There are organizations and units where “no can do” is a frequent behaviour of employees and lower levels of management. No can do is undue pessimism, foot dragging and a passive attitude.

Upon encountering such behaviour, senior management gets all upset and may demand “engagement” programs from the ever so perky HR department, as well as pressure middle management to assume responsibility.

Consultants may diagnose no can do-ism as  lack of engagement and then prescribe engagement or managerial training or even coaching, reminding me of doctors looking at something they do not understand by labelling it a virus caused by stress and tell patients to live a less stressful life style.

Can’t do-ism, however, in many cases is a positive adaptive defence mechanism on the part of employees.Unless recognized as such, it cannot be properly addressed.

Here are examples where a no-can-do attitude actually pays off!

1-an organizational culture in which people are pushed to over commit, and then blamed for delays.  This is very prominent in software, sales and cut throat competitive domains.

2-a culture where constraints to aggressive timetables/goals are negotiated (in the sense of bargaining) ,not discussed. This can be prominent in software, in goal setting, and with certain societies which tend to negotiate instead of discuss.

3-a culture where there is a severe work life imbalance and employees perceive a need to “hide” (pad) from management, because where there is no such thing as priority management, and everything is urgent.

As such, no-can-do is a survival reflex of an abused employee to a dysfunctional organization.

In my experience, all engagement programs, talent management and training efforts that “throw skills” and wow wow (cheerleader) when dealing with no-can-do are doomed, because they see no-can-do attitude through the biased eyes of management.

In worst case scenarios, there is a ready made training/coaching product that is “applied”  to make a fast buck which also helps someone internally look good for rapid action to deal with this no can do  `virus`.

No can do is a severe and hard to diagnose dysfunction which cannot be picked up at a proper resolution via organizational surveys or cured via engagement programs. However when diagnosed qualitatively and without a management bias, there are many positive steps which can be taken to reverse the situation, none of which have anything to do with engagement.

Because of commercial interests, a desire for more business alignment, and loss of direction, OD practitioners have both promulgated and actively jumped on the bandwagon of passing fads and fashions. TQM, Re-engineering, Excellence, Knowledge Management, Engagement are a few examples of these “short affairs”.

More recently, as organizations mechanized work flow and cooperation, having eliminated the need for intelligence (!) via IT driven business processes, OD practitioners clipped a coupon with a wide variety of products geared at lessening resistance and driving the change.

Big bucks have been made by “serving the mainstream” and avoiding the role of contrarian when confronting new fads.

Yet one by one, the fads die and are replaced by new fads, and practitioners find themselves preaching, retreating and then preaching a new fad, taking a huge hit on their professional credibility.

I have always looked at my role as a contrarian. Part of this is no doubt due to my personality, which is indeed critical and skeptical. (I am also a non-believer and avoid rigid religious beliefs of all kind, theological or organizational).

Yet being a contrarian is not only a function of personality. I think that contrarianism should be a major ventricle in the heart of OD.

This is not about criticizing everything or being anti for its own sake; rather it is a set of assumptions which may look like:

• How can/will this new system be “outsmarted?” What does this mean?
• Where is the arrogance behind this new belief or fad? How can I unmask it?
• Whose interests are being served and whose interests are being compromised? Why? What does this mean?
• What underlying dynamics are being ignored and created? What can be done with this?

And I can go on and on. Contrarianism is a sanity check on excessive  “beliefs”.

Few HR departments want this type of input from an OD consultant, and when internal OD departments are created to save costs, the first thing that is compromised is critical thought.

Yet contrarianism is an approach that senior management both wants and needs. If you want to look in the mirror and be proud of the value of OD, re consider learning to be a contrarian.

Notice the term: approach not product. You need a lot of experience to do it well, and it is not scalable.

For commercial reasons, for every contrarian OD consultant, there are a hundred consultants looking for new fads to support. To be a contrarian, you do not need to be an altruist, but you aren’t going to be rich.

The concept of “face” and “face saving” do exist in Western Cultures, although it is far less prominent, salient and discernible in the business domain than it is in Asia.

When I consult executives who are about to/have just assumed a role in Asia, one of the first things I address are the behaviours deriving from the concept of face. Unlike many consultants, I begin by giving examples of face in the Western world.

For example-

1) Your aging father calls you in the morning and ask you, “how are you feeling, sonny boy?” The “truth” is that you are very worried about an income tax issue, and you have a severe headache. Yet you answer “fine Dad, and how are you”. You want to save your father from feeling uncomfortable.

Preventing people from feeling uncomfortable is a key aspect of face saving; the Thais call this type of face saving “kleng jai” (deferential heart).

2) Your partner asks you “how do I look in this new dress”. The “truth” is that you are very busy with other issues and clothes are not your thing. “Great, darling”, is your answer. You prefer harmony to telling her “I am not the person to ask, and this is not the right moment”.

The preference of harmony to conflict is another component of face saving.

3) You tell a visiting colleague, Igor from Russia, “Why don’t you come by and visit next time you are in the States?” You have no intention to ever follow through on that, but you want to make Igor feel good.

