Organization Development

By Matt Minahan When Rip Van Winkle awakened from his 20 year-long sleep, he was confused about what he saw, and no one in his home town recognized him (Irving, 1907).

As the field of organization development turns 60, it is time for us to awaken from our decades-long sleep walk, and recognize the tectonic shifts that are underway. New ideas, new values, new demands, new competitors, new expectations are all pushing the field to awaken from its Rip Van Winkle-type slumber. And if we are lucky, those who see us anew will find us just as hard to recognize as was Van Winkle in his small town in the Catskill Mountains along the Hudson River.

The field of organization development formed in the late 1950s around a nexus of psychologists, trainers (NTL Institute), educators (university professors and administrators such as Edie Seashore), engineers (at TRW, Esso of Canada, GE, etc.), and a stage manager (Dick Beckhard). MacGregor and Beckhard’s work at General Mills in the late 1950s, called “bottom up management,” was one of the earliest seeds from which OD has blossomed (Beckhard, 1997).

As the field approaches 60 years, there are many things to be proud of, some things we could have done better, a number of assumptions we have about who we are, and some hard choices ahead about who we want to be in the world, if we choose to rouse ourselves from our history of slumber.

What We Can Be Proud Of

The benefit of our eclectic history has been an energy, vitality, and diversity as a field that we have also offered to our clients and the world. We have strived to be strong and constant advocates of equality and voice for all. We have brought a social scientist’s thirst for hard data to support our actions, research, and interventions. We have worked with some success at keeping lines of communication open among ourselves and adjacent disciplines such as sociology and psychology.

We have seen the emergence of ideas and concepts that struggled at first, but now have broad currency in our field. Think: MacGregor’s Theory X and Y, Ouchi’s Theory Z, Quality Circles, Blake and Mouton’s Managerial Grid, Hersey and Blanchard’s Situational Leadership, the MBTI, Participatory Management, Organizational Transformation, Appreciative Inquiry, and now Dialogic OD (Scherer, et al., 2015).

As students, professors, and practitioners alike we have used our OD skills and knowledge to organize ourselves and others to bring social change to our organizations, schools, cities, nations, and the world.

Leaders in our field were early supporters of labor rights, civil rights, LGBTQ rights, school integration, women’s rights, social consciousness, and environ- mentalism. We took principled and often difficult stands against racism and apartheid, unfair imprisonment and detention, discrimination and

OD: Sixty Years Down, and the Future to Go

“As the field approaches 60 years, there are many things to be proud of, some things we could have done better, a number of assumptions we have about who we are, and some hard choices ahead about who we want to be in the world, if we chose to rouse ourselves from our history of slumber.”

5OD: Sixty Years Down, and the Future to Go

homelessness, and other causes. As the world has shifted, we are now working to understand and overcome the negative effects of globalization, the downward pressure on wages, increased pressure on quarterly profits, privilege, implicit bias, rights for people of all genders and preferences, income inequality, police- community relations, and more.

Borrowing the words of futurist and pioneer Frank Burns, as a field, we have been working to “close the gap between the human condition and the human potential” (Levy & Merry, 1986, p.122).

On any scorecard, the field of OD has been a major contributor to the great social and organizational changes that have occurred in our lifetimes.

What We Could Have Done Better

As with any human system, the many good things that make for our success also have downsides, which historically we have not managed well and which have contributed to our own dysfunction as a field. As early as 1972, Larry Greiner identified several “red flags” for the field, many of which are still present today: » Putting the individual before the

organization. » Focusing on the informal organization

instead of the formal organization. » Driving for behavior change without a

solid organizational diagnosis. » Putting group and interpersonal

process ahead of task. (Greiner, 1972).

Another red flag is our desire to operate at the margin of systems. This gives us a unique perspective on life in the system, but it also marginalizes us from the true center of the system, with the result that the OD function is neglected in top management decision making, strategy formulation, mergers and acquisitions, globalization, alliances and virtual organizations, corporate governance, personal integrity (Greiner & Cummings, 2004).

