The Hindu Business Line : Organisation Development

In the 1970s, implementing an “OD (Organisation Development) intervention” was as sacred as performing open heart surgery. The feat was rare and the practitioners revered. Sixty years after the birth of this discipline, profession and concept, OD continues to excite and frustrate its ardent practitioners as much as it evokes puzzlement and cynicism among many others.

Given the complex changes that organisations of every kind are going through and the stress and dysfunctionalities being generated in the process of achieving organisational goals, I see renewed interest among many in leveraging the value of OD to enhance organisational effectiveness.

So what is OD and what is its purpose? What is its history? Where is it today and where is it headed?

OD defined

It is best to define OD through a simple analogy.

For all of us, as human beings, being effective in our lives is the ultimate goal. Personal effectiveness includes many dimensions such as physical, emotional, social and spiritual effectiveness. It is about achieving our fullest potential and being all that we are capable of. At a more basic level, it is about coping effectively with environmental stressors and pressures and still upholding our commitment to our larger purpose.

Similarly, for an organisation, effectiveness is about going beyond profit and achieving its full potential and fulfilling the needs of all its constituents and doing it in the most socially responsible, commercially ethical and environmentally friendly way. At a more basic level, it is about the ability of the organisation to cope effectively with the harsh influences of the environmental stressors and pressures and still stay committed to the larger purpose.

As individuals, we adopt different means to achieve this effectiveness — intellectually through learning, psychologically through emotional intelligence, physically through fitness and existentially through spirituality. Similarly, organisations have used various approaches to remain effective. OD is one such important approach.

Born from the roots of psychology, sociology and anthropology, OD attempts to enhance organisational effectiveness by understanding and changing individual, group and organisational behaviour.

Like individuals are administered psychometric tests for diagnosis, feedback and improvement, OD consultants used diagnostic tools to build awareness and initiate change. Survey feedback and action research were most popularly used for this purpose.

The OD practitioner’s style of relating with his client varied. Edgar Schien described three such styles of engagement — the doctor-patient model, the expert model and the process consultation model.

Over the years, OD consultants discovered various ways of designing the entire change and improvement process and involving people in the same. This gave rise to several change management methodologies. Today, there are at least 18 known change methodologies. Open space technology, appreciative enquiry and future search are the more popular ones.

The final actions taken to fix the issues included sensitivity training, structural change, team-building, visioning, process improvements and so on.

The history

OD was very hot in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. OD professionals were mostly applied behavioural scientists with deep capabilities in human processes, diagnosis, research and facilitation. Many were trained in T-Group (sensitivity training) training and/or in large system change methodologies.

While the science was impeccable and their diagnosis was strong on human processes, it was weak on the business linkages. There was a growing sense that they did not understand business and that their solutions were too simplistic and focused excessively on individual behaviour change as a means to organisational effectiveness. Putting everyone through T–Groups did not make a difference when they re-entered the workplace to face real life problems. Organisations soon began to look beyond OD.

It was around this time that the quality movement emerged as a breath of fresh air. The quality professionals were able to focus on business issues. They had specific tools, they showed dollar benefits and yet demonstrated the same human process sensitivities.

The world of business was by then in an even greater hurry and found even TQM too slow. That is when organisations started focussing a lot more on financial performance and a lot less on overall effectiveness. In that context, things like re-engineering emerged as quicker solutions.

Around this period, human resources (HR) management emerged as a strong profession and function within organisations. While the initial incumbents in the HR leadership roles came with an OD grounding, the next generation was trained a lot more in the design and implementation of HR processes.

OD, today and tomorrow

Today, TQM remains largely restricted to manufacturing organisations. Things like Balanced Score Card are not holistic enough. The HR profession is at the crossroads given that its practitioners want a seat at the table and their sponsors don’t want to grant it to them without their having competent answers to their problems of organisational effectiveness. Finally, the OD profession is fragmented, applied in isolated bits and pieces with pockets of success, but buried under layers of fads, other priorities and ignorance.

All of this is set to change. Just as individuals are beginning to pay more attention to their psychological well being, given the stresses in their lives, organisations are also beginning to focus on the psychological implications of their actions, strategies and decisions.

Especially in India, organisations are perplexed by the fast changing social and emotional fabric, the emerging demographics and the new socio-technical challenges posed by the way they have designed jobs. They want to reconnect with their people, have conversations with them and understand what really motivates them. They are slowly beginning to realise that in this lies their effectiveness and sustenance.

Suddenly, the original need for an OD professional who can improve organisational effectiveness through a deep understanding of human and organisational processes seems to re-emerge. It is my hope that a second version of business savvy OD professionals will emerge to meet this need very soon!

(The writer is the founder and CEO of totus consulting, a strategic HR consulting firm. He is also the co-founder of the Executive and Business Coaching Foundation India Ltd. He can be reached at ganesh@totusconsulting.com)

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