I received a PDF today from Dr. John Scherer with an article by Minahan and Norlin called “Edging Toward the Center”. The article was published in the OD Practitioner: Vol 45: 4, 2013

The article is thoughtful, extremely well written and well worth reading. As a matter of fact, I would say it is a” must read”.

The article contains an excellent diagnosis of the issues facing OD in the context of the present economy, mapping out the challenges of working in the private sector as well as the public sector. Furthermore, the authors ask the most cogent and painful questions about the derivate issues between clients and OD practitioner in light of these the present  challenges we face.

And best of all, the article point out how irrelevant some of OD’s behaviours appear  when practiced in the extreme. Table 1 of the article should be on all of our desktops….. an absolutely brilliant description of just how absurd our values, beliefs and actions are when manifested in the extreme.

When the authors spell out “ What is to be done”,  the article falls short of what I expected. For example, the authors suggest to cease “fixating on creating space for “onlys” and other small groups at the expense of the needs of the whole.”  And they suggest that OD be more accepting of the legitimacy of power and the system. And the authors state that OD could stay focused on “strong humanistic and democratic values” , “stay out of content and focus on process ” and focus on “capacity building and development of the system”. Furthermore, OD should  not loose its focus on the  purpose of being a central  building block in the creation on “effective and healthy human systems”.

When I read the initial part (diagnostic section) of the article, I tend to reach different conclusions.

1) In the organizational reality which has been created by the present economic conditions, OD as practiced has been “voted off the island” due to its irrelevance. The values we represent are seen as out dated, not just in extreme, but almost “ in toto”.

2) In the global configuration of organizations in today’s economy, the focus on democratic and humanistic values is far too parochial and thus, almost irrelevant to global organizing.

3) A focus on process renders OD irrelevant in places where process is not the way to get things done, like in about 80% of the countries in the world (where relationships or tradition or authoritarianism play a major enabling role).

4) As far as OD’s purpose as serving as a cornerstone for Impacting human systems, I see this proposed “purpose” as  illusionary omnipotence as well  misguided use of limited energy. This is far beyond the capabilities of OD in our age of economic determinism. I see this as almost a self evident truth.

The Israelis tell a story of someone who goes to a zoo and sees a giraffe with a very very very very very long neck. When s/he leaves the zoo, s/he says to himself, “that cannot be”.

It appears to me that the authors gave us an excellent mirror into which to look, but they themselves were reticent of using the very  mirror they provide.

People may ask me what I recommend?

1) I would reply that only when OD  internalizes the depth of the crisis that we are facing can we turn to solution engineering.

2) Being practical is fine, but let’s agree we need a new operating system, not a bug fix. Now this may sound impractical, but a sinking ship needs more than “some focus”. And unless we have that new OS in place, we will find ourselves working with the lessening circle of  clients who share the somewhat archaic world view of traditional OD.

3) As far as purpose is concerned, I view the propose of a new OD operating system as the creation of a culture-agnostic  platform which enable people of  different values and  communication styles to work effectively in a global organizational configuration, in a spirit of inclusion and cooperation.

This having been said, get your hands on the article and read it.

Signal-to-noise ratio is a scientific measure which compares the level of a pure signal with the level of background noise, expressed in decibels.

I will use “noise to signal ratio” in this post to describe the amount of background noise generated in the organizational domain in which OD is done, as opposed to the OD work itself.

The level of political driven  noise involved has grown over the past years, and at present ,the level of noise is so high it is punishing.

I love doing OD and any burn out I may feel is caused by the noise, not by the OD itself.

Here is a list of major noise generating factors in OD:

1) The HR gateway into organizations, staffed by people like Gloria Ramsbottom, the HR manager we know all too well.

2) The number of coaches, cooking workshops, team building via rope climbing, etc which purport to do organizational development have rendered building a trusting relationship with clients into a steep uphill run.

3) The huge damage done by hacks who have chopped  OD into “products” has forced  OD into a vendor status, at least at the beginning of the relationship.The vendor needs to “please the client”, not to do what needs to be done. Now…..fixing this is OD work, but the low pegging of the vendor status creates horrific noise.

4) Since 2008, no one looks very good; management is hooked on quick fixes, in order to look “less bad” a.s.a.p. This causes huge noise as HR prompted by management pushes for short cuts  to look good and feel wow.

5) In many organizations, there are 4-5 consultants on the same playing field, which leads to lack of change and internecine conflict between consultants.

The birth of OD was rooted in establishing a type of organizational life which would never allow the atrocities of WW2 to occur again, and as such, OD  has a very humanistic bias in its very foundations.

The achievements of OD in establishing a humanistic compass are enormous. And while I believe that Hannah Arendt hit the nail on the head when she claimed how banal evil is, OD does provide a context for preventing certain types of evil from happening again in certain cultures.

