sides but we can never actually see more than three. Our immanence or “something inside” tells us there are three faces, not a cube itself. But if we embrace our transcendence or “something outside” in clear subjective reporting, we know we are looking at a cube. We don’t say, “I am looking at three faces and deduce I’m looking at a cube.” So, it is not false to say that our perceptions contain more than meets the eye.
Immanent transcendence contains within itself the ultimate significance of learned experience, that is, if we can demonstrate sufficient courage to embrace what we know is there but cannot see. OD practitioners with diverse backgrounds in such dissimilar fields as psychology and engineering, banking and literature, personnel and manufacturing possess a rich inventory of immanent transcendence with which to work.
But alas, possession of these attributes is not nine-tenths of the law. It often requires penetrating the barrier of our cultural programming.
* * *
The individual grows from the “outside-in” rather than the “inside-out.” Parents, teachers, preachers, friends, relatives, peers and so on define the individual and what that individual perceives as true, just and right before learned experience kicks in to refute or confirm that programming.
To become oneself, and discover one’s essence, rebellion is often displayed as Einstein demonstrated in challenging the 300-year reign of Newtonian physics. More recently Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman playfully reinvented quantum mechanics and grew to be at odds with the very community that idolized him.2
Both these accomplished scientists relied more on their internal dialogue than the constraints of their cultural programming to define themselves and orchestrate their minds to new scientific truths.
The Fisher Paradigm©™ acknowledges this barrier and proposes a model meant to engage insight, promote intuition, and integrate this into conceptual understanding. Such understanding is only possible when transcendence is realized.
The Fisher Paradigm©™ promotes this understanding by postulating that learned experience centers around three discrete spheres of influence:
(1) Personality,
(2) Geographic and
(3) Demographic.
These are offered as profiles recognizing that these spheres are constantly bombarding our senses comparable to the three invisible surfaces of the cube, that is, they are always there but not seen.
CASE IN POINT:
Few would argue the discovery of the “DNA fingerprint” has been one of the more remarkable discoveries in recent times.
James Watson and Francis Crick were co-discoverers of the DNA molecule. That enormous breakthrough was managed through conventional painstaking laboratory research. This is well documented in Watson’s best selling book, “The Double Helix” (1969). The methodology was representative of what we expect from scientists.
Not so for Kary B. Mullis, Nobel laureate for Chemistry, 1993. Mullis departs from the furrowed brow stabbing in the dark of this mystifying lot to be more like everyman.
His discovery was that of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which redefines the world of DNA, genetics, and forensic science. Known more widely as a surfer, a bar hop, strip club patron, and veteran of Berkeley’s rebellious 1960s, he is perhaps the only Nobel Laureate to ever describe a possible encounter with aliens.
A scientist of boundless curiosity, he refuses to fit the mold of “scientist,” or to accept any proposition based on secondhand or hearsay evidence, preferring to embrace the chiaroscuro of life in all its shades and patterns, not from a distance but as part of him.
In his book “Dancing Naked in the Mind Field” (2000), he challenges us to question the authority of scientific dogma and every other kind of authority as he reveals the workings of an uncannily original scientific mind. His words fit comfortably in the Fisher Paradigm © ™. To wit:
”Suddenly, I knew how to do it. ‘Holy shit!’ I hissed and let off the accelerator. The car coasted into a downhill turn. I pulled off. A giant buckeye stuck out from the hill. It rubbed against the window where Jennifer, my girlfriend was asleep. I found an envelope and a pencil in the glove compartment. Jennifer wanted to get moving. I told her something incredible had just occurred to me. She yawned and leaned against the window to go back to sleep.
“We were at mile marker 46.58 on Highway 128 (Malibu, California), and we were at the very edge of the dawn of the age of PCR. I could feel it. I wrote hastily and broke the lead. Then I found a pen. I confirmed (my intuition). I must have smiled. I could still smell the buckeyes, but they were drifting a long way off. I pulled back onto the highway, and Jennifer made a sound of approval . . . About a mile down the canyon, I pulled off again.
“The thing had just exploded again. Not only could I make a zillion copies, but they would always be the same size. I had just solved the two major problems in DNA chemistry. Abundance and distinction. And I had done it in one stroke. I stopped the car at a nice comfortable turnout and took my time working my way through the consequence. Everybody on Earth who cared about DNA would want to use it. It would spread into every biology lab in the world. I would be famous. I would get the Nobel Prize.”3
The Fisher Paradigm©™ is common yet rare. It is common because the innate capacity for intuition is there for everyone, rare because intuition goes against societal cultural programming in this cognitive age.
If anything, society kills the intuitive drive, as the process of unabashed intuition is too incomprehensible to contemplate. This is displayed in the Washington Post’s crass assessment of “Dancing Naked in the Mind Field” on the book’s back cover:
“Kary Mullis, perhaps the weirdest human ever to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, has written a chatty, rambling, funny, iconoclastic tour through the wonderland that is his mind.”
The critic focused on the person demonstrating little interest in or curiosity about how a highly trained scientist. Mullis stepped out of the stereotype of a scientist and what is perceived to be science to make this incredible breakthrough.
Dancing naked in the mind field, indeed. Mullis was considered by his scientific colleagues to be a flake, if not incompetent for the ways he behaved against how he was expected to behave as a scientist. Thus he was not only able to think outside the box but beyond the limits of what the Scots like to call the multitude.
Mullis was a free man in an age of conformity, which ironically has become more perverse in the scientific community than in such self-regarded institutions as theology, philosophy and academia.
THE FISHER PARADIGM © ™
The Fisher Paradigm©™ looks at the organization whole from its
Personality (character), Geography (baggage) and Demographics (make up), then assimilates this wholeness into intuitive insights as complement to more conventional criteria.4
From insights gleaned, the inclination is to move quickly to a more rational mode. This is resisted. Thinking with the whole body is fundamental to this OD process. Once intuition of the Fisher Paradigm©™ registers empirically on the mind, the temptation is to say, “Why didn’t I think of that before?”
Many have said that of the Mullis discovery. This doesn’t make it any less cogent. It was said, incidentally, of my “Six Silent Killers” (1998), where I claimed passive and defensive behaviors were like social termites in the infrastructure of the complex organization destroying it from within.
Currently, there is a popular medical show on television called, “House.” Dr. House is a contrary sort, temperamentally infantile, given to polarizing his group on purpose by sending them off to analyze complex cases with their superior medical knowledge, only to step in at the last minute and solve the case with a eureka like insight, something of which the group had not considered.
* * *
There are three basic spheres of influence in every group dynamic: between the person, the place and the thing. These spheres may be derived from:
(1) Personality (person) Profile, that is, personal eccentricities, culture, and circumstances;
(2) Geographic (place) Profile, or situational dynamics on the ground, time, and circumstances;
(3) Demographic (things) Profile, which relates to population, age, gender, race, religion, education, status, experience, competence and circumstances.
Each of these spheres of influence is constantly in a state of motion interacting with the other two.
Where they intercept is the domain of intuition, which alerts the observer to what is actually happening.
