Der Chef organisiert von Zeit zu Zeit den Betrieb völlig um. Das schadet aber nichts, weil ja alles beim Alten bleibt. ( The boss reorganizes the company from time to time completely. But that does not hurt, because everything stays the same.) 

Kurt Tucholsky, 1924

Plus ça change, plus c’est reste la même chose. (The more things change, the more things remain the same.)

Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, 1849

What’s done cannot be undone.

Lady MacBeth (whilst sleepwalking)

Case One

Igor, Hadas, Natalie and Vadim own/manage a very successful niche chartered accounting firm dealing mainly with clients in the media, including celebs and investor-tycoons from all the countries from the FSU, former Soviet Union, especially Georgia.  Despite their success or because of it, severe tensions plague the quartet who constantly argue about issues such as ‘what constitutes a pure billable hour, what is monetary value of maintaining an intense relationship with academia and with senior  clerks from the Ministry of Finance, and how many resources should be allocated to digitalize client interfaces”. There were also less intense disagreements about whether the language in management meetings should be in Russian, Hebrew or English, although this was minor because all partners are fluently trilingual.

An OD intervention was commissioned after Vlad and Hadas had a  horrendous shouting match that the entire staff of 30 heard with furniture in the meeting room having been smashed.

After 6 months of work, agreements between the four were signed and sealed. The consultant was even payed a bonus!

One year later, all agreements had undone themselves.

Decision making by the quartet is paralyzed/severely paralyzed yet business has never been better.

Case Two

Gerald (the son of the chairman of the board) is an excellent technologist and incorrigibly poor R&D manager, with a team of 159 developers many of whom with PhDs, spread all over the world. Following a massive turnover of staff, the chairman commissioned an OD intervention during which Gerald was moved into the role of CTO and Carmella was recruited to manage R&D. Two years later, the chairman retired, Carmella was axed and Gerald returned to run R&D.

Comments

These cases illustrate the return to the status quo ante following what had appeared to be a successful OD intervention. This post will elaborate several reasons why this occurs.

First however, I want to drift off a bit and illustrate that return to status quo ante happens in politics as well. The failed Oslo agreements between Israel and the Palestinians fell apart at the seams, making a very bad situation even much worse, just as the ink dried on the signed agreement. Some experts claim that neither side was ready to accept a western compromise force fed onto a Middle East reality where winners take all, and losers loose. (There are many experts in the Middle East who explain failure).

There are several reasons that agreements made during an OD process can fall apart.

1. The agreements that were made are ahead of their time.
2. Agreements made are not backed up by a tenable change to the power structure.
3. The agreements made were made following too rigid a process, which ignored under the water iceberg dynamics.
4. The consultant was too dominant and the agreements were made with too much imposition.
5. The agreements were based on apparent agreement.

I believe that because OD is very imperfect, things like this will happen. (I am reminded here of my dentist who used a strong antibiotic when pulling a tooth telling me that only one in a hundred people are impacted by the antibiotic. I was the ONE, and suffered from stomach pain for 6 whole months.)

Partial prevention of return to the status quo ante can be mitigated

1-by slowly phasing out of the OD project over the period of a few months/years, based on the complexity of the changes.

2-Clients can be initially informed/ warned that this phenomenon exists building in the necessary prophylactic awareness.

3. And, most important, when making really big changes, the question of ‘how can this is undone” needs to be addressed in nightmare scenario planning.

Let’s be honest. Despite the hype on social media and in magazines, many people have roles which are not all that meaningful, either for them personally or for the organizations for which they work.

Over the last few months in the framework of work,  I have spent hours observing leaders who manage people whose jobs have little meaning. I spent over 24 hours at a car wash, 3 days at a bakery and a 14 hours at a call centre which sells financial products.

I watched people doing the most tedious of jobs who were totally engaged without the use of any measurement matrix or enslaving IT process.

These are the behaviours that I observed which were seen as highly motivating.

1. Care for the employee. “Get out of the sun, Ahmad.”  “If you are not serving anyone, sit down Natalie”. “After a call like that, take a smoking break, Giselle.”
2. Laughing AT a client with the employee after the client has been served. “No wonder he is so fat”. “She probably was calling you while sitting in the toilet”. “Rude fucker, I hope he is married to someone he deserves”
3. Siding with the employee when the client is wrong. “Wait your turn, Bud. He will get to your car in 15 minutes, Stand back and let him work”. “Lady, if you need more time to decide what else to buy, please step aside so that our server can serve the next customer.” “When people hang up on you like that, it’s all about them, not about you.”
4. Use of informal language. In Hebrew, there is a marked difference between street Hebrew (with some Arabic or Russian swear words thrown in) and a more sophisticated office Hebrew, which would include lots of English words. The use of the street language was seen as  highly motivating.

My major take away from all these hours of observation is that the work itself does not need to be meaningful; it is enough for the work related interactions to be pleasant.

A potential client interviewed me for a new project on Thursday. I was asked about the more challenging projects I had facilitated and I mentioned these three.

1) A wealthy company of 30 people acquired a company in crisis of 400 people and took over full command.
2) Mexicans, Americans, Japanese and Israelis worked together in a split-site development project which was 8 months behind schedule.
3) Two huge independent vendors (Chinese and Israeli) , working for a German client, ask me to do an OD between the 2 vendor organizations, along with the client.

Later on during the day, I thought to myself how easy these 3 projects had been for me, because they were free of the filthy politics which traditionally accompanies OD work. How did this happen?

Projects for which there is no cook book or protocol allow the OD practitioner freedom to “develop” solutions along with his/her clients, and not deliver some well packaged snake oil products. Furthermore, there is no competition from motivational pep talkers and magicians who solve all issues within 45 minutes.

Furthermore, in all the projects I mentioned above, OD had been commissioned by the folks on top; as a result:

• The eager beavers of procurement have little say to say about price or scope
• The project is owned by the CEO, not HR, so that there is less need for apparent effectiveness and wow wowing
• Leadership will support the consultant, not step aside and download the risk to the consultant, as often is the case in Change Management

There are lots of organisational design questions about managing in general and managing change in particular with teams full of contractors, permanents, and virtual teams.

While present ecosystems are coping with these changes albeit with great difficulty, the major challenge that remains is that technology change is so frequent and so massive that everything else lags behind. Organizational design is always trying to catch up with technology.

In this post, I want to focus on what I see as five design issues (there are many more) which can serve in redesigning organizations which are more adaptive to the world of work which is being dragged/pushed along by technology.

1. The approach to design needs to be piecemeal, that is constantly in flux, not too rigid, not too orthodox, without assuming that one size fits all. A purchasing process will look differently in China and the USA. Hiring may need to adhere to a few basic principles, but there will be exceptions. In brief, French grammar….a few rules and thousands of exceptions. Oui!
2. Fairness is a key design element which needs to be factored into organizational design. In the present political climate, the left sees fair as egalitarian and the right sees fair as proportional. In post modern organizations, lack of fairness has yet to be fully understood, categorized and re-engineered. A contractor working side by side with a salaried employee have totally different motives. The contractor may want to get the job done now; the salaried employee wants to fill up the hours he or she works. It is impossible to avoid the fairness issues. It is so blatant. It cannot be defined away by process or legal means.
3. Some cultures are not transparent by design. Some cultures believe in win lose. Some belief systems are exclusionary of the legitimacy of other belief systems. Thus, behavioural codes must factor in (or out) the immense diversity that is obfuscated by the massive use of the English language, messaging and other technologies by making us all seem/appear similar. To address this variance, there needs to be far more, or far less, tolerance. Probably both!
4. Except for a the western rich educated liberal, people have tribal needs of belonging. These tribal needs are neglected when contractors, salaried and temps work together. When tribal needs are somehow met to foster a sense of belonging, we will have come a long way. Oh yes, if the model of belonging  is to be ‘multiculturalism’, forget it. It doesn’t work all that great except in the mind of  rich educated liberals and on social media.
5. Leaderless solutions need to be flushed down the toilet. The complexity of the ecosystem, the inherent lack of trust, the inevitable silos and the competitive  economic model all dictate the need for wise, mature and very flexible leadership. And the vast majority of followers outside of the rich democratic countries prefer strong autocratic leaders.

Thanks to my friend Andy Spence for the inspiration.

When Wang (China) looks at the marketplace, he looks for, and finds, people with whom he has trustworthy relationships. Into these relationships, he plugs in business, leveraging on the value of the relationships.

When Moshe (Israel) looks at the marketplace, he sees a bunch of clients who think they know what they want, but Moshe knows what they need. Moshe sees the gap between what clients want and what clients need as the area where he can creates value and does business.

When Francis (USA) (f) looks at the market, she sees clients who expect to get what they want, when they want it, with high quality and low cost.

When Hans (Germany) looks at the market, he sees the need to be predicable and reliable to his long term customers, producing very high quality products and services which compensates for high costs.

Naturally, Wang, Moshe, Francis and Hans naturally prefer different forms of organizing to achieve their goals.

Wang prefers organizations with a solid insider culture of which he is part. Moshe prefers a lose, undisciplined semi structured blob, where he can innovate. Francis prefers clear structure, a defined process and roles and responsibilities which are clearly delineated. Hans like a very well controlled process, heavy in detail.

To enable effective sustainable global organizing, OD practitioners must mediate between very different sets of expectations people have about the ideal form of organizing, and not try and change these basic instinctual desires unless absolutely necessary.

At present, we do not do that. OD pedals North American values about organizing. That makes OD very parochial. And irrelevant.

Morris (US)  has just finished a late night of work with Jean-Marie, his visiting colleague from France. Morris said: “next time you visit the USA, you should come over to my home for dinner”. Jean-Marie wonders how Morris can be so dishonest, since Jean Marie has already  been in the USA for ten days without having been invited.

Art (US) asked Wang (China) “what does this quarter look like” on a concall with 6 other participants . Wang said “looks good”. After the concall, Wang called Art and told him that the quarter looked bad. Art told himself that Wang cannot be trusted as he is a pathological fibber.

Oya (Japan) call Max in Detroit and told him emotionally, “Max-san, if you do not fly over 3 engineers now to Japan, the customer will throw us out”. Max thought to himself, “Oya always bs’s to get me to act with a false sense of urgency because he thinks we so not care about his Japanese customer”.

Peter (UK) told Moshe (Israel) that “that’s a good idea which needs more work”. Moshe wrote off Peter as a sweet-talking phony.

Stan (US)  told Miyamoto (Japan) that the product was “commercially deployable”. When 4000 bugs were discovered, Miyamoto thought he had been stung because Stan claimed the bugs were not “revenue impacting”.

Bill (US) corrected Zhang (China) in front of Zhang” subordinates on a minor factual issue.  Zhang believes Bill’s “vulgar correction” means than he has lost Bill’s trust, because face to Zhang is a more important truth than stupid facts.

So, when working globally, leave your personal judgement about truth at home. Understand the cultural context which basically says, truths are  often culturally defined artifacts.

1-They blend discussion, arguing and negotiation at the same time. Americans appear to resent the constant negotiation and the elephant (intuition as per Haidt) leading the driver (ratio).

2-Israeli organizations often tell  clients what they really need which upsets their ‘satisfying clients’ American counterparts.

3-They misinterpret American unwillingness to be blunt as a weakness. They do not often understand cultural clues, forcing the Americans to be “overly” direct.

4-They reopen oral decisions, not understanding that this is a trust buster for Americans, although not for Israelis.

5-Israelis are far less politically correct that their American counterparts. And even when the Israelis adopt the PC lingo, it’s more fake than real. The Americans smell it from a mile.

The degree of organizational formality manifests itself in the use of language, dress codes, existence and use of formal titles, the way rooms and offices are organized, seating arrangements, office design, and many, many other things and artifacts, big and small.
Formality enable some people to feel comfortable to do business in a global setting; others need informality.
• There are cultures where people need to break out of formality in order to feel comfortable enough to do business. “Just call me Bob; I gotta get this company out of the muck soon-so let’s get a move on it!”….in first meeting, with sleeves rolled up.
• There are cultures where people need to booze in order to relay messages that cannot be relayed due the formal etiquette (and linguistic structure) of everyday business. “You know Oya-san, this idea of yours really needs more work”…..after 5th drink.
• There are cultures where the only way to do business is within a framework of strict formalities. “Dr Muller, sir. I am ready to give you the report”, says Hans who has been working under “Dr” Muller for ten years.
When OD is practiced in a global setting, the degree of formality needs to be adjusted; this is often a daunting task.
Here are some rules of thumb for an OD consultant in a global diverse setting.
• As a facilitator, overdress, all the time. Many populations do not respect a facilitator who is casual.
• In a meeting, you need to relate to people as they relate to you. Call Bill by the name of Bill and call Dr Muller by the name of Dr Muller. Decide how to present yourself, and let people call you whatever they want.
• Introduce people as if you are a host; do not ask them to introduce one another before you say a few words.
• Make sure to prepare people one on one before more formal meetings as much as possible. Use more structured meetings as a default, slowly migrating to less structured as you see the level of tolerance for this developing. Unstructured meetings are harder to run in a very diverse setting.
• If there is a gap in the way people address one another, bridge the gap at the beginning. “Bill and Dr Muller, how does each of you see this issue developing and what are the gaps? Then, start to translate intent. “Dr Muller, when you call Bill by the name Mr. Thomas, he feels uncomfortable”. “Bill, Dr Muller is only called Hans at his golf club, so you make him feel out of the aquarium”..
• Avoid humour because it is too informal. (I ignore this advice all the time).
• Always issue a formal written summary, with action items and ownership.

Travel policy has now been changed; business class travel is permitted only for the second trip each quarter.

Charles from Ohio complains but adheres to the policy. He has started looking around for a new assignment in the company where no travel is needed.

Edna from Tel Aviv has requested an exception, “unless the first trip is more than 6 hours”. She is presently trying to change company policy, bombarding the corporate with emails and threats.

Ratana from Huahin Thailand said nothing. Nevertheless Ratana started a job search that very evening, since all her trips are gruelling 19 hour flights to New York.

Abhay from Delhi has a friend who works in corporate travel. Leveraging his relationships, Abhay orders his first quarterly ticket at the very last second on flights where the coach class is full, and as per corporate policy, gets an upgraded flight, “if the flight is a customer visit”, which it always is.