Our Values and Attitudes

Updating a study that was first conducted in 1994 (Church, et al., 1994), Amanda Shull, Allan Church, and Warner Burke revisited OD values and attitudes (Shull, et al, 2014). The full report on their research is at: http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www. odnetwork.org/resource/resmgr/Center_for_ Professional_Development/ODP-V46No4- Shull_Church_Burk.pdf

Their breakout of results by category is published at: http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/ www.odnetwork.org/resource/resmgr/Center_ for_Professional_Development/OD_Network_ Member_Results_20.pdf

Of the 1201 respondents in the overall sample, 690 were members of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (58%), 286 were members of the OD Network (24%), with the remaining 28% split among ISOD, NTL, APA, and AoM.

On Values OD Network members identified the top 7 as developing organizational leaders (92% on a five point Likert scale, agree or strongly agree), promoting inquiry and continuous learning (91%), facilitating ownership of process and outcome (89%), creating openness in communication (90%), empowering employees to act (89%), promoting a culture of communication (89%), and promoting employee self-awareness and growth (87%).

However, in some cases OD Network members rank ordered values differently than other survey respondents. Notably, OD Network members ranked “harder,” more business oriented values lower than the other 76% of respondents to the survey (Table 1).

Also notable are the values toward the bottom of the list. The values ranked 30–34 by the ODN members include some of the core values that would have been atop the list of the founders of the field (Table 2).

Other notable low responses included, focusing on profitability ranked 24th (65%) and diversifying the workforce ranked 26th (58%).

On Attitudes OD Network respondents were in agreement with the overall ranking and the differences were not significant in most cases. OD Network members ranked the top 6 attitudes as: 1. Practitioners should be more self-aware

before acting to change others (83% agree or strongly agree).

Table 2. Values Ranked Near the Bottom of the List

Ranked by OD Network Members Value

Overall Ranking

30th Promoting autonomy and freedom

33rd

31st Promoting democratic systems and policies

31st

32nd Establishing systems based on equality

30th

33rd Giving back to society

34th

34th Protecting the natural environment

32nd

Table 1. How ODN Members and Other Respondents Ranked Business Oriented Values

Ranked by OD Network Members Value

Overall Ranking

8th Increasing effectiveness and efficiency

2nd

9th Enhancing productivity

3rd

10th Enabling organization to grow more effectively

5th

11th Promoting excellence

6th

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2. Cultural differences between individuals should be openly discussed in the workplace (85%).

3. The field is lacking a strong external brand (77%).

4. Although topical issues may differ from the past, the core interventions that existed 50 years ago are still in practice today (68%).

5. People in the field are practicing without appropriate background, skills, knowledge, and appreciation to do so (60%).

6. There is a lack of leadership in the field (56%).

Four of the top six attitudes express some measure of dissatisfaction with the field and its leadership. Farther down the list, more than a third (36%) said that practitioners should be certified or licensed, and only 25% agreed that OD practitioners have a seat at the table and strong influence in organizational decision making.

The Hard and Soft Truths in the Data

It appears from these data that OD practitioners are no longer as committed to the core values of the field, as espoused by McGregor, Beckhard, Bennis, Tannenbaum, and others. Values such as diversity and justice, performance improvement, democracy and choice, process effectiveness, etc. (Jamieson & Gellermann, 2014, p 50) no longer seem to be at the very center of the practice of OD as they would have been in years past. And the field’s attitudes toward itself are notably dyspeptic. Our sense of ourselves as a field, at least in these data, cries out for more alignment in the field, greater clarity about who we are and what we do, and a more muscular kind of leadership than we have had in the past.

There is likely some truth in both, and yet neither or both tell the whole story.

Certainly, only a few of the founders who developed and held the values of the field still survive. For the most part, they personally trained and mentored most of the second generation of OD consultants, many of whom are now aging

out of the field. A large portion of this third generation of OD practitioners is learning about the field’s core values via graduate schools, which have brought to the education of OD practitioners rigorous well-honed curricula, results-based learning objectives, institutional grading requirements, rubrics for allocating points on assignments, and outcomes that must be met in order to maintain university funding and institutional accreditation.

As a result, today’s OD graduate students are learning OD values, but blended along with theory, models, tools, technology, and techniques into the big salad which is now OD education. They enter the field with better knowledge and tools to do the job, certainly more than just the values that were the center for the early practitioners.

It is also possible that there is less focus on OD values because practitioners believe these battles have already been won. Who would have thought that, following the huge advances in the rights of women in the 1970s and 1980s that there would now be battles over funding for women’s health? Feminists complain that today’s young women take their rights for granted. Early AIDs activists complain that risky behavior is on the rise again because people expect access to and the efficacy of AIDs medication. A similar phenomenon may be occurring with OD people around OD values as well.

