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Chapter 12: Whole Organization and Multiple Organization Interventions

Characteristics of Contemporary Large-Scale Interventions

Participation: Involvement of participants.

Timeline: Greater timeline of interventions.

Practitioner’s role: Change.

Participation: Large-scale interventions, particularly the directional interventions, now tend to include a greater variety of stakeholders than may have been true for interventions like these in the past. To increase both the adoption rate and cycle time of change (and often to develop better decisions), many large-scale interventions began to involve multiple organizational levels

Timeline: Despite the need for rapid change, many interventions that target a whole organization rarely consist of a single intervention activity; rather, they often involve multiple activities over a longer period.

Practitioner Role: The practitioner’s role has also changed, as many large-group interventions ask organizational members to take primary responsibility for generating and analyzing data, and the practitioner’s role is “that of a community organizer who structures, encourages, and helps focus the issues.”

Strategic Change Interventions (1 of 5)

Strategic Planning and Real-Time Strategic Change

Involves decision making.

Strategy implementation: Six silent killers.

Concerns of strategy formulation.

Involves decision making: Strategic planning involves making decisions about the organization’s purpose, products, vision, direction, and action plans. It also involves tradeoffs and choices about customers and markets, as well as introspective analysis about the organization’s competitive advantage and challenges in its current environment.

Strategy implementation: Six silent killers are:

Top-down or laissez-faire senior management style.

Unclear strategy and conflicting priorities.

An ineffective senior management team.

Poor vertical communication.

Poor coordination across functions, businesses, or borders.

Inadequate down-the-line leadership skills and development.

Concerns of strategy formulation: They can contribute to the process of developing the strategy itself but also can make leaders aware of many additional concerns as they formulate the strategy, such as the following:

How individuals and teams adapt to changes in strategic direction.

Implications of the strategy on the organization design.

How organizational processes support or hinder the strategy.

Elements of the organizational culture (language, rituals, etc.) that support or hinder the strategy.

How performance management and rewards systems relate to the strategy.

How strategic initiatives can be translated into goals.

Collaboration between departments to achieve strategic objectives.

Strategic Change Interventions (2 of 5)

Strategic Planning and Real-Time Strategic Change

A Strategic Planning Case Study.

The Integrated Strategic Change Process.

Real-Time Strategic Change.

A Strategic Planning Case Study: The process resulted in organizational members being allowed to “discuss the undiscussable,” though this remains a challenge outside of the SHRM process.

A higher level of involvement of employees and connections to senior management has opened up avenues for feedback and participation.

Top executives say that the development of the company’s overall strategic agenda relies to a significant extent on the SHRM process.

The Integrated Strategic Change Process: In this process, the strategy does not stand alone, but it aligns the organization around the necessary means to make it effective through a change plan.

Strategic analysis: The first step is to conduct a strategic analysis, which involves an assessment of the organization’s readiness for strategic change, an understanding of the organization’s values and priorities in creating a strategic plan, and a diagnosis of the organization’s current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It also includes a diagnosis of the organization’s strategic orientation, including mission, goals, and core processes.

Strategy making: The next step is to formulate the strategy. This involves the organization’s vision and strategic choices about the amount of change that will be proposed in the new strategy. Leaders analyze the organization’s environment, performance, and core competencies to determine whether minimal revision of the strategy is appropriate or whether it needs more radical change. Decisions are made about adapting or improving existing processes and about the future of the product portfolio, including areas in which to invest or reduce.

Strategic change plan design: The strategic change plan outlines not only the major activities that will be implemented or will change when the strategy is adopted but also the impact that the strategy will have on stakeholders inside and outside the organization.

Strategic change plan implementation: Leadership has a particularly important task in the implementation of the change plan. Leaders must communicate the vision and strategy, including the rationale for the change and how the leadership team arrived at major strategic decisions.

Real-Time Strategic Change: It is a related intervention that OD practitioners have developed that can increase the pace of change.

Real-time strategic change events are generally structured over a 3-day period.

The first day is focused on “building a common database of strategic information.”

Next, customers or content experts may give presentations to expand the group’s perspective.

The conclusion of the event asks intact teams to work on action plans as a team to take feedback from other groups and to make decisions about how they can support the strategic plan, designing follow-up initiatives that they will commit to accomplishing.

Strategic Change Interventions (3 of 5)

Scenario Planning

Benefits of scenario planning.

Getting started.

Laying environmental-analysis foundation.

Creating the scenarios.

Moving from scenarios to a decision.

Benefits of scenario planning:

Uncertainty is high relative to managers’ ability to predict or adjust.

Too many costly surprises have occurred in the past.

The company does not perceive or generate new opportunities.

The quality of strategic thinking is low.

The industry has experienced significant change or is about to.

There are strong differences of opinion, with multiple opinions having merit.

Getting started: Before any scenarios are written, a scenario planning team should be formed (usually somewhere around a dozen members who have executive support) and the group must determine the time horizon to be discussed and the focal topic of interest. The group should agree on the process and outcomes of the effort.

Laying the environmental-analysis foundation: Group members gather quantitative data about facts and trends as well as qualitative data about views of the future from organizational members. At this stage, the group explores external factors such as demographic trends, social and environmental patterns, and other economic, political, and technological concerns.

Creating the scenarios: The factors discussed earlier are now analyzed and compared for their predictability and influence on the organization. Three to five story lines or scenarios are written that capture the majority of the extreme future alternatives. A table compares the scenarios across several variables of concern. Good scenarios, according to Lindgren and Bandhold, have the following seven characteristics:

Decision-making power: The scenario provides enough detail that decisions can be made based on the scenario coming true.

Plausibility: The scenario must be realistic and believable.

Alternatives: The scenario should imply options and choices, each of which could be a likely future state.