The observer allows empathetic understanding to surface in the form of insight.
For this to occur the observer becomes the observed. The subject and object become inseparable in the dynamic.
Landscape painters often use this device. They observe a scene they are interested in painting. They study it, absorb it, and allow their senses to gradually reduce the distance between what is seen with the eye and what is experienced with the whole body. When subject and object become as close as possible to one and the same, landscape painters put brush to canvas but not before.
OD operates in somewhat similar fashion. The mind is like a heat sensor. An OD practitioner is contracted to solve some organizational problem. Before that can be done, however, like the painter the OD practitioner must absorb (sense) how an organization “listens.”
OD moves about in no certain pattern penetrating the distracting camouflage that has been erected consciously and sometimes inadvertently to distort the listening. This wandering about appears as if OD doesn’t have a clue, which it doesn’t, that it is wasting time, which it isn’t. OD is in the process of becoming one with the organization, not cognitively but intuitively. Eventually, OD, if it has the patience, experiences the eruption of insight with understanding and problem solving following.
Take the familiar story of Archimedes and his principle as reported by Plutarch:
Archimedes, as he was washing, thought of a way to compute the proportion of gold in King Heiron II’s crown by observing how much water flowed over the bathing stool. He leapt up as one possessed, crying eureka! (I’ve found it”). After repeating this several times, he went his way.5
The Sicilian mathematician (ca. 287 – 212 B.C.) was the classic absentminded professor, a brilliant thinker often oblivious to the real world and its expectations. He died while tracing a geometric diagram in the dust, as Rome was conquering Syracuse. So absorbed was he in his speculation that he didn’t hear the command of a Roman soldier to rise; the soldier, infuriated, ran him through.
Rationale for the Fisher Paradigm©™
The Fisher Paradigm©™ is more art than science, more impressionistic than cognitive. Reality is complex, ambivalent, ambiguous, and elusive, as much a matter of play as plan. Given this, the Fisher Paradigm©™ doesn’t separate cause from effect, subject from object, thinking from feeling. It is consistent with “Thought and Extension” as proposed by Spinioza.6
Spinoza infers natural order must be undivided to be comprehended. Archimedes, tracing the geometric diagram in the dust, was one with
the diagram and not separate from it, outside the box and the limits of the world around him, yet very much a part of it.
The fundamental features of that order, as we perceive them, emerge from within that order, not separate from it. The observer isn’t considering the subject observed from a distance but is integral to it.
The Fisher Paradigm©™ abandons the bucket theory of the mind, as in the philosophy of Descartes and other empiricists, according to which, in perception, ideas arrive through the senses into a receptacle, or bucket, where they are processed. This is a limited picture.
The Fisher Paradigm©™ encompasses Edward de Bono’s lateral thinking,7 which insists that linear logic and cause and effect analysis reinforce the box,
and offer no opportunity to think outside it. The emphasis, de Bono claims, is to lionize critical thinking, which is limited to the box or what is already known, whereas lateral thinking introduces the possibility of creative thinking, which doesn’t search for answers but creates them out of experience and what lies beyond.
While the Fisher Paradigm©™ shows evidence of following the prospects of creativity, it does so by thinking with the whole body, not simply the mind.
That said there is no perception without activity and thought. All perception is in an interaction with an eternal reality, a reality more often intuitively sensed than cognitively understood, especially as it relates to persons, places and things.
An organization has a personality, a certain geography and encompasses specific demographics.
It is a mistake to see organization as different than what it is, a most human entity. OD recognizes the organization is the collective conscience of individual sensibilities with a mindset that either enhances positive activity, or neutralizes and impedes such action.
The emphasis on intuition separates OD from other disciplines. OD’s power is self-conscious. Its authority is calibrating the organizational mindset (culture) in terms of comfort, complacency and contribution.
This is critical for this reason:
The structure of the organization determines the function of the organization, the function of the organization creates the work culture, the work culture dictates organizational behavior, organizational behavior establishes whether an organization will succeed, vegetate, flounder, expire or survive.
Trying to understand OD as a straightforward naturalistic discipline of action and answers is bound to disappoint and paint an ambiguous picture.
What people are doing is not what OD must see, but what they are not doing and should be doing. OD must see beyond appearances. This means OD accustoms itself to the fact that structure and function are not always what they seem.
An organization that is devoid of conflict, confrontation or disharmony is not a dynamic and healthy organization, but quite the opposite. Conflict not harmony is the glue that holds the organization to its task. Moreover, when the components of an organization are behaving as well as they possibly can, the organization as a whole will not behave as well as it can. This is counterintuitive to Machine Age Thinking, but is absolutely essential to organizational thinking. Conversely, when the organization is behaving as well as it can, none of the parts will be. Why? They are sacrificing individual achievement for collective success.
PRESENTATION OF OD IN EVERYDAY LIFE
Recently I accompanied my wife to a large discount department store. As she was trying on clothes, I watched a man, woman and child shop. The man was six-foot, athletic looking, dressed in shorts, tee shirt and sneakers. He had a trim physique and prominent calves that suggested a jogger. His salt and pepper beard gauged his age at about 46. The woman was tan, trim and athletic looking in a blouse, shorts and sneakers, age about mid-twenties. The boy was dumpy, about thirteen, a little on the heavy side dressed in jeans, sweatshirt and sneakers.
The man kept bringing clothes for the boy to try on until the cart was overflowing. The woman didn’t participate, but maintained a bored expression with folded arms across her chest, constantly looking at her watch, forcing a smile whenever the man looked at her. When my wife acquired her purchases, I said, “Wait! Look at that couple and the boy. Tell me what you see.”
“I see a family shopping. Why?”
“Look again,” I insisted. “Study them a minute. Now tell me what you see.”
“This is ridiculous,” she said, “I could stalk them if that’s what you like and it wouldn’t change anything. So, tell me! What do you see?”
“I see a father and his son, and a woman not the mother. The boy is from up north, visiting his father and his trophy wife, and she would like to be elsewhere.”
“Okay, smarty pants,” she said, then walked over and started a conversation with the woman, who was even younger looking up close.
“Handsome boy!” my wife opened. “What is he 12, 13? You don’t look old enough to be his mother.”
“I’m not,” she answered tartly and then recovered quickly. “Donny is my husband’s son visiting us from Chicago.” Then to put a lid on the conversation added, “We have no children.” With that, my wife politely withdrew.
“How did you do that?” she asked shaking her head.
“You already know,” I answered. “You were just too busy shopping.”
It involved marrying the mind to the moment to become one with what was being observed in terms of the three spheres of influence to understand what they implied together. It is the clash of these spheres that produces the chain reaction to intuition.
(1) Personality Profile of the three was discrete – father enthusiastically interacting with his son, the woman isolated calculating how much all this would cost;
(2) Geographic Profile – father and son in one space shopping with a vengeance, woman in another space with folded arms looking at her watch, wanting to be somewhere else;
(3) Demographic Profile – father clearly of an age to have a teenage son, not the woman, man and woman in comparable physical health, not the boy. But it was the boy’s pallid complexion, which spelled separation.
