1) Highly professional Organizational Development is impossible to scale. The personality of the practitioner, the trust he or she builds with the client, the accrued knowledge and experience of the individual practitioner cannot be scaled.

2) OD assumes change is constant; “constant  changing”  is a semi chaotic process ,made more effective and tenable when appropriately enabled by OD.

Change Management believes changes have beginnings and ends, and can be managed like a project.Many OD people believe (I certainly do) that change is not managed like Change Management  believes it is.

Enabling constant change like OD does  is less scalable and marketable  than “managing” change, like CM purports to do.

3) Commercial needs have led to the development of OD tools, but in the hand of the unskilled professional OD practitioner, these tools are useless, (what we call in Hebrew a “gold ring in a pigs’ nose”)

Furthermore, highly skilled practitioners use very few tools, although they have a wide eclectic knowledge of these tools.

4) Obviously, Change Management assumes change can be managed. Management has tools and templates and process. Once these tools and process become workable templates, many folks can be “scaled up” to become Change Managers.

While the personality of the Change Manager carries some weight which is non scalable, the tools and processes and templates can scale up NCG’s (new college graduates) in no time, forming armies of Change Managers.

6) I am old enough (64) to remember the TQMers who almost put OD out of business, until the software industry showed us all how far you can get delivering half cooked crap, denting  the myth of the overwhelming value of quality. (“You don’t like this version-buy the next one”.)

 As the world speeds up and the pace of constant change becomes even more furious driving organizational life into deeper chaos , the sexy myth of the manageability of change may experience “some” difficulty.  CM will become another TQM. Because there is no scalable  “cookbook” for dealing with change.

7) The very lack of scalability of OD is what makes it sustainable when well practiced.

Change management, Organizational Development and Coaching all deal with change and the enablement thereof. CM and Coaching attach huge importance to the setting and achieving  of goals. OD should not necessarily follow suite.

Change management is the top down, mechanistic and process-driven of implementation of a priori defined set of changes.  Clearly change management cannot exist without a great deal of emphasis on achieving the change goals. “We’ll get this implemented for you on time, sir; we will use template 34-77.”

Coaching supposedly assists people to achieve their goals. There is no coaching without a strong “play” on the “goals” ticket. Coaching is not only done by professionals; it is often done by “certified” and semi-trained “barefoot doctors”  (赤脚医生), who lean on a protocol of “making your dreams come true, a la “yes we can”. Like the barefoot doctors, these coaches are one trick ponies who need goals FOR THEMSELVES, to deliver what they market

OD needs to put goals in perspective. Following are 4  points we need to keep in mind in order not to emulate CM and Coaching.

• Goals change all the time due to the rapidly changing environment. The danger of sticking to your goals is obvious in many present day organizational realities.
• A twisted sense of self, personality defects and traits as well as chemical activity of the brain may lead to a wrong set of goals being set up.
• Goals are part of a system consisting of people, luck, strategy, values, constraints, motivation, politics etc. Everything does NOT need to be aligned to achieve goals; rather at times,  goals need to be changed due to circumstance. Goals are part of a system, not THE defining parameter by which we line up everything else.
• Many goals are contradictory and often,  people need to entertain 2 or more conflicting sets of goals, as they juggle the realities of post modern organizing.

Awareness of this above will ensure that the OD practitioner is wiser, less mechanistic, while truly bringing value added to our clients.

My friend Terry Seamon asked me to write a post about some of the differences between the coaching traditionally done by OD people, and the coaching work done by the coaching folks.There is not a clear boundary around either profession, and I doubt that there is even agreement if both domains are professions. But here is a first stab.

1) OD coaching assumes that goals change all the time as a result of organizational dynamics. So coaching within an OD context  is not obsessed with defining goals, because of constant flux, and lots of these goal changes are exogenic to the individual.

2) Coaching in an OD context assumes some degree of organizational “lack of wellness”exists, since the act or organizing itself creates anxiety. Anxiety is rampant in organizations and thus,coaching in an OD context will probably factor in a more “dynamic understanding of context” and  thus may be less gung-ho, “yes we can.”

