HOW DOES DR. FISHER’S OD COMPARE TO ORTHODOX OD?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 24, 2012
A READER WRITES:
Sir James,
As you have noticed, William L. Livingston III’s Design for Prevention (2010) and your OD are the same technology and sociology. I have digested the definition of OD by Wikipedia and wondered how that aligns with yours.
I acquired a huge book on OD with 60 pages in it from 1990. It is obvious these dudes are far off the mark, not even in an arena where truth resides.
If you produce an incontrovertible case for OD, and you can, you will be aggressively ignored. Henry Adams blazed that trail. Is there a target audience that makes sense?
My inclination is for you to produce the incontrovertible case for your own satisfaction, and then do what pleases you for the book.
Regards,
A fellow sufferer
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Dear Fellow Sufferer,
You are quite perceptive. Orthodox OD and my take on OD are alike only in the language we use, but not in the disposition of that use.
Let’s take the opening lines of the Wikipedia definition of OD. As with orthodox OD, my form of OD is designed to increase the organization’s relevance and viability and future readiness to meet change. From that point forward, I have a problem.
The implication as the definition continues is that training and development, as conceived by Human Resources (HR), developing a catalogue of in-house courses, outside seminars and proclamations intended to change the basics of beliefs, attitudes and relevance of values is clearly outside the purview of my OD.
OD, for me, is diagnostic, consultative, and a systemically designed process to create a strategy for implementation. It is not a program but a process, and it is not intended to change values, beliefs and attitudes but to assess them in terms of their congruence or incongruence with the mission. This is how I have stated it before ("Leadership Manifesto," AQP Journal, Winter 2002, p. 24):
"The structure of work determines the function of work; the function of work creates the workplace culture; the workplace culture dictates organizational behavior, organizational behavior establishes whether an organization will succeed or fail or expire.
OD is not a religion. OD is an ideal type. OD is not a sacrosanct structure meant to ameliorate or meant to better absorb disruptive technologies. OD is an assessment tool to aid the organizational leadership in accomplishing its mission. My brand of OD is impersonal in determining the cause (problem), but personal in implementing the effect (solution).
Impediments to this process are noted and reported as certainly as X-rays and MRIs are used to determine the health of the individual.
OD as I practice and define it is meant to gauge as accurately as possible the climate, perturbations, agents and aggravations that seem at odds in performing and completing the stated mission of the organization, and then to take note of them to fully understand the what, where, how, why and when of chronic problems that negatively impact operations.
There is no attempt to throw a number of courses at the problem in hopes that some will stick and relieve the blockage.
There is no attempt to placate either management or people in the system by blaming one factor and exonerating the other.
There is no attempt to compare this organization, which I will henceforth call “a system” with another healthier system, or compete with that healthy system by attempting to duplicate or replicate it.
Just as certainly as every organization (as an organism) has common generic features it shares with every other organization, each organization has a unique personality, geography, and demographic profile, as well as a unique history and culture.
The first priority is to understand the system by studying existing mechanisms in the system as they perform their stated functions. In studying them, assessing the level of age, deterioration and, yes, atrophy, as every system is in a constant state of moving towards decay and death, and no system can operate with the hubris of “if it is not broke, don’t fix it!”
When a system is broke, it is long past the stage of fixing, and even artificial support, which current OD is often guilty of proposing in the form of multidisciplinary interventions, cannot save the system. I can best illustrate this point with an actual OD experience of mine.
MUTINY OF THE RALEIGH POLICE DEPARTMENT IN RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
Similar to the Wikipedia “overview,” when 550 sworn police officers in Raleigh, North Carolina threatened to walk off the job, a team of internal and external experts was amassed to collaborate to prevent this debacle. They included an acclaim former national police chief, an accountant, psychologist, psychometrician, a gaggle of MBAs, local professors from four institutions of higher learning, a negotiator and me as a “people person” OD specialist.
Studies were made of “core values,” and a questionnaire was sent out to all the citizens of Raleigh in their water bill.