Consistency: The scenario should be consistent in its own story. That is, to use the example above, proposing employment loss but income increases might need to have some explanation to make it consistent.

Differentiation: Scenarios must be different enough from one another that they describe genuinely alternative situations (ideally they would be diametrically opposed).

Memorability: Scenarios should be limited in number, and each should provide dramatic narrative for ease of recall.

Challenge: The scenario should confront what the organization currently believes about future events.

Moving from scenarios to a decision: The scenario planning group and the leadership team discuss implications of each scenario, including the opportunities and threats to the organization for each alternative. Current strategic decisions are tested and debated. The group makes decisions about what actions to take and agrees on metrics and processes for communicating and monitoring the actions.

Strategic Change Interventions (4 of 5)

Search Conferences and Future Search

Size, length, and subject.

Attendance.

Data gathering and interpretation.

Exploring the wider context.

Structure.

Size, Length, and Subject: A future search conference is a 2.5- to 3-day meeting (with a typical size of about 60 participants) to create action plans for an issue or concern that participants share.

It is not a problem-solving conference, in the sense that it is not intended to get a group together to determine how to deal with the county’s homeless population or how to reduce the cycle time for shipping of the company’s most popular product.

Instead, the topic is likely to be “a future search for ABC county” or “the future of ABC company,” topics that tend to promote positive energy toward a desired future.

It is also not a team-building meeting where members negotiate roles or work processes.

Attendance: The objective in inviting participants is to “get the whole system in the room.”

A broad cross-section of stakeholders is invited to participate. A conference to determine the future of a school district may invite administrators, students, parents, teachers, staff, business leaders, and elected and government officials.

Involving multiple stakeholder groups is an important feature of a search conference, for two reasons.

First, involvement leads to better input and better decisions. When participants share what they know, every participant learns something about another stakeholder group (their opinions, goals, and problems) that they may not have realized when they examined the situation from their perspective. New relationships are built.

Second, involvement means that implementation is more likely because solutions already have built-in commitment from people who developed them.

Extensive “selling” is less necessary. “The mayor opens one door, the grass-roots activist another, the ordinary citizen still a third.

Weisbord and Janoff recommend that 25 percent to 40 percent of the participants be from outside the organization.

Most important, participants must care about the topic and have a stake in its outcome.

Data Gathering and Interpretation: The future search conference methodology approaches the task of data gathering and interpretation differently from the traditional role of the OD practitioner.

Instead of the practitioner leading the data gathering and interpretation process, Weisbord remarks that “in search you have people interacting, collecting, and interpreting their own data."

Participants may bring external data, but their own experiences tend to be the most powerful source of data.

By conducting the data interpretation process themselves, participants take responsibility for managing their own content and group process, skills that will be important following the conference as groups take action without the aid of a consultant.

Exploring the Wider Context: The conference is designed for participants to hold a broad dialogue about their shared past and present before attempting to plan a future.

In doing so, they learn how their past paths intertwine and interrelate and how they each have arrived at a particular interpretation of the present based on this foundation.

With the wider context as a foundation, participants can have a dialogue about a future in which they also all will participate.

Structure: A future search conference involves few to no presentations, training, or speeches by top executives. Instead, it tends to follow this 3-day pattern

Strategic Change Interventions (5 of 5)

Search Conferences and Future Search

Day 1 (Afternoon): Focus on past.

Day 2 (Morning): Prouds and sorries.

Day 2 (Afternoon): Creative presentation.

Day 3: Agreement and action plans.

Day 1 (Afternoon): The first theme for the afternoon is a focus on the past. Participants sit in heterogeneous groups, often with people whom they have never met. On long sheets of paper posted on the wall, participants write their experiences along 5- to 10-year time frames under three categories: “Personal,” “Global,” and a third focusing on the company, community, or the issue on which the conference is focused. Then the topic immediately shifts to present trends that are affecting them. The activity is a “mind map,” a large graphic display of trends and their relationships to one another. As the final activity of the day, participants vote on which of the top trends they believe are most influential.

Day 2 (Morning): The next morning, participants are reseated into stakeholder groups. They analyze the influential trends from the previous day, and they share with the larger group what their individual stakeholder groups are currently doing with respect to the trends and what they would like to do in the future. Next, the same groups make two lists. The first list is their list of “prouds,” or those things they are currently doing with respect to the organization or focal issue that they are proud of or that are working well. The second is a list of “sorries,” those things they regret or that are not working well. By the end of the morning, the stakeholder groups have acknowledged their place in the system’s success.

Day 2 (Afternoon): In the afternoon, talk turns to the future, and participants are again reseated in diverse stakeholder groups. Each group has a single deliverable: a creative presentation of their desired state in 10 to 20 years, often putting themselves into the future and looking back on today with the hindsight of experience. Participants often report that this was the most energizing, entertaining, and powerful part of the conference.

Day 3: The final day is devoted to developing agreements and action plans. The whole conference group reviews the lists of themes, projects, and disagreements from the previous day. Individuals and stakeholder groups face the reality of the choices they need to make about the future, and they may not be willing to support some of the identified alternatives. The objective is to identify those actions, based on a common vision of the future, that groups can support. Once projects or themes are agreed to, stakeholder or ad hoc groups meet to develop short-term or long-term action plans.

Quality and Productivity Interventions (1 of 3)

Total Quality Management

Uses quality principles and tools.

Organizational architectures.

Statistical Process Control (SPC).

Five basic activities of TQM.

Uses quality principles and tools: TQM uses quality principles and tools to manage and improve processes through employee involvement in teams. Quality, in this respect, is not just the responsibility of manufacturing products that are error-free.

Organizational architectures: It can be defined as creating and implementing organizational architectures that motivate, support, and enable quality management in all the activities of the enterprise.

