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.

I have a severe addiction. I read the Economist weekly. I have been doing so for decades. In the October 25th 2014 edition, Schumpeter writes: “The best way to understand a system is to look at it from the point of view of people who want to subvert it.” (page 63)

During my 9 kilometre walk today, I thought how useful this sentence is for those of us who deal with change, be it as OD consultant or as change manager.

In the last decade, the powers that be have tried to enlist the change professions to serve as Vaseline to force the wrong changes, such as reorganization number 3 in as many years. Or an employee engagement project in a government bureaucracy. Or implementing a “customer intimacy program” in a organization governed by a dictatorial IT process.

Generally , “Change Management” prepares a deck of 70 slides to explain how any change can be managed, so clearly they are blind to what Schumpeter suggests. On the other hand, professional OD  looks at any change via the lense of  “why won’t this work”. Hence OD’s value-the underlying dynamic!

And when management insists on implementing silly plans  whilst HR wow wows and kowtows to the system, the OD consultant  must stand his/her ground. The ensuing dialogue between what management wants to happen, and the perspective of possible subversion, is the very heart of the OD dialogue. 

Furthermore, the wow wow HR cheer leading and the OD perspective is the source of the tension between the professions.

And once again, there is nothing like the Economist. It is proof positive that there is still a brand of journalism that is non sensationalist.

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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

A colleague and good friend of mine John Scherer just released a video about the Global mindset, based on my last posting on this subject.

John’s Wiser@Work is well worth subscribing to, as of December 3rd.

The video is here  https://vimeo.com/johnscherer/review/112689584/e2a3bcc5e9

These ten questions access the extent of your global mindset.

1. Do you believe that discussing contentious issues openly in a group setting can generally help resolve issues within very diverse teams in a global organization?
2. Do you believe that interdisciplinary teamwork is seen universally as a positive attribute of organizational behavior in all cultures?
3. Do you believe that time, as a resource, should be universally valued?
4. Do you believe that being authentic with your emotions is generally considered a healthy thing in the work place?
5. Do you believe that some degree of participatory decision making is something folks all over the world subscribe to as desirable in organizations?
6. Do you believe most people in the world want their managers to delegate authority?
7. Do most people agree that telling your boss what he wants to hear, and not the truth, constitutes a lie?
8. Is transparency valued in most cultures?
9. Can a well -defined corporate culture bridge all cultural differences?
10. Are the terms “trust“ and “respect“ universal enough to serve as a bridge for the inevitable challenges of global organizations?

For every question that your answer is YES, my suggestion is that that you work on upgrading your basic assumptions and skills in order to develop relevant capabilities to be effective in the global organization.

Here is a video on this subject, by John Scherer.

—–

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This post will describe my experience is working with people from the former Soviet Union. I do not suggest that I describe anything more than my experience. Every pattern has exceptions, we all have met worldly Americans, disorganized Germans, loud Thais and humble Israelis. But there are patterns of culture.

I have worked with about 120 people from the FSU in intensive consulting relationships. Over time, I began to see things that repeat themselves despite different types of business, different ages, and a different time frame for having left the FSU. The people I have worked/work with are based in Germany, the UK, the US, Canada and Israel.

I certainly stand against political correctness. However, the goal of the following list is to characterize, not stereotype,

1) Relationships start from deep mistrust, then migrate to trust very slowly.

2) There is a lot of cynicism, and most of it is healthy. Cynicism is the parallel of the American yes-we-can, except it is no-we-can’t. However, it is a starting point from which to move on to: how can we do it anyway.
This stands in sharp contrast to yes-we-canners, who suddenly develop cold feet.

3) There is a lot of compassion and true caring, masked by toughness. The talk is  hard and the heart is compassionate.

4) There is a lot of passion, a lot of investment in problem solving, and a lot of emotion. 

5) Organizational life is about details, not high level abstractions. There is very low tolerance for sloganeering. It is all about pragmatism. Idealism and Utopian ideas are severely scorned.

6) Transparency is viewed with deep suspicion; it is often viewed as pure stupidity. People need to protect themselves.

7) Things are thought out and thrashed through in informal meetings with trusted people. Formal meetings are more ceremonial.

8) Communication style is slightly dour with little place for humour in formal setting, although informally, the dourness melts away!

9) Win win is seen as a western quirk. If I win, you lose. If you win, I lose-is far more prominent.

10) There is a deep pride in professionalism. There is far more respect for experts than for branding, to be sure. And certainly there is more loyalty to maintaining one’s reputation as an expert than managing one’s career.

11) Political correctness -forget it.

12) When something goes wrong, there is more focus on solving the problem than fixing the process or lessons learned. People accept that shit happens.

My satiric Gloria blog has an absurd character called Comrade Carl Marks. Many former Russians love this colourful character, yet Americans/Canadians have told me that Comrade Carl is a bit insulting. Very telling difference. (By the way, readers of the Gloria blog as me if I speak Russian. I do not. But I do know about 200 swear words).

And finally, I LOVE working with this population. It is very hard to break in and gain access to trust, especially for someone with some semi -Anglo like type like me, but once you break it, things get done.