The Fisher Paradigm©™ is designed to advance intuition. It provides an intuitive framework for gauging and interpreting problems in impressionistic terms that OD practitioners, executives and change agents can understand and aptly apply without confusion. A more in depth discussion is provided in the Fisher trilogy:
(1) Personality Profile – “The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend” (The Delta Group Florida, 1999) deals with the adverse effects of social, cultural and psychological conditioning, which program people away from their essence or essential self.
At the organizational level, it finds inclination to look for answers in all the wrong places. An organization has a collective essence as well but is inclined to search for excellence elsewhere when sustainable excellence is right under its nose and can be created out of the organization’s own reality.
(2) Geographic Profile – “Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge” (CRS Press, 1998) describes the social termites that burrow silently into the infrastructure of the organization only to be discovered too late for damage control. These social termites are dissonant workers.
Are the workers the culprit? No! The toxic culture of the workplace is the culprit. It spawns passive behaviors, cover ups, malicious obedience, defensive postures, and obsessive compulsive complaining. This poisons the collective will to cope much less manage to survive. It finds 100-year-old companies expiring at a record rate because they no longer have the energy or will to reinvent themselves.
(3) Demographic Profile – “Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership & Dissonant Worker” (1stBooks Library, 2000) unmasks the problem. The Industrial Revolution is more than 150 years old, yet most workers are still managed, motivated, mobilized and manipulated as well paid serfs.
Something is wrong when a society is blessed with the most able bodied workforce in history, but insists on managing and leading these workers as if they cannot find their way. We are in the digital age which is changing everything, but the way and how we work. This denies the fundamental change in the balance of power. It has led to corporate sin where both workers and managers share in the guilt.
The Fisher Paradigm©™ is not theoretical but empirical. I have been practicing this paradigm for more than forty years. The chronology of my OD experiences, which follows is representative of what led to this epiphany.
THAYER MAXWELL & HOW INTUITIVE OD FIRST SURFACED
Three weeks into my new job with Nalco Chemical Company as a chemical sales engineer, and a comparable time away from the security of the research laboratory with Standard Brands, Inc., I was told by my district manager, “I don’t think you’re cut out for this type of work.”
Only the previous week when asked by my area manager to critique his calls, I told him they were mainly social calls; he didn’t ask for the order; didn’t give reasons to change suppliers; gave a canned speech, and made Nalco out to be the greatest thing since sliced bread.
This was the first time my young family of a wife and two small children had been out of Iowa. She hated Indiana, was homesick and complained, rightly so, that I was making less money than in the lab.
The words of my boss stung me like a slap in the face. “We’ll give you some accounts to service,” he said. “You’re solid technically, but you should find something else within the next six weeks.” From somewhere in my reeling mind I asked if I could call on competitor accounts. “If you like,” he answered with annoyance as if my departure were already a fait accompli.
One of the first competitor accounts I called on was Philco in Connersville, Indiana. The plant is seven acres under a single roof and manufactures refrigerators.
Betz Laboratories, Nalco’s chief competitor, has serviced this account “challenge free” for years. The front desk secretary informs me that she has not seen a Nalco salesman since joining Philco three years before.
Someone escorts me to the office of Thayer Maxwell, the plant superintendent. The office is a glassed in bullpen in the center of this huge factory. Mr. Maxwell is not there. I sit for nearly two hours with a cadre of folks coming and going, always looking for the superintendent, and always leaving frustrated.
The desk, chairs, cabinets and tables are overflowing with cigarette butts in dented steel ashtrays, coffee stains everywhere, on papers scattered across the superintendent’s desk, on broken floor tiles and even on the glass walls of the bull pen.
Corroded pipes, plugged condenser traps, boiler sludge samples, and severely damaged heat exchangers glare at me from the four corners of the office. These red rusted casualties of operations are haphazardly wedged against the door, on chairs, tables, and on top of papers on the desk, even under the desk. It makes me think of the “Morgue of the Machine” – a picture of total chaos.
The extent of my knowledge of Nalco is a three-week intensive technical training course on water treatment technology at Nalco’s Chicago headquarters.
I know little actually about Nalco’s products and nothing about selling. Finally, Mr. Maxwell comes in, lights a cigarette, props one leg over the desk, smiles, and says, “Okay sport you’ve got five minutes. What you got for me?”
Where it came from, I’m not sure. Nalco’s Chicago laboratories, pilot plant operations, and technical service personnel impressed me during my training. It was like being indoctrinated into a new faith. I believed in Nalco only on the strength of this limited exposure. I found myself saying to the superintendent without flinching, “I’m here to save your job.”
Mr. Maxwell throws his head back and laughs heartedly, “So you’re the answer to my prayers? Well, I’ve got to hand it to you sport. You’ve got spunk.”
Relief registers on his face as his voice tells me he’s not angry, only amused. I move to be on the business side of his desk, and he follows. I take out a piece of paper, and start drawing a flow diagram of the facsimile of a steam generated power supply system from memory of my Nalco technical training.
A red marker is used to indicate areas where I assume he’s been having chronic problems as revealed by the samples across his office. This is a systems approach, not a product approach. I show him no flashy literature. I don’t talk about my fabulous company. Instead, I explain the how the why and the approach to dealing with his troubles.
I talk chemistry as if he understands. I give him the A, B, C’s of trouble free applications as I am confident Nalco’s products and technology can provide. When I finish, he thanks me, lights another cigarette and heads for the door.
“Mr. Maxwell,” I say, the timber of my voice rising, “your operation’s in trouble now.” I look around the room. “Now! I’ve been sitting here for a long time and heard of breakdowns across the plant.”
I pick up a blocked piece of pipe. “This is packed with suspended solids, carryover from the boilers. Not normal. Shouldn’t happen. Give me a three-month trial and I’ll prove it.”
My mind is not thinking of what’s in it for me, but solving problems, problems I believe are correctible. Perhaps my naked intensity is disarming.
“You never meet a stranger do you sport?” I ignore his comment.
“I know I can fix this.” I look about the bullpen at the metallic cadavers.
“Blanket order for three-months, em? What we talking about in money?” I have no idea. I have never made a survey, never calculated an actual chemical dosage.
“A lot less than it’s costing you now in breakdowns, lost production, and missed schedules, but we’ll have to survey the plant first. We will have to devote a full day to this.” The “we” implies I’ll need Nalco’s technical expertise. I’ll need the area manager.
“Okay, do your survey. Have my girl give you a purchase order number. Now let me get back to work.”
* * * * *
(1) Personality Profile – neglect is apparent, confusion, putting out fires and not having the time or inclination to deal with causes suggest panic.
(2) Geographic Profile – the office and traffic define chaos.
(3) Demographic Profile – the focus of plant engineering is on crisis maintenance, not preventive maintenance. Ten names on the “in-out” board of the bullpen wall indicate an overworked maintenance engineering staff as complement to 1,200 factory employees. From failed samples the impression is unmistakable – power plant operations are a foreign concern to this crew.
