Author Archives: shevat allon

Why the results of OD interventions are not perfect

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Recently, I have finished major dental treatment which I had put off for years, due to fear and dilly dallying; finally l decided to just do it. The treatments took six months.

During the tens of meetings I had with my dentist during this half year, I found myself observing his work . And as the work came to a close, it was evident  that he felt satisfaction at the near perfect results. Indeed, my smile is “luvly”.

I have executed many complex OD projects over the years: post merger integration, interventions with very senior managers, and working with cultures where OD values appear incompatible. I have also done lots of work with Fortune 500 companies and very demanding start-ups.

My business grows via referrals and although my style is an “acquired taste”, at the personal level I have a sense of humour and it is easy to interact with me, so clients “like” me. This having been said, I have never delivered a “perfect” result, like my dentist has.

If properly executed, OD interventions cannot be perfect. Organizations themselves are very imperfect. Once the human race started organizing and we all  became dependant on one another, there is severe anxiety built into the very essence of organizing, and all forms of organizations. This anxiety is not soluble.

OD creates more effective coping mechanisms, flexibility and a better breed of manager, follower and team. Yet often, once OD mitigates the noise caused by one problem, another problem surfaces, which is totally natural.

Many so called OD practitioners try and sell OD products  which can be “plugged in and played” , as it were,  to any organization. They promise “client satisfaction” and perfect results. This brand of OD practitioner, the snake oil salesman, wants his client to be thrilled. I don’t. Being thrilled with the results an OD project makes no sense at all, because at best, human organizing is so imperfect.

The OD which I practice delivers a professional service and not a product. The results that I deliver are very real and concrete, because they are not “perfect”. Certainly since most of my business is repeat or referral, the clients are satisfied, but they are not thrilled! Mais non!

And alas, in dentistry so much is dependant on the dentist, whilst in OD, so much dependent of client-consultant interaction. So here is a paradox to think over: in OD, only the unskilled deliver perfect results.

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When someone is professionally competent, cultural skills may be less important. (revised)

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When a manager lacks professional competence, cultural competence becomes far more  important for success.

To illustrate: In 2 different companies, Lynn and Morris both lead a major Supply Chain/IT effort to regulate the suppliers to whom work is contracted.

Morris and Lynne have both been told “not to rock the boat with the remote offices too much during the transition” yet ensure that the software be deployed globally with one year.

Morris is a top notch professional with business domain knowledge as well as IT skills which garner huge respect. Lynne comes from project management. She is a manager and an integrator. She lacks the professional business and IT knowledge that Morris has.

Although their personal style is similar, there is far more noise/ rumblings about Lynne. Folks complain that Lynne “does not understand the mentality” of the local offices. Strangely, Lynne encountered the strongest resistance in France and Belgium, although she speaks French fluently!

The level of professional competence that Morris exhibits mitigates the importance of his lack of his cross cultural competence. His professional competence lessens his need even to be seen as culturally competent. For Lynne, without cultural competence to win over initial trust, she may be a goner.

I train dozens of managers yearly in “cultural literacy and competence”. Cultural competence can compensate for lack of professional competence, and professional competence can lessen the need to be culturally literate.

Training departments would be wise to take this into account instead of “across the board” one size fits all.

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When change is failing, don’t fall into a trap

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OD consultants and other change professionals are commissioned at times by clients who are stuck and dither when facing a serious problem.

Two examples:

Take the merging 3 small companies into one and management insisting on “creating a new culture, based on the best parts of the 3 companies.” Management dithered on this issue for two years with the hope that things would somehow stabilize as the social fabric fell apart in political warfare.

Or, take the example of a company which needed  to really commit itself to transparency with its own staff to ensure credibility, yet focused on word-smithing, sweet-talking and sloganeering as the company employees become more and more “militant” and unionizes.

In such situations there is natural tendency of the consultant to push hard for decisiveness. And to make matters worse,  when  decisive action does not occur, the client may even blame the consultant for the slow pace of change!

Here is the crunch: If you push the client too hard because YOU want to succeed, then you may find yourself out on your ass. On the other hand if you accept the clients’ pace, you become part of the system.

This problem has no easy fix. For those of us who have learned to drive in heavy snow, it is helpful to remember how to free yourself from a snow bank….backwards and forwards, slowly, until you get the leverage to jolt forward.

And remember, ultimately it is the clients’ mess, not yours. If you feel that you are the one who is failing, your actions as a consultant will probably be less effective.