It is also likely that the field has moved forward: “As the adaptive side of OD moved ahead, its values became more complex and diffuse. Traditional humanistic values of openness, collaboration, and trust frequently competed with values favoring organizational effectiveness, shareholder worth, speed to market, workforce diversity, and worker productivity” (Greiner & Cummings, 2004, p. 382).

It also appears that OD Network members are not as interested in variables around organizational performance and effectiveness as other respondents. Some of that may be explained by sampling imbalance (Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology = 58% of respondents, with fundamentally different philosophies and educational curricula of

IO psych versus OD). Also, the average age of OD Network respondents was 55.7, which under represents the third generation of OD practitioners, the very ones who are learning the craft in their graduate schools, where business impact and organizational results on the ground are key components of the curricula.

The larger truth is that the field of OD has had an allergic reaction to the hard, countable variables on which organizations run. We do not have clear and easy ways to count the impact or measure the costs and benefits of our work. “OD continues to worry about itself instead of doing the hard work of proving itself. There has been more emphasis on action and the development of interventions. As evaluation and research have become less emphasized, the field lacks a current database of ‘How do you know it worked?’” (Feyerherm & Worley, 2008, p.4).

These results may set the table for the kind of concerted action to define and energize the field in ways that we have been unable and unwilling to take on in our first 60 years.

Just Before Dawn

Historically, OD has resisted calls to define itself, establish competencies, create a certification process, and integrate across its various organizations.

We will not make a decision about defining our field, allowing every text book, author and practitioner to make up their own, such as “OD is a body of knowledge and practice that enhances organizational performance and individual development, by increasing alignment among the various systems within the overall system. OD interventions are inclusive methodologies and approaches to strategic planning, organization design, leadership development, change management, performance management, coaching, diversity, team building, and work/life balance” (Minahan, 2015).

OD practitioners tend to be individualists, with more members of the OD Network being independent external consultants than any other type of practitioner. Anecdotally, our FIRO-B

7OD: Sixty Years Down, and the Future to Go

scores trend toward low wanted Control, which suggests a fierce independence, a drive toward counter dependence, and unwillingness to align with others. “As a field, we are pretty good at promoting collaboration among others and among ourselves at a small scale; but we are not very good at creating and sustaining large scale change among ourselves or our field” (Minahan & Norlin, 2013, p. 4).

The number of VP and Director of OD jobs appears to be shrinking, even as the number and size of organizations around the world is expanding. “OD has virtually disappeared as the title of departments in many organizations” (Greiner & Cummings, 2004). The number of OD jobs with substantial HR requirements is increasing. Some look at these and say the field is on its way to extinction.

Signs of Hope for the Field

Admittedly, there are challenges that face the field. More on those in the next section. But there are many reasons to be optimistic that we can overcome them, and in cases, that is already underway.

Since 2008, the directors of OD academic programs from around the world have been meeting two and often 3 times per year, at first just to network and share learnings (Minahan, 2014). The first hopeful sign is that they formed a self-managing organization within the OD Network called the OD Education Association, which has its own charter, and whose purpose is to establish, advance, and promote the body of knowledge required in OD education: http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/ www.odnetwork.org/resource/resmgr/Docs/ ODEA_Charter_v1c.pdf

A second hopeful sign is that after several rounds of meeting and drafts, the ODEA program directors agreed on the Essential Elements of OD programs: http:// www.odnetwork.org/?page=EssentialElements

A third hopeful sign is that the OD Network is on the verge of publishing a working draft of global OD competencies. For years, members have wondered why most other membership organizations have competencies and certifications, but OD has neither. After years of effort, 2015

was when the resistance finally subsided, research was completed, a working draft was developed and circulated widely. It has received 830 comments and responses from OD practitioners around the world. Exemplars and their bosses have been interviewed. Updates have been made, and a solid working draft is due to be published early in 2016 on the ODN website, www. odnetwork.org.

There are more signs of hope in the new bodies of knowledge and practice that continue to be developed. Our roots have been in industrial organizations and psychology. Appreciative Inquiry, now almost 30 years old, shifts our focus from deficit thinking and problem solving to building on the positive assets of people and organizations, as does strengths-based leadership theory. And just in the last 5 years, Dialogic OD represents a compelling alternative to planned change efforts, focusing instead on the socially constructed realities as evidenced in conversations and images (Bushe & Marshak, 2015).

