The A to Z of OD: Z is for Zeitgeist

Posted on November 6, 2019November 6, 2019 by Jeremy Lewis

Some say OD is prone to the latest management fads. As such, it is fickle and cannot be trusted. At times, it does seem that whatever OD practitioners happen to be doing defines OD. But what if OD is merely reflecting the times in which it is practised? What if the spirit of the age – the Zeitgeist – defines OD practice?

In this final post in the A to Z of OD, I will canter through the history of OD and show how it captured the Zeitgeist. And consider what this might mean for OD in the 2020s…

From founding ideas to becoming discredited– 1950s to the 1980s

OD emerged after the Second World War in the US (Lewin et al) and the UK (Tavistock Institute). From its initial ideas in the 1950s of open systems theory coupled with psychoanalytic understanding of group dynamics, through the social change of the 1960s and 1970s, OD mirrored the times.

The 1960s represents a time of technological advancement, individual freedoms and the birth of popular culture. OD focused on deeper understanding of individuals and their contribution to the systems in which they worked and lived.

The 1970s was a decade of huge change. OD reflected this through a deepening of its understanding of itself as a planned approach to change. It also focused on self-development reflecting the growing sense of self within society, particularly within burgeoning youth cultures, and on team development, reflecting perhaps the growth in union power.

This all came to a head in the 1980s. Margaret Thatcher crushed the unions; In OD, the concept of a leader’s vision rose to prominence. New electronic gadgetry flooded our homes – from kitchen appliances to personal computers – aimed at making life more efficient. OD focused on efficiency too, by adopting total quality management and other approaches to business process re-engineering.

During the eighties, quite probably because of focusing too narrowly on process efficiency, comentators discredited OD. They saw the focus on individual enlightenment and teamwork of the 60s and 70s as naïve and so OD practice began to focus more on process and less on humanising workplaces. This tore away at OD’s founding ideals. It was time to grow up…

A pivotal moment in time – the 1990s

The 1990s represents a growing up of society – taking all that had gone before and melding it in a postmodernist way to create something new and vibrant. This decade gave birth to the internet and mobile phones took off. People began to understand how they could access what they needed 24/7. They understood their own values more deeply and began to be choosier about where they worked. What had been radical in the 1980s in our culture became mainstream and the mainstream had to downsize.

Organisations reflected this too: they embraced what is meant to be a learning organisation and became more values-driven. They also downsized, on an enormous scale. OD began to polarise – some practitioners worked on enabling the gnarly, corporatist change of cutting jobs, while others focused on enabling individuals to thrive through learning and living their values.

This left OD practice in a dilemma. How can OD be both these extremes of practice?

Current OD practice – 2000s to present

The past 20 years or so has seen OD attempt to reconcile itself to these two positions. In society in the 2000s, the technology explosion intensified – from mobile tech to YouTube – and anyone could become a star through reality TV. OD encouraged distributed leadership (we’re all TV stars now … we’re all leaders now!) and focused on employee engagement, collaboration skills and the behaviours that demonstrate corporate values. OD practitioners justified their approach of developing people and laying them off: if everyone can embrace the ‘new’ culture, become a ‘designer’ employee, then it’s okay to cope with less people…right?

In the 2010s, the world tilted again. Digital tech and social media has taken over our lives and has helped to promote social change and individuals’ rights (#metoo, Arab Spring, LGBT,…). The global economic crisis of the late noughties has refused to go away. Against this backdrop, OD coined the term VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) to reflect the complexity of the world and adopted Agile Change methods to effect organisational change incrementally, collaboratively and speedily.

It seems in the past 20 years, OD has ‘modernised’ by accepting its role to be both an emancipation for individuals and a corporatist tool.

The future?

What will OD in the Twenty-Twenties look like? Well, your guess is as good as mine in terms of what the spirit of the age will be.

If you want a few predictions: populism will finally break politics and new forms of governance will emerge, with a significant emphasis on decentralisation. The global economic crisis will be less significant than the global environmental crisis we face, and these new forms of government will finally invest in climate change reversal. Individuals will outpace governments and organisations in which they work by taking more personal responsibility for their actions and make more active choices in how they live their lives.

OD can reflect this imminent Zeitgeist by focusing on creativity, empowerment and flexibility. I foresee a return to OD fundamentals – whole systems and psychodynamics – and techniques such as large scale event facilitation, and individual and group coaching. I see OD as being less overtly corporatist and more focused on individuals. We will help the individual choose wisely. They then choose how (or even if) they show up at work. This will require organisations to be more attuned to the needs of their workers in order to survive and thrive.

In many ways, this goes right back to the approach of the 1950s and 1960s, but with a postmodern twist that recognises more power within individuals to effect change at work and in society. I still believe that OD has a role to play in the emancipation of human beings within society.

OD thought leader: Zappos

Zappos is a company (now owned by Amazon), rather than an individual. However, it demonstrates a key principle of OD thinking: embedding your core values into everything you do.

Formed in 1999 by a few entrepreneurs – notably Tony Hsieh – who started the organisation as “a service company that happens to sell shoes”, Zappos puts customer experience at the heart of everything it does. This core value is embedded in every part of the organisation – from hiring primarily for fit with the service culture, skills and team building, recognition and the role of the manager as enabler of people. Most importantly, staff are unambiguously empowered to serve the customer. For example, if they do not have the size of a shoe a customer wants in stock, they will direct them to a competitor who does. Compare that to a call centre measured on efficiency rather than service!

This empowerment extends to being creative and having fun and writing the “Culture Book” that is published annually, sharing stories of their staff’s experience of the Zappos culture.

In 2013, Zappos formally removed its traditional hierarchies and embraced a management system based on the principles of holacracy with self-organising teams. This move has helped to embed the culture even more firmly.