Police officers insisted on forming a union when public employees in North Carolina are not allowed to form unions. Leadership of these police officers appeared in the mayor’s office, at city council meetings, nearly every night on local television, in town hall meetings, and in lengthy articles in local newspapers and radio shows.
None of this seem to jell but only to exacerbate the problem. A large segment of the Raleigh Police Department (RPD) eventually called in “sick,” which was the equivalent of a mutiny.
For my part, attending meetings of the police command staff, traveling all three shifts with police officers in the field, and visiting with the city manager and his staff, I came to the conclusion there were three separate islands operating essentially isolated from each other, and therefore ineffectively: central command, administrative support and patrol.
What was perceived as a "training needs assessment of police officers" gave rank and file officers the impression that they were being perceived “as the problem” and that RPD command staff and city hall were off the hook.
This only rallied their call to push their demands even harder, which included firing the current chief and replacing him with their preferred candidate.
The “police community questionnaire” didn’t help improve that perception: for one, it wasn’t scientific, and for two, it had a bias against these renegade police officers that stuck out a mile.
Meanwhile, I developed profiles of the more than one hundred officers I interviewed and/or traveled with during their shifts – I worked with them on all three of their shifts (8 to 4; 4 to 12; 12 to 8). I studied demographics not only of these officers but also of all other segments of the population including the university community. Then I took special note of the geography of the region, which was heavily saturated with university complexes. Years later, this would become the Fisher Paradigm©™.
* * *
It was February 1976, and our work continued over the next three months. This included the planning, the diagnosis, the data collection, creating feedback loops to unfreeze the situation to realize some movement (transformation) in order to produce measurable change, and then to refreeze (stabilize) operations, but without success.
One day I was in city hall wandering the halls having interviewed nearly everyone working there several times, when I passed an office. I had often past this office, and noted a handsome elderly man invariably smoking a cigarette, drinking a cup of coffee and reading The Wall Street Journal.
I said to myself, what the heck, stopped, introduced myself and was invited to sit down. What happened over the next hour changed everything.
I learned the man was the former city manager. He had been a good friend of the former police chief. “He was our first police chief with a college degree,” he quipped proudly. Then got serious. “Unfortunately, he had a bad heart condition.”
He then told me a story that fit well within the framework of my “three islands,” only in a new manifestation of the problem.
Considering the police chief’s heart condition, the city manager said, “I made him titular police chief allowing him to come in if he liked, and not if he didn’t.” I raised an eyebrow. “It was to protect his pension,” he said with authoritative justification.
He then appointed the three majors in the department to rotate as police chief every four months, and got the city council to vote in his assistant manager in as city manager, and then resigned.
This rotation lasted for nearly three years, and then the police chief died before his full retirement would have gone into effect. Operationally, the former city manager’s action created essentially three cultures, three police organizations and three sets of loyalties, or three islands of operation, each attempting to sandbag the other.
The new city manager appointed the senior major of the three to permanent chief once the police chief died. That is where the trouble started. This was some three years prior to this intervention.
The new chief elevated his favorite sergeant to major in charge of patrol, a line function, put a former captain whom he despised on permanent nights, placed one of the majors in charge of administrations, a staff function, and the other major in charge of community services, a ceremonial function.
His mistake was putting the captain he detested on permanent nights. I often attended role call on the midnight to eight shift, and I could see this captain was something of a demigod.
The troops would express their angst and anxieties to him and he would reconfigure these emotions into painting them as victims to the chief's callous disregard of their security and interests.
Indeed, the roll call captain would salt the air with half truths and outright lies such as the chief's head of patrol doubled as his bagman for his gambling, that the chief had been incompetent when he was on patrol, that he was a spy for the city manager, and so on. Innuendo ruled without the need for facts.
A litany of real or imagined transgressions against them by the chief festered to the point of believing a conspiracy was lodged against them with no other option then to revolt.
When I reported my findings to the company director managing this intervention, and it was leaked to the press, it was as if a pin had been stuck in the balloon of the mutiny.
It didn't matter that some of RPD rank and file members’ accusations were confirmed. What mattered was that everyone could see, including police officers that the situation had been seeded and manipulated by the midnight shift captain.