THE TRIGGER TO THIS INITIAL INTUITION
My lab experience in combination with Nalco’s technical training gave me the confidence that identifying and treating chronic problems would in this system lead to success. I had no doubt about that. The technical level is the most comfortable level because it is totally dealing with things. I had left the security of the laboratory and was in the realm of people.
People are totally another matter. Everything I saw and felt (re: persons, places, things) told me the superintendent was overwhelmed, possibly incompetent.
Meeting him I sensed his need and exploited it. I didn’t understand what I was doing. Perhaps I thought I had nothing to lose, given my boss’s ultimatum. When I called to inform my boss of the sale, he checked with Philco’s purchasing to confirm the order. Skepticism was not limited to him.
The area manager surveyed the plant with me the next day, shaking his head in disbelief as he calculated the astronomical daily chemical dosages required.
The situation was made even more incredulous when asked by the superintendent to survey Philco’s other two plants in the city and include them in the billing. It was the biggest order in the district’s history by someone who had never sold in his life, had no training in sales, and was to be given his walking papers in less than a month.
Compounding the irony, Nalco didn’t expect its salesmen to be productive until completing a three-year comprehensive technical training program. Nalco’s philosophy at the time was that you wowed the customer with technology, and then delivered customer friendly service with your sophisticated knowledge of Nalco’s many product lines. I had neither.
Intuitive OD, which I was using and would continue to use with consistent success made me out to be lucky rather than skilled, which also seems apparent in the following episode.
THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR
Two years later still with Nalco, after a stifling hot summer day in Terre Haute, Indiana, I find myself on the campus of Indiana State University. The temperature is nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit as it has been for several days.
The campus is situated in the heart of the business district of this community of 75,000. The summer session is in full swing, but classrooms and dorm windows are open, furniture is spewed out on the campus lawns, and many professors are lecturing outdoors in the stifling heat.
Several chemical trucks with toxic hydrochloric acid are rigged with hoses and acidizing pumps. This means air conditioning condensers have “frozen up” and are down. This is due to calcium carbonate scaling in the condensers because of improper chemical water treatment.
Acidizing will put these units back in service but only temporarily. Confident in my chemical water treatment technology, I drive to the office of the physical plant.
”Mr. Thomas Crown, Superintendent, Plant Engineering” is stenciled on the frosted glass door.
I knock and he says, “Come in.” The office is a workplace with a drafting board with white-lined blue pages of architectural drawings, and on the wall framed B.S. and M.S. degrees in mechanical engineering from Purdue University.
There is also a picture of several children of various ethnicities smiling down from the wall, and on his desk is a framed picture of an attractive woman and three boys, seemingly age’s three to six. Tacked to the wall directly behind the desk is a child’s stick figure drawing that says, “Hi daddy! This is me! This is you!”
An American flag is on a stanchion to the left of the desk and another kind of flag I don’t recognize is to the right near the corner.
I’m able to take all this in because Mr. Crown busies himself cutting his nails and doesn’t look up for nearly a minute. When he does, I explain my business noting the activity on campus, and saying this is the perfect time to establish a sound chemical treatment program.
“It would not only be cost effective but could eliminate the inconvenience or need for periodic downtimes to acidize the condensers.”
He listens attentively, and then gives me permission to survey his facilities across the campus and to come back with a recommendation.
Six hours later I return proposing a chemical treatment program including a $10,000 consulting agreement for monthly service calls.
“No way Jose! Board will scream to high heaven with such a proposal. We don’t pay consulting fees.”
I ask for an hour to refigure another option. He agrees. Once the new proposal is in his hands, he says, “Be here at 8 o’clock sharp tomorrow morning. We’ll see if we can do business.”
The next morning I arrive with high expectations. As soon as I enter his office, he shouts in a thunderous voice, “Get your ass out of here before I kick it from here to Lafayette.”
I hesitate, stunned, but more out of panic than anything. He is a big man, but so am I. “I mean it, God damn it,” he bellows, “this new proposal costs as much as the original only you buried the goddamn costs in the chemicals.”
* * * * *
I wasn’t thinking of the Fisher Paradigm©™ or of the three spheres of influence. I wasn’t thinking at all. Yet I must have been processing information subconsciously because I stood there. I didn’t leave.
Mr. Crown ranted until his throat was so dry he couldn’t speak anymore. I looked at his tired eyes, deep dark circles etched around them in half moons. I wondered if he’d been to bed and decided he hadn’t.
He slumped forward in his chair, stretching his massive arms over his head, and then through his thick black hair. Suddenly he noticed me standing, waved me silently to sit, and then collapsed forward on his desk. A lapel pin on his jacket became prominent as it bunched up around his bull like neck. It was a Lions International Club pin.
“You’re a Lion?” I asked. The lids of his eyes lifted, a minute sparkle in them. In that moment I made the connection of the pin, the unknown flag in the corner, and the picture of the children of diversity on the wall. “Lions do a lot for kids,” I continued fatuously remembering something about sponsoring children’s hospitals.
For the longest time he studied me, but said nothing. I stared back silently, uncomfortably, my nervous energy crying to fill the vacuum with words but I resisted. Nearly an eternity of two minutes transpired.
“You know ‘bout Lions International?” he asked finally sotto voce, fingering his pin, his voice little more than a whisper.
I shrugged. “Not much. Know of its eye bank. Have a daughter with eye problems.” I felt my answer disappointing. I was wrong.
Instead he broke into a big grin, an upturn smile lined across his face. “Giving city a new ambulance tonight.”
“Wow!” I heard myself say.
Then he launched into a spirited history of Lions International, his face flushed with pride. The exercise was cathartic for us both. I jumped when he banged his fist on the desk. “Tell you what! How ‘bout being my guest at the Terre Haute Club tonight?”
I cowered. “Sure.” But actually I wasn’t. What’s going on here? The guy has gone from rage to rapture just like that! I’d never studied psychology. Something told me, however, to stay cool and quiet during his rage. It helped coming from a home where my da often lost it. I was audience to his fury, one with it, not separate from it. I didn’t become defensive. I couldn’t explain why. I’m not a meek guy. Perhaps I attributed his rage to a lack of sleep, constant system failures, mounting complaints of students and faculty, and perhaps, as well, to a little guilt for deceiving him.
But I wasn’t aware of any of this at the time.
At the dinner, he introduced me to everyone as his friend. He did this from the Lions Club president to Terre Haute’s mayor. As we were leaving, he whispered in my ear, “I sent in a blanket order for that stuff you recommended. They’re to rush it over night. Your boss will be calling you.”
He chuckled. “Don’t expect to see your family for a few days.” Then he added in a friendly voice, “Believe me I know the feeling.”
* * *
(1) Personality Profile: A man is at his wits end with a problem I am trained to handle. His office defines him, efficient, pragmatic, and functional. The workplace is his comfort zone. Deciphering this proves the key.
(2) Geographic Profile: High summer heat, acidizing trucks across the campus, furniture on lawns, student-faculty sweltering in the heat conducting classes on campus lawns, open doors and windows indicate major air conditioning failures.
