Poodles tend to have weak rear legs.

Older people get cataracts, shingles and what not. Kids get measles, mumps and chicken pocks.

Boxers often get dementia. Tennis players get bad elbows.

People who sit next to a computer all day get various aches and pains.

All of the above “come with the territory”, and are almost unavoidable.

Similarly, different types of organizations have different pathologies. The pathologies are not avoidable because they come with the territory of being what they are.

In this post, I shall provide a short taxonomy of pathologies I have encountered in my long career in 4 types of organizations, and suggest how to best deal with them.

1. Bureaucracies eventually ossify to the point that that they work against doing their own job. Ministries of Housing slow down building of new houses; Welfare Ministries keep people poor. Ministries of Defense go to war. Income Tax creates a black market. My approach to working with bureaucracies has always been to work with empowered project teams from different functions to create a counter force to the functional structure and logic of bureaucracies.
2. Start Ups create new technology, but they do not change human nature. Start-up founders are often extremely arrogant, know-it-all, and believe that they are so special that their shit smells like a rose. They have little trust in consultants, until things get really bad. My approach with start-ups has generally been to try and create around the founder more common sense. The founder is often not part of the solution, but the problem itself which needs to be counterbalanced.
3. Organizations which are growing quickly often believe that they are doing everything right, and that is why they are growing quickly. This is very often total nonsense. They are growing because in the past, smart decisions were made. In the present, they are creating the reasons why they will stop growing. My approach to working with organizations which are growing quickly is to work on mitigating the damage to the “critical core” (people, ideas, behaviours) that made the company great; it is these very people who lose their power and influence when the company grows quickly.
4. Organizations of about 20-30 people have a problem of infrastructure. They are no longer a small company, but they cannot afford to create “staff” roles. As such, everything slows down and it becomes very hard to do simple things. My approach has always been to focus on hiring an over qualified individual who have vast experience in companies of this size. Hires from start-ups or very small companies have a hard trouble adapting to companies of this size.

One final comment. OD consultants must have domain experience. If you have done OD in family businesses, it does not “count” as relevant experience for any other type of organization.

“It’s a really slow and boring game, but let’s go anyway,” my Dad suggested in the first season (1969) that the Montreal Expos entered the  American baseball league. Dad added, “we can get ourselves a chien-chaud (hot dog) and a few Labatts (beer); I’ll doze off and you can wake me up when it’s over”.

Dad loved sports. He had played professional football after the airforce and he was an avid skier and golfer as well. Baseball was not his cup of tea but joking around with me about  baseball gave him a kick.

Dad knew no French at all (ok, he knew 30 words) but he knew that I loved French. He knew how interested I was in what words would be used to translate the various roles in baseball, and how the PA announcer would (mis) pronounce different names.

At Stade Parc Jarry (Jarry Park) he parked his Pontiac, lite up yet another Export A, and we tried to make our way to the seats. Dad was hard of hearing and the attendants who gave directions at Jarry spoke only French. Dad kept asking me ‘what did he say”? I laughed at that; he didn’t. “What a sick sense of humour you have, boy”.

A few things stand out in my memory from that game. First and foremost, I ate 3 hot dogs, chips (frites), popcorn and ice cream. Another memory: the the PA announced the name of the next batter:  “l’arret-court, the short stop, John Bocabellllllllllllllla.” I was ecstatic. The French word for short stop and the Bocabella name dragged out.

Later on in the game, a batter came up whose family had originally come from Quebec, although he himself was playing for an American team (LA Dodgers) , having been born and bred in the US. His name was James Kenneth LeFebvre. The announcer said “Second base, deuxieme base, Jim Le-Feeber, Jacques LeFebvre”. The crowd went wild.

On the way home, Dad asked me if I wanted to drop into the Dairy Queen for a sundae. Of course, he knew that I had eaten like a pig. After he asked me that question, he laughed for a long time, while smoking yet another Export A.

When we got out of the car Dad said, “Jesus what a f-cking back ache I have. I prefer watching boxing from bed, to be honest.”

Oh how I miss him.

Given our diminishing attention span, I have written  this post  so that it will take only one and a half minutes to read. Less if you just scan it briefly. If needed, I can send you a brief summary.

OD’s true value expresses itself in enhancing peoples’ relationships, creating a context of cooperation which goes beyond certain specific transactions. That’s the unique and essential “core” of developing an organizations’ human capabilities.

And it takes time to do so.  Meetings take time. And the “time” I am referring to is not a minute here and a minute there between looking at your phone or PC. I am referring to protracted periods of time working on improving the people part of organizations.