Imparting a good feeling without any intent to follow through with action is another element of face saving.

4) You compete for a tender and loose. You pick up the phone, call your lost potential client, and “thank” him for giving you and chance and wish him “success”. You avoid telling “truth” because civility, not truth, serves the relationship.

Civility at all costs is another major component of face saving.

Face and face saving exists all over the world. In Asia, the use of face saving behaviours in business is overwhelmingly dominant, yet there is nothing that does exist, mutatis mutandis, in the west.

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OD and change consultants who want to remain relevant would be wise to  stop drinking academia’s warmed over cool aid, check their western biases, step away from force feeding western values when inappropriate, and get real. Want an example? Let’s look at the feedback loop’s appropriateness to the global organization.

Feedback is one of the building blocks that OD introduced into organizations. Feedback consists of information about an organization, a group and an individual which is “recycled” to provide a basis for assessment, reflection and as a basis for corrective action.

OD’s toolkit and values froze over a long time ago, whilst organizations globalized their configuration.  The blanket misuse of feedback in global organizations is an example at hand. There is a need to align the feedback loop to the huge cultural variance that exists in the global workplace, which is what I will do in the post.

Let’s look at some cultural variance in the global workforce.

1. In some cultures, it is easy to talk about the future, but if the past is discussed, there is/may be a  loss of face.
2. In some cultures, corrective action may be more effective if positioned as adaptive change,without use of explicit lessons learned from the past.
3. In some cultures, direct and authentic feedback of any kind is seen as extraordinarily rude.
4. In some cultures, the essence of leadership is to “protect employees by assuming responsibility for their errors” and keeping it all hush hush.

Clearly, the existing feedback loop with all its western biases, must be retooled for the global organization.

As we align organizational design and development to a global configuration, here are a few components worth developing.

1. Develop and legitimize opaque communication tools that allude to the past in order to plan corrective action.

2. Develop and legitimize indirect and “back door” feedback so as not to cause any perceived discomfort whatsoever, yet enable change.

3.Develop a contingency feedback model that allows a legitimate trade off between the feedback and the perceived harmony of relationships.

4. Budget much longer time cycles for giving feedback so as to allow face saving.

Have you ever attended an OD conference that put this issue on the table? Have you read a text book that focuses on western OD’s irrelevance? Of course not, global organizations are side shows which challenge the dominant western bias of OD. And there is a power elite that keeps it this way.  

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Because of the Western bias of Organization Development, OD’s concepts, values and tools are inappropriate to many issues impacting global organizations. As a matter of fact, OD is biased in action and behaves with the same intolerance which gave birth to OD’s creation.

Text books, articles and web sites dedicated to OD ignore the irrelevancy of the OD profession to problems of global organizing.  Even OD conferences pay only minor lip service to the crushing need to develop OD’s relevance.

Written material and conferences recycle the same traditional old crap repackaged in new slogans. Alternatively, folks reminisce about the good old days… the good old days when white liberal UK and US based males established the OD profession which the next generation inherited and then “froze” OD’s design. The world changed and OD stayed put, except for the moronic design of OD products, whose goal was to make money, not further OD’s cause.

There is a wonderful expression in Chinese 哑巴吃饺子,心里有数 which means “When a mute person eats some dumplings, he knows how many he has eaten, albeit he cannot speak. In other words, people know things that they do not or cannot express.

OD practitioners know how much irrelevance is bombarded at them by the old guard, they just do not speak up. Why? Because the old guard controls the keys to the palace. The palace may be crumbling, but they have the keys…the keys to keynotes, the key to publications, the keys to budgets-because they sit in the House of Lords.

OD conferences are good for networking and PR, but little else. In other words, we all know that besides networking, conferences have minimal value. New content is not provided, but no one says anything. Few OD books really innovate anything new, except new tools for a crumbling paradigm.

The old OD guard is trying to ensure that OD stays at it is. At most, practitioners need “some cultural skills”, mumble the Lords. Nonsense, claims this author. It is OD itself that needs to be modified. In the domain of global OD, the present elite needs to listen, not preach, read and not write. They are not ready.

Imagine that the Lords of OD stopped perfuming the pig and dedicated a conference, or a book, to examine how to make OD relevant in global organizations.

Could you imagine a book, or OD conference on these 5 subject?

1) Root Canal 101: Breaking Away from the Founding Fathers

Since organizational reality has changed radically since OD’s founding fathers first murmured their ideas, OD can become relevant when its tools are not biased. The profession must be realigned around global organizing.

2) Organization diagnosis in discrete and face saving cultures

3) A culturally contingent role of OD Consultant:

Expert, Mediator, Enabler, Masked Executive

4) Retooling OD:

What are the alternatives to free flowing team interventions,”conflict management” and ways and means of by-passing the need for direct communication, and how to do OD “offstage”.

5) Managing the Major Polarities in Global OD

-openness and discretion

-involvement and stability

-respect and change

-ascription and achievement

The OD power elite in OD does not have a clue about these topics so they shut these topics down. So the voices of those of us who advocate the globalization of OD are expressed mainly in avant guard blogs like this.