(3) Demographic Profile: A student-faculty population of 10,000 unable to function in classrooms or dorms because of these failures spells a crisis situation.
ROLE OF INTUITION IN THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR
Someone might argue that I was programmed to deal with an explosive personality having had a father of that temperament. That would not be accurate.
Superintendent Crown was warm and open in his greeting. He was real. Candor was displayed when he admitted he couldn’t sell a consulting agreement to the board.
It was clear that for this air conditioning system to function effectively, however, it required high-end technical service. Nalco had two options to provide this service, one via the consulting contract and the other by incorporating the cost of such service in the chemicals.
The plant survey of the air conditioning system indicated a serious breach in water treatment application and control. This translated into a costly and time-consuming chemical service commitment. Nalco’s 400-series matched these demands however deceptively they were presented.
Discussion was expected, but not rage. Intuition told me to weather the rage although I had no such training. Spheres of influence separately were clueless. It was all of them clashing like thunder that submerged me into the problem, not only technically but emotionally.
We carry our geography with us. We carry it in our heads, and surround ourselves with it for comfort’s sake at work. Mr. Crown did this so carefully that the clues to the man spoke so loudly I could not hear him, until I did.
CULTURE + TEST KIT = INTUITIVE SYMBOLOGY
Success in Nalco’s Industrial Division brings me to the attention of senior management. No one can put a finger on my incredulous success given my unconventional approach. My method has:
(1) Nothing to do with intimidation;
(2) Nothing to do selling the sizzle instead of the steak;
(3) Nothing to do with finessing the buyer with assumptive closes, penalty of delay or scarcity of product;
(4) Nothing to do with selling benefits to deflect objections.
My method has everything to do with becoming one with the buyer merging complementary interests into a partnership.
The vice president of Nalco’s International Division is so intrigued with my success that he comes into the field to travel with me. At the conclusion of the day, he says, “I’m not sure what you’re doing, but we can use it. How’d you like to work for us in South Africa?”
Knowing nothing about South Africa, I ask if I can think about it. I do and am intrigued with the country’s history. My job there is to facilitate the formation of a new chemical company composed of our American subsidiary, The Alexander Martin Company, Great Britain’s I.C.I., Ltd. affiliate, Alfloc, and South African Explosives, Ltd.’s Specialty Chemical Division.
South Africa has no anti-trust laws to prevent this new company from dominating the huge industrial water treatment business. Water is a precious commodity. Water clarification in the gold and diamond mines is critical to profitable business. Nalco has cutting edge technology in this field and is anxious to leverage its product line to full advantage here.
Two brothers inherited the Nalco subsidiary from their father, Alexander Martin. They have no college training in either chemistry or business, but have the colonial manners and elocution of the British business elite. Likewise, the Alfloc people are mainly British and derive their business acumen primarily from colonial history and culture. College trained people are mainly Afrikaners, primarily from South African Explosives.
Afrikaners are descendents of the 17th century Dutch and French Huguenot settlers, who fought two Boer Wars with the British.
It is 1968. Afrikaners have had control of the South African government since 1948, while the British still remain the major player in business and industry.
The Afrikaner government has created a policy of apartheid, or “separation of the races,” which is rigorously enforced. Nearly a million Bantu workers come into Johannesburg every working day from their homes in the South West African Township of “Soweto.”
This is the climate in which the three technical directors from the merging companies are now acting, temporarily, as the technical management team. They ask me, “What test kit are we to use in the field?” I study them and sense their defiance – what is this kid doing here telling us what to do?
“Here is my suggestion,” I offer. “Go back, consider the needs of the field, build your test kit, and come back in two weeks with a recommendation.”
Three days later they return with a Rube Goldberg concoction. It is mainly a South African test kit, the most inappropriate of the three. “Fine, package it and send it to the field.” They look at me stunned. “Anything else? If not, good luck!”
It isn’t a month later that radical modifications are made to this basic test kit, and Nalco’s sedimentation test kit is being used without modification. When Nalco’s chairman of the board comes to Johannesburg and asks to explain my behavior, I have no vocabulary. It was an intuitive decision that I would not be able to articulate until long after I had left Nalco.
* * *
(1) Personality Profile: A clash of cultures is felt from the moment customs confiscates my copy of Allen Drury’s critical book on South Africa, “A Very Strange Society” (1968). This is magnified as I feel the conflicting pull of colonialism with British descendents who look to Great Britain as their homeland to the passionate nationalism of the Afrikaners, Dutch and French descendents, who consider South Africa, home.
Although Afrikaners in this new company tend to be better educated, it is the English speakers who occupy most leadership positions. A subterranean superior-inferior relationship is rumbling between the two groups with the Bantu majority treated as non-citizens.
(2) Geographic Profile: Apartheid divides the Bantu majority into nine native tribe homelands. These homelands have little wealth, commerce or industry, forcing Bantu men to leave their families to live and work in the industrial centers of Johannesburg, Durban, East London and Cape Town.
Apartheid of a different sort exists between the British and Afrikaner as these two groups share little in common but maintain a necessary tolerance of each other as whites represent only 20 percent of South Africa’s population.
(3) Demographic Profile: South Africa is a country with a population of 20 million – 14 million Bantus, 4 million whites (2.5 million Afrikaners, 1.5 million British), and 2 million coloreds (mixed race) including Indians, descendents of 19th century indentured workers from India.
This newly formed company, Anikem Ltd., is slightly more Afrikaner than British.
THE VOICE OF INTUITION SPEAKS TO THE OUTSIDER
Before taking on this assignment, I read all I could about South Africa and found the country’s history surprisingly parallel to that of ours. Also, being from Iowa, I could identify with Afrikaners or Boers (Afrikaans word for “farmer”) in their down to earth approach to life unimpressed with the pretentious.
Still, my intuition told me I was an intruder. I looked much younger than my years and knew I was not likely to be taken seriously. My intuition told me to put the risk of failure and the burden of success on this new company, not on Nalco. It was after all “their company.” It wasn’t until later that I realized this symbolic move proved consequential.
The action elevated the three diverse companies above petty differences into the possibility of a common culture. What could have been a colossal snafu became an opportunity for a promising success.
* * *
Too often when companies merge, the dominant company in the merger assumes its culture should prevail at the expense of the less dominant company. This puts a wrench in the works crippling the transition and often signaling ultimate collapse.
THE FISHER PARADIGM©™ SAVED MY LIFE!
In 1974, I was contracted by the American Management Association (AMA) to investigate a riot, which had occurred in Fairfax County Virginia.
A white police officer shot and killed an unarmed 27-year-old black man in a convenient store in Herndon, after the young man grabbed the officer’s nightstick and hit him with it. This led to a riot.8
My job was to interview senior officers, detectives and command personnel to get a sense of how the Fairfax County Police Department (FCPD) operated and how this might have contributed to this debacle.
During this nine-month intervention, I also conducted executive seminars for AMA across the country. In the course of this work, the deputy Secretary of State of Iowa participated in one of my seminars in Kansas City, Missouri. Later, he looked me up when he came to Washington, D.C. and we went to dinner and took in a play.