But let’s put aside the last war for a moment, and let’s look at the present war. There is basically one dominant economic model –  is global capitalism. Other economic models do exist but they are minor players. Without competition, this dominant economic model gets more hard core, cruel and cut throat. This has impacted the economy and organizational life.

Organizational life is often a cess pool of political intrigue by folks struggling to keep a job by doing everything it takes not to be in the way of the swinging axe of the downsizing department. Everything goes when it is all about survival.

In my experience, jungle warfare within organizations seems to “pay off” by those  skilled in that art. Darwinism is a great key to understanding present organisational politics. And Machiavelli’s insights were never more apt: “Men should be either treated generously or destroyed, because they take revenge for slight injuries – for heavy ones they cannot” comes to mind.

I believe that in order to be relevant, we OD practitioners need to better understand jungle warfare, have a better grasp of Darwin and reread Machiavelli. We need to ask ourselves what can we change, and what can’t we change. And we need to ask ourselves if the solutions we provide suggest going unarmed into the battle ground. If indeed this is the perception of our work, OD has a real problem of being relevant for the present war.

1) Highly professional Organizational Development is impossible to scale. The personality of the practitioner, the trust he or she builds with the client, the accrued knowledge and experience of the individual practitioner cannot be scaled.

2) OD assumes change is constant; “constant  changing”  is a semi chaotic process ,made more effective and tenable when appropriately enabled by OD.

Change Management believes changes have beginnings and ends, and can be managed like a project.Many OD people believe (I certainly do) that change is not managed like Change Management  believes it is.

Enabling constant change like OD does  is less scalable and marketable  than “managing” change, like CM purports to do.

3) Commercial needs have led to the development of OD tools, but in the hand of the unskilled professional OD practitioner, these tools are useless, (what we call in Hebrew a “gold ring in a pigs’ nose”)

Furthermore, highly skilled practitioners use very few tools, although they have a wide eclectic knowledge of these tools.

4) Obviously, Change Management assumes change can be managed. Management has tools and templates and process. Once these tools and process become workable templates, many folks can be “scaled up” to become Change Managers.

While the personality of the Change Manager carries some weight which is non scalable, the tools and processes and templates can scale up NCG’s (new college graduates) in no time, forming armies of Change Managers.

6) I am old enough (64) to remember the TQMers who almost put OD out of business, until the software industry showed us all how far you can get delivering half cooked crap, denting  the myth of the overwhelming value of quality. (“You don’t like this version-buy the next one”.)

 As the world speeds up and the pace of constant change becomes even more furious driving organizational life into deeper chaos , the sexy myth of the manageability of change may experience “some” difficulty.  CM will become another TQM. Because there is no scalable  “cookbook” for dealing with change.

7) The very lack of scalability of OD is what makes it sustainable when well practiced.

Change management, Organizational Development and Coaching all deal with change and the enablement thereof. CM and Coaching attach huge importance to the setting and achieving  of goals. OD should not necessarily follow suite.

Change management is the top down, mechanistic and process-driven of implementation of a priori defined set of changes.  Clearly change management cannot exist without a great deal of emphasis on achieving the change goals. “We’ll get this implemented for you on time, sir; we will use template 34-77.”

Coaching supposedly assists people to achieve their goals. There is no coaching without a strong “play” on the “goals” ticket. Coaching is not only done by professionals; it is often done by “certified” and semi-trained “barefoot doctors”  (赤脚医生), who lean on a protocol of “making your dreams come true, a la “yes we can”. Like the barefoot doctors, these coaches are one trick ponies who need goals FOR THEMSELVES, to deliver what they market

OD needs to put goals in perspective. Following are 4  points we need to keep in mind in order not to emulate CM and Coaching.

• Goals change all the time due to the rapidly changing environment. The danger of sticking to your goals is obvious in many present day organizational realities.
• A twisted sense of self, personality defects and traits as well as chemical activity of the brain may lead to a wrong set of goals being set up.
• Goals are part of a system consisting of people, luck, strategy, values, constraints, motivation, politics etc. Everything does NOT need to be aligned to achieve goals; rather at times,  goals need to be changed due to circumstance. Goals are part of a system, not THE defining parameter by which we line up everything else.
• Many goals are contradictory and often,  people need to entertain 2 or more conflicting sets of goals, as they juggle the realities of post modern organizing.

Awareness of this above will ensure that the OD practitioner is wiser, less mechanistic, while truly bringing value added to our clients.

My friend Terry Seamon asked me to write a post about some of the differences between the coaching traditionally done by OD people, and the coaching work done by the coaching folks.There is not a clear boundary around either profession, and I doubt that there is even agreement if both domains are professions. But here is a first stab.

1) OD coaching assumes that goals change all the time as a result of organizational dynamics. So coaching within an OD context  is not obsessed with defining goals, because of constant flux, and lots of these goal changes are exogenic to the individual.