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Listening is a guessing game in many cultures

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Some cultures are relatively blunt and to the point. One rarely needs to guess what a Dutch, German, French or Israeli means when they express themselves in business. True, nuances and cultural clues may be be missing, but after some exposure, getting the point is pretty straight forward.

In other cultures, corporate communication is much more difficult to decipher. In some cultures, this  difficulty comes from face saving (e.g. Thailand, Philippines) ; in other cultures the difficulty comes from a cultural uniformity which negates the need to be explicit , like Japan. In the USA, the difficulty in figuring out what something means is negatively impacted by political correctness, which obfuscates clarity.

In cross cultural communication, a key skill that one needs to acquire is how to understand corporate communication when a lot is “unsaid”.

Example: A senior manager asks the Japan Office if he can visit the first week of August. The answer he gets is yes. Then, the senior manager asks how many people will be on vacation that same week. When he learns that 70% of the people will be on vacation that same week, he asks if the first week of September is better, and gets a “yes”, only to learn later on that this date is also unsuitable.

Here are a few suggested ways to get around this impediment of implicitness:

1) Don’t try to get people to be explicit. While it can be done, it is very humiliating for the other side.

2) Ask many people the same question and compare answers.

3) Learn to provide alternatives, as opposed to asking questions the answers to which are yes or no. (Do you prefer I come on this date or that date).

4) Listen very closely to what is not said. Watch eye content, pay attention, putting  all communication in (age, role, situational) context.

5) Watch for purposeful ambiguity. E.g, Is this a good time to meet? “Yes, it may be”.

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In praise of the global organization-and a toast

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Nothing like spending the last month running to and from bomb shelters with my dog Georges to make me think. Today,  I  propose a toast to the global organization.

Coming from me, this may sound strange. This blog and my satiric blog focus on some of the more serious defects in global organizations.

Over the past  month, my thoughts were tortured watching the worst of human behaviour manifest itself in the Middle East-beating on the war drum, mutually exclusive narratives which drive fanaticism, so much hatred and senseless violence. I found myself asking how is it that global organizations, with all their weaknesses, never bring out such evil behaviour. When I compare the behaviour of people in global organizations to the behaviour of people in nation states, global organizations eat nation states for breakfast.

I work with one team of technical pre-sales engineers based in Tel Aviv, Cairo, Ankara, Dallas, Shanghai Munich and Riyadh. Yes, there are tensions, infighting and problems of synergy. And yes, there is squabbling about how does what. Yet folks work together, laugh together, and communicate well and strive for success together. Even In the hardest of geopolitical times, the team’s behaviour is matter of fact and to the point.

Here is what I believe are a few success factors which explain why global organizations succeed where nations fail.

1) Membership in a global organization is temporary and based on achievements. This provides clear focus, sense of purpose and direction, as well as a healthy sense of the  temporary nature of belonging.

2) While there is plenty of violence in global organizing, there is no use of physical force at all.

3) The desired  ways of behaving are defined, measured, policed and enforced.

4) Religion has no place whatsoever in the public domain.

5) There is no democracy whatsoever in global organizing, so a huge mob with the wrong ideas has no impact. Yes, there is heavy handed leadership at times, but shelf time is limited and there is periodic life cycle regime changes.

So, Georges and I propose a toast to global organizing. Cheers!

Le-Haim-To life.

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Focus on what needs to be changed, not what you have been hired to change

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Companies use OD to drive difficult change in line with structure and values of the corporate, which are usually highly impacted by Western values.

Often the proposed changes may be the wrong changes, not do-able in  some of the local cultures where the company operates. The role of the OD consultant tasked with facilitating the change should be to raise a flag and prevent the change from happening, or at least do risk mitigation. In order to understand the issues in advance, the consultant needs to be aware of the cultural barriers to change.

The OD consultant  however is often in denial about his/her own cultural  bias, which stem from OD’s core concepts and tools.These cultural biases may lead to the ineffective imposition of an ill planned changed.

For example, let us assume that  headquarters dictates that two managers (two in a box) will co-manage a certain organizational sub-unit and share power. One manager is to focus on engineering, and the other is to focus on development and product architecture. The two are to “cohabit” in the “leadership space”.

Let’s assume that the local culture where these 2 managers are to co-manage  is characterized by “One hill is not for 2 tigers ”, i.e, power cannot be shared, and power is exercised autocratically. In such a case, there is no chance that two managers will share a management role if they hail from such a culture. Instead of two-in-a-box, we will have two in a boxing ring! Smile

An OD consultant with Western values who is asked to facilitate the change may take the 2 managers and  try to define clarity of decision making processes, build trust, or build various mechanisms to minimize conflict and power games. But the two managers want another type of clarity-who the f-ck is the boss?-and constantly battle, like two tigers on a hill.