3) In an OD context, coaching is ONE tool of many than can be applied. Thus, it is not a cure-all. A top OD professional will not recommend coaching when another dynamic is broken. He/she will point to the root cause, and not apply an empty “what’s your goal” protocol.

4) OD consultants would probably concur that individual coaching done within organizations executed by coachers without an OD background is misguided because it lacks context, has the wrong focus, and is a cop out from dealing with the issues at hand….like middle management training.

5) The main beneficiary of OD in the context of an OD project is the alignment of an individual or team to the system and-or change. The main organizational benefit of coaching individuals in an organization but not in the context of OD is the maintenance of the status quo.

Aging and death are natural-both for people and for organizations. Clearly an organization is not a biological entity, yet enough similarities exist to justify the parallel.

People have life cycles; when someone gets lucky, they are born, grow up, have kids, have grandkids, get sick, and die. This is natural. Yes, to some extent the aging process of an individual can be slowed down. But we all get old, sick and die; that is a best case scenario.

Organizations have life cycles as well. When they are conceived, they are crazy, sexy, innovative and informal-then they proceed along a path of aging as nature takes it course. Most organizations get very sick, get old (or prematurely old)  and die, or disappear in acquisitions or disasters such as sudden loss of market. Only few will last a long, long time. Death is part of organizational life. This is especially true now as covid has decimated supply chain, labour supply, motivation and cash flow.

If OD is to be true to its humanistic roots, we must cleanse ourselves from the denial of death. Life of a high quality needs to be prolonged, yet we need to better understand what can change and what cannot change. We need to acknowledge that an organization’s various illnesses and ultimate death are part of its life. 

OD needs to beware of over treating (yet another reorg) and over diagnosing (too much feedback when change is impossible). For many aging organizations , there are no “cures” or magic elixirs.

We must accept an organizations’ limitations & ultimate decay, which include containment of pain and eventually hospice. It do believe that there is an organizational parallel to the famed Dr Werner in the French Movie Country Doctor (Medecin de capagne), who deals with an elderly patients death with grace and dignity.

Afterthought

I wrote the above post several years ago. Since then, not only have I aged (somewhat gracefully, I hope) , but there is a pandemic raging-with organizational collapses a-dime-a-dozen, fear of illness and societal/political delay all around us.

There have been several attempts to cope with the pandemic which appear to be part of the denial-of-death which this post originally challenged. What caught my eye from the very beginning was the “back to normal” harpings of the “positive thinkers” and those who grind lemons into lemonade which aggravate the shit out of me.

Periods of sickness are normal, and after many protracted diseases, we are never the same. 

I suffer from a very painful lower back pain for most of my life, due to my height and genetics. The pain used to come and go;  now it comes much more than it goes. I keep very active, watch my weight, and wouldn’t you know it, the pain is there. However, there are good days and bad days. Good hours and bad hours. The best of times and the worst of times. This is natural. Like a pandemic.

Afterthought: Yalom’s Staring at the Sun is a brilliant guide to overcoming the fear of death. When my mind wanders in the wrong direction, Yalom’s guidance serves me well. People can and do err when fear of death prevails, butchering their lives and others’ due to not accepting the inevitable.

The present “fear” and obsession about the threats posed by AI are a good example of what happens when the inevitability of organizational death is ignored. AI is just another change. It will not make organizations immune from its natural life cycle. It will not save us, or kill us. No. It is just another change. 

Organizations are born, get old and die.

1) Change management assumes that organizations are more orderly than they really are. And, when CM encounters unexpected difficulties, they further develop tool kits to drive out the noise cause by these so called “unexpecteds”.

OD (when practiced as an art) knows that the organizations have massive underlying dynamics which render much of the “visible activity” of an organization into a very partial view of things. OD knows that the organizational world is about the anxiety caused by the chaos fuelled by constant changing.

Thus, OD’s view of things is less positive and enticing for managers.

2) Change Management is not stuck in humanistic values. Thus, CM is more appealing to managers,. Managers and CM never say that people are spare parts; they just act that way. Thus, the derivate difficulties they encounter but do not often acknowledge.