This resulted in these officers stepping down from their demands. Order was restored with the city council passing a resolution in total support of the chief of police.
The demand that the chief of police resign, be fired "or else" was tabled, as officers obediently returned to duty, while the chief continued in office until his retirement.
WAS THE OD RALEIGH AFFAIR A FLUKE?
During this same mid-1970s period, I was invited by the American Management Association to be their man on the ground after a riot broke out in Herndon, Virginia, a community in the plush county of Fairfax, twelve miles west of Washington, DC. Many congressmen and women as well as congressional lobbyists at the time lived in the county.
A population of roughly 1,000 African Americans had been relocated to Herndon from Washington, DC. This population had few jobs, few venues of entertainment, and was disproportionately young.
Herndon was an upscale white community with conservative values and beliefs. It was not too happy with the intrusion of this new population, and was quick to take umbrage at the slightest African American nuisance.
Of an evening, African Americans would congregate in their only community center, which was a shopping center. Music was piped into open mall, and drivers would swing out and around it tooting their horns playing music from their boom boxes.
The atmosphere was carefree, festive, spontaneous and liberating, but also noisy in violation of a city ordinance that the white community insisted in enforcing, thus eliminating the black community's only venting mechanism.
By a coincidence of circumstances, one white FCPD officer had successfully engaged this community, and was accepted and respected by it without protocol. Another white FCPD officer had a problem with the black community, but especially with one individual. These two officers would take center stage in opposing roles.
One day the biased police officer saw this young man, who was always in trouble with the law, driving into the shopping center when the officer knew he had a suspended license.
He confronted the young black in the Seven/Eleven store, pushed him hard against the beverage cooler, and asked for his license. The twenty-seven-year-old grabbed the officer's nightstick and attempted to beat him off. The officer unloaded his service revolver on the youth, killing him. A riot followed.
I was called to Fairfax after the riot had been quelled to study what caused it, and how to prevent it from happening in the future. I wrote my master’s thesis on the subject (“A Social Psychological Study of the Police Organization: The Anatomy of a Riot," University of South Florida, 1976).
Suffice it to say here that the officer who quelled the riot was the white officer trusted by the black community. When the riot occurred, he was on suspension. He had stolen a hunting knife out of criminal properties.
For a time, he acted as chief of police and chief negotiator. The rioters would talk to no other.
The Fairfax County Police Department (FCPD) was, at the time, 840 officers, but still operated as it did decades earlier when it was a full complement of 84 officers. Command staff still found time to go to incidental disturbances, while computers sat at headquarters as complaints were hand counted and filed. An officer in the field had a master’s degree in computer technology but was not allowed to pursue his specialty until he completed his mandatory three years in patrol.
FCPD was structured and maintained a culture for another time and paid dearly for this miasmal breach with internal and external demands.
* * *
Orthodox OD did not work for me because it became an exercise in a discipline rather than an effort to frame and define the problem diagnostically.
It has been my experience in OD, and that is why I am interested in writing this book, is that Occam’s razor is not only the correct route to the problem but the only route to solving the problem, which means in the language of Henry Adams and William Livingston the most advantageous ways to control it.
Every solution is temporary as Henry Adams puts it:
“Society has been born of man, and has been built on sand, often with only materials of convention. The individual for whom it is created is always its worst enemy, but will not bend to its necessities.”
Orthodox OD has its role but it is mainly to handle routine situations where reliance on unconventional methods doesn’t get in the way. Often, like religion in the modern world, reeling from lost status, ritual has become a large part of the problem solving apparatus.
Orthodox OD attempts to follow the materialism of science where the emphasis is to imagine a world made out of atoms. My approach, I sense, might better be described as Platonist, or imagining built out of a range of ideas.
You could say science is obsessed with matter and I am obsessed with mind, but I choose to see myself as respecting nature or matter and to see how it plays out in mind. I don’t see myself as a specialist, theist, humanist, behaviorist, or as a culturist. But whereas the mystery detective says, “follow the money,” I say, “follow the insanity.”
Be always well,
Jim
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