John to consultant: Alexander (boss) told me that I would get a two month bonus by Jan 13. Yesterday at lunch, I reminded him, and he said, “I never promised you anything like that.”

Ira (who works with John but in another department) to consultant: Alexander makes up decisions ex post facto, so you can’t win with him. But I’m 65, with two years to go till my pension, so fuck it. What do I care!

Consultants can find themselves in a quandary in such situations. What is the best approach to take when confronted with stories like those told about CEO Alexander?There are 3 approaches which I want to map out.

• Manipulation

Managers do use selective memory loss as a tool to change decisions, wiggle themselves out of an uncomfortable situation, or de-commit from something they promised because reality changed. So, let’s be real – this all could be part of CEO Alexander’s strategy when the going gets rough. Look for that pattern: that’s always my default action plan. In my 45 years of experience, I would estimate that “poor memory” is very very often best explained (away) as a manipulation of some sort.

• Organizational memory is poor

At times, different people remember different things, especially when ambiguous terms (“at the beginning of next year”) or sensitive promises to clients (“it should be fully functional by the spring”). If key decisions are not documented via a plan of record, or a meeting summary, or a text message, then it is organizational memory that needs to be the focus. However, often an organization will push back on too much decision clarity as it is seen as backing oneself into a corner.

• Oh my, it IS memory loss

In the unfortunate case that there is lots of smoke, and perhaps you yourself has encountered the memory eclipse, the first step is to find out if the client is going through a stressful rough patch. If so, discuss the stress with the client. If the memory loss is not stress related, my suggestion is to wait until you and the client remember things differently, on several occasions, and then-discuss the option of seeing the relevant professional health provider.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/it54wi0maaxsby0g8t480/Episode-3-01-07-25-Customers-v-stock-holders.mp3?rlkey=xxsew826g37bfjn6bysgj2p81&st=jnjako8d&dl=0

Or-why customer service has gone down the toilet….and how HR fiddles as Rome burns. Veteran Canadian journalist Howard Schwartz, shown below,  interviews me.

Ann has been hired as an OD consultant to facilitate a process revising “the strategy, the supporting strategy and the critical success factors of a large cosmetics, family owned firm active in 16 countries. The process will take place over one year, with meetings in Paris, Rome, Goa and Tel Aviv. Ann reports to the board, who has instructed Ann to “add a “wow” factor. A market dip 6 months into the project stops the process cold. The chairman wrote Ann that “we hope to restart in two years”. The outcome of the process until it was stopped is a 18 word mission statement.

Harold has been asked to work with a mortgage companies’ call centre due to “employee churn” of 50% a month. Harold chose to “shadow” the shift leaders and give them ongoing feedback about their people skills. However, the shift leaders themselves left and the new shift leaders hired in their place had, as per the HR manager, great people skills. Harold’s project ended.

The “time frame focus” of organization development efforts varies between clients and practitioners; each time frame focus may be legitimate but some foci (plural of focus) are better than others.

There are those who focus on a rather long term which entails working on sustainability, vision and other elements that will (or will not) impact the organization is a few years. Clients and consultants who choose to do OD in this fashion are often well off or government funded, multi layered, and have plenty of people in “staff” positions who garner power by managing these efforts.

In my experience, these projects are either effective, or they are not. Often the output consists of statements/declarations, ppt presentations, training and are subsequently translated into branding efforts.

At the other extreme to the long-term focus, there are short term OD efforts which help cope with on-going operational issues, such as better coordination between pre-sales, sales and marketing. These efforts include team building efforts, facilitated meetings and 1:1 consultation.

These types of efforts are successful in the short run by compensating for flaws in the skills of management, and/or serve as a counterbalance to internal political pathologies. Often when these interventions cease, the status quo ante reappears.

In the centre, between the operational short-term and the long-term focus is the type of OD that I find myself doing for the many decades (4) that I have been in practice.

To explain the focus, I will use an automobile-related metaphor. In daylight, we do not need headlights.  Yet, at night we need to use our headlights, and at times, the bright lights. However, we don’t have lights that are, let’s say, twice or thrice as bright as our bright lights. Using another metaphor-neither tactical not strategic-but rather mid range…beyond tactics and less than strategy.

The OD interventions focused on this time frame include creating more scalability via minor tweaks in organizational design, introduction of new positions, revamping onboarding, and improving enabling small changes which will, eventually enable bigger changes.

Sadly, there is too little effort to train OD practitioners about the time frame goal-post that they should be aiming at with their clients. Too much focus is given to OD trends and fashions, outdated values, and crying about the past.

OD practitioners who adopt this approach will never find themselves short of work, nor getting booted out when budgets get cut “because we cannot afford fluff and/or we can do without you”.