The People Bulletin

Over the past year many of us have come to experience first hand something about chaos and complexity. What most of us knew as a butterfly flapping its wings causing a tidal wave on the other side of the world was illustrated powerfully in the sorry saga of the sub-prime loans. Since then household names like Woolworths and Royal Doulton have disappeared, heads of industry such as Sir Fred Goodwin have been vilified and ridiculed and the skyscrapers in Canary Wharf have been shaken to the core. As if that were not bad enough we have also approached the edge of chaos in our public institutions with widespread disbelief that tax payers money is spent on moats and duck houses! What has all this got to do with OD?

We have heard a lot recently about systemic failure which seeks to place the blame on the wider system rather than individuals and we have reached a point where our organisations and institutions now have a major task in rebuilding customer, employee and public trust. It is time for some serious organisational development to take a whole systems approach to organisational cultures that have enabled some of our top people to remain blind to risk and bad practice. Frog Theory suggests that if you put a frog in a pan of boiling water it will jump out, if you slowly heat it will simply cook. One of OD’s roles is to shock the system into action.

The Institute for Employment Studies has taken a fresh look at current UK OD practice through interviews with practitioners and chief executives, to examine the value of OD in the face of such turmoil.

OD past and present

OD was born in the post-war era as a response to worker alienation and the dehumanising impact of scientific management practices. It drew on the behavioural sciences such as psychology and sociology and brought humanistic values to the study of motivation and employee involvement. OD replaced the old Cartesian and Newtonian mechanistic view of organisational life with metaphors of health and body. Early OD practitioners were interested in group dynamics and what drives behaviour. They were also pioneers of the employee feedback survey and were strongly evidence-based, using action learning principles to encourage cycles of change and reflection.

OD itself, however, has had to adapt to survive and traditional textbook definitions of top down, planned, incremental change seem somewhat out of step with our turbulent working world. In response, practitioners have drawn on the new sciences such as social movement theory, complexity science and chaos theory in order to understand some of the underlying principles of living systems.

Core OD principles

Our research suggests that OD has built on its heritage but is sensitive to specific organisations, industries and environmental conditions which means that OD is practised very differently in different contexts. Whilst it remains highly contextual, however, there are some core concepts.

At its heart, OD is about organisational change and effectiveness. Practitioners talk about working with emergent (some call it ‘improvisational’) change; establishing a direction for change and working in a way that is responsive and adapts to fluctuations in the real world.

Importantly it works with the whole system to support organisational strategy. For example a coaching initiative may or may not be an OD intervention. It is the connection to the larger strategic intent that earmarks it as OD.

At the heart of OD practice is a careful balancing act. Along with a keen emphasis on being business focused, often data driven, the humanistic values of OD have not been lost on today’s practitioners. However they have been translated into current business language. Practitioners talk about ‘supporting engagement’, ‘making human connections’ and ‘optimising the potential of people’.

Another balance is to both facilitate and challenge. ‘My role is to advise the organisation, not to tell them what to do. It’s like coaching for a whole organisation’, explained the head of OD for a City firm. Yet OD is not a soft option as a former head of OD and HR in a large housing association explains; ‘OD does far more than just challenge the status quo. It can really uproot the whole lot’.

Tools and techniques

While OD is known for creating and borrowing a whole range of interventions and approaches, practitioners are keen to emphasise it is much more than a kitbag of tools and techniques. OD tools range from various types of whole system events designed to break down organisational silos, to techniques for changing the quality and type of conversations people have in organisations . They are designed to engage people rather than just inform them. Storytelling, for example, has become increasingly popular to deliver messages that hook the emotions and inspire. Stories are easy to remember and spread.

Social movement theory similarly provides insights into how popular ideas catch on and spread. The phenomenon of Susan Boyle is a good example of global spread. OD practice recognises that big change does not necessarily take big effort (Newtonian principle). Small interventions can have unforeseen implications.

The future for OD

The systemic nature and organisation-wide remit of OD means that it rarely sits neatly in an organisational hierarchy. OD practitioners often work at and across traditional boundaries. Our research concludes that it is not a functional discipline and as such it can be done by a variety of individuals who have an instinctive understanding of how organisations and systems work. This distributed capability is particularly effective when the chief executive has an OD mindset.

OD has a long tradition and strong legacy which remains as relevant to day in tackling worker alienation and lack of trust as it did in the post-war years. Practitioners remain upbeat about the future and believe they make an important contribution in tough times. As organisations and institutions navigate the edge of chaos, rather than succumb to the temptation to control and regulate, they would do better to draw on OD skills to re-engage employees, design more flexible structures where front line people are able to take responsibility for solving the problems close to them and their customers.