Minahan and Norlin in their recent article “Edging Toward the Center” (OD Practitioner: Vol 45: 4, 2013) suggest a move away from the extremities of OD which may have been applicable in the past in the happier days of OD and suggest that OD should migrate to the centre, i.e., towards bringing more value to clients without abandoning OD’s core values. I suggested in my critique of that article that this is “too little too late” because OD has been almost “voted off the island”; I also suggested we needed a new Operating System for OD, not a bug fix or service pack. I proposed six principles.

The goal of this post and the next 3 posts is to provide examples of each of the 6 principles I proposed as a new operating system for OD.

4) Create  a set of global organizing “algorithms” which address organizational design and management development; these so called algorithms serve as a platform to manage complexity in order to enable rapid and adaptive behaviour.

Global organizations often need to move quickly and be highly adaptive, because  speed is often a major part component of strategy. Yet global organizations are often slowed down by time zones, misunderstandings, overt and  hidden agendas as well as draining culture clashes.

Global organizing has been around enough that we know of many recurring problematic patterns that OD needs to cope with. The question is: how can OD be relevant? Let’s look at some of the recurring issues in global organizing.

1) Developing trust between cultures which follow process and those which leverage relationships.

2) Openness vs. discretion as preferred communication venue, especially when speed is strategy

3) Risk taking behaviour  vs. risk aversion behaviour-as linked to “face” and furthering/hindering one’s career, especially in new product introduction

4) Need for clarity vs. high tolerance of ambiguity, especially when two diverse sites are jointly developing a new product.

5) Obey vs. challenge authority

……and the list goes on and on.

Here are some examples of what OD would deal with:

1-In a Global Supply Supply Chain organization HQed in Holland and Singapore, in an industry with 2 products every 5 years/3 products a month, what organizational design/behaviour issues can be expected and what is the protocol for designing and staffing such an organization. What type of leader are we looking for?

2-In an organization which sells most of its products in Japan and the US, with R&D taking place in Israel and India, what organizational design/behaviour issues can be expected and what is the protocol for designing and staffing such an organization. What type of leader are we looking for?

The new OD operating system would drive these critical issues into organizational design and focus on non parochial leadership development, which is very different from what happens today.

Sadly at this point, OD does not deal early enough in global organizational design, and too few OD interventions are prophylactic in nature. This gap is a huge strategic niche; if OD can provide something even close to a conceptual and architectural algorithm for global organizational design, this would vastly improve our impact and not position OD in training and firefighting.

Nowadays, when the fires break out (if the manager has a high level of awareness and Gloria is not the HR manager, ) OD may be used to ease the pain, The pain relief (in the form of cultural training) probably has a western bias.

In the new OD operating system,  training would not have a western bias which would push  patience and understanding until the other side changes, nor preach “meeting in the middle”, which is clearly a western quirk. But that belongs to another post.

Minahan and Norlin in their recent article “Edging Toward the Center” (OD Practitioner: Vol 45: 4, 2013) suggest a move away from the extremities of OD which may have been applicable in the past in the happier days of OD and suggest that OD should migrate to the centre, i.e., towards bringing more value to clients without abandoning OD’s core values. I suggested in my critique of that article that this is “too little too late” because OD has been almost “voted off the island”; I also suggested we needed a new Operating System for OD, not a bug fix or service pack. I proposed six principles.

The goal of this post and the next 3 posts is to provide examples of each of the 6 principles I proposed as a new operating system for OD.

3) Develop global leadership/followership capabilities across acutely diverse cultural divides, which factor in value and behavioural  preferences of  all major cultural constituencies. (By acutely diverse, I do not mean merely a colour or food preference divide)

Amir (m) is an outstanding global leader. He is aware of the limitations of his own culture; his basic assumption is that things get done very differently all over the world. Amir has pushed back with vigour on HR attempts to push for unified way of doing things, promulgated in phoney globalism training.

Amir is multi-lingual. He speaks 3 languages and reads books, novels and newspapers of every country he visits. Before his recent visit to Turkey, he read Hurriet for a month, to be savvy of what is going on. When Amir visits different sites, he generally stays for the weekend.