2) Coaching in an OD context assumes some degree of organizational “lack of wellness”exists, since the act or organizing itself creates anxiety. Anxiety is rampant in organizations and thus,coaching in an OD context will probably factor in a more “dynamic understanding of context” and  thus may be less gung-ho, “yes we can.”

3) In an OD context, coaching is ONE tool of many than can be applied. Thus, it is not a cure-all. A top OD professional will not recommend coaching when another dynamic is broken. He/she will point to the root cause, and not apply an empty “what’s your goal” protocol.

4) OD consultants would probably concur that individual coaching done within organizations executed by coachers without an OD background is misguided because it lacks context, has the wrong focus, and is a cop out from dealing with the issues at hand….like middle management training.

5) The main beneficiary of OD in the context of an OD project is the alignment of an individual or team to the system and-or change. The main organizational benefit of coaching individuals in an organization but not in the context of OD is the maintenance of the status quo.

Aging and death are natural-both for people and for organizations. Clearly an organization is not a biological entity, yet enough similarities exist to justify the parallel.

People have life cycles; when someone gets lucky, they are born, grow up, have kids, have grandkids, get sick, and die. This is natural. Yes, to some extent the aging process of an individual can be slowed down. But we all get old, sick and die; that is a best case scenario.

Organizations have life cycles as well. When they are conceived, they are crazy, sexy, innovative and informal-then they proceed along a path of aging as nature takes it course. Most organizations get very sick, get old (or prematurely old)  and die, or disappear in acquisitions or disasters such as sudden loss of market. Only few will last a long, long time. Death is part of organizational life. This is especially true now as covid has decimated supply chain, labour supply, motivation and cash flow.

If OD is to be true to its humanistic roots, we must cleanse ourselves from the denial of death. Life of a high quality needs to be prolonged, yet we need to better understand what can change and what cannot change. We need to acknowledge that an organization’s various illnesses and ultimate death are part of its life. 

OD needs to beware of over treating (yet another reorg) and over diagnosing (too much feedback when change is impossible). For many aging organizations , there are no “cures” or magic elixirs.

We must accept an organizations’ limitations & ultimate decay, which include containment of pain and eventually hospice. It do believe that there is an organizational parallel to the famed Dr Werner in the French Movie Country Doctor (Medecin de capagne), who deals with an elderly patients death with grace and dignity.

Afterthought

I wrote the above post several years ago. Since then, not only have I aged (somewhat gracefully, I hope) , but there is a pandemic raging-with organizational collapses a-dime-a-dozen, fear of illness and societal/political delay all around us.

There have been several attempts to cope with the pandemic which appear to be part of the denial-of-death which this post originally challenged. What caught my eye from the very beginning was the “back to normal” harpings of the “positive thinkers” and those who grind lemons into lemonade which aggravate the shit out of me.

Periods of sickness are normal, and after many protracted diseases, we are never the same. 

I suffer from a very painful lower back pain for most of my life, due to my height and genetics. The pain used to come and go;  now it comes much more than it goes. I keep very active, watch my weight, and wouldn’t you know it, the pain is there. However, there are good days and bad days. Good hours and bad hours. The best of times and the worst of times. This is natural. Like a pandemic.

Afterthought: Yalom’s Staring at the Sun is a brilliant guide to overcoming the fear of death. When my mind wanders in the wrong direction, Yalom’s guidance serves me well. People can and do err when fear of death prevails, butchering their lives and others’ due to not accepting the inevitable.

The present “fear” and obsession about the threats posed by AI are a good example of what happens when the inevitability of organizational death is ignored. AI is just another change. It will not make organizations immune from its natural life cycle. It will not save us, or kill us. No. It is just another change. 

Organizations are born, get old and die.

1) Change management assumes that organizations are more orderly than they really are. And, when CM encounters unexpected difficulties, they further develop tool kits to drive out the noise cause by these so called “unexpecteds”.

OD (when practiced as an art) knows that the organizations have massive underlying dynamics which render much of the “visible activity” of an organization into a very partial view of things. OD knows that the organizational world is about the anxiety caused by the chaos fuelled by constant changing.

Thus, OD’s view of things is less positive and enticing for managers.

2) Change Management is not stuck in humanistic values. Thus, CM is more appealing to managers,. Managers and CM never say that people are spare parts; they just act that way. Thus, the derivate difficulties they encounter but do not often acknowledge.

OD is rooted in humanistic values, many of which are admirable but out dated. OD has been reticent about updating its value offering by become more relevant world wide. Thus, OD is a bogged down in the values of the western world and cannot scale up to global organizing.

Thus, CM mechanizes change and ignores people while OD promulgates western values in a global environment.

3) CM is productized, easy to understand and markets well. OD is “knowledge work” with an “art” delivery mechanism when well practiced. It is very hard to market, but far more sustainable over time.