Organisation Development: A Bold Explorer's Guide - Brossura

Traeger, James; Warwick, Rob

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1911450220 ISBN 13: 9781911450221

Casa editrice: Libri Pub Ltd, 2018

Riassunto

The authors of Organisation Development put the art of everyday interaction at the center of organization development, explored through narratives and fiction. They give confidence to those who are tired of frameworks and tools that do not relate to their daily practice and ask: “is it just me, or…?” Important clues for practice and theory can be found in exploring everyday interactions. It is in the detail, for example the corridor conversation with a senior director, that things can be said that affect the lives of many. Organization development never stops or starts. It is a continuing series of interactions in which we have choices. These choices are creative and artful as well as practical and ethical, and the authors show how any of us might weigh these complex balances and move forward. There is a noticeable current of ‘process philosophy’ running through the book that pays attention to the nature of connection, flow and how our understanding comes to develop over time. The authors therefore challenge the received building blocks of organization development. They put the curious, reflexive individual at the heart of their own development. This book is written for those who are keen to develop their practice from the ground up and who are looking for inspiration to take their own experience seriously.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Since 2010, James Traeger has supervised doctoral students at Ashridge-Hult Business School. He also co-founded the organization development consultancy Mayvin.co.uk, which helps its clients in government, commerce and 3rd sector navigate the increasing complexity of their environment.

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Organisation Development: A Bold Explorer's Guide

By James Traeger, Rob Warwick, Steve Marshall

Libri Publishing

Copyright © 2018 Libri Publishing
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-911450-22-1

Contents

An overture, 
Introduction, 
1. The essential fluidity of OD and organising, 
2. How does OD work happen?, 
3. Knowledge, knowing and learning, 
4. Artful practice to inspire human systems, 
5. Crafting an OD strategy, 
6. Politics and ethics of OD, 
7. The impact of what we do, 
8. Reflexive practice and social ripples, 
9. How the 2048 world of Jas Porter and Imogen Sharp helps us think about OD today, 
10. Concluding thoughts, 
Glossary, 
References, 

CHAPTER 1

The essential fluidity of OD and organising

IN THIS CHAPTER, we consider the nature of organisations and OD from a different angle. Instead of giving discrete definitions that imply they are things or objects, we offer a way of thinking about them as patterns of shifting interactions in which we are immersed. Because these interactions are a part of our daily lives, they can be hard to notice in our own practice and difficult to talk about. But this is important as becoming increasingly reflexive creates the opportunity to develop our practice. We offer this to begin the process of challenging and understanding practice. In other words, it is an invitation to ask questions (a theme we will continue throughout the book). It is not a neatly packaged argument in itself.

The organisation, or to organise

The organisation, or to organise: one is a noun, the other a verb. In the OD community, we often talk about organisations as if they are an object or an item. And in some respects, they are physical things: the buildings in which they are based, the legal documents that describe them, the contracts for the people who work with them, and so on. But in doing so, we downplay the stream of relationships that we are a part of: how we influence others, as others influence us. For example, in saying "I work for the NHS in ..." or explaining that, as an OD consultant, "I'm going into the NHS to work on ...", we are using abbreviations that take complex processes and wrap them up as objects. Here, we are going to draw attention to the processes of organising. This means considering organisations as patterns of human behaviour dedicated to some form of organising principle along with an array of resources. And through these tensions and enablers, people muddle on as best they can. This does not mean that any organising principle has been agreed by everyone; rather, it forms a sense of orientation by which people take decisions and move along.

In some organisations, this is stronger and more overt than in others, depending on the power of those involved; and in this process, patterns of interaction emerge and become increasingly predictable. These routines that people adopt, often unthinkingly, become culture. When we in OD talk about resources, we mean those materials and enablers that might be used in advancement of those aims such as buildings, intellectual property, software, networks of individuals and, of course, people themselves.

So when people use nouns to describe organisations, structures and systems, attention is often not paid to the verbs of organising, becoming, interacting and engaging. This also extends to policies, strategies and other propositional themes. Often these are discussed in terms of concrete outcomes, with little attention being given to context and how events unfold over time. These propositional themes are declarations of some future intent but accept that meaning emerges from the interaction between individuals and the context that they face.

Assumptions of organisations

There are some assumptions that we as authors would like to probe and, in doing so, we hope to encourage the practice of noticing and testing assumptions. We do not offer a definitive list here but raise questions to challenge the assumptions of organising, for example:

• Are organisations a good idea? On the one hand, they form a set of cohesive relationships around which activity is coordinated. They create a sense of identity for individuals as they relate to their teams and wider network. On the other, what good ideas and people do they exclude?

• Are teams a good idea? On the one hand, a cohesive group of people is vital in working, say, in an operating theatre on a complex surgical procedure. On the other, to what extent are the characteristics of teamwork stressful for those who prefer to work by themselves? Is it a contradiction that many in OD are sole practitioners, or work in small associations, yet advise others on developing teams?

• What will organisations be in the future? In a hyper-connected world, what will organising look like and will the demarcations that denote the limitations of an organisation today exist in the same way?