Everyone actually has the needed time, there is no doubt about that. But they don’t have the attention span, thus the time spent focusing on any given issue is a few minutes at best. Probably less. We have lost the ability for protracted focus, and this is a boundary condition in which we work. This is not good news for OD. There is no doubt in my mind that we have to adapt to this reality. It is bigger than us; we cannot change it. True, there are consultants who claim that OD can take on huge mega tasks of societal change, but these are the very consultants who often fail at smaller tasks, such as retaining their own clients. So be it. 

Here are a few things I have done, with a very heavy heart, that allows me to continue to practice on in the hostile focus-less époque.

• No more long group meetings. 90 minutes far max. Even these are few and far between.
• Personal sessions are 45 minutes at the most. Often less.
• I tend to ignore people glancing at their phones two or three times during a meeting; if it is more frequent, I suggest that we reschedule.
• I try not to deal with a wide range of issues, but rather try to keep more focused.
• At times, I myself use messaging for clients who are extremely busy all the time, albeit I detest myself for doing this.

Let’s be honest; it is a battle of retreat. With all the technology, working from home, and the ubiquitous use of cell phones, relationships have become transactional. And, as a result, most  OD has morphed into a water-down form of “motor oil” to keep the transactions squeaking on and/or by perfuming the pig with wellness, gender parity or diversity. All the former are real issues, but do not focus on the true value OD, namely that good, trusting relationships, healthy interfaces based on fulfilled and negoitiated mutual dependencies  serve as a very solid platform to enable things getting done.

From time to time, an organization can attempt a OD endeavour a second time, after a first attempt has failed.

For the consultant, this is a challenge with many pitfalls, and in this post I will spell them out, with a few recommendations.

• The previous consultant did good work, but the organization wanted fun and wow wow wow. This can happen when the work was commissioned by an internal OD and Training Manager, who is fearful for her/his standing in the organization. Example: Galit (internal OD) wanted the sales team to improve their soft skills. The consultant recognized that the products that the Sales team were failing to sell are of low quality and highly priced. But the VP of Engineering has a lot of clout with investors, so it is difficult to remove him to improve product quality. The consultant asked to investigate this issue in more depth and was fired for “poking around and overstepping his mandate”. In cases such as these, 2^nd time OD will probably fail, unless the consultant also practices the second oldest profession in the world.

• The previous consultant did poor work and was booted out. I have replaced Kumbaya consultants, rigid old-fashioned consultants who promulgate OD’s western values in the wrong places, flirtatious ladies, and consultants who just did not have the brain power to do the right things. However, the motive of “doing better work than my predecessors” is not a smart one, because it becomes “all about you”. The correct mindset is that the organization, not you, are trying again. If YOU want to succeed where your competition failed, you are setting yourself to be knocked out by your own ambition. Focus on what needs to be done, not where others failed.

• For certain types of clients, second time OD is very difficult. Organizations with a very strong culture which has become a religion are prone to fail because the OD consultant, if not a high priest of the religion, is a heretic. I remember doing a project where transparency was a religion. Of course, it was not, but it was forbidden to admit it. Or I worked for an organization where every decision had to be made by consensus. This of course never occurred, but again, saying so was heresy.So, take a look at WHY your predecessor failed, and if you observe that the organization probably failed because it is impervious to change, but cannot admit it, stay away.

We all know how hard it is to access the compatibility of candidates for a job. Tests, interviews, graphologists, peer interviews: we have all had to eat our humble pie after massive errors of judgement.

I have been way off many times and I am not kind to myself after I miss. But thankfully, my clients are nicer to me than I am to myself because I try to do my best to innovate in order to improve.

One of the factors that I try to access in each interview is the level of political savvy that a potential client has, since more often than not, it is the organizational politics that plays a critical role in the adjustment of the candidate. There are a lot of organizations which don’t test for political skills, especially organizations that are very political. The army and family businesses are a good example, as are large and older organizations.

I will provide some examples of how I try to access political skills.

• For a family organization

The CEO, your boss, is extremely dominating. Furthermore, some of his critical decisions are made in haste. The CEO’s mother wants to speak to you next week. She is the former chairwoman and founder. What are your thoughts? Plans? Fears in any? Describe your approach.

• For an engineering job at a senior level

You have been asked to submit a budget to present to the Board which covers 60% of what you actually need. Your boss has told you that the budget submission is a political act, and later on down the line, he will allocate “whatever is necessary”. How will you react to your boss’s request?

• For a business development role for hi-tech

You are about to meet with new investors who may be interested in injecting money into the company for which you work. You have been thinking of jumping ship because the next  product releases are 1) too buggy and 2) too late; you are pretty negative about where your company is heading. You know that these investors will really bad mouth you if you mis-represent, but you need to stay put until you get a new job (which is not easy) because of your mortgage payments. What’s your plan?

These are just a few of the many examples I have developed.

Try doing so next time you are fishing for a candidate. It may add just a bit more of validity in the perilous process of predicting success.