And the more that the western consultant tries to push his values on the local culture, he may find himself looking like an American politician trying to organize a cease fire between intense enemies who want to knock the crap out of one another, and prefer death to compromise.

What can an OD consultant do to prevent using OD to implement change the wrong way?

  • Look at the cultural alignment of each change.
  • Understand what can change, and what cannot change.
  • Put your OD values on hold.
  • Focus on what needs to be changed, behaviour in the field or corporate policy.  Focus the OD effort in the right direction.(If you have been hired by someone junior or a possessed by looking good, this will be hard.)

In the above case in China, it is best to focus on not implementing two in a box policy.

Here is another example.

Corporate asked me to work with senior management on “the value of transparency”. One key manager in this process believed everyone is lying to him all the time by padding effort estimates. This manager hated the word “transparency” and thought it was “western propaganda”. The focus of my  work with him centred on building a group of people whom he could trust, and avoiding “religious” statement like “the value of transparency” which challenged his belief system. We totally avoided the use of the word “transparency” to the chagrin of the internal team “measuring OD’s effectiveness”.

It is important that OD work of this nature is commissioned by someone internally who is not obsessed with looking good, but rather someone who wants to get it right.

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7 Tips for successful coping with organizational chaos (revised)

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Organizational life moves faster and faster, propelled by information technology and fluctuations in the market place.

Organizational structure, roles, responsibilities, missions and goals have limited impact in creating stability; de facto more often than not, organizations hover between the threshold of chaos and deep chaos.

Clients (and consultants whom I supervise) often consult with me about what can be done at the organizational “architectural” level to ensure effective functioning in the “threshold of chaos mode”.

Threshold of chaos is the area that exists between superimposed unreal man made stability (eg, our mission, charter) and the ugly reality (e.g., the need to make a commitment to win a tender, then immediately break the same commitment once we define what is “doable”)

Here are some of the cornerstones for successful coping strategies  for life on the “threshold of chaos”.

1) Ensure that staff has an end to end understanding of how things work, to prevent staff from optimization of sub systems. (“I don’t care how they DO it, I sold it)

2) Overinvest in the infrastructure of trust and strong personal relationships which serve as “credit” for enabling frequent change.

3) Loosen up rigidity by emphasizing the importance of overlapping roles and responsibilities augmented by ongoing dialogue and communication.

4) Hire people who know how to learn.

5) Deal with poor teamwork immediately upon the very first sign of dysfunction and never accept team clusterfucks as inevitable. (50 emails to get one purchase order ok’ed)

6) Be real! Deemphasize the “religious” doctrinal nature  of mission statements and other organisational artefacts which breed cynicism and contempt.

7) Focus training, consulting and coaching on enhancing staffs’ capability to function in ambiguity, which should be a major leitmotif of services provided to ensure strengthen people and teams.

Too many consultants swim against the current, trying to stabilize the inevitable chaos, after change is managed! (which it is not) 

Leverage the major critical difference between Change Management and OD. That being-Swimming with the current of change, working with clients to constantly adapt without the need for a so called “change management” effort each  time that a change is needed, which basically all the time.

 

PS

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Dear blog subscribers,

In order to clean up the spam, all blog subscriptions were deleted and a new subscription system installed.

Please re register on the right side of the blog – sorry for the trouble.

Allon

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Coping with a hopeless situation

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At first thought, coping with a hopeless situation is pretty tough.The essence of hopelessness is that no doing can change the fact that there is no light at the end of tunnel.

Yet Yalom’s book “ Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death”  comes to mind. The author  provides philosophical insights, suggests cognitive approaches and unravels psychodynamics which make thinking about Death more bearable, at least for me.

Inspired by Yalom,  I will reflect a bit on how I have been trying to deal with the hopelessness of the present war in the Middle East, in which I am caught.

1-No longer my generation

Each generation has its own time in the drivers’ seat. I have less skin the game than people whose children are serving in the forces. I did my time; I fought in a brutal war and my kids served in the forces in very unstable times. I was relieved of reserve duty when my wife died, my son is abroad and my daughter, now a mother, no longer serves in reserves.This conflict is now owned by the present generation. And even if I could do something, is this really my generation’s turn at the steering wheel?