Statistical Process Control (SPC): In TQM, processes are systematically measured using statistical techniques, called statistical process control (SPC), to chart the accuracy and productivity of each process.

Five basic activities of TQM:

Identify customers and what they value at all levels: The top management team must support the quality effort in the organization and should meet regularly with top and potential customers to assess the organization’s products and services. Moreover, TQM also emphasizes meeting the needs of internal customers, for those departments that serve others internal to the organization, such as finance or human resources.

Identify products and services provided: Customers should be asked which products or services they value, how they use those products or services, and what improvements would make the product or service even more valuable.

Define processes: Flowchart techniques are used to document the actual process in use today, with all its flaws, including rework, testing, and quality checks. Employee teams can document processes and point to common problems or errors in the process.

Simplify the process: Like quality circles, ad hoc cross-functional employee teams can take ownership for process improvement activities as those closest to the action. Unnecessary process activities can be combined with others or eliminated to streamline the number of steps required.

Continuously improve: Incremental process changes can be made regularly when data from SPC charts and root cause analysis tools prove that there is a fault in the process. SPC charts show the standard variations in the process so that when a process exceeds these levels, action can be taken to understand and correct where errors are occurring. Management must rely on data (such as quantitative charts) to make decisions rather than making decisions on a hunch or best guess.

Quality and Productivity Interventions (2 of 3)

Reengineering

Reengineering the Corporation.

Rebuilding process.

Reengineering efforts.

Value conflicts with OD.

Reengineering the Corporation: This book was written by Hammer and Champy’s and it argued that management fads and quality efforts had done little to improve productivity and profitability in corporations.

They pointed out that in most organizations, there exist tremendous inefficiencies caused by organizational structures that segment research and development, engineering, manufacturing, shipping, customer service, and more into distinct divisions that may each be successful but at the expense of another department.

Rather than make small incremental changes to existing processes (such as small technology improvements that could save a few hours or dollars in manufacturing or shipping), companies could save more time and money by rethinking and restructuring entire operations.

Rebuilding process: Hammer and Champy write that reengineering is not the same as automation, downsizing, or reorganizing; rather, it is a rebuilding process where entire organizational operations are created anew. The reengineering movement touched off by Hammer and Champy’s book continues today, sometimes under the moniker of business process reengineering (or redesign), though today it does often involve new technology and downsizing.

Reengineering efforts: comprise a leader, a process owner, a reengineering team, and an overall reengineering steering committee and “czar” (who oversee all of the organization’s reengineering efforts).

Value conflicts with OD: The primary values of reengineering tend to be about organizational profitability and process control rather than participation. Hammer and Champy note that two major flaws with most reengineering programs are that they let the corporate culture stall the effort and they fail to run the program from the top down, with the result that “frontline employees and middle managers are unable to initiate and implement a successful reengineering effort.”

Quality and Productivity Interventions (3 of 3)

Six Sigma

Statistical measure and improvement initiative.

Built with several important roles.

Steps taken to sustain Six Sigma.

Statistical measure and improvement initiative: The term six sigma has two meanings. The first is as a statistical measure; the second is as a business process improvement initiative that uses statistical methods or strives for Six Sigma–level performance. As a statistical measure, six sigma (6σ) refers to the existence of fewer than 3.4 “defects” for every 1 million opportunities.

Built with several important roles: Six Sigma is built into the infrastructure of the organization through the establishment of several important roles, called champions, master black belts, black belts, and green belts. Black belts and green belts lead improvement projects, whereas champions and master black belts remove obstacles and provide support and mentoring. Black belts work with green belt team members to apply quality tools to specific problems to drive financial savings and productivity improvements directly to the organization’s bottom line.

Steps taken to sustain Six Sigma: To implement and sustain a Six Sigma program, Harry and Schroeder (2000) write that it takes three steps:

An honest assessment of the organization’s readiness to implement Six Sigma. This includes an assessment of strategic direction, the chances of meeting financial and growth goals, and the organization’s ability to adapt effectively and efficiently to new circumstances.

Willingness to expend the needed resources. There are direct and indirect financial impacts to launching a Six Sigma program. Direct and indirect payroll costs include the number of people dedicated to the effort full-time and the time devoted by executives, team members, and process owners to measuring and improving processes.

Reflection on the objectives, scope, and timeframe for the program. This includes an assessment of what the organization wants to accomplish in which areas in what time period, and whether it is appropriate to implement a pilot program in one area, or in the entire organization at once.

Interventions in Mergers and Acquisitions (1 of 7)

Culture clashes.

Precontract stage.

Postcontract, combination phase.

Postcombination.

Culture clashes: When two organizations come together, culture clashes can occur on a variety of dimensions, such as whether the two companies match or differ with respect to the following:

Consensus decision making or autonomous decision making.

Risk taking or risk averse.

Formal or informal.

Emphasis on rapid agreement or on thorough analysis.

Emphasis on standard rules or on flexibility.

Emphasis on centralized corporate control or on regional control.

Hierarchical or egalitarian structures.

Long-term orientation or short-term orientation.

Preference for face-to-face or e-mail communication.

Successfully integrating two cultures requires significant work even before merger and acquisition agreements are signed. In each phase of the merger and acquisition process, leaders should devote some attention to cultural issues.

Precontract stage:

In the precontract stage, “human due diligence” requires cultural assessments of both the acquiring company and the company being acquired.

As Deetz, Tracy, and Simpson write, “Before an organization should even consider merging with another, it should take stock of its own corporate philosophies, goals, and visions.“

The acquiring company should know what strengths and weaknesses exist in the target company’s culture.

Some organizations that take cultural due diligence seriously actually walk away from acquisition deals when their assessment indicates that the integration would be so difficult and argumentative due to cultural factors it would not be worth it.

This level of assessment can be difficult, especially for confidentiality reasons, because the OD practitioners or human resources department are often left out of the early stages of negotiation and due diligence.

Transition to the new culture begins the moment the deal is announced.

Executives, managers, and the integration team should be prepared for and plan for employee responses to the shock of the acquisition announcement.

Communication plans should include the delivery of messages in person, frank discussion of the challenges of integration, two-way dialogue to allow employees to express their own concerns and ideas, and education about the acquiring company to ease the transition to a new cultural and organizational identity.

Postcontract, “combination phase”:

Once the merger or acquisition is announced and employees of both organizations can begin discussing it in the open, they can further explore cultural attributes of both organizations and develop what Trompenaars and Prud’homme call a “cultural gap analysis.” An integration team can be the focal point for such an effort.

The job of the integration team will be to handle the daily decisions and actions needed to effectively bring both organizations together, and it should be managed by a respected leader who can resolve conflicts among integration subteams. Tetenbaum also recommends that the integration team have a cultural leader who has strong skills and a high level of knowledge of organizational culture.

The level or type of acculturation should be an explicit topic of dialogue, however difficult it may be for the team to discuss. Nahavandi and Malekzadeh write of four acculturation scenarios:

Assimilation: This occurs when the acquired company relinquishes its cultural practices and adopts those of the acquiring company.

Integration: The acquired company and acquiring company both retain and also both relinquish aspects of their cultural identities, perhaps sharing cultural elements between them.

Separation: The acquired company retains most of its original cultural attributes, frequently remaining as a division or stand-alone part of the acquiring company.

Deculturation: The acquired company gives up its cultural attributes but is unwilling to adopt those of the acquiring company, usually leading to dissolution of the old organization.

Postcombination:

Once the two organizations are legally combined, it is common for the integration team to quietly disband, declare the organizations integrated, and ask members to return to their former jobs.

As Buono notes, “Pre-combination transition planning teams continue to be disbanded too early” and “far too many organizations continue to treat the merger and acquisition process as an engineering exercise . . . rather than a far more chaotic set of events that readily affect people’s lives and future prospects."

This may be because many observers note that a long, drawn-out integration is likely to result in long-term ambiguity and confusion.

This is unfortunate, however, because this is where the cultural integration work truly begins, as new teams need guidance and support in team formation activities and learning to cope with the cultural challenges ahead.

Such integration work can take up to 2 years or longer, depending on the size and difficulty of the acquisition, and without an integration team to provide resources and attention to integration activities and challenges, managers have few avenues for support.

Interventions in Mergers and Acquisitions (2 of 7)

Individual Integration	Team Integration	Cross-Team/ Department Integration	Organizationwide Integration
Employees spend too much time finding information and getting set up. Employees lack motivation and engagement, translating to increased turnover, absenteeism, and low productivity. Employees desire to return to “old” ways or fail to adapt to new processes, tools, and systems.	Acquired employees lack understanding of team goals, purpose, and processes. Employees do not understand or accept new roles. The team charter is unclear. There are long decision-making cycles as well as unproductive meetings and communication patterns.	Newly formed teams work at cross purposes, missing handoffs or duplicating work. There is confusion about which team handles which tasks. Employees are unclear about the strategy, and there is little buy-in to the strategy.	There is gridlock, failure to make changes over time, and an inability to realize competitive opportunities. Two companies still remain.

Table 12.1 Common Problems in Integration at Four Levels

Table 12.1: Common Problems in Integration at Four Levels

Interventions in Mergers and Acquisitions (3 of 7)

Organization Development in M&A Integration

Practitioners identify equally diverse set.

Early stages: Conduct organization assessments.

Practitioners identify equally diverse set:

The quantity, diversity, and complexity of challenges in an acquisition demand that the OD practitioner identify an equally diverse set of practices to match.

Some practitioners prefer to focus on the areas of incompatibility in organizational cultures, whereas others immediately focus on the challenges of individual transitions.

In early stages of the integration, OD practitioners should consider conducting organization assessments and sensing surveys as data gathering mechanisms to help identify sources of conflict and prioritize these interventions.

Questions should address potential trouble signs at each of the following target levels to enable the practitioner and client to select and customize appropriate interventions that match the organization’s particular needs.

Conduct organization assessments: In early stages of the integration, OD practitioners should consider conducting organization assessments and sensing surveys as data gathering mechanisms to help identify sources of conflict and prioritize these interventions. Questions should address potential trouble signs at each of the following target levels to enable the practitioner and client to select and customize appropriate interventions that match the organization’s particular needs.

Interventions in Mergers and Acquisitions (4 of 7)

Target 1: Individual Integration

M&A noted for psychological stress.

Personal concerns in acquisition process.

Interventions for Individual Integration.

M&A noted for psychological stress:

M&A activity has been noted for the significant psychological stress it places on employees, described variously as a sense of loss, anger, anxiety, uncertainty, and grief.

Individuals experiencing these emotions are likely to exhibit increased conflict, low motivation, and greater mental and physical illness, while for the organization this translates to absenteeism, turnover, and low productivity, among other outcomes.

Personal concerns in acquisition process: Early on in the acquisition process, concerns are naturally very personal. “People’s first reaction to a merger is to think of their own interests: They become preoccupied with what the deal means for their jobs, livelihood, and careers.” Once the “survivors” are confirmed, at a similarly very basic level the logistics of the job become important. Technology, facilities, telephones, badges, signage, and business cards have the potential to easily disrupt productivity if not handled accurately and swiftly. Employees’ time and attention are thus directed away from everyday work activities to solving basic problems of getting set up with basic needs and finding answers to their procedural questions.

Interventions for Individual Integration:

“Focusing on the individual earlier in the due diligence process can yield significant long-term benefits,” writes Tim Merrifield reflecting on his experience with research and development talent integration at Cisco.

Seo and Hill identify a number of prescriptions to help individuals cope with the stress of individual transitions, including counseling and social support, disengagement efforts, or grieving meetings in which individuals can share feelings of uncertainty and anxiety with others experiencing similar emotions, and two-way communication with leaders.

Collective socialization tactics in which employees and managers participate in group learning, provide opportunities to socialize with peers.

Such activities have been shown to increase embeddedness and reduce turnover among newcomers in at least one study, though this study did not focus on acquisition onboarding specifically.

Interventions in Mergers and Acquisitions (5 of 7)

Target 2: Team Integration

Consequences faced on high-level decisions.

Interventions for team integration.

Consequences faced on high-level decisions:

Newly acquired employees may not understand the purpose, goals, or direction of the new team or their role in it.

The team’s charter or mission may have changed due to the acquisition as well, and even existing (pre-acquisition) team members are likely to have questions about their responsibilities and how the new team members will fit with existing roles and processes.

The result can be long and unproductive cycles of trial and error, where team members struggle to determine who makes what decisions, miss important handoffs, duplicate work unnecessarily among team members who do not understand or respect one another’s roles or responsibilities, or engage in ineffective communication patterns.

Managers, perhaps pressured to get on with the team’s tasks, tend to throw new members into the team and expect them to pick things up as time goes on.

Since both new and tenured team members are working through Bridges’s classic stages of endings and new beginnings, failing to pay conscious attention to the transition will slow down the team integration process.

Interventions for Team Integration:

In an acquisition, it may be even more important to conduct team interventions early on in the life of the team in order to clarify changes in team membership, goals, purpose, roles, and expectations about team norms such as meetings, decision making, leadership, and communication.

One intervention in particular—team startup or transition meetings—can be effective in an acquisition to start teams off quickly and can increase acquired employees’ identification with their new teams.

Interventions in Mergers and Acquisitions (6 of 7)

Target 3: Cross-Team/Department Integration

Sense of team identity.

Tribal consequences of ingroup identity.

Interventions for cross-team/department integration.

Sense of team identity:

Recent research confirms that the longer a group has been together, the greater the feeling of loss of the historical identity, the greater the resistance to a merger or acquisition, and the more actively members will work to protect and maintain the former identity.

Colman and Lunnan found that strong identification with a former company increases employees’ resistance to new processes and approaches they are now more likely to see as substandard.

These findings underscore social identity theory which proposes that a significant part of our identity is developed and shaped by the social groups to which we belong.

The pragmatic advantages of this identification, of course, are that team members who hold a strong sense of team identity are more likely to engage with fellow team members in team goals to achieve shared outcomes.

Tribal consequences of ingroup identity: In a merger or acquisition, however, this same sense of ingroup identity can have “tribal” consequences as fighting between internal teams overtakes cooperation. Leaders of the new organization must reflect a common understanding and shared commitment to the strategies, plans, and goals of the combined organization. This highlights the importance of relationships among the leadership and management community where these issues can be openly shared, discussed, and decided.

Interventions for Cross-Team/Department Integration:

First, OD practitioners can aid leaders in managing intergroup conflict between intact teams that existed prior to the acquisition and newly acquired teams.

Organization mirror activities, joint problem-solving workshops, and microcosm groups can all be effective in increasing intergroup contact and reducing stereotypes of other teams.

Leaders of both groups can agree on a combined strategy, facilitated by OD practitioners skilled in strategic planning and goal setting.

Leadership development activities can provide leaders and managers with increased skills in managing cross-functional challenges.

Morris outlines the development of the Adobe Leadership Experience that set expectations for both pre- and postacquisition leaders with a common set of leadership attributes and values.

Interventions in Mergers and Acquisitions (7 of 7)

Target 4: Organizationwide Integration

Continual monitoring and adjustment.

Interventions for Organizationwide Integration.

Continual monitoring and adjustment:

In the integration stage, as the organization’s capacity to address these issues increases, new information usually comes to light that provides more data for effective decision making.

This research suggests that continual monitoring and adjustment following the close of the combination is a key competency in achieving a successful merger or acquisition.

During the integration process, new capabilities or opportunities may be realized that require leaders to rethink previous decisions about the organization’s design to truly realize the benefits of the acquisition.

Interventions for Organizationwide Integration:

Jasinski writing about MetLife’s organization design and acquisition process, argues that “sound organization design, applied from early in the acquisition process through implementation, can be an effective catalyst for ensuring that the structure, process, governance, metrics, and people are optimally configured and aligned to fulfill the strategy of the newly integrated organizations.”

One possible approach would involve forming a combined OD team, composed of practitioners in both the acquired and acquiring organizations, to collaborate.

Practitioners with expertise in each organization and target area can join forces to develop a comprehensive postintegration organization development strategy.

This approach has the benefit of putting the practitioner team in the shoes of the clients they are working to support (forming a team, negotiating roles and processes, observing cultural differences, and collaborating across organizations), allowing the practitioners to experience similar challenges to those of their clients.

Transorganization or Interorganization Development (1 of 3)

	Individual Integration	Team Integration	Cross-Team/ Department Integration	Organization Integration
Goal	Support employees through acquisition stress and foundational needs, and develop employee engagement	Form productive teams	Develop cooperative interactions between leaders and teams	Remove gridlock and promote future potential
Interventions	Onboarding sessions New employee orientation New manager orientation Two-way communication sessions	Team start-up meetings Manager development to foster team transitions	Intergroup/ interteam interventions Strategic planning and goal setting to jointly develop superordinate goals Leadership development to promote cross-functional networks and shared values	Organization design Large-group interventions

Table 12.2 OD Interventions That Address Common Integration Problems

Table 12.2: OD Interventions That Address Common Integration Problems.

Transorganization or Interorganization Development (2 of 3)

Entry of multiple organizations.