Recommended reading: check out some of the Zappos employee stories on https://www.zappos.com/about/culture.

The A to Z of OD: U is for Unifying Theory of OD (there isn’t one!)

Posted on September 20, 2019September 20, 2019 by Jeremy Lewis

Or, “Why can’t OD practitioners agree on what is OD?”

Or even, “If OD is defined by whatever OD practitioners happen to be working on, is it any surprise that there is no unifying theory of OD?”

In reading this series of articles, you may well have gained a sense of what OD is to me, and you probably have your own views on the subject. For example, is OD an HR function, predominantly focused on training and development, facilitation and coaching? Is it a strategic function or an operational function, perhaps currently focused on digitisation of customer strategy or business processes? Maybe is it a change function that is modernising archaic project management disciplines by embracing Agile and Design Thinking? Are all of these examples of OD? Are any of these examples OD at all?

Where is OD located in your organisation?

OD is many things to many people and there is no unifying theory. Perhaps this is why OD practice is so divergent – nebulous even – and hence opens itself up to criticism? For example, locate OD within HR and it is more likely to be seen as people-orientated and have less power, whereas it is more likely to be seen as commercially focused and is probably more powerful if it is located in Strategy or Operations where it can demonstrate its impact more directly onto the bottom line. Unfortunately, the former is often seen as too soft and may even result in a lack of focus on the organisation’s primary purpose; the latter is too hard, perhaps even dehumanising organisations in cases where over-rationalised business processes take precedence over the people employed to work them.

Getting the balance right

I believe core to OD’s philosophy is a balance between psychoanalysis (see: P is for Psychoanalysis) and systems-thinking (see: J is for Joint Diagnosis). The dilemma OD faces is when one of these aspects dominates. Taking a systems-thinking perspective requires the OD practitioner to be at the table of power so she can influence strategic change. Taking a psychoanalytic perspective requires marginality, independence from the corporate agenda, so that she can challenge over-rationalised thinking that might dehumanise organisations. Achieving both simultaneously is hard to do… If OD has power – signified by a close relationship to leaders, a corporatist agenda and aligned to strategic or operational change – then its ability to challenge the group dynamics at play may be inhibited. On the other hand, if OD has marginality – perhaps traditionally located within HR and focused on challenging and developing management values and behaviours – then it is difficult to have true positive impact across the whole system. The traditional OD model weakens OD’s power; whereas the strategic model weakens OD’s philosophy.

Where should OD be located in an organisation?

However there may be an organisation design for OD that preserves its philosophy whilst offering it the power to achieve real sustainable change. I have seen this model work very well and endure. It involves an OD generalist located within HR and yet with an independent dual reporting line to the CEO. In large, decentralised organisations, OD generalists can be located in each division (again, within local HR and yet with independent reporting lines to divisional CEOs), influencing change locally and coming together under the stewardship of the central OD lead for coordination and as a community of practice. Such a model is best supported by external OD consultants for specific initiatives, enabling internal OD practitioners to be effective generalists and not overly-narrow specialists. Over-specialisation of internal OD practitioners (e.g. into coaching and facilitation, or projects and change) can undermine OD’s philosophy.

A possible unifying approach

I believe OD should go back to its roots. To do this, OD practitioners must focus on three praxes in relation to delivering sustainable change:

Diagnosis must be grounded in psychoanalytic interpretation;
Facilitation should be in structure and not content;
Interventions must be humanistic.

The first praxis ensures OD is not subsumed totally into the corporate agenda and retains its ability to challenge organisational norms, routines and behaviours.

The second praxis ensures that OD is applicable to transformational change, where the consultant helps to establish structures and processes that consciously enable organisational members to operate using different perspectives. This aligns with process consultancy: the only expertise the consultant sells is psychodynamics and whole systems-thinking, whereas organisational members provide the content.

The third praxis guards against over rationalised systems-thinking dehumanising organisations.

For me, OD must reconnect with its psychoanalytic roots, its structuralist processes and its humanist values. I honestly believe unless all three are present, then it’s just not OD.

OD Thought Leader: Dave Ulrich (b. 1953)

Ulrich is an author, university professor and management consultant. He is the creator of the HR model currently favoured by the vast majority of large corporate HR departments, which he set out in his 1997 work Human Resource Campions.

In this model, he argues there are four roles for HR to fulfil (administration, employee champion, change agent and strategic partner). This has been interpreted and implemented by many through centralising and automating HR administration into shared service centres with manager self-service solutions for processing HR transactions (leavers, absence, etc), centres of excellence for employee relations, etc, OD functions (more or less like I described above) and HR Business Partners to act as the strategic interface between organisational managers and HR specialists.

Whilst predominantly in the ‘corporatist’ mould (i.e. the whole structure and philosophy is aimed at creating and organisation fit to meet the corporate agenda efficiently and effectively), the structure clearly puts human beings at the centre of its thinking, and creates a home for OD.

However, in A to Z of OD: U is for unifying Theory of OD (there isn’t one) above, we saw that when corporatist thinking prevails, the OD agenda can become marginalised. In his seminal work on how to organise the HR function, Ulrich outlines how the HR agenda can build employee engagement through balancing demands and resources to avoid over- and underutilisation of human resources, demonstrating that underutilisation leads to apathy and over-utilisation leads to burnout. For me this provides further evidence for the need to increase focus on the psychoanalytic and human-centred agenda.

Ulrich recommends HR professionals focus on reducing demands on people, increasing resources and turning demands into resources. He suggests these goals can be achieved through OD practice by:

Emancipatory diagnostic interventions to help people prioritise what is important to them and focus their energies on the shared goals and values they have with the organisation
Working with the organisation to provide employees challenging work, fun culture, shared goals and shared control of work processes
Encouraging organisations to become more human, involve employees in key decisions that affect them and recognise the impact of decisions on employees’ non-work lives/families.

