Organization development in the downturn

I was interviewed recently by HRZone's Annie Hayes, for a piece she was writing on how organizations should implement OD/change strategies during the current economic conditions.

Her feature article, Downturn downtime? Organisation development in a recession, was published today. So I thought I'd expand a little here on some of my thoughts that are included in the HRZone article.

Before addressing the question directly, and to help put my comments in context, this initial post explains briefly where I sit in relation to OD/organizational change in general.

An organizational dynamics perspective

I tend to look at organisations through the lens of organizational dynamics, rather than from a conventional OD viewpoint. This means paying attention not only to the formal, structured and rational aspects of organization but also - and in particular - to its underlying dynamics. From my perspective, business results (and other performance outcomes) arise from the complex interplay of these formal and informal dynamics. Primarily, therefore, I’m interested in how change happens in organizations and the implications of this for everyday leadership practice.

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What do we mean by Organization Development (OD)?

It’s worth recognising that it is far from clear what people mean when they talk about Organization Development. For some, it’s not really OD unless its purpose is to change the organization ‘as a whole’. For others, OD refers to any intervention – whatever its scope – provided that it comes from the OD ‘toolkit’. Aficionados of OD would also argue that OD implies a set of humanistic, people-based values that need to inform all OD work. Others, though, would take a more pragmatic stance.

Whatever the pros and cons of these various perspectives, if the OD ‘community’ embroils itself too much in inward-facing arguments, there is a danger that it will be seen as irrelevant to the needs of business. It is crucially important, therefore, for OD practitioners (whether internal or external to an organization) to focus on the problems, opportunities and required results of the clients/businesses with which they are working; and that they don’t get too hung up on the ‘rights and wrongs’ of specific techniques, approaches or philosophies.

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My specific take on change and organizational dynamics is reflected, of course, in Informal Coalitions. There, I talk about organizations as dynamic networks of self-organizing conversations (that is, as complex social processes of people in interaction). I also see organizational reality ('what we're working with', so to speak) as being socially constructed through these everyday interactions. It is not objectively discoverable, in the ways that most conventional management (and OD) approaches assume that it is.

Formal leadership (and conventional OD) is usually spoken about in terms of managers acting with intention to bring about rationally designed outcomes. From an informal coalitions perspective, though, these intentions and designs provide only part of the mix – and often not the most important part. Much of the way in which work actually gets done and outcomes emerge is through the informal, messy and hidden processes that are played out in the local conversational interactions of everyday organizational life.

One further point is probably worth making. Unlike conventional OD, organizational dynamics does not imply a particular set of values. That is to say, these dynamics will be at work whether the overt approach to leadership is one of command-and-control or empowered self-management. The nature of the organization and its performance outcomes are likely to be different; but the underlying dynamics – the complex social process of people interacting - will be the same in each case.

In the next post, I shall try to answer the question: Should organizational change/OD strategies be different during a recession? If so, how?

Comments

[Stephen Billing]

I found this post interesting. You point to different degrees of 'purism' with OD and also to the OD 'toolkit' which I think can get in the way of practitioners doing something useful and making a different - people have to see things through their toolkit and follow a certain number of steps in a methodology. This can mean that the result takes a lot longer to obtain.