Examples of multiple organization relationships.

Transorganizational system’s three-step process.

Entry of multiple organizations: Multiple organizations may enter together into interorganizational relationships (also called transorganizational systems and collaborative networks) “to exchange or pool their resources, or they may decide to work together toward some common and mutually agreed upon end, or they may collaboratively produce a new product or service.”

Examples of multiple organization relationships:

Joint ventures for new products or services.

Consortia to develop industry standards.

Production networks.

Public-private partnerships, such as those in education or health care.

Co-ops or purchasing networks.

Trade agreements, associations, or unions.

Joint research and development consortia.

Lobbying associations of for-profit and not-for-profit organizations.

Transorganizational system’s three-step process: In this three-step process of identification, convention, and organization; each of these stages presents distinct topics of concern:

Identification: The focus is on the reason for forming the TS as well as finding and inviting members who have a stake in the issue or concern to participate. Because different groups will see the problem differently, they may have different ideas about the problem’s scope and boundaries, so identifying relevant members and establishing the scope of the relationship can be difficult.

Convention: This second stage consists of soliciting input on each member’s perception of the problem, members’ objectives and motivations to join, and developing a commitment to taking action to address the issue.

Organization: Members explore and agree on the desired future they would like to see, including actions each would agree to take to reach that future. Some have used the search conference methodology described earlier to do so. Participants develop working arrangements on topics such as communication preferences, norms of participation, decision making, leadership, and structure.

Transorganization or Interorganization Development (3 of 3)

Hierarchy and structure.

Membership relationships.

Trust and collaboration.

Network choreographer.

Hierarchy and structure: They are different in transorganizational systems from those in typical organizations:

In many cases, group members participate on equal footing with no hierarchical relationship between them, and no higher-level “manager” to resolve disputes.

Members must conduct their own activities in a self-regulating fashion.

Some have suggested that transorganizational systems are “underorganized,” meaning that participants are only loosely tied to one another, with vaguely defined purposes and few or no policies or formal procedures.

In these situations, change strategies should “increase organization of the system” such as “increasing shared norms and values, and designing structures, roles, and technologies to create predictability and regularity."

Membership relationships: They are unique compared with most organizations in which employees all have the same relationship (or similar relationships) to the organization.

Membership in a transorganizational system can be voluntary, as in the case of a cooperative production network or international political body, in which case participation and engagement of all members is a primary concern.

In these cases, it helps to know members’ motivations for participating and individual members’ goals and objectives.

Different members may have different objectives and desires for the system, some of which may conflict.

Participation can also be involuntary or mandated by regulation or law, where conflict may be more apparent.

In both cases, members of the transorganizational system also are members of their “home” organization, and often must report back to it or get official permission from it to act on the home organization’s behalf.

Consequently, negotiations and agreements often involve several rounds of discussion.

Change agents working with these systems can help to define decision processes so that members are clear about what levels of agreement are required.

Trust and collaboration: They are special concerns in transorganizational systems, and political issues are likely and can be highly charged.

For example, competitors may decide cooperatively to join together and come to agreement on joint industry standards because the market demands it, but each has a separate interest in its own success.

Members may suspect other members’ motives and hidden agendas for their choices, contributions, or opinions.

Lobbying, vote-trading, power struggles, and coalitions are likely results.

Vangen and Huxham write that trust and collaboration can be developed in these systems through a gradual cyclical process of trust building, taking risks, managing power imbalances and dynamics, and achieving modest incremental successes as a foundation for further trust.

They also note that it may not be possible to build a highly trusting relationship in these systems and that the system must learn how to manage with this situation.

Network choreographer: Network relationships are maintained through a leadership role they call the “network choreographer,” who organizes participants and develops and maintains network relationships. Choreographers must also be:

Entrepreneurs, “to hold the vision and be comfortable with the ambiguity inherent in creating and growing something new.”

Passionate advocates, who can persuade others of the vision of the collaboration.

Coaches and mentors, “working with senior leadership to guide them in understanding the implications of some of their actions and decisions.”

Indefatigable communicators, who can “bridge silos that exist in traditional organizations and create links between organizations.”

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Engaging with clients.

Design of the change process.

Engaging with clients: In many ways, a dialogic OD process suggests different ways of engaging with clients throughout the OD engagement, including contracting. Dialogic OD interventions look different from and are facilitated differently from traditional OD interventions. In dialogic OD, interaction and conversation are the priority, and participants are given ownership and responsibility to bring up the issues and topics that matter most to them.

Design of the change process: It has to ensure that two key things happen:

The people who will ultimately embody and carry out the change are engaged, along with leaders and other stakeholders, in discussing what changes ought to occur.

Members self identify, individually and in groups, the changes they want to take responsibility for.

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Role of the OD Practitioner in Dialogic OD Interventions

Role difference in dialogic OD and diagnostic OD.

Described as planner and designer.

Role difference in dialogic OD and diagnostic OD: In diagnostic OD the practitioner plays a principal role in gathering information about the system, feeding it back, and facilitating interventions designed to change the system. In dialogic OD, this role takes a different perspective as the consultant role is more about acting as “a facilitator of events and constructor of a container within which client systems engage themselves rather than being a central actor in diagnosis, intervention, and/or facilitation of interpersonal and group interaction.”

Described as planner and designer: This role is described as a “planner and designer” of events whose responsibility approaches that of “convening or hosting,” creating the right conditions for a community of engaged participants to arrive at their own interpretations and organize their own outcomes. Marshak and Heracleous also observe that in a dialogic approach to OD, the facilitator must take “a discursive orientation to organizational phenomena” to make “real-time process observations, interpretations and interventions.”

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Role of the OD Practitioner in Dialogic OD Interventions

Dialogic OD facilitation.

Dialogic OD practitioners.

Dialogic OD facilitation: Where traditional facilitation techniques might encourage participants to deal with problematic conflicts and come to a set of final conclusions about what actions to take, dialogic OD facilitation might encourage participants to hold off on final conclusions but instead experiment with questions that encourage thinking about future-oriented possibility.

Dialogic OD practitioners:

They create “containers” where this kind of thinking and dialogue can take place.

In the events that are convened in dialogic OD practice, practitioners create “a time and space where normal, business as usual ways of interacting are suspended so that different, generative conversations can take place."

Facilitators help to involve and invite the right people to attend, frame the questions that will guide the conversations in a helpful way, and seek the balance between a loose enough structure that invites multiple interpretations and one that guides the group to action.

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Examples of Dialogic OD Practices

World Café.

Seven integrated design principles.

Engaging participants in conversations.

Open Space Technology: Four Principles and One Law.

World Café: It is an intervention designed to bring large groups together in the discussion of issues important to them, based “on the assumption that people already have within them the wisdom and creativity to confront even the most difficult challenges.” It makes use of the principle that in everyday organizations, we self-organize as we bring new colleagues into conversations, debating ideas, sharing knowledge, challenging thinking, asking questions, and persuading others.

It takes seriously the idea that an organization is an “evolving web of conversations and it encourages groups to foster these networks as they explore a common issue of concern.”

World Café is based on seven integrated design principles:

Set the context.

Create hospitable spaces.

Explore questions that matter.

Encourage everyone’s contribution.

Cross-pollinate and connect diverse perspectives.

Listen together for patterns, insights, and deeper questions.

Harvest and share collective discoveries.

Engaging participants in conversations:

By engaging participants in conversations on significant issues and multiplying these conversational insights through rotations, participants build on one another’s ideas, which sets the stage for collective insights to emerge and actions to take place.

There are many methods for the individual tables to present and acknowledge their insights about the collective contributions, but the important point is that as they do so, a greater awareness of the whole group emerges.

Open Space Technology:

Genesis of Open Space Technology is a meeting design that is often used when a diverse group of people must deal with complex and potentially conflicting material in innovative and productive ways.

It is particularly powerful when nobody knows the answer and the ongoing participation of a number of people is required to deal with the questions.

Open Space is inappropriate for situations where a decision has already been made.

Four Principles and One Law: Open Space operates with a set of values called Four Principles and One Law.

These principles remind both participants and facilitators that voluntary participation increases the quality of the discussion and that progress depends on whatever willing participants show up, no matter when the meeting starts or how long it lasts.

The Law of Two Feet is intended to give everyone the freedom to move to another discussion where they find they may have more interest, passion, or commitment.

Owen writes that Open Space is a “bare bones” method of facilitation that takes seriously the desire for individuals to organize themselves, and that the facilitator, client, and participants must have faith in the process to reach the outcomes desired.

When the conditions are right, Owen writes, “the people involved find themselves excited, energized, and ready to move forward."

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Introducing Dialogic OD Successfully

Entry and contracting: Clarifying the sponsor role and dialogic mind-set.

Blending traditional and dialogic OD.

Entry and Contracting: Clarifying The Sponsor Role and Dialogic Mind-Set:

During the contracting process, practitioners must be clear with sponsors about what the sponsor role entails, as it may feel risky or put the sponsor in a vulnerable position. Sponsor and practitioner must be willing to buy into:

A basic attitude of not knowing.

Engaging diverse players in dialogic, nonhierarchical conversations, not top-down communication and one line of command.

Ensuring that both the results and the process are emergent and cocreated.

Focusing on the future.

Specifying these values explicitly clarifies the underlying mind-set of dialogic OD for the sponsor. Failing to do so might mean that we run the risk that when the process reaches a point of collective empowerment that the sponsor cannot tolerate any more, the sponsor takes back control and starts giving orders. Clear contracting for the dialogic OD approach and mind-set can help to prevent that from happening.

Blending Traditional and Dialogic OD:

Oswick proposes that perhaps dialogic and diagnostic OD might be combined in a single consulting engagement where “the outcomes offer a more provisional and plurivocal, rather than a finite and prescriptive, understanding of the processes being explored” in a joint and open diagnostic process.

Gilpin-Jackson writes of diagnostic and dialogic OD as being on a continuum rather than a choice of two practices.

She describes a blended diagnostic/dialogic OD engagement where the organization’s readiness for change was low but the complexity of the project was high.

In this situation, diagnostic data were gathered through a more traditional process to develop an initial set of tentative and temporary conclusions, but then the data were discussed in open facilitated sessions where multiple perspectives surfaced and multiple events were held for the group to decide collectively how to take action.

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Introducing Dialogic OD Successfully

A sponsor with the authority to commandeer necessary resources and support emergent change An effective sponsor–change agent working relationship Reframed problem/challenge into possibility centric, future-focused issue that is personally meaningful to community members Identification of the appropriate community for addressing the issue and a way to get them to come to the event(s) Convening events that build the relationships among community members so that readiness to engage in the change issue is heightened Convening events that create and/or utilize generative images to provoke new thinking and catalyze self-generated change proposals from the community Slack resources are available to support emergent changes Processes for sponsors to “track and fan” emergent changes

Table 12.3 Key Conditions for Successful Dialogic OD Interventions

Source: Bushe, G. R. (2013). Dialogic OD: A Theory of Practice. OD Practitioner, 45(1), 11–17. Reprinted with permission.

Table 12.3: Key Conditions for Successful Dialogic OD Interventions.

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Introducing Dialogic OD Successfully

Skills needed for the dialogic practitioner.

Strategic process design.

Event design.

Dialogic facilitation skills.

Skills Needed for the Dialogic Practitioner:

Traditional skills required of OD practitioners include knowledge of different types of interventions, consulting skills, data collection and analysis, and organizational behavior.