OD is rooted in humanistic values, many of which are admirable but out dated. OD has been reticent about updating its value offering by become more relevant world wide. Thus, OD is a bogged down in the values of the western world and cannot scale up to global organizing.

Thus, CM mechanizes change and ignores people while OD promulgates western values in a global environment.

3) CM is productized, easy to understand and markets well. OD is “knowledge work” with an “art” delivery mechanism when well practiced. It is very hard to market, but far more sustainable over time.

You sure don’t need this blog to tell you that the context in which Organizational Development is practised is changing:

• people have become spare parts making our humanistic focus an uphill battle.
• rapid change is just getting faster, making organizational change inhumane; this has grown the business of “change management” and shrunk available business for more classical OD types.
• globalization is all over us, making the Western values of OD often irrelevant.
• the HR function is degraded to compliance and hire/fire, and OD’s former gateway to organizations is contaminated,
• the twisted character of the manager who gets the top in this new reality, make the prognosis of their understanding OD’s added value as poor.
• and the inroads of the false Messiah of quick fixes, aka,  the Coaching “profession”,making competition cut throat.

Given the above, what are the areas of expertise we need to survive as OD consultants, without cross dressing as coaches or change managers with a humanistic streak?

Here are 3 areas which come to mind.

1) Cross cultural competence.

Huge portions of this blog site  are dedicated to how to acquire  cross cultural competence and I shall not expand on this here. An example in this link.

2) Business Domain Knowledge

Domain specific content and context is absolutely necessary not only for face validity, but also in order to ensure relevance.Gone are the days when OD consultants can facilitate change in all domains, simply because we focus on process and people and systems.

Personally, I focus on high tech organizations which develop products quickly, medical devices, the interfaces between R&D, engineering and product management, financial services and professional services. My  domain level of understanding is enough that I really get the gist of what is going on, end-to-end.

I believe that without this domain specific knowledge of the clients served, you are a has been.

3) Cognitive and Behavioural Patterns of Various  Professions

Finance people, engineers, software developers, chemists, lawyers, system engineers and accountants all think and act quite differently in organizations. While within each profession there is vast variance, each profession has a code which OD needs to crack in order to be able to interact and gain trust.

It is unreasonable to expect an OD consultant to be “fluent” and capable of interacting with all professions with the same level of competence.

OD needs to map out the cognitive and behavioural patterns of the various professions and provide ways and means to “gain access” by speaking our language in their dialect.

• These 3 skills are part of  the foundation for the next generation of competent OD consultants. These skills will  provide OD  with a competitive advantage, create more customer intimacy, and enable OD practitioners to be more relevant and effective in the niches in which they operate.

It is not infrequent to find several OD vendors in a shared space.

It may look something like this, for example, in a call centre:

• Anne is working with the middle managers of a call center; she was hired by Training.
• Sam is working on processes between Engineering and the Call Center; Sam was hired by the IT focal point in Engineering.
• Bella is working with front line staff on soft skills. Bella is CEO’s brother’s son’s girlfriend.

Then, out of the blue, someone in client base decides to have a periodic meeting of all vendors “for the good of client”. This post relates to what I recommend doing in such a situation.

1) What the client has done by farming out work in such a fashion is not good for the client. Putting vendors in one room and expecting them to act as one group is another act which does not serve “ the good of client”, because the expectation from the vendors is non realistic.

Never forget that having multiple vendors is a method organizations use in order not to change…..so don’t get carried away in the meeting. The meeting is all about playing defence against other vendors’ prying while avoiding the stupidity of pretending to all be part of a one team. If the vendor wants one team, he would have hired one.

2) If asked your opinion whether or not such a meeting should take place, be non committed. “The client can manage vendors as it wishes.”

3) If you like sports metaphors, “play defence”. If you prefer a more political script, “be cautious”. If you want straight talk, shut up as much as possible.

4) Talk last. Let others talk before you.

5) When it comes time to talk, ask questions. Disclose the bare minimum.

6) If another vendor stings you, roll back and absorb.

7) Mildly praise work of others.

8) When asked on feedback about the meeting, you should say “you hope it brought value to the client.