As you will see, we too use the noun "organisation" but with some hesitancy, knowing that it is shorthand for the verb that describes the processes of organising. With the use of science fiction, we do not take the organisation for granted. New hyper-networked ways of organising may just be too fluid for the structures and rules of the traditional organisation.

The fluidity of OD

In this section, we will explore the essential fluidity of what we mean by OD that is mirrored by the organisation writ large, the idea of which we have briefly touched upon above. There are three connected themes:

• How the part becomes manifest in the whole, by which we mean how an OD intervention affects the wider organisation

• The pitfalls and benefits of talking of OD as a 'thing'

• Bringing these together, how we can think of OD as something that is a contested and a continuingly negotiated idea.

To explore this, we venture beyond OD and HR by introducing some philosophy, a subject that can help us to see the world and the assumptions we make in refreshing ways. Firstly, we hear from James:

The first time I put two and two together about what OD was, I was walking down a corridor at Roffey Park, an internationally renowned leadership institute. It was the early noughties and a group of colleagues were discussing how to handle a particular challenge with a client. I do not remember the details but I think it was something to do with managing the relationship between a manager and his or her team, in the context of some complex change. Someone in the group said "We'd treat this as OD. This is a classic piece of OD for us." This struck me as interesting in a number of ways. Firstly, it was the first time I had ever heard the words 'organisational development' being used in this way. It seemed to have something specifically related to the place where it was being practised; in this case it was being defined as a piece of OD work by practitioners at Roffey Park. It was the "for us" that resonated, as if calling it OD and defining it that way was somehow relevant for this group of people. For me, OD had become definitionally tribal; in the dynamics of our interactions we were defining ourselves and our identity by comparing our group with others. Often, this creates a sense of a 'superior us' opposed to an 'inferior them'.

We often say that it has a 'local, timely and specific' flavour. Secondly, I realised that OD was something I had (sort of) already been doing for about ten years before that amble down the corridor. I may have called it 'facilitation', 'team building' or 'coaching' – or even 'restructuring' or 'systemic practice' – but this OD thing was the bag I could now put all of these loosely connected tools in. They were all instruments to manage the people side of change. Finally, the X factor that brought these tools together, the fabric the bag is made of, is the holistic mindset. It was perfectly possible, I realised, to do a bit of team building, or coaching, without any regard to the wider system, and our own place in relation to it, as well as our own value set or ethical position. But only by having some regard to these does team building become something approaching OD. So, the local timely nature, the practice that brings the tools of the people side of change together, the holistic mindset with a sense of the ethical and values-based systemic choices – these may not add up to a tightly defined artefact called 'OD', but we may have to live with that. You might have to do some work of your own to define it more tightly. And that is the final piece of the jigsaw. What makes OD OD is how you bring all of these components together in your context. There are, by necessity, as many definitions of OD out there as there are practitioners. You make your own Lego with these bricks.

To discuss this further, we consider the work of Henri Bortoft and his interpretation of the German polymath, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. As a brief diversion, we explore Goethe and other forms of knowing beyond the scientific, with its assumptions of rationality and cause and effect, that we often accept without question, even when faced with the trickiest human-to-human dilemmas. But back to Bortoft: he developed Goethe's ideas of science and his view of 'wholeness' as a counter to the current scientific tendency of seeing things in isolated units that we then assume can be aggregated to produce a whole (Bortoft, 1998). His concern, as a scientist himself, was that this aggregation of activity or insight did not describe the complexity, the dynamic interaction and the subtly of the whole (or 'system'). Bortoft uses a vivid example of reading a book:

We cannot know the whole in the way in which we know things because we cannot recognise the whole as a thing. If the whole were available to be recognised in the same way as we recognise the things that surround us, then the whole would be counted among those things as one of them. ... But the whole comes into presence within its parts, and we cannot encounter the whole in the same way as we encounter the parts. We should not think of the whole as if it were a thing.

(Bortoft, 1998, p.285)

Here Bortoft is suggesting that the whole is of a different nature to its parts. And we hear this in James' experience. When we run a training programme or facilitate a workshop, it has some impact and we can measure and record this using evaluation sheets handed out to participants. We might even benchmark and undertake some statistical analysis, but the actual impact that we have on the wider system defies knowing in the comforting scientific way because the entity of the organisation and its organising processes are of a different quality to any discrete activity. This is not to say that the workshop or training event has no impact – it does – but we cannot be concrete about what this impact is. We must be trusting to some extent and encourage the trust of others too. In James' metaphor of the bag, this trust is in the service of some greater organising benefit – that the system will be better off according to some hoped-for agenda – but this cannot be guaranteed. We will explore this in more depth in our chapter 'The impact of what we do'. As we see with Bortoft's example, words and paragraphs have impact but they do so in how they fall away and create in the reader's mind the story of the book that is created by the author's intent and the imagination of the reader. Coming back to OD: this is why it is so hard to pin down!