These skills are necessary if one thinks of change as in systems theory, from one relatively stable state to another. In that case, the job of the practitioner is to help guide the organization through that transition through interventions.

In dialogic OD, with the change in mind-set to ongoing, continuous, adaptive change fueled by new ways of interacting, not only are the underlying mind-set and practices different, but the skills required to help are different as well.

Strategic Process Design:

Designing one or a sequence of change processes to occur that form at least a coherent structure or narrative at the outset.

Storch writes that the design of the change process often comes as a result of thinking through “what kind of conversations are needed in order to achieve the desired outcome and how these conversations might take place."

As dialogic OD engagements often involve a design team and encourage broad-based participation from many people in the design stages, practitioners must be comfortable and skilled in working with diverse stakeholder groups during the design phase.

Event Design:

Being able to create events that strike a balance between a structured approach and one that is emergent, flexible, and adapts to what happens during the event.

“The skills to stay in the moment with others, to engage their concerns and meaning making without providing answers or false certainty to assuage their anxiety about change, and to facilitate conversations that generate new possibilities are vital."

Knowing the basic approach of a World Café or future search is important, but practitioners must be skilled to know when to deviate from the typical approach to make it fit the present needs of the event.

Dialogic Facilitation Skills:

Intervening in the ongoing sequence of events, as in dialogic process consultation, with outward and inward skills.

Examples of outward skills are the ability to reframe statements back to participants so that the conversation continues in a productive fashion, or to ask questions that prompt a new way of thinking about the situation or topic under discussion.

Inward skills refer to the ability of the practitioner to be conscious of his or her own feelings, thoughts, reactions, and desires.

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Further Areas for Development of Dialogic OD

Lack of additional skills.

Opportunity to explore conditions.

Lack of additional skills: There are a variety of dialogic OD approaches now in use, but we do not yet know when each approach is most useful for what kinds of situations. Theorists have explored an initial set of practitioner skills required to perform dialogic OD, but it is not yet clear what additional skills may be required to successfully conduct dialogic OD engagements or how practitioners might gain those skills.

Opportunity to explore conditions: We are only beginning to understand when and how dialogic OD practices and other traditional forms of OD might be combined or adapted together. There is also an opportunity to continue to explore the conditions necessary to make dialogic OD successful, and when it might be ill advised.

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Positive Organizational Scholarship and Appreciative Inquiry

Examines positive phenomena.

Three components of positive phenomena.

Abundance culture.

Positive practices at work.

Examines positive phenomena:

The field of positive organizational scholarship (POS), a branch of the field of positive psychology founded by Martin Seligman, suggests new approaches to organization development by examining positive phenomena and their outcomes. Positive organizational scholarship “advocates the position that the desire to improve the human condition is universal and that the capacity to do so is latent in most systems.” POS investigates phenomena such as resilience, meaningfulness, gratitude, and positive relationships and the influences of those phenomena on organizational effectiveness.

Three components of positive phenomena:

An affirmative bias (away from negative phenomena): We focus on “strengths, capabilities and possibilities rather than threats, problems and weaknesses."

An emphasis on goodness, or the best of the human condition: We seek to elicit “virtuous actions” where organizational members may assist others without any expectation of self-benefit, setting aside blame, offering forgiveness for mistakes, and being open with information.

Positive deviance, or extraordinarily successful outcomes: By positive deviance, we mean examining conditions and moving to a state where the organization or team is not just satisfactory, effective, or efficient, but instead striving to flourish, find excellence, and create extraordinary results.

Abundance culture: An organization that develops these three areas creates an “abundance culture” that improves social capital, develops positive emotions, and builds strengths, all of which create high-quality relationships and a resilient culture that can improve organizational performance. Several studies attest to these outcomes.

Positive practices at work: It will improve organizational performance through three factors:

Amplifying effects, whereby positive practices create positive emotions in an upward spiral, producing an environment where other organizational members also want to display positive practices.

Buffering effects, whereby positive practices help organizational members remain resilient through difficult times, inoculating them against the negative effects of distress.

Heliotropic effects, whereby organizational members tend to be more attracted to positive social systems than negative ones.

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Positive Organizational Scholarship and Appreciative Inquiry

The StrengthsFinder approach.

Appreciative inquiry.

Seeds of change.

4-D cycle.

The StrengthsFinder approach: It advocates investigating attributes where an individual or team has a talent, in contrast to a weakness-based approach to development in which development programs generally push individuals and teams to shore up deficiencies.

Appreciative inquiry: One method of intervening in teams and organizations consistent with this philosophy is called appreciative inquiry. Whereas ordinary problem-solving approaches follow a standard process of identifying problems, brainstorming possible causes and their negative effects, generating solutions, evaluating possible solutions, and implementing the ideal solution, the appreciative inquiry process begins with the team’s strengths.

Seeds of change: Cooperrider and Whitney write that “the seeds of change, that is, the things people think and talk about, the things people discover and learn, and the things that inform dialogue and inspire images of the future are implicit in the very first questions we ask.”

4-D cycle: The appreciative inquiry process consists of four steps or phases, called a “4-D cycle.”

Discovery: The discovery process consists of engaging the team and relevant stakeholders in a dialogue about strengths, best practices, accomplishments, and rewarding experiences. Topics are turned around from what is absent or not working to what the team would like to see happen more often and what is working well.

Dream: Participants look to the future to imagine how things could be, articulating and sharing their visions for the future.

Design: The team collaboratively constructs a vision for a new future and actions that move the team or organization to a desirable new point.

Destiny: Last, the discussion focuses less on action plans and spreadsheets and more on creating grassroots networks (including those beyond the team) of interested and committed parties who are empowered and who freely choose to take action on their own.