He uses what works: Amir is high on relationships in Asia and in the Mid East, high on process in the US and parts of Europe. He is forceful yet tolerant when dealing with the creative yet undisciplined Israelis and orderly and disciplined when dealing with the Germans. Amir defines this cultural flexibility as his key skill.

When East meets West, Amir does not force feed western ways. Amir does not even push traditional “transparency” in cultures with “face issues”. Amir is quoted as saying “It’s my job to learn the bad news”.

In HQ, Amir’s chooses to surround himself with senior managers from different cultural backgrounds to ensure that the touch and feel of the organization’s HQ has huge variance so that it is user friendly to the extreme. For example, he constantly grills product managers about the cultural  variance of each major market before he ok’s travel.

When he visits Japan, he uses an interpreter and the meetings are in Japanese.

Amir looks at his role as a trust builder between his unit and the rest of the world. “I create a platform on trust and deals are plugged into that platform”.

Amir is very different from the managers who are trained by todays’ OD consultants, who promulgate “patience”, and “sensitivity” and listening skills, and perhaps even “know thyself”. Yet underneath todays consulting is a hidden bias of….one day folks will be develop and do things “our way”. Why does OD have this bias? Because OD itself which”leans” to and on western values.

When OD gets this right builds development of global leadership into the operating system, the sky is the limit of how much impact OD has.

Minahan and Norlin in their recent article “Edging Toward the Center” (OD Practitioner: Vol 45: 4, 2013) suggest a move away from the extremities of OD which may have been applicable in the past in the happier days of OD and suggest that OD should migrate to the centre, i.e., towards bringing more value to clients without abandoning OD’s core values. I suggested in my critique of that article that this is “too little too late” because OD has been almost “voted off the island”; I also suggested we needed a new Operating System for OD, not a bug fix or service pack. I proposed six principles.

The goal of the previous, this post and the next 4 posts is to provide examples of each of the 6 principles I proposed as a new operating system for OD.

2) Drive cross cultural organizational literacy, so people from different cultures can understand the different view of organizational life.

Cross cultural organizational literacy is the ability to understand organizational life as someone different from you understands it, and thus design organizations and organizational life appropriately.

People from all over the world see organizational life very differently and behave differently.
While the external veneer of organizations may superficially appear to be similar, “disturbed” somewhat by some background noise stemming from cultural differences, the perceptions of organizational life and desired behaviour actually have huge variance.
Time after time, despite the variance, OD mostly supports organizational alignment around Western values and norms, and thus, OD looses its relevance as a tool to debug problems caused by the global organizational configuration.
Many of the bugs of present day organizing can be debugged if OD approaches this issue holistically: structure, control mechanisms, enabling mechanisms, types of leadership and followership, training, policies, values etc.

Moshe argues to show committment; Shayakit does not give bad news in order to show committment, Hans follows process to show committment.

Stan (US) plans in order to control. Adi (Israel) does not plan, in order gain control. Anil (India) prepares to plan, but them improvises.

When Obe (Japan) is silent, Fred disconnects. When Fred (US) thinks out loud, Obe disconnects.

Sima (Israel) argues with her boss because she cares; then they have lunch together. Sam (Canada) discusses things with his boss, but must be careful not to ruin his career. Chai (Thailand) defers and shows respect to his ignorant boss, whom he criticizes behind his back at lunch with his peers.

Fred (US) focuses on strategy to get the long term right; Yossi ignores strategy to ensure survival; Yossi does not care about the long term. Fred writes off the short term (he lives in an Empire.

Paul (Canada( arrives on time to show respect; Sivan (Israel) will never allow a time constraint to interfere with content, because she respects content not form. Helmut (Germany) believes form is content.

Sally (US) show excitement and optimism to engage people around selling a new product. Pierre (France) feels that undue optimism and excitement disengage him. Som (Thailand), turns off when she hears how “great” everything is.

Organizing has a global configuration today, but OD relegates the aforementioned issues to the realm of “cultural training”. Typically OD would prefer Western managers have patience, and suggest that others grow; thus the growing irrelevance of OD.

Aligning organizations to be global is not cultural training; it is the very heart of OD.

And OD must understand that acquiring the ability to have us all understand how others view organizing is THE critical success building block of the new OD operating system.

Once we get this right, we can become important players in organizational design issues and develop prophylcatic and corrective interventions, far beyond the impact of cultural training.