In addition, the OD Network has begun a strategic partnership with the International Society for Performance Improvement, sharing our knowledge about systems and change with them, and benefiting from their knowledge about performance and impact measurement, addressing one of the key areas that continues to limit the effectiveness of OD as a field.

There are signs that this third generation of OD practitioners, educated largely in graduate schools of business and education, are learning and leaning into the actual business dynamics in their client systems. Many can read a balance sheet. Some understand income dynamics. They are entering the field with a wealth of organizational knowledge and experience which makes them credible advisors to senior management.

Finally, it is a slow process, but we are getting better at the language of business and results, taking seriously David Bradford’s admonition, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AbB3VEy1BM, to lean into the hard questions about what difference our work makes and the impact our projects have. “An effective

evaluation process enables the client system to understand what was done, how it was done (and how well), and what impact the change process has had on the organization, on groups with the organization, and on individuals within the groups” (Livingston, 2006, p.231). And we need to take leadership in this area as well. “OD should never be on the receiving end of the ROI question. We should be the ones asking it. We should initiate the conversation on this subject. And we should initiate it at the outset, when the program is being considered” (Kruse, 2010, p.52).

Hard Choices Ahead

Fix the Troubled Relationship with HR Our fuzzy boundaries with HR are not a new phenomenon. In early years, there were debates about whether OD belonged safely tucked away in the training function where T-group training was the fad, or whether it could/should be exposed to the rough and tumble of organizational life (Burke, 2004). Sound familiar? We have still not come to grips as a field with this essential element of our self-concept, as we struggle with our boundaries with HR.

At the OD Network conference in 2004 at San Juan, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the OD Network, Warner Burke challenged the field to step up and boldly assert itself as the owner of talent management. Allan Church and others have continued the exhortation (Church & Rotolo, 2013). But where OD people are doing talent management, in too many cases, it is not because the OD function owns talent management, it is because the HR function owns OD.

The result has been a diversion of OD talent and energies into such core HR functions as employee relations, employee engagement, chairing the employee morale committee, the annual redesign of performance management systems, and dozens of other tasks to solve problems for the HR function.

“You Are My Pink and Fluffy.” Worse still is the practice of grafting OD responsibilities into the jobs of HR generalists. Even in

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the cases where they have the OD training, the transactional content of most HR jobs crowds out the space to do the true OD work that they want to do and know the system needs.

In a recent session with some OD leaders in the National Health Service in the UK, they cringed as they confessed that they are often called by their clients “The Pink and Fluffies” and the “Touchy- Feelies,” intended no doubt as a term of endearment, but definitely not taken as a compliment. In response, the NHS has created a “Do OD” campaign, an app, and a colorful DOOD character that are serious but fun attempts to upgrade the skills and practices of the 200+ people who have some OD in their jobs, and to increase the ways that OD people are contributing to the organization, getting beyond the pink and fluffy (NHS, 2015)

What Are We Missing? What is not getting done is good, solid systemic OD. With blended OD and HR jobs, it is not possible to spend enough time and effort to be credible business advisors taken seriously by top management. What is not getting done is support to leaders who are developing organizational strategy, building structure, improving business processes, creating alignment, improving goal setting and communications, building leadership teams, and changing culture.

Of course, there are exceptions. There are some truly smart and wise HR leaders who realize what a scarce and valuable commodity a strong OD person is. They understand how to leverage the time and energy of their OD people, and they orient their efforts to working “on” the system, rather than “in” the system. Some HR leaders are becoming more strategic, many with advanced degrees in OD, and they truly “get” the importance of OD.

The Fundamental Difference. But they are the exception, not the rule. In the end, there is a fundamental conflict between the purpose and mission of the two functions. At its core, the HR function exists to manage compliance, avoid risks, and to reduce payroll to the lowest possible level to get the job done. By contrast, the

purpose of the OD function is to enable the organization to expand capacity, create experiments, explore ideas, maybe take a few risks, improve the work and the work lives of managers and people, and sometimes, that just costs money.