Washington, D.C. is about twelve miles from Fairfax City where I was residing at the Holiday Inn. A FCPD police officer drove me to D.C., and said he would pick me up when I called. It was after midnight when the Iowa official and I parted. The police officer, however, couldn’t pick me up until 1:30 a.m. I said that was okay, as I was a walker.
It was a brisk evening and I found myself walking along Pennsylvania Avenue. There was a November chill in the air, but I was comfortably dressed in an unbuttoned dark blue cashmere topcoat, a pinstriped gray three-piece suit, and wearing black leather gloves.
I noticed three African American youths across the street that were jiving and laughing as they walked parallel to me. I paid them little mind as there are eight lanes of traffic separating us, that is, until they raced ahead, crossed the street, and started hanging out at the corner under the light.
Some time ago, an elderly United States senator from Mississippi was accosted, knifed and nearly died after being robbed. When I was about one hundred yards from the boys, that crossed my mind. Without breaking my stride, I processed this information:
* * *
(1) Personality Profile – three young people up to no good at this hour and I am alone.
(2) Geographic Profile – this is no place for young boys to be out at this hour.
(3) Demographic Profile – they are teenagers; I am in my late thirties. They are black, slender, one about six feet, the other two about five-six, athletic looking. I am white, six-four, two-ten, and in good shape.
I feel the rush of their excitement (Personality). How do they see me? I sense danger but imagine they sense opportunity.
Somehow (Geographic), my feet continue their aggressive stride. More incongruous still, I have a sense of calm. Why? I can’t define it.
I know the three have the advantage (Demographic) especially if they have a knife or gun. I have no weapon.
No weapon? My senses explode. That’s it!
INTUITION AND THE PHANTOM GUN
During my intense one-on-one interviews with plain-clothes detectives, they would invariably squirm and adjust their shoulder holsters when I asked sensitive questions. I am now thirty yards from the boys, still walking with the same authoritative gate.
When I am ten yards from them, I make an elaborate move to adjust my phantom shoulder holster through my open topcoat. Not a boy misses this. They open a path for me to pass. Without looking back, I hear them giggle, “There goes the fuzzzz!”
Not leaving it at that, I hear myself say, “Going to be a little hard to get up for school in the morning isn’t it boys?”
They laugh hysterically, “Yeah, man, sssccchoool what we is all about! Dig it!” They retreat in the opposite direction.
When I explain this episode to my ride at half past two in the morning, the police officer says, “You just might have saved your ass.” No might about it as far as I was concerned.
MUTINY MINDED POLICE OFFICERS
In 1975, the Public Safety Institute (PSI) was contracted to investigate and dismantle the unauthorized labor union of the Raleigh Police Officers Association, and to defuse its threat of striking the city of Raleigh, North Carolina.
Statisticians, psychometricians, experts on police organization and public safety policy experts were brought in. I was retained as a “people’s person” with a reputation for OD detective work. In the course of riding with officers, attending roll call during the three shifts, walking around city hall, and interviewing citizens, the spheres of influence begin to materialize:
* * *
(1) Personality Profile: A clear dichotomy appeared to exist between police command and the ranks of police patrol, or between staff and line authority and function. Police officers were spiteful of the police chief and spoke angrily of his incompetence, but were surprisingly civil to me, an outsider – a disconnect.
They demanded the chief be fired or they would strike even though public employees in North Carolina have no such right.
(2) Geographic Profile: Raleigh is the state capital, centrally located, and the hub of politics, industry, commerce and education. It has the bizarre feel of an antebellum community, producing a certain time-lapse ambivalence.
(3) Demographic Profile: Raleigh is a community of more than 200,000 with several colleges and universities within and around the city, including Duke University and the University of North Carolina in nearby Chapel Hill.
Only 5 percent of the 350 sworn officers are college trained, the rest are high school graduates or have GED equivalences; 80 percent are between the ages of 25 and 35 with an average of five years on the police force, while 60 percent live outside Raleigh city limits. None of the command officers, including the chief, are college trained.
As the situation worsened, the headlines of The Raleigh Times blared a daily menu of police officer dissonance, and the demand for a change in leadership, while television news programs nightly echoed the same sentiments.
Meanwhile, I continued to ride with angry patrol officers on three shifts, interviewed command staff, wandered around city hall, and sent out a questionnaire with the water bill. This was not a scientific study, yet the response was more than 30 percent, indicating citizens wanted resolution of this stalemate.
INTUITION AS SERENDIPITY
We were several weeks into the intervention, and getting nowhere. I had spent scores of hours with police officers, but only marginal time in city hall. Something told me the problem started there.
My previous interviews with the city manager, members of the city council and the chief of police were not insightful. I thought I must dig deeper. So I wandered city hall some more.
That is how I came to see a distinguished looking man with a white mane sitting in an office devoid of trappings reading The Wall Street Journal. I asked if I might talk to him. “Sure, make yourself at home,” he said with the fastidious gestures and diffident manner of antebellum civility.
For the next two hours I listened to an intriguing story that made everything fall into place.
He informed me he was the prior city manager. His best friend was the previous chief of police. “First college graduate ever to be a Raleigh police chief,” he said proudly.
But there was a problem. His friend had an incurable heart condition and could tolerate no stress. To make certain his friend acquired full police chief pension benefits, he made him a sinecure while he rotated the three majors in the department every four months to run the police department, creating three islands of authority, three different and competing police departments, three different work cultures, and three distinct power cells.
After three years in this configuration, the city manager’s friend died. He then appointed the senior major of the three as permanent chief, convinced the city council to hire his deputy as city manager, and resigned.
The new chief to solidify his power promoted his favorite sergeant to major over patrol, the most powerful wing of police operations, placed one major in administration and the other in community service – both non-power positions. He then placed his most despised adversary, a captain, on permanent nights running patrol. That proved a fatal error.
This meant that the captain on permanent nights had access to all patrol officers, some 300 strong. As they rotated shifts and came under his wing, he painted the chief as a clown, incompetent if not a crook, and a perfect foil to all that grieved them. I saw this first hand. He used nuance and innuendo, humor and bravado to cultivate the officers’ collective dissonance and project their frustration and contempt on to the chief of police.
When I disclosed this scenario in a report to the Public Safety Institute, which was in turn published, it took the air out of the siege. Officers could see how they had been duped and used. Order was restored. The union became a social club, and the chief ended his career with dignity.
TECHNICAL OBSOLESCENCE & INTUITION
It is 1980. I am now a Ph.D. in organizational/industrial psychology with ten years of consulting experience. OD consulting failed to be fulfilling mainly because there was no sense of fruition.
An OD intervention can uncover chronic systemic problems, and make recommendations, but then the OD practitioner usually moves on, and is not there for the implementing stage. So, I was delighted when an opportunity came to join Honeywell Avionics in Clearwater, Florida as an OD psychologist.
My new boss gave me what sounded a lot like an ultimatum, reminding me of my initial days with Nalco a decade earlier. “If you don’t find your role here in the first six weeks,” he said, “you’re history.”