These days, Ulrich sometimes gets bad press for his HR model, usually surrounding the lack of capability within HR to facilitate system-wide change, or bottlenecks created because HR business partners are working beyond their capacity. However, I note that his three OD recommendations align with my suggested three OD praxes and suggest his model is indeed a good one. Perhaps it is more of a failure in implementation and investment in OD skills that is the real issue?

Next time in the A to Z of OD: V is for Vision and Values; W is for Weisbord

The A to Z of OD: T is for Trust

Posted on July 19, 2019July 19, 2019 by Jeremy Lewis

“Culture is what people do when no one is looking,” said Herb Kelleher, CEO Southwest Airlines.

T is for Trust in the A to Z of OD.

The issue

Moving to new ways of working – leveraging new tech and embracing flexible hours and locations – is the single most important shift in organisational life in generations. From an OD perspective, you simply cannot afford to have managers who say, “I can’t trust my team are getting on with their work when I can’t see them in the office.”

Now, you may have some sympathy with this manager’s position: our attention spans are falling and we have access to distractions on portable and wearable tech that is growing exponentially. However this “new” tech gives us choice and freedom to access information and entertainment when it suits us, when it fits around our other commitments, whether they relate to work or leisure time, family life, exercise or hobbies. It enables us to be more productive, to research any topic in moments, to broaden our knowledge base and connect with people across the globe instantly.

I suggest any manager who can’t trust their team either has the wrong people or is locked into a 20^th century management mindset that belongs in the past. Either way, it is a failure that is down to weak and insecure managers.

The facts

Recent research by Virgin Media Business found 1.6m UK workers already regularly work from home and 66% of employees say collaborative relationships make them feel more focused and productive.

It’s time to reappraise these archaic management assumptions

What happens if we assume people respond positively to being trusted and are more productive if they are encouraged to collaborate? The evidence suggests we can step back from those unfounded worries of the weak and insecure manager. You hired your people to do a job. Presumably, you have discussed and agreed objectives with them and are measuring the outcomes they produce? Presumably there are consequences for them delivering or not delivering those objectives? And presumably there are standards for their behaviour at work and support for them to develop their skills and be the best they can be? If not, you have work to do on your culture. That said, you can’t afford to let managers off the hook. When these things are in place, good management allows people to thrive, embeds the culture you seek and improves organisational effectiveness.

As OD practitioners, we believe in people. We believe individuals and teams can be trusted to choose how they work. Get the enabling infrastructure right (tech, office space and management practices) and educate your managers how to trust and be trusted by their people. “I empower and trust my people to get on with their work and choose how best to get the job done together. I’m here to help them get unstuck if they run into problems.” Now that’s more like it!

“When the culture is strong, you can trust everyone to do the right thing.” Brian Chesky, CEO Airbnb.

OD thought leader: Peter Thomson (b. 1946)

Peter has spent the majority of his professional life observing changes in working patterns. Working in industry well before the age of the Internet, he could see that the rigid work practices of the 20th Century were outdated and mobile technology was about to revolutionise the way work would be performed.

He set up the Future Work Forum at Henley Business School where he continued to study emerging patterns of work. Whilst there was a massive potential for change, driven by a new generation of worker and aided by technology, change was happening slowly and many organisations were sticking to their outdated management cultures.

His action research built up a unique insight into the business impacts of flexible working practices. He studied the management of virtual teams and the leadership qualities needed in the new world of work. He recognised that traditional ‘command and control’ cultures were stopping progress and that a new ‘trust and empower’ management style was needed to bring major benefits to employers and employees.

Peter has written, contributed to and edited several books on the subject of the future of work. He regularly presents challenging ideas to business leaders and conference audiences, stimulating debate about the changing role of work in society, the expectations of employees, effective organisation cultures and motivational management. His thinking has inspired audiences to prepare for a future of work that is radically different from conventional employment.

You might also be interested in Peter’s upcoming workshop on creating a plan for a more productive workforce, to be held in London on 4^th September 2019.

Next time in the A to Z of OD: U is for the Unifying theory of OD (there isn’t one!)

The A to Z of OD: S is for Supervision

Posted on June 24, 2019June 24, 2019 by Jeremy Lewis

In coaching and in certain regulated professions such as clinical practice and social care, the concept of supervision is well-established. However in OD consulting, it is in its infancy.

If you are an OD practitioner employed within an organisation, maybe you have a line manager who provides this role. However, many in-house OD practitioners are lone rangers reporting to a generalist HR Director who may not have the experience or deep understanding of OD as they do themselves.

Many external OD practitioners work for larger consulting firms and may well have line managers who provide a supervisory role. As with internal OD practitioners, this may not always be the case. Perhaps you are the OD/change expert in a larger firm that has a broader offer? Who do you turn to when you need professional guidance and support?

As professional OD practitioners – internal or external – our challenges are to consult flawlessly through the five stages of the consulting cycle, respect client confidentiality and boundaries and hold an appropriate ethical attitude. Supervision is there to help us solve dilemmas, support us through emotional challenges and provide fresh perspectives so we understand ourselves and our clients better and develop into the consultants we want to be.

If you feel like a lone-agent OD practitioner, how are you getting the support you need?

There are several ways you can get the support you need. You might join an OD networking or other peer support group, seek a mentor or hire a coach, or even hire a qualified consultancy supervisor. There are a few of us* out there.

OD thought leader: Ed Schein (b. 1928)

It would be hard to overestimate Ed Schein’s contribution to the field of OD. As former professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, Schein won several awards for his work in organisational culture, individual motivation and career development and the process of consulting.