And to that mix, add the ever greater cost pressures on staff functions like HR. So, it is no wonder that non-core functions like OD get blended with and ultimately crowded out by the transactional processes of recruiting, promoting, and paying people. It is a rare person who can combine the enlightened HR leader with solid OD capacity and adequate resources for the OD function.

As graduate students enter the OD world and become the third generation of OD practitioners, they know the world and the field better than at any time in the history of the field. They are more capable of doing the most advanced OD work than at any time in the history of the field. They are better educated and are more competent than ever before. This is the moment for solid, competent OD folk to awake from the slumber, declare independence, and attach to the COO or CFO or even the CEO, leaving HR behind.

Facing the Field Forward: Hurdles to Overcome We must overcome our propensity toward individualism. Our future depends on our ability to operate “less as a collection of independent individuals and more as a collaborative network/community of professionals who are aligned on servicing our entire global community” (Jamieson & Gellermann, 2014, p.63).

If we did that as a field, we would figure out how to knit the regional OD Networks into one coherent and cohesive whole with each other and the national Network. Our founders created a Network structure, a loosely coupled system, allowing maximum degrees of freedom to the individual parts, but which greatly diminishes the size and strength of the whole (Burke, 2014a). As attached as we historicals and romantics are to the network idea and concept, the member associations that are thriving and growing today were created as a single entity, with

membership in the local and national organizations inseparable. The long term future of the OD Network depends upon its ability to create new and stronger chapter-type relationships with its regional networks.

We have to get over the distinctions that preoccupy some in our field of defining change management as different or separate from OD. Change management is one among many things that we in OD do, and focusing on the differences magnifies them past the point of usefulness. We have much more in common than we have differences, but that is hardly reflected in our language and writing. If we did that as a field, it would make possible connections and even mergers among the OD Network, the International Society for OD and Change, the Association of Change Management Professionals, the International OD Association, the Asia OD Network, the Japan OD Networks, and other national and international organizations possible. The Second World OD Summit, this year in Portland, OR, was a joint production of the OD Network and IODA, and a potential model for how we might build bridges across all these organizations.

We have to decide if we have among us the “leadership gene” in addition to the “OD gene.” Yes, we are good at process, but taking the field forward will demand a different kind of leadership than we typically see among OD people. The best among us have the OD gene, and are good at servant leadership and leading from behind. The leadership gene requires a bolder declaration of future ideas, actions, and directions. This is the kind of advice we give to our clients. Yet, we have not been able to muster it among ourselves and too often, when strong leaders in OD arise, we undermine them and limit their ability to make change, which contributes to the sense of idling and entropy that many in OD attribute to our field. Our independence and counter-dependence as followers makes the act of leadership in OD a perilous risk.

We need to get over our desire to live at the margin of organizations and to lean into the center of organizations,

9OD: Sixty Years Down, and the Future to Go

where the power resides. Our marginality is preventing us from impacting the central core of the system, which is where decisions are made.

Conclusion

It is fitting that the founding director of the OD Network, Warner Burke, has been a foundational reference point for these thoughts, and that he would offer advice that would take us forward into the second 60 years of life in OD, for OD, and for the world (Burke, 2014b). He suggests three things to help tighten a loosely coupled system such as the field of OD and its associations and networks: » Enhanced leadership, in a shared

coalition rather than a hierarchy; » Focused attention, overcoming the

loosely coupled system’s propensity to be “all over the place,” by creating a common purpose and creating products or even events in which all participate; and

» Shared values, reminding ourselves about why we exist.

We have the third. We can do the second. Are we willing to awaken from our decades-long slumber and take on the first?

Note: Opinions expressed here to not represent those of the OD Network or its Board of Trustees

References

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Scherer, J., Alban, B., & Weisbord, M. (2015). The origins of organization development. In W. Rothwell, J. Stavros, & R. Sullivan (Eds.), Practicing organization development: Leading transformation and change (4th ed. pp. 26–41). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Matt Minahan, EdD, leads a small consulting firm, specializing in organizational strategy, structure, business process, leadership, and communications. He teaches leadership and OD at American University and is a guest lecturer at several masters and doctoral programs. He is a member and former board member of NTL Institute and the Chesapeake Bay OD Network. He has been a member of the OD Network since 1982. He has just completed his 7th year on the Board of Trustees of the OD Network, serving as co-chair in 2013 and chair in 2015. He can be reached at matt@ minahangroup.com.

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