Directness is akin to my own personality. I liked the unabashed clarity of my marching orders. He, too, had first been trained in the hard sciences before studying the soft sciences, and was not inclined to beat about the bush when he had something on his mind. His directness established immediate trust as he was to become my mentor.
So off I go to create an OD role and identity in this new environment. It soon became apparent that the spheres of influence were blatantly obvious:
(1) Personality Profile: Engineers here are the elite, treated with deference, which is manifested in a cavalier attitude by engineers toward everyone. They are cowboys who can do no wrong. Human Resources personnel, where OD is located, are intimidated by these engineers and obsequious to their demands, mainly because they speak a different language and have that hauteur and mystique of their special power.
(2) Geographic Profile: The facility is mainly a government contractor with work centered on large defense contracts in space and strategic operations. Program managers are engineers and dictate the tempo of work. All accede to their needs. The ten-acre campus is graced with seven attractive white sun baked buildings including a recreation center on manicured lawns, and complemented by an artificial lake, picnic areas and several parking lots in the heart of this leisure driven tourist paradise called Clearwater, Florida.
(3) Demographic Profile: The working population of 4,000 includes 1,000 engineers, 2,400 support technicians and administrative personnel, and 600 production workers. More than 3,000 workers are college trained with 400 with advanced degrees among whom there are more than 30 Ph.D.’s.
After three weeks in the company, I experience the wall between Human Resources and engineering. Engineers requisition courses, seminars, and professional meetings but take umbrage when asked to explain the benefits.
Their elitist attitude says, would you know if I told you? A pervasive duplication of courses is noted. This unnecessarily multiplies costs. I ask HR Compensation to generate a demographic profile of the engineering community.
Most striking in this profile is that pay continues to increase for engineers as job complexity decreases; 75 percent of these engineers are working on technology developed long after they have left engineering college. Moreover, many engineers receive engineering pay for non-engineering work. Technical obsolescence is apparent, a problem correctible with training.
A memo is prepared that goes out to all chief engineers announcing the formation of a task force to address this problem. No response. A second memo follows to forty of the top engineers who are representative of the range of engineering disciplines and programs. One response.
The single engineering responder is an engineer near retirement, who long ago recognized his declining skills, and claims to be sold on the idea of continuing engineering education.
We meet every week as if we are a full-fledged task force with me mainly the audience to his delivery. All of this is dutifully written up and sent out in memos to the chief engineers and the top forty engineers.
INTUITION AND THE POWER OF THE PEN
Trained as a chemist, I can relate to technical arrogance. Knowing this, and being a writer by inclination, I embellish our weekly sessions with statistics, schematics, graphs and studies and copy everyone on the original listings.
One day a chief engineer joins us. Mention is made of his attendance in the next memo, not realizing his celebrity. Thirty engineers show up for the following session overflowing our cramped quarters. The chief engineer takes over the meeting outlining how technical education might work.
Each gathering thereafter finds greater and more diverse attendance from the engineering community. A holistic view is developing. In time, the chief engineer becomes director of engineering, and then general manager of the facility with technical education key to his administration.
Today technical education at Honeywell Avionics is a highly developed program. Technicians in conjunction with the engineering college of the University of South Florida are able to pursue engineering studies while working on the Honeywell campus. All engineers come to see the benefit of upgrading their skills as no engineer need be left behind.9
A BRIDGE TOO FAR
The management team of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratories (CSDL) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) makes its routine visit to Honeywell Avionics, Clearwater and asks to see me. They have read an article of mine, “Quality Control Circles: Motivation through Participative Management.”10 The CSDL director says he would like me to come to Cambridge to work with his people in team building.
CSDL designs the ring laser gyros that are manufactured in Clearwater. It is evident that a breakdown exists between the design phase in Massachusetts and production phase in Clearwater. This is a $50 million U.S. Navy program.
Before going off to MIT, I create a book out of my published works at Honeywell that cover all phases of OD that relate to operations. I do this with the full realization that MIT is unlikely to take me seriously. I didn’t anticipate the elitism would be any less in Cambridge than it was in Clearwater. Yes, this is an anticipated bias, but a protective one.
* * *
(1) Personality Profile: The nation’s top engineers, physicists and chemists work at CSDL. These scientists are perfectionists. If there is a problem, they are certain it is not with them.
(2) Geographic Profile: There is a 1,000-mile separation between the design team and production team.
This was before the digital age and the Internet and so that distance was an obvious barrier. What was not so obvious until I arrived at CSDL is that another barrier existed that further crippled this collaboration.
The CSDL facility was designed around twin circular towers joined by a bridge well above the street. This housed the CSDL laboratories and offices on the MIT campus. The design was meant to provide privacy but it also promoted separation and isolation.
(3) Demographics: There is a distinct CSDL pecking order. Physicists are of the first rank, engineers and mathematicians of the second rank with electrical engineers rated above other engineers, and chemists and biologists completing the ranking corps. Many are Ph.D.’s and so academic credentials cause less friction than seniority and status.
The mean age of the group is late thirties but the mindset is closer to that of the spoiled child.
INTUITION AS ANTICIPATION
Although an OD psychologist is not a clinician, per se, I anticipated being perceived as a touchy-feely shrink trained at second-rate schools (state universities), so I put together beforehand a loose leaf book titled “Teaming: Productivity through Cooperation,”11 composed of articles I had written on team building, transactional analysis in the workplace, leadership style, effective communications, stress management and how to conduct meetings. Armed with 40 books produced by Honeywell’s technical services, I journeyed to CSDL.
Once there, I outlined how to use the book, divided people into groups of ten with the balance acting as audience, and then sent them off to plan their respective meetings on topics ranging from conflict management to how to sell an idea. My anticipated rejection never occurred.
They took to the assignment like excited children. Each team tried to outdo the other. In the process, they ventilated pressing concerns and created an agenda on how to address them. The following week, again in teams, they conducted meetings, developed corrective strategies and allowed ideas to surface without interference. Sad to report, but it was quite apparent these well-trained minds had never had an opportunity to demonstrate leadership.
Pleased with their solutions, anxious to implement their ideas, they decided I could now go home.
“Aren’t we forgetting something?” I asked. “I don’t see Clearwater in the picture.”
Busy arriving at consensus on how to work better together they overlooked the breakdown between the design and production teams, between Massachusetts and Clearwater. That was partially my fault. I left Clearwater out of the discussion wanting for them to bring up the subject. No one, up to this point, had made the connection that something was awry between the two operations that they might consider and even resolve.
“Why don’t we have a CSDL team go to Clearwater and observe production and have a Clearwater team come to Cambridge?” somebody finally said. And that is what happened.
The CSDL team learned that their precise design was not reproducible in the factory, and the production team found they could propose suggestions to the lab to make its design more production friendly. One thousand miles was no longer a bridge too far nor were the labs in the two towers across the bridge.
WORKINGS OF THE FISHER PARADIGM ©™
These illustrations are not abstractions. Nor should it be a concern of the reader that the Fisher Paradigm©™ originated in a sales discipline.12 It was in sales I learned the fallacy of the mechanistic A, B, C linear approach to persons, places and things. It was in working as an OD consultant that I learned a company has a personality, geography and demographic profile unique to itself.