We also hear James' experience of the conversation that occurs when colleagues use OD as tribal shorthand, as occurs in many professions. But something else is happening too: OD has become a thing, it is now reified. In tribal shorthand, this makes sense otherwise our conversations would never get anywhere. The experts 'get this'. For example, in the 'Introduction', Sam in fact she does not think about it, it is automatic. A consequence of this is that she is unable to notice these assumptions and shortcuts, and thus doesn't ask questions such as: what are the wider implications and what am I missing? To Chris, the inexperienced OD consultant, this is no shortcut at all: this is OD. David Seamon, a scholar of Goethe, explains a concern that the polymath had:

Goethe emphasised that perhaps the greatest danger in the transition from seeing to interpreting is the tendency of the mind to impose an intellectual structure that is not really present in the thing itself. "How difficult it is ... to refrain from replacing the thing with its sign, to keep the object alive before us instead of killing it with the word". [One] must proceed carefully when making the transition from experience and seeing to judgement and interpretation, guarding against such dangers as "impatience, ... self-satisfaction, rigidity, narrow thoughts, presumptions ..."

(Seamon, 1998, p.3)

One of the themes that Goethe kept returning to was the hard work involved in paying attention to the shifting and developing nature of phenomena and how we take this for granted. He was inviting us to pay close attention to development and interaction, and to consider deeply any recurring patterns and what they might be. This takes time but we are rewarded with a deeper understanding of the interactions that we are part of. These routines might be helpful or unhelpful but we now have choice.

The final idea we introduce in this chapter is the contested nature of what we mean by OD. We argue that this should not be a source of frustration; on the contrary, it is the rub or friction that makes OD what it is. This is a friction that exists between us, OD practitioners, and our clients; it is not a definition that will settle. We turn to W.B. Gallie, a philosopher who also had an interest in the process of how things occur. This is a short excerpt from a paper he presented to the Aristotelian Society in 1956 that makes a succinct point using art as an example.

'This picture is painted in oils' may be contested on the ground that it is painted in tempera, with the natural assumption that the disputants agree as to the proper use of the terms involved. But 'This picture is a work of art' is liable to be contested because of an evident disagreement as to – and the consequent need for philosophical elucidation of – the proper general use of the term 'work of art' ...

(Gallie, 1956)

In the paper he argued that it was futile to define concepts such as 'this picture is art', democracy or social justice in any conclusive sense. However, there could be meaningful discussions of one's interpretations compared with those of others. In doing so, we are not seeking the predictive power of the scientific method, but instead a deeper understanding of how the concepts have been used and understood over time and in different contexts. A consequence of this is that we should go out of our way to explore our practice and discuss it with others. As James points out, issues of context, our own values and the client all come to define locally what we mean by OD. But in these conversations we have half an eye on the longer term and wider impact. We should therefore not seek to close the definition of what OD is; rather the opposite: we should seek opportunity to understand that the contestedness is the activity itself.

Challenging our practice and assumptions

In this chapter we have sought to highlight the habit of thinking of organisations and OD as objects. Although these short cuts of reification might quicken our thinking, they hamper our reflexive abilities to consider the processes and contexts that we are part of. This has knock-on effects for the conversations and the shared meaning that we create with others; it downplays the shifting, contextual and relational nature of human interaction.

Experience of OD, experience of this book

What is your experience of reading a book? By the end, have you ever felt browbeaten into accepting the author's point of view, but rather resentful of the journey you were forced to take? As a practitioner in organisation development, would that approach work with your client? As authors we suspect not, so we are keen to avoid this here. In short, this is a process of joint inquiry with you the reader, one that engages the full range of knowing – logical argument, emotion, artistry, an appreciation of knack and even cunning. We have been cautious of being overly didactic, accepting that whilst we can share our views, backed up with evidence, other approaches work as well. That said, following feedback there are occasions in this book where we are now more assertive, more so than might seem natural to us. In short, we have approached writing this book in a way consistent with our OD practice: that of being reflexive, listening to ourselves and others as we make sense of what we do and make progress.

You can therefore dip in and out, following your line of interest; each chapter or section can be read by itself. With this in mind, we see ourselves as guides pointing out areas of interest, their implications and possibilities, enabling you to develop the ideas further in relation to your own interest. So how we come to do this is important, particularly going beyond intellectual argument, in fact challenging the nature of how we know. In light of this we will be exploring:

• Narratives. We tell our stories and those of others, drawing attention to events in the lead up, during and after; and how they weave together. In doing so, we appreciate that nothing sits in isolation, being instead connected to a whole lot of other activities and how we come to understand.

• Fiction. To appreciate issues of context and the assumptions we and others bring to OD we use fiction set in the future as a way of reflecting on how organisations might be seen when people have a very different view of what organising might be like. To do this, we have created two characters set in 2048 along with several stories.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Organisation Development: A Bold Explorer's Guide by James Traeger, Rob Warwick, Steve Marshall. Copyright © 2018 Libri Publishing. Excerpted by permission of Libri Publishing.
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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Libri Pub Ltd
• Data di pubblicazione: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1911450220
• ISBN 13: 9781911450221
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero di pagine: 198
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile