To round off this short series of articles about organisation development (OD), authors Linda Holbeche and Mee-Yan Cheung-Judge answer questions raised by readers of the previous two articles.
OD in Focus
Looking ahead, highly turbulent and constantly changing environments will mean that organisational development is likely to become increasingly recognised as a core capability
required for the design and delivery of a strategic HR agenda. Over the last three issues of Impact we have tried to provide an overview of some of the key characteristics, benefits and challenges associated with organisational development. This has sparked a number of questions from CIPD members, which we answer in this final feature.
1 What is the Role of an OD Practitioner?
The primary goal of OD is to improve organisation effectiveness; therefore the primary role of an OD consultant is to establish helping relationships
within the organisation, with and between individuals and groups, to achieve that objective. The way that goal is acted out depends on the
nature of the task in hand. It may involve the OD practitioner playing a variety of roles – being the sounding board to the top people, guiding a change team, designing or redesigning an organisation or process, being a partner to key decision-makers on a transformation project, facilitating a work team, being a process consultant
to a critical work group, providing methodological leadership to a change programme, being an extra pair of hands in an overloaded period, carrying out regular health checks in each strategic cycle, and so on.
So while OD roles can be diverse, the purpose and the outcome we aim for is consistent: to bring greater health and effectiveness to the organisation, especially in times of change. In addition, let’s briefly look at the three elements that make OD consultants different in the world of consulting:
- the centrality of relationship-building
- expertise in human dynamics and the intervention processes associated with that
- the development process of OD practitioners.
Expertise in human dynamics
OD’s primary goal is to help an organisation become more healthy and effective, especially during change. The key custodians of organisation
health are not the internal or external HR or OD specialist; they are the organisation’s leaders and managers. Therefore, an OD consultant has to be committed to encouraging ownership and the growth of organisation capability among the primary practitioners of OD, that is, leaders. By taking that stance, our main approach is not one of offering expert advice. Instead, our commitment is to design processes to facilitate an organisation’s ability to help itself through the skilful engagement of its key leaders. Our goal is to help an organisation to secure from its own internal members the acceptance, energy, competence and commitment to make things work.
Relationship-building
As OD practitioners we cannot rely on just a formal role, rank or power to influence; instead, we have to earn the right to help by focusing on increasing our interpersonal influence to make things happen, which in turn makes managing the relationship arena a key focus. Managing relationships and using one’s self to shift mindsets and behaviour requires an in-depth understanding of how the human system works. We need to draw not only on our understanding of various theories – psychodynamic, psychoanalytical, system, group dynamics, action research and change – we also need to have a heightened level of self- awareness and understanding to put ourselves into a good place to be of service to our clients.
The self as instrument
Unlike the expert technical consultant, it is not just our thinking skills (head) that will enable us to do the job; we have to bring our head, heart and all of
our being to make real-time intervention effective. Even if we start off thinking that all we need is a bit of technique and knowledge, our experience will soon tell us that more is required. We will discover that we cannot take our clients to places to which we ourselves have not been able to travel. If we have never resolved conflict in our personal life, we can never help clients resolve conflict in their world. In other words, it is not concepts or techniques that will give us the competence to do our job – even though they are important for our credibility. It is the ability to stay acutely aware of our own inner processes moment by moment, our ability to get in touch with the complexity of what’s lurking below the waterline of human dynamics, that will stand us in good stead in this work.
Therefore the development of OD practitioners is not about academic study alone but about spending more and more development time getting to know this one instrument we own and learning to do more fine-tuning of that instrument through the integration of our learning and experience.
2 How do you Measure the Effectiveness of any OD Intervention?
This question has two parts to it which need answering: a) what do we mean by ‘intervention’, and b) how do we know the intervention works and
delivers its intended objectives? In other words, how do we evaluate the outcomes of any intervention? We will take each part separately and
join up the two questions in a summary conclusion.
a) What is ‘intervention’?
Intervention constitutes the action thrust of OD – putting our theory into practice. An intervention is a set of structured (designed) activities that are set up by internal or external change agents to a) disturb the status quo within the ‘system’; b) shift the ‘system’ from one state to another; c) help the ‘system’ to grow, change and/or adapt effectively. The ‘system’ can be an individual, a group, several
related groups, a whole organisation or several organisations. Whatever the system is, the goal of any intervention is to improve and develop it. Here are some of the key criteria for effective intervention design:
Clarity of purpose: Being able to answer the question, ‘what are the objectives we aim to achieve through these structured activities?’ or, the even bigger question, ‘if the objectives are met, how would they contribute to the bigger organisation objectives and effectiveness?’ Without clarity
of purpose, intervention effort will be wasted.
Targeted focus: Alongside the decision about the objectives of the intervention, practitioners and their clients must together decide who should be the targeted focus of the intervention: is it a specific individual, or a group, or groups, or the whole organisation? This is the unit of intervention.
Other criteria: Once the unit of intervention is clear, design criteria will include deciding the levels of intervention – (that is, how many levels of organisation the intervention aims to shift: is it the whole organisation, or inter-units, or intra-unit, inter-groups, team, interpersonal or intrapersonal, or all of the above?). What should be the depth of intervention: how deep (that is, emotionally charged) does the intervention need to be to achieve its purpose, and what level of capability-building does the intervention aim to achieve so that the targeted individuals or groups will not only learn how to solve a particular problem but also get supported to learn how to learn.
Then the final round of design decisions are around such issues as how much information and choice each group will have, how much experience-based versus conceptual-based learning the activity will have; how many ‘safety nets’ the intervention needs to set up to free up individuals and groups from being anxious and defensive, and what real role and decision power each group or individual will be given during the intervention.
Any intervention design based on the above should be guided by the critical theoretical frameworks of OD, namely action research theory, system theory, psychodynamic theories, psychoanalytical theory and change theories. This is what is so distinctive about the field of OD – we use behavioural science knowledge and theory to inform our methodology to build healthy organisations. Lewin sums this up neatly: ‘Nothing is so practical as a good theory.’
b) How do we evaluate the outcomes of OD intervention?
It is important to state that evaluation as a technique for organisation change has been a major issue in OD research since the field of OD began. But first, to widen our understanding about the
complicated issues surrounding OD and metrics, we will focus on the following three questions:
- What is evaluation and what are OD metrics?
- How does evaluation fit into the OD cycle of work?
- What are we measuring?
Since the goal of organisation development is to improve organisational effectiveness, OD practitioners need to be committed to finding out whether our planned intervention has indeed helped to move the organisation forward on its journey towards the desired end game. This involves evaluating both the what and the how of the intervention, along with assessing the various impacts against agreed metrics.
What do we mean by ‘evaluation’ and what are OD ‘metrics’? ‘Evaluation’ is the overall process of assessing whether or not the work undertaken delivered its intended objectives. ‘Metrics’ refers to both the specific measures used to decide what kinds of outcome the OD intervention has achieved, as well as the assessment procedures employed. For example, one of the typical metrics for evaluating organisation effectiveness will be profit margin. However, the specific metrics considered to be valid indicators of organisational effectiveness will depend on the organisation’s own definition of effectiveness. In reality, robust evaluation data will usually consist of a number of metrics and codetermining the nature of the metrics to be used forms part of an OD intervention in itself.
How does evaluation fit within the OD work cycle? Evaluation is the final phase of the action research model. However in OD, evaluation really begins at the earliest (contracting) phase of the work cycle so that it becomes part of the ongoing diagnostic process as well as designed into the intervention. At every stage of the work cycle, the evaluative data collected act as a steer, helping OD practitioners and their clients to decide the next appropriate steps in the life of that specific OD intervention. This is especially true for longer-term transformation change in which there is really no end point, but a resting point during which things can be recalibrated and stabilised before further changes proceed.
What are we measuring? This is often a source of confusion because the evaluation process has a political undertone. Typically, what the organisation or clients want to measure is the immediate impact of OD on specific outcome metrics, for example profits, turnover, productivity level, cost, customer feedback, and so on. On the other hand, OD practitioners are usually more interested in evaluating the longer-term impact of specific OD interventions on the behaviour, attitudes and ability of the clients to solve their problems and ultimately to sustain and build healthy relationships and a healthy organisation. So if, having achieved improved profits, or reduced staff turnover, the organisation has lost its ability to renew itself, OD practitioners will consider that a failure.
To be more specific, this can be the key point of tension between a client organisation and OD practitioners. OD practitioners are instinctively aware that their clients will remain sceptical about the value of OD interventions without the outcome metrics that can be measured by discrete variables; however, they find it hard to ignore the ‘process’ value of the methodology they use to provide longer-term system health, which may be of lesser immediate interest to clients. Without the ability to compromise and aim for both, there is a risk of clients failing to recognise the potential value of OD. The early work of Golembiewski et al (1976) has shed some significant light in this debate by their distinction between three types of change result: alpha, beta and gamma:
Alpha change is mainly concerned with the comparative measures before and after an intervention. For example, if frequency of conflict has lessened after a conflict intervention, then one might conclude that a specific intervention has made a difference.