These spheres of influence are charged with intuitive insight if we can only erase the lines between cause and effect, thinking and feeling, observer and the observed to witness what is happening without bias and allow the small voice of reality to resonate with its need.
The Fisher Paradigm©™ is conceptual, self-conscious and self-organizing. Instead of forcing the world it observes to fit into a presupposed order of vertical thinking (linear logic) or inside the box, it lets information organize itself into lateral thinking and understanding.
By doing so, persons, places and things find themselves on the same page, fall into their own unique patterns and find their own way forward to move off the dime together.
The quick response is that “the Fisher Paradigm©™ is just common sense,” but common sense is so rare. Even more rare is to see a situation whole and integral rather than separate and elemental, to see beyond the cultural blinders that would judge, label and describe “what is,” not as it is but as it should be or is expected to be. The workings of the Fisher Paradigm©™ are as much in evidence in the small as in the large as I close with this episode.
BOTTLING PLANT FIASCO
A major bottling company of soft drinks replaced its bottling handling conveyor system with a top of the line electronic conveyor system during a Christmas vacation while 200 employees were on holiday.
The new design was meant to cut operating costs in half and reduce employees by a third. The exact opposite happened.
A productive work force with virtually no labor problems (Personality Profile), situated in a low-tech community (Geographic Profile) with most employees otherwise unskilled (Demographic Profile) registered shock, then anger, and finally disgust when reporting back to work to find everything had changed.
Management expected employees to be pleased. They weren’t. This is important. Workers kept their bad feelings to themselves. They displayed their contempt for the company silently and indirectly in passive behaviors: that is, work slowdowns, failure to repair equipment immediately, failure to report outages in the new system, coming in late and leaving early and doing just enough to get by. Production levels plummeted, schedules were missed, product wastes increased and costs soared. The company was on the verge of collapse.
In panic mode, an OD intervention was initiated. This included interviewing all the workers. A sense of betrayal and being taken for granted was palpable. Employees wanted to hurt the company, as they had been hurt, failing to realize it was hurting them as well.
The management team was advised to level with employees, to explain the basis of its thinking, and its surprise at the reaction. Teams of management-employees were set up to voice concerns and to ensure this didn’t happen again.
Economic challenges had never been discussed with employees before. OD advised that this take the form of problem solving and brainstorming sessions. These teams looked at cost cutting measures and innovative ways to increase production, improve quality, and reduce waste. Management was at first reluctant to discuss such matters, but found when it did that workers were reasonable, understanding and more enthusiastic than they had expected.
Management had mistakenly read the slow down as employee apathy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Employees felt locked out, deceived and betrayed.
Intuition was staring management in the face but was ignored. Intuitive OD gave management the eyes to see, but the mind and will to understand are likely to require more time.
Production eventually increased to its former levels with every indication that the new technology would perform as advertised. The workforce was cut by only 10 percent rather than the projected 30 plus percent. Trust was still an issue. Management’s challenge now was to earn it.
* * *
1 The Fisher Paradigm © as of October 10, 2002 has sought copyright protection. The Fisher Paradigm™ has also applied for trademark registration pursuant to certification for “consulting and advisory services with respect to infrastructure organizational development in commercial, educational, industrial, military, government and religious institutions as well as for individuals therein and separate from same.”
In the interim, no one may use it or a variation of it in writing or application without the expressed written approval of the author and The Delta Group Florida. Licensing agreements are available as well as application seminars in the innovative use of this design by contacting The Delta Group Florida, 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tsmpa, FL 33617, Phone/Fax: (813) 989 –3631, or by email: TheDeltaGrpFL@cs.com
2 James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (Pantheon Books 1992). Feynman was a magician of the highest caliber, architect of quantum theories, enfant terrible of the atomic bomb project, caustic critic of the space shuttle commission. He forever changed science, and what it means to know something in this uncertain world. He was also a scientist with an intense emotional nature and used it.
3 Kary B. Mullis, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (Vintage Books 2000), pp. 6 – 11.
4 As Emerson insists, experience is crucial. Dr. Fisher’s life represents an OD progression: he was reared in an Irish Catholic home, educated by the Sisters of St. Francis in grammar school (St. Patrick’s), attended public high school (Clinton, Iowa), state university (Iowa), spent five summers as a laborer in a chemical food processing plant (Clinton Foods, Inc.), worked as a bench chemist in research & development (Standard Brands, Inc.), entered U.S. Navy (enlisted man) with the 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean during Eisenhower Administration, then became chemical sales engineer (Nalco Chemical Company). It was at Nalco that he commenced to practice OD without knowing it. Forty years later intuitive OD (Fisher Paradigm ©™)would take shape in his mind. With Nalco, he advanced from a field manager to an international corporate executive, retired (in his 30s), returned to school (University of South Florida/Walden University) to earn his Ph.D., consultant (Psyche-ology, Inc.), adjunct to several universities, contract consultant (American Management Association, Public Safety Institute), OD psychologist (Honeywell, Inc.), international corporate executive (Honeywell Europe, Ltd.) and for the past thirteen years, full-time author/consultant/publisher (The Delta Group Florida).
5 Michael Macrone, Eureka! 81 Key Ideas Explained (Barnes & Noble 1994), pp. 77 – 78.
6 Oxford don Stuart Hampshire describes this as “the Spinoza solution,” The New York Review, October 24, 2002, p. 55.
7 Edward de Bono, Lateral Thinking (Penguin Books 1970), Parallel Thinking: From Socratic to de Bono Thinking (Penguin Books 1994). The author decries the limitations put on thinking imposed by vertical or cognitive and critical thinking (cause/effect, linear logic) in a changing world. Thinking “inside the box” (or thinking based on what is already known) is no longer adequate, the author insists, with it necessary for vertical thinking to be complemented with lateral thinking, or conceptual and creative thinking.
8 James R. Fisher, Jr., Master of Arts thesis, “A Social Psychological Study of the Police Organization: The Anatomy of a Riot,” University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, 1976.
9 James R. Fisher, Jr., paper titled “Combating Technical Obsolescence: the Genesis of a Technical Education Program.” This paper was presented at the World Conference of Continuing Engineering Education in Orlando, Florida, May 8, 1986.
10 James R. Fisher, Jr., “Quality Control Circles: Motivation through Participation,” paper presented at the National Conference of the Institute of Printed Circuits in Dallas, Texas, October 17, 1981.
11 James R. Fisher, Jr., Teaming: Motivation through Cooperation (© 1983 by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., Honeywell Avionics, Clearwater, Florida).
12 James R. Fisher, Jr., Confident Selling for the 90s (The Delta Group Florida 1992), nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, is comprehensively OD. It is a sequel to his earlier best selling Confident Selling (Prentice-Hall 1971) in which the intuitive OD framework of the Fisher Paradigm ©® was first displayed in its embryonic form.
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posted by The Peripatetic Philosopher | 5:47 PM
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