2-Living in the shadow

I am an atheist in a country with a very powerful religious lobby which tries to dictate how I live my life. Yet, nowhere is it easier to live a secular life than in Israel, because there is a secular shadow reality which serves as black market economy serving the vast majority of Israelis who are indeed non believers. Herein is the clue: I need to look at another dimension of existence within the present reality, where I can live in my own personal peace.

3-Mild Dissociation is functional

I belong to the political left, which has been decimated  since the assassination of Rabin, the realities of the mid east conflict, and demographics. Yesterday, I was in the Carmel Market when missiles exploded overhead causing total  pandemonium. As we lay on the ground waiting to see if our time has come, a fruit vendor yelled out: I hope that missile goes up some leftist’s ass”. It is very typical of me to say, “I am a leftist, and I am right next to you, idiot”. But I did not. I feared the vendor’s intolerance more than the missile.  Later on, I asked myself if the political left has any answers, and the answer was: probably not. At that moment, I felt the helplessness, which is different than thinking about it.

Feeling the helplessness breeds mild dissociation, which can be very functional.

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Use of self in OD

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“Use of self” is a key advantage that Organizational Development has in facilitating organizational change.

Use of self simply means combining OD knowledge and skills education  along with leveraging aspects of ones personality traits, behaviour, value systems, and culture as part of OD practice.

Use of self allows the OD practitioner to work on and work through the unseen world of emotional undercurrents as well as other hidden dynamics impacting organizational life. This perspective provides a phenomenal  advantage over the absurdly  mechanistic world of Change Management and the pathetic cheerleading efforts of many “semi-skilled“ HR departments which dabble in change.

So far so good.

The challenge begins if use of self negatively impacts the practitioner, because of the practitioners’ own cultural bias, especially in global organizations.

Let’s take an example.

A (product manager)  and B (sales) are upset with one another, although they pretend to get along well. A is pressuring B to coax a client to buy a new feature. B wants A to ensure feature completion so that B does not ruin his career by selling something he cannot deliver.

Consultant Z wants to develop genuine and authentic dialogue between A and B, leveraging the positive relationship Z has with both. When positive dialogue has been established between A&B, they will figure out a compromise.

Consultant Y wants to ensure that A&B continue to sidestep the conflict between them, so that they can pretend get along well. Y believes that if A & B were to express the differences of opinion between them openly, no good will come to their relationship. Y is convinced that B, an 55 year old male from a conservative society will never accept the input from a 24 year old female product manager from a western society.

So Y wants to serve as a go between so that A&B do not need to interact on this sensitive issue.

Summary

At present, Z’s behaviour is aligned with positive use of self in OD, because OD is bogged down in western values.

If OD embraced more non western values,  Y’s choices would becomes a legitimate strategy as well.

Until that happens, use of self provides no advantage in the world of global organizing.

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Retracing my thoughts during a missile attack

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I love to walk in extreme heat. In the late summer afternoons,  I “do” 9 kilometers along the beach.

The beach sands are still  burning and the Mediterranean sun is still pounding down at 4 pm when my walk begins, but by 520 pm, the cool wind has been added to the mix.

It is not wise to walk on the beach in a city being bombed. The shelters are few and far between; sirens cannot be heard clearly if the sea is noisy.

I have lived long enough to know that when my time comes, it comes.

At 440 pm, I hear a siren. There is no where to go. The sea waves on my left are high, the sand strip on which I walking is narrow; I have a huge stone wall on my right.  Maybe I should not be here. Fuck it. Johnny Walker. Keep walking. Two faint blasts are heard.I check my smartphone;  3 missiles have been downed over a working class area. Keep walking.

At 515 pm I can see my car 100 meters away in the parking lot . Again, the sirens go off. There is a very very loud noise everywhere. My hearing is better than I thought. Out of nowhere, I see missiles overhead. Right over my head. Iron Dome missiles are also over head. Right over my head.

When did this chaos in the parking lot area begin? Where is the yelling coming from? I hear fearful curses in Hebrew, French, Russian, Arabic and English. People are running, some are crying, frightened. Some people are laughing. Someone is putting on sun oil.

I look up. The Iron Dome interception is overhead. There is going to be shrapnel. If it hits me, I hope it is a direct hit. No injuries please. I took care of my wife when she was dying. My kids are great. And I did enjoy the walk. How much longer till the shrapnel hits the ground for shit sake? This is taking forever. I am not a patient person. Never was.

When nothing falls near me, I get into my car and update  my daughter who never worries anyway. “So Abba (dad), you are still around? and we laugh.

I put on my favourite song, and drive off.

Keep walking.

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Not too many bomb shelters on Sidneh Ali Beach

 

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