Culture

These days, it is commonly accepted that organisation’s culture is concerned with the shared meanings that members give to past and present organisational experiences. Ed Schein pioneered this thinking in the 1980s, suggesting culture is a layered model of symbolic artefacts, behavioural norms, espoused values and underlying tacit assumptions.

Motivation (‘career anchors’)

As part of his career anchors model, Schein argued there are three core factors (economic, social and self-actualising) that motivate individuals in organisations. Many OD practitioners – me included – believe organisations must make the complex assumption that motivation is a combination of economic, social and self-actualising factors. Managers’ behaviours, e.g. more participative management styles, communication, recognition/rewards and encouraging personal development, both symbolise and enact the organisational culture.

Implications for OD

OD is partly about good diagnosis of the current and desired culture and influencing the role of leaders to develop appropriate culture through symbolic means.

We can enhance organisational effectiveness whilst stimulating the self-actualising element of individual motivation by creating linkages between the organisation and the employee – a sense of belonging.

The benefit of observing organisations through their cultures is that the OD practitioner is attuned to the human side of the organisation, not just its functional subsystems. The key to successful organisation change is to view it as complementary: culture change and functional change in harmony.

Process consultation

Schein’s interpreted collaborative consulting as ‘process consultation’. For him, this is about helping others understand the importance of adherence to the social rules surrounding human relationships. His “ultimate dilemma … is how to produce change in the client system without people losing face”. Referring to Lewin’s ice cube theory of change, he sets out three elements that must be present during unfreezing, i.e. where motivation for change is created:

Disconfirmation (or lack of confirmation);
Creation of guilt or anxiety;
Provision of psychological safety.

One of the main reasons the unfreezing stage of change fails is that people resist change and hence pervert the change effort. There are many reasons people resist change: they don’t want to lose something of value; lack trust in management; hold a belief that change doesn’t make sense for the organisation; have a low tolerance for change; or exhibit passive resistance to change by complying with the change without real commitment.

OD practitioners must find ways to value resistance to change; a healthy tension during unfreezing helps to ensure the change plan is robust. This requires the OD practitioner to recognise resistance as trapped energy, and engage the resistors in dialogue – they may be sensitive to flaws in the plan, or be able to identify unintended consequences of the change. The OD practitioner must beware of low tolerance to change and not require people to change too much too quickly.

I suggest participative change through process consultation is the most appropriate approach to ensure change targets are involved in setting the change agenda. Process consultation is also the best approach to overcome passive resistance, where people are only accepting change to save face; adopting anything other than process consultation models here “increases the risk that the client will feel humiliated and will lose face”.

Resistance can also be at play in the refreezing stage. Even when an individual has refrozen new concepts, these changes may violate the expectations of ‘significant others’ such as bosses, peers and team members. Schein suggests the initial change target may need to implement a programme of change for these others with them as targets. Ultimately a strategy for change should identify likely sources of resistance and ensure methods for dealing with it are consistent with the overall strategy.

The A to Z of OD: O is for Open Space

Posted on March 7, 2019March 7, 2019 by Jeremy Lewis

According to Guy Browning in his wonderful book Office Politics: How work Really Works, “Conferences are the business equivalent of going for a curry, in that everyone thinks having one is a great idea, but you always end up drinking too much, talking rubbish and feeling sick for days afterwards. The biggest fear in the business world is having to make a speech at a conference. This is because generally you have nothing of interest to say and no one in the audience has the slightest interest in anything you have to say anyway. For example, when you are the IT director, it’s your job to make sure the IT works. If it does work, they know that already and if it doesn’t, they don’t want to hear your pathetic excuses.”

Why are conferences so bad?

Joking aside, a lot of conferences are bad. They are expensive to arrange and take people away from work. The benefits are often questionable as you get either expert content presented inexpertly – think of that dreaded feeling when the first slide containing too many bullet points appears – or entertaining presentations with little valuable content.

Delegates become distracted by their phones and pay little attention to the presenters, dipping in and out and kidding themselves they will read the material later. The most value is generally from the networking opportunities and side conversations in the bar.

Great conferences require delegate involvement and interesting content.

Open Space is an OD technique

Open Space technology was created by Harrison Owen in 1985 as a way of engaging a large group of people in discussing content related to a theme or issue. The technique is used by industry groups, communities of interest or for finding solutions to issues. Such conferences are particularly useful when you want to engage a large cross-section of people impacted by an issue by drawing out different views on the topic. These happenings might be referred to as Whole Systems Events.

These days, organisers of Open Space events often call them Unconferences – a term introduced in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s. Open Space and Unconferences are essentially the same thing. You may also come across them in different contexts labelled Accelerated Solutions Events, Design Sprints or Design Thinking Workshops.

What is Open space?

The crucial aspect of an Open Space event is that there is no agenda until the attendees turn up. This approach overcomes some of the issues with a traditional conference as it reduces costs, minimises centralised administration and often lowers or even removes fees for attending!

How does it work?

Self-organisation is key. You will need: a large conference area; several smaller meeting areas; a large blank agenda visible and accessible to everyone; and delegates with something to say!

The event starts with a facilitator inviting delegates to propose discussion topics. That person steps up and pitches their idea. The delegates demonstrate their approval, sometimes with a vote (show of hands or more often these days with a polling app such as Sli.do) or sometimes the facilitator will take on this role on the delegates’ behalf. If agreed, the presenter writes their topic on the agenda, scheduling it in one of the smaller meeting spaces and time slots available.

This continues until you have a full agenda with multiple sessions now scheduled to run concurrently… just like a regular conference, but with no fees paid to the speakers and a guarantee that the topics are of interest.

And then you can begin. Typically, delegates are invited to go wherever they feel they have something to learn or to contribute to a discussion. And they are invited to use the “Law of Two Feet”. This means they are free to wander in and out of sessions at will – should they feel they are neither learning nor contributing, then they obey the law and go somewhere else where they will.

At the end of each session, reflections, conclusions and actions are captured and shared back with all the delegates.

Good conference organisation often means doing less so your delegates do more. The result is a creative, collaborative conference with engaged and empowered delegates. This is no jolly out of the office to get your ticket punched!

And as Guy Browning reminds us, “[Well-organised meetings] are meetings for which you have to prepare, in which you have to work and after which you have to take action. Fortunately, these meetings are as rare as a sense of gay abandon in the finance department.”

OD Thought Leader: Eddie Obeng (b. 1959)

Eddie Obeng is a Professor at Henley Business School and the founder of his own virtual business school, Pentacle.

Obeng believes that somebody changed the rules of the world. At midnight about 20 years ago. He believes the real 21^st Century (the ‘New World’) operates to a whole new set of rules and that we are responding to a fantasy version of the world that we learnt in the 20^th Century (the ‘Old World’).

The argument goes something like this: the pace of change is ever-increasing. The amount of information available to us has increased exponentially. It is, for example, estimated that 50% of the information on the Internet was created in the last two years. By being connected to the Internet, we are effectively at the centre of a global corporation that we no longer understand.

In comparison to this explosive pace of change, the pace of learning is effectively flat. Consider the usefulness of a business plan covering the next five years against that context. It is worthless the instant it is approved, if not before.

The moment the pace of change exceeded the pace of learning is the moment we lost our grip on the reality of the New World. This happened at midnight about 20 years ago. And nobody noticed.

To combat this, Obeng believes we must exponentially accelerate our learning. Many organisations now say to their managers, “Innovate, be creative!” Yet they mean, “Do something quirky and fail and you’re fired.” He believes we must be allowed to fail faster – he calls it Smart Failure – and be rewarded for it.

Sure, if you know what to do and how to do it then you can’t afford to fail, and you should be fired! It’s like painting by numbers – not much opportunity for failure unless you’re incompetent.

However, change these days is about achieving things when you know neither what you’re doing nor how you’re going to do it. How could you know these things when you do not understand the New World? He calls this ‘foggy change’. It requires innovation, collaboration and Design Thinking. It requires organisations protect people by encouraging smart failure.

Or you could continue to respond as if it is still the 20^th Century. Continue painting by numbers. It will keep you occupied for a while longer, but it will not create anything new or innovative.

Recommended reading: Obeng, Eddie (1995): All Change!: The Project Leader’s Secret Handbook, London, Pitman/Financial Times

Next time in the A to Z o OD: P is for Psychoanalysis

The A to Z of OD: M is for Metaphor

Posted on February 5, 2019February 5, 2019 by Jeremy Lewis

Our language is littered with metaphor. Oftentimes, we do not notice metaphor unless it is used poetically. Had I said, “We walk through streets of literature littered with metaphor”, you are more likely to have spotted ‘littered’ as a metaphor for the ubiquity of metaphor. ‘Littered’ suggests metaphor contaminates our language, just like litter contaminates the street. Perhaps, I’m even suggesting we are so accustomed to seeing litter on the street we have stopped noticing the street is cluttered, dishevelled, even unhealthy. I’m clearly suggesting metaphor is a bad thing, and we’ve stopped noticing it is bad.

Our language is rich with metaphor. A different connotation entirely. Metaphor is a good thing, perhaps even having monetary value. Money: that thing that symbolises success in our culture, that enables us to feed and protect ourselves, that gives us choice, freedom and agency over our lives.

The use of metaphor is very helpful to the reader as it describes what you’re trying to say in a few words. The reader’s mind ‘conjures’ up her own interpretation from her own experience; an experience that is rich with her own metaphor. She can see the ‘whole picture’ you were ‘painting’. The problem is that the use of one metaphor – is it magic or is it art? – restricts other interpretations. This is how others’ words can manipulate us.

Organisational metaphor

Our language defines our culture. We create the word around us though how we talk and write about it. As such, it also defines the organisations we create. The organisations that is, where we work, rest and play; where we live our lives.

And so, the words we use to describe those organisation matter. We tell stories about those organisations and the metaphors we use are very much a part of that narrative.

I’ve just looked back at the A to Z of OD articles I’ve written in this series to review the metaphor I’ve been using to describe organisations and OD. I counted nearly 100 examples. Many of these are consciously deployed – OD is a journey for example – however several were unconscious.

The most frequent positive metaphor I use is one that describes organisations as organisms: I provide the right ‘climate’ for people to ‘flourish’, I put leaders at the ‘heart’ of organisations, I encourage ideas to ‘spread like viruses’, I ‘diagnose’ issues with them when the organisation ‘hiccoughs’ and I provide ‘antidotes’ to what I must perceive to be poisonous practices.

I also quite often use negative connotations, suggesting organisations and organisation development are instruments of domination and coercive control: OD ‘drives’ the culture (as if driving a team of horses, perhaps?) and ‘spurs’ people on, it has change ‘targets’, I talk of humans being treated as ‘puppets’, manager and employee as ‘servant and master’ and that managers deploy ‘tricks’ to get things done.

And sometimes I refer to organisations as if they were machines: employee engagement is one of the ‘engines’ of organisational effectiveness, leaders pull ‘levers’ to ‘lock in’ changes and are themselves the ‘lubrication’ that ensures the organisation operates smoothly.

That is not to say organisations literally are organisms, instruments of coercion or machines. But they can exhibit characteristics that are like those things. Next time you are describing your organisation or OD approach, what metaphor are you using? What metaphor do others use, particularly influential people like the CEO? And how might these metaphors be denying other possible interpretations?

OD thought leader: Gareth Morgan

Gareth Morgan wrote the definitive guide to organisational metaphor, categorising and exemplifying eight archetypal metaphors for organisations:

Archetype	Words used include
Machine	Efficiency, waste, order, clockwork, operations, re-engineering
Organism	Living systems, life cycles, evolution, fitness, health, adaption, malaise
Brain	Learning, mindset, feedback, knowledge, networks
Culture	Values, beliefs, rituals, diversity, tradition, history, vision, family
Political system	Power, hidden agendas, authority, toe the line, gatekeepers, Star Chamber
Psychic prison	Regression, denial, Parent/Child, ego, defence mechanism, dysfunction, coping, pain
Flux and transformation	Change, flow, self-organisation, emergent, paradox, complexity, VUCA
Instrument of domination	Compliance, charisma, coercion, corporate interest, alienation

He suggests metaphor is a simple tool that can help leaders and OD practitioners effect change and solve seemingly intractable problems that require adaptive thinking from people right across and down the organisation.

Next time: N is for Nudge Theory.

The A to Z of OD: E is for Energy – Managing Energy

Posted on June 20, 2018June 20, 2018 by Jeremy Lewis

Suggested by Perry Timms, Simon Daisley and – notably – Dorothy Matthew, who suggested to me that time management is outdated, and the focus today needs to be on managing energy as opposed to time, and Russell Harvey, who reminded me leading change means checking in with others to see how they are managing their energy for change.

Managing time is out

I remember attending a training course on time management when I first started out in my career. We were encouraged to schedule important tasks in our diaries and treat them as of similar importance to meetings, for example. At the end of the course, the delegates paired up to check-in and support each other with our agreed actions. I can’t remember the name of the chap I paired with. Let’s call him Dave. So, a couple of weeks later, I dutifully phoned Dave…

“Hi Dave, it’s Jez. How are you getting on with managing your diary?” I asked, politely.

“I’m far too busy to start with any of that crap!” he retorted, paradoxically.

Perhaps even then, the concept of time management was outdated. Dave was living on adrenaline, managing all the tasks he needed to, performing adequately, perhaps, surviving, just. But for how long is such an approach sustainable?

Managing energy is in

Fast forward a couple of decades or so and I now work with groups of senior leaders who are coping with gnarly transformational changes in their organisations. My work is concerned with how to lead change so that it sustains. I’m struck that today’s rapidly changing world gives rise to rapidly changing pressures on leaders.

I’ve said before that leading change starts on the inside. We all react to change when it happens to us from the outside-in. Learning to recognise our own emotional response means we can make more active choices in how to respond, rather than react. How we can maintain our own energy for change, so we can help others cope with it too? How we can internalise the change, so we work with it from the inside-out? This, I believe, makes us better change leaders.

The way we are working is not working

I am reminded of the words that describe working in different zones as articulated by Tony Schwartz in The Way We work Isn’t Working. Schwartz suggests we tend to operate in one of four zones:

Performance Zone, when our energy and activity are high, and we feel optimistic
Survival Zone, when our energy and activity are high, but we are running around doing so much. In this Zone, our emotional state is negative, we become pessimistic about work, we retreat into silos, protecting ourselves from the outside world. We are just about surviving
Burnout Zone, when our energy dips catastrophically and it all becomes too much
Renewal Zone, when we find time to recover from the pressures of work, energy remains low (we are recovering after all), however we regain our optimism and become ready to move back to the Performance Zone.

So, what?

When the pace of work and change becomes too much, our performance slips, we can find ourselves operating in the Survival Zone. We might find ourselves feeling lonely or moody, we may become narcissistic and unpredictable. We might also become apathetic, appearing to others as stubborn or intense. These are the signs we are moving towards the Burnout Zone.

The trick is to find ways to move freely between the Performance Zone and the Renewal Zone, so that we remain optimistic and enthusiastic, while slowing our energy and activity to recover, and then using our renewed energy to keep our performance high.

And so, the question becomes: what can you do to maintain your energy for change? To find time in your routine to recover from the pressures of work – where the pace of change is ever-increasing – and keep your performance high?

Three tips to maintain your energy for change

Find your own words to describe the four Zones. Then, notice when you are feeling that way, it is probably an indication you are already in that Zone, or moving towards it
Work out what renews your energy – this might be mindful meditation, sport or exercise, social activities, hobbies or clubs. At work, it might simply be finding time to leave your desk and go for a walk or have your lunch with others away from the office. It might be finding time to #JustBe. Outside of work it might be reading, listening to or playing music, painting or simply have a long soak in a hot bath. This tip helps you discover your own Renewal Zone.
Mindfully choose to spend time in your Renewal Zone. Schedule it in your diary if needs be. Dave, are you listening? I was listening, I have time blocked out in my diary entitled #JustBe.

You might find you start to spot the signs of the Survival Zone or Burnout Zone in others. If so, you might want to encourage them to think about their own Renewal Zone. You may also find you can spot the signs of the Performance Zone or the Renewal Zone in others and choose to appreciate them, to celebrate their achievement!

OD Thought Leader: Chester Elton, “The Apostle of Appreciation” (1958 – )

Chester Elton is one of the masters of employee engagement.

Elton and his co-author, Adrian Gostick, conducted research with 200,000 managers and literally millions of workers to evidence the thinking behind their ‘Carrot Principle’. The research found that feeling appreciated is one of the highest ranked (top three, worldwide) workers’ motivations.

They propose, “a carrot is something used to inspire and motivate an employee. It’s something to be desired… Simply put, when employees know that their strengths and potential will be praised and recognised, they are significantly more likely to produce value.”

Their research has spawned an industry of formal employee recognition schemes. But it is the informal, cultural aspects that often have the most impact. A carrot does not need to be monetary. Simply being thanked or publicly recognised is enough for many.