Beta change is mainly concerned with the recalibration of the dimension in question. Taking again the example of conflict, it is not whether there was an increase or decrease of conflict after the intervention that is measured, as much as whether there has been a shift of perception about what conflict is about; whether conflict is bad or good; whether the system members understand when it is legitimate to have conflict and when it is not; what sort of conditions will lead to the reaping of synergistic results from conflict, and so on. This variation of how the system views conflict is called the beta result.
Gamma change is mainly concerned with a complete reframing, redefinition and reconceptualisation of the nature of the problem that affects the team or organisation and involves a shift from one state to another. Staying with the same example, the intervention may help the members of the system conclude that in order to create healthier conditions for working together, they need to pay attention to how their system works as a whole, for example get greater clarity about their roles and responsibilities, how they share knowledge, what support structure the unit needs to set up, how various bits of work processes are linked together, and so on. In fact, in the longer term, it is the improvement of these relevant factors and the way they link together that will help people
to work together better. Hence shifting the focus from conflict management to building organisation health and then to total system thinking is what gamma change is all about. The ability to gain understanding of the scope of the issue in a more holistic fashion (that is, from a total system perspective) and to
develop the corresponding ability to ‘fix’ the issue constitutes a gamma
change result.
So does OD work?
We believe we have not resolved how to impose a scientific assessment
methodology on a dynamic human system in which it is hard to isolate and control some independent variables. This makes the documentation, in full confidence, of the impact of specific intervention on some dependent variables difficult. However, Heisler (1975) carried out a review of literature and concluded that while there are major criticisms of OD effort in evaluation, the review did find evidence that OD interventions do indeed work. Other authors – French and Bell (1978), Golembiewski et al (1974) – also found supportive evidence for the efficacy of OD. But much more work is needed to ensure that OD interventions can be properly evaluated and this will be a fruitful area for future research.
3 What is the Difference Between Organisation Development and Organisation Design?
These two traditions are historically distinct but are strongly related. As we have previously discussed, organisation development is a distinctive approach to building healthy and effective organisations. It does this by improving the way people work together and uses techniques based on behavioural science and process facilitation. Some of its early exponents, such as Edgar Schein, began writing and consulting in the field in the 1960s.
Organisation design is more conventionally associated with the ‘technical’ top–down aspects of organisational structure and system change. Its fundamental premises are about economic rationalisation. The antecedents of contemporary organisation design theory date back considerably longer than
organisational development, and in the business context trace their roots back to scientific management, the time and motion studies and hierarchical structures of the 1920s and 1930s.
Organisational design came to the fore as a field in its own right in the 1970s when a number of mainly American academics and consultants produced a series of publications on design and structure. Jay Galbraith’s 1973 publication, Designing Complex Organisations, and his later work on the ‘Star model’ had a significant influence. Other well-known gap analysis frameworks, such as the 7S model by Pascale and Athos and the Burke-Litwin model, have formed a bridge between the two fields, since they recognise that organisation design must both align structures with business models and also take into account the human dynamics and cultural aspects of organisation if they are to be successful. The organisational design field has tended to be dominated by consultants who assist CEOs and HR directors with complex reorganisations, for instance during mergers and acquisitions, and structure-related processes such as job evaluation.
Where organisation development has influenced organisation design is through
the concept of the socio-technical system, that is, the concept of two work system elements – social and technical – designed to deliberately fit each other. Other organisation development practitioners who have written about organisation design, such as Nadler and Gerstein (1992), have also emphasised the crucial importance of systemic alignment between structure, people, work, technology and information. Weisbord (1987) goes beyond alignment to consider the democratic value that drives restructuring – focusing on the autonomous work design process that is critical to producing a high-performance work unit.
The HR function itself has typically been the object of ongoing redesign in recent years and has demonstrated how various sub-functions, such as transactional HR processes, can be delivered in new ways, such as through technology-enabled self-service, or through outsourced arrangements. HR transformation has also highlighted the importance of interweaving organisation design and organisation development to produce good outcomes. For example, even with the best technological tools to help them, line managers may not want to take on devolved HR activities unless they have been involved in the process-mapping or have helped in other ways to take ownership of the new processes.
In the future organisations will have to respond with organisation designs that
enable sustained levels of high
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