state, and local governments (which are among the largest employers in the United States, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics), public sector organizations around the world, health care organizations, educational settings, and nonprofit and private enterprises. Interventions can involve a single individual, a small team (such as the cancer center team described earlier), multiple teams, or a whole organization. It can also consist of multiple targets of change, such as in the Vodaphone initiative that involved not only large-scale culture change but also the implementation of teams and individual coaching. OD can also deal with multiorganization efforts, such as in the case of Santa Cruz County, or it can involve multiple national governments. The target of change can be something as seemingly simple as increasing employee involvement or developing coworker relationships, or it can be as potentially large as creating the vision or strategy of an entire organization or documenting the 10-year future of a large county.
Profiles in Organization Development
Marvin Weisbord
Marvin Weisbord had a 50-year career as manager, writer, researcher, and consultant to corporations and medical schools. He was a founder and co-director of Future Search Network, a global nonprofit whose members manage strategic planning meetings for communities worldwide. He received a lifetime achievement award from the Organization Development Network, which voted his book Productive Workplaces one of the “Top Five Most Influential OD books of the Past 40 Years.” For 20 years, he was a partner in the consulting firm Block Petrella Weisbord, a member of the NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Science, and a member of the European Institute for Transnational Studies (ITS).
1 How did you get started in OD? What favorite lessons stand out about your work with people and organizations?I learned to do organization development (OD) by doing it. I became an advocate for projects to help people learn from their own experience. Most people know more about their work than they realize. They rarely have a chance to discover it. Given time to educate one another, people always learn more about the whole than any one person knew before. Given influence over policies and work systems, people perform better than they think they can. This has occurred for decades regardless of culture, age, class, gender, ethnicity or “personal style.” I learned that “sustainable change” was an oxymoron! The best we could hope to sustain was peoples’ commitment from one meeting to the next. That is a priceless change worth having. If you want a new culture, make every meeting congruent with the culture you want. You’ll never do better than that.I learned the power of applying systems thinking to complex tasks. Getting from Point A to Point B means paying attention all at once to economics, technology, and people. Such was the origin of my 6-box organizational diagnosis model. I imagined it as an aircraft’s instrument panel. I likened leadership to scanning the dials, keeping all the instruments in balance, mindful that you never can change just one thing.For two decades after leaving the consulting business, I ran and taught a three-day planning event called “Future Search.” Indeed, Sandra Janoff and I showed more than 4,000 people around the world how to do effective large group strategic planning for themselves. I liked that work because it required all the key players in the same room. Whatever did or did not happen was up to them. We saw people who had never worked together do things in a few hours that none believed possible. We documented positive results from Future Searches all over the world.
2 What other jobs or experiences helped you as an OD practitioner?I could not have become an OD consultant had I not worked for a decade in a business forms company. I could not have written up my OD cases had I not been a magazine writer. Nor would I have gotten into the NTL Institute, a group dynamics pioneer. I could not have learned to function in groups, nor how to do action research, without being an NTL workshop leader for 20 years. I could not have learned the nuts and bolts of collaborative consulting without partnering with Peter Block and Tony Petrella. Had it not been for research in medical schools with Paul Lawrence and D-I (differentiation-integration theory), I might never have got how behavior change follows structural change more often than vice versa.I could not have appreciated the unity of human experience but for Sandra Janoff’s and my shared interest in applying D-I theory to strategic planning. Nor could I have freed myself to work easily anywhere in the world without John and Joyce Weir’s gift of owning my experience without needing to deny anybody else’s. In the long run, I integrated everything I learned into a dance that included human relations, socio-technical systems design, and personal growth.
3 What do you think are the most important skills for a student of OD to develop?If you want to help others, do what they never did before: Start with yourself. You cannot get too much self-knowledge. That requires finding parts of yourself you didn’t know existed. There is a lifetime of work for each of us in finding our “shadows,” harmonizing inner voices that tear us apart. We’re never finished, and the right time to do it is every day.When you walk into a meeting, imagine everyone doing their best with what they have. Then deal with people the way you find them. Realize that you can’t change them. You can learn to do things you never did before—even accepting others the way you find them. You can give people opportunities they never had. You will not discover this in power points and executive summaries.
4 Can you comment on the future of organizations and the field of OD?After 30 years of Future Searches, I believe that the best way to manage the future is to understand that it happens now. Both past and future exist only in the present. Today is yesterday’s future. It’s dissolving into the past by the second. Learning that is the best asset a consultant can acquire. Look around you. Whatever people are doing today was yesterday’s future. We cannot solve novel problems before we have them. Improving companies and communities can be satisfying work if you avoid thinking you build for the ages. You can only do “future” work in today’s meetings. You can only capitalize on the expertise, experience, hopes, fears, and dreams of those doing the work. Figure how to get everybody improving whole systems. If you put energy into doing that you can make a difference, not someday, but every day.
What Organization Development Is Not
Despite this seemingly expansive definition of what organization development is and what issues and problems it addresses, it is also limited. OD is not any of the following.
Management Consulting
OD can be distinguished from management consulting in specific functional areas such as finance, marketing, corporate strategy, or supply chain management. It is also distinguished from information technology applications. Yet OD is applicable to any of these areas. When organizations attempt a conscious change, whether it involves implementing a new IT system; making changes in strategy, goals, or direction; or adapting to a new team leader, OD offers relevant processes and techniques to make the change function effectively. An OD practitioner would not likely use expertise in one of these content areas (for example, best practices in financial structures of supplier relationships or contemporary marketing analysis) to make recommendations about how an organization does this activity. Instead, an OD practitioner would be more likely to assist the organization in implementation of the kinds of changes that management consultants would advise them to make. Thus, OD makes a distinction between partnerships with a client where the consultant offers content advice and those where the consultant offers process advice. Consulting where the practitioner offers content advice falls under the heading of management consulting, whereas OD offers consultation on the process used to reach a desired goal. Most management consulting also is not based on OD’s set of foundational values (a topic that we will take up in detail in Chapter 3). In Chapter 5 we will discuss OD consulting in particular and differentiate it from management consulting activities with which you may be familiar.
Training and Development
While individual and organization learning is a part of OD and a key value we will discuss in a later chapter, OD work is not confined to training activities. OD is not generally the context in situations in which learning is the sole objective, such as learning a new skill, system, or procedure. OD deals with organizational change efforts that may or may not involve