If I may borrow from another great thought leader, Nancy Kline, “people do their best thinking in the presence of Appreciation.” I’d suggest ‘their best thinking’ translates readily into ‘their best work’. And so, managers showing their honest appreciation improves organisational performance.

Creating a climate of appreciation enables organisations to sustain what Elton calls a ‘Carrot Culture’.

And if, as I believe, Engagement is one of the engines of organisational effectiveness, this can only help to humanise the workplace in a systemic way. And that, dear readers, is what OD is all about.

Next time: F is for Facilitation

The A to Z of OD (Part III conclusion): C is for Change

Posted on June 14, 2018June 14, 2018 by Jeremy Lewis

Today, we finalise the letter C in our A to Z of OD. We have seen C is for Culture, and C is for Creating the right Climate for Culture to Flourish. Today, we consider the big one. Today, we consider Change itself. It is a huge topic and I have considered it from the perspective of OD as a humanistic, systemic approach to achieving sustainable change.

This post was in part inspired by my former colleague Francis Lake. Francis is Head of OD at Clydesdale and Yorkshire Banking Group; he reminded me of the importance of the emotional response to change and the need to think long-term when planning change.

C is for Change

It strikes me, from my experience of facilitating transformational change in many different organisations, that change often appears to be driven from the ‘outside-in’. Typically, this is in response to the external environment, economic considerations or technological developments. This is clearly rational; however, it can lead to short-term changes being implemented that do not last long.

More sustainable, long-term change requires changing from the ‘inside-out’. This requires consideration of the whole organisational system. It starts by looking internally at how different parts of the organisation are aligned to meet its primary purpose (see the A to Z of OD Part I) against those external factors, i.e. understanding that the whole system includes the external stakeholders and operating environment.

Motivation

Earlier in Part III of the A to Z of OD, we explored culture and the importance of creating the right climate for culture to flourish. There are three core factors that combine to motivate employees to take on change: feeling safe (adequate reward and psychological safety), social factors (working relationships and recognition) and self-actualising factors (autonomy and personal development).

As I outlined in The A to Z of OD: C is for Culture, managers’ and leaders’ behaviours – such as more participative management styles, colleague engagement, recognition and rewards and encouraging personal development – both enact and symbolise the culture by stimulating motivation so that organisations access discretionary effort from their workforce.

Past-Present-Future

That notwithstanding, people fear change. They are apt at romantically reconstructing the past through rose-tinted spectacles, editing it to create myths of a glorious bygone age. This is organisational nostalgia.

Organisational nostalgia is often at odds with the case for change, which is expressed optimistically, yet rationally, in formal business cases and enacted through tightly-controlled project disciplines. This future-oriented approach explicitly hides emotions. People get the message that emotions are bad; nostalgia is bad. And like some movie of a dystopian future where the (emotional) humans battle against the (rational) machines, “Resistance is Futile!”

You can see how this might represent a major (psychological) problem.

By recognising both these opposing positions, I believe OD must build a case for change by taking a different perspective; revealing rather than denying the nostalgics’ stories from the emotional past, the reality of the present and the optimistic journey to the future. This requires a process-centred approach to change, rather than a destination-focused project plan.

Outside-in vs inside-out

OD can:

Help individuals recognise and challenge their natural responses to change
Adopt a process-centred approach to change
Select a change strategy to promote motivation rather than tackle resistance
Tap into emotional nostalgia to better understand the past and how the organisation got to where it is today before visioning the future and how to get there.

This, I believe, is how long-term, sustainable change is delivered.

OD Thought Leader: Stephen R. Covey (1932 – 2012)

Based on his PhD research into world religions and other codes of practice throughout human history, Covey synthesised a list of seven habits that encourage people to live principled lives, and to choose to change from the inside-out rather than decide to change purely as a response to external influences.

The first three habits encourage people to move from being dependent to being independent: (1) be proactive, (2) begin with the end in mind and (3) put first things first. The skills that underpin these three habits are often described in organisations as positive behaviours and offered as personal development interventions, i.e. (1) taking accountability, (2) aligning activity to an overall mission and (3) prioritising important work over work that is simply urgent.

The next three habits are about moving from independence to interdependence: (4) think ‘win-win’, (5) seek first to understand, then to be understood and (6) syergize. These are often offered in OD as team development, e.g. (4) collaborative working, (5) coaching skills and (6) teamworking so that more can be achieved than working alone.

Habit 7, Sharpen the Saw, aims to promote the concept of continuous learning. In OD, this aligns to the concept of the Learning Organisation.

Whilst written from the perspective of personal development, there is much to learn in Seven Habits from an organisation development perspective. I particularly like the way Covey draws from fundamental principles of what is to be human as taught be elders throughout history, across the world, and makes it relevant to today’s organisational context.

Next time: D is for Design

The A to Z of OD (Part III continued): C is for Climate

Posted on June 13, 2018June 13, 2018 by Jeremy Lewis

Earlier in the week, I covered C is for Culture. Continuing the letter C, this beautiful blog post about organisational climate is contributed by freelance OD practitioner Lucy Thompson. Lucy is a creative OD Specialist, Changemaker and Coach. She typically leads the people aspects on major transformational change programmes, focusing on delivering organisational effectiveness and team performance.

Creating the right Climate for Culture to Flourish

I was reminded today of the simplicity of a flower in nature – when you see a flower growing beautifully and thriving, the last thing you do is pick it. You leave it to be nurtured by nature- safe in the knowledge that this flower had found its place in the world and the climate it was growing in was enabling it to be the best version of itself it can be.

A climate in an organisation is often referred to as its culture. You only need Google ‘culture’ and ‘organisation’ to find a raft of insight, models and diagnostics that can help put labels on what is happening at any one time in the organisation and its system.

Many an OD practitioner will tell you that culture is a direct descendant of the team at the top. Leadership shapes culture. It’s the way leaders walk, the way they talk, the messages they send and the way they bounce back when things might not have gone as planned.

Creating high performing leadership teams

Taking this a step further, the leaders in an organisation are a team in their own right – they might be members of several teams but their ‘first’ team is their peer group and the purpose of their roles is to work together to steer their ship to success (whatever that might look like for them). Therefore, if this team shapes culture, then creating high performing teams must start with the top team. This creates the right climate for OD – simple enough? Yet why do many organisations struggle with this concept?

Patrick Lencioni is a true hero of mine. He really puts out in to the ether a simple construct of a high performing team and its characteristics. No long-complicated words or theory, no model that requires you to follow a tube map of arrows to understand the end goal. Quite simply the five behaviours of a cohesive team are Trust, Conflict, Commitment, Accountability and Results – simple when you know how, right?

For OD to flourish in organisations, the culture needs to be right: it needs to enable OD practitioners and their practice to be the very best version they can be, and this means the work starts at the top. Enabling the cohesive team can be the gamechanger for the success of organisation development and its interventions.

Next time: C is for Change

The A to Z of OD (Part III): Cis for Culture; C is for Change

Posted on June 11, 2018June 11, 2018 by Jeremy Lewis

This is the third part in a series of articles that will set out the A to Z of organisation development: the principles and practices, the tools and techniques and the past and present thought leaders that have shaped the field.

In fact, this part is itself in three parts. Today, I’ll cover Culture. The second part to follow is a beautiful blog post by freelance OD practitioner Lucy Thompson, who will reflect on creating the right climate for culture to flourish. Finally, later in the week, I’ll turn to change, which was in part inspired by my former colleague Francis Lake. Francis is Head of OD at Clydesdale and Yorkshire Banking Group; he reminded me of the importance of the emotional response to change and the need to think long-term when planning change.

Many other people have commented via LinkedIn or by contacting me directly on what they would like to see included in the A to Z of OD. Big thanks to all – just like Lucy and Francis today, you’ll get a namecheck when your ideas come up in the alphabet! And if you want to guest blog a topic or thought leader, then let me know. You’re more than welcome to get involved in the conversation.

C is for Culture

“Is this the real life; is this just fantasy?” so a certain Mr Mercury asked the world in 1975. At some point in the Eighties, organisations started asking themselves the same question about their own existence, their own cultures. Academics argued that organisations could have their own distinct cultures, their own shared values, beliefs and norms, and that there would be competitive advantage from aligning these with the needs of their stakeholders. What followed is a global change consulting industry now worth in the region on US$250bn per annum.

A fair chunk of the consulting industry is about changing organisational culture. I shouldn’t really complain as I am a very small part of this industry myself. Changing the culture is only possible if culture is real, or in other words that you believe the way people live, work, interact with each other and come together to achieve something jointly creates and re-creates the “ever-changing world in which we’re living” (McCartney… apologies, I seem to be stuck in some sort of 70s pop music frame today).

If we believe that is the case, then culture is real and if it is real, it can be managed.

How do you change culture?

Like any other change, a common approach to managing culture is to diagnose the current state (using tools such as the Culture Web), envisage a desired state and plan to move from the current reality to the new, future reality. Much of a culture change plan tends to surround influencing the role of leaders to develop the culture through symbolic means, most notably through their behaviours (see: B is for Behaviours).

And so, many OD practitioners encourage organisations to set standards of behaviours through scripting them (“this is what we are looking for”; “this is what we are not looking for”; that sort of thing) and embedding them into individual objective setting, performance review and personal development planning. Managers’ and leaders’ behaviours – such as more participative management styles, colleague engagement, recognition and rewards and encouraging personal development – both enact and symbolise the culture.

This approach has become pervasive across all sectors. It uses culture management as a tool to advance organisational effectiveness, to stimulate motivation and to create linkages between the organisation and the employee – a sense of belonging, often referred to as a sense of family.

And when used purposively, it seems to work; it benefits both the employee and the organisation; and hence the customer and other stakeholders; and hence the primary purpose of the organisation.

What could go wrong?

If culture can be managed, it can be manipulated too. I’m not sure organisations are like families. Organisations still tend to favour tasks over relationships, they still discourage emotional expression. And membership of organisations is less permanent than in real families, particularly during periods of organisational change. Power and leadership differ significantly, and family members are less likely to mistrust each other. Also, families are predicated on Parent/Child relationships. Many organisations work like that too, whereas the culture we seek in organisations is Adult. Oftentimes, ‘Family’ is a poor metaphor for the organisational culture we seek.

To make things worse, employees who believe in the team-family metaphor can become colonised by their organisations. The very same organisations who may then have to announce redundancy programmes in pursuit of benefiting one stakeholder group (shareholders/governors) over another (employees).

In the face of these conflicting messages, employees become ambivalent: on the one hand believing the organisation is adding value to their lives beyond their salary, whilst harbouring fantasies of autonomy and other forms of escape from the psychic prison in which they have become trapped. This manifests as worsening performance, lower motivation, and a desire for Work-Life Balance. Work-Life Balance has become a socially acceptable form of dissent. Organisations that espouse Work-Life balance can inadvertently make employees anxious. I suspect Work-Life Integration is the antidote to anxiety.

The only way to avoid this risk is to ensure the espoused culture is real, which means it must be lived day-to-day. You must favour relationships as well as tasks, encourage emotional expression, flatten power hierarchies to become more democratic, build trust through Adult relationships and encourage Work-Life integration. This creates the right climate for culture to flourish.