This week I got an email from someone who says "I have been asked to put together the business case for going down the organization design route to solving a number of organizational issues. The problem is that the executive team does not see that the organization design process is the best way to get them from current to future state because they think they can just write down the work priorities for their areas on the back of an envelope and then decide what to stop doing etc."

She then lists the organizational issues the group has identified need addressing:

• Approaching service delivery differently (but not specifying what or how)
• Making more effective use of our tightening resources
• Smoothing out the patchiness, peaks and troughs in workloads across the organisation
• Ensuring that we are not just driving financial change but also culture and values change
• Supporting the executives in spending time on the strategic things and not the lower level work
• Putting more focus on managing the business and how this impacts staff
• Developing wider, cross-organization thinking so that fewer things slip through the net

Continue reading...

I am frequently asked for help in recommending resources. Here are two requests that I got this week "I am interested in the parallels/similarities/differences between architectural and organisation design principles: could you recommend any references that address both, please?" and "We are collecting some useful tools on OD, talent management, leadership development and other HR related topics. Are there any tool websites you can recommend?"

I am fortunate in one respect that my three career tracks of consulting, academic work, and writing, keep me constantly on the hunt for materials of various kinds. Looking back at my Google history for last week I find I looked at websites that offered: tools, books, articles, survey instruments, games, activities, methodologies, videos, comment and opinion, and news. I haven't yet cracked how to organize all this stuff in a way that makes for easy retrieval. I have various classification systems going simultaneously, rather than a master one that might make life simpler:

• My 'favorites' website listing with a rather random list of folders - what, wonder now, was in my thinking when, for example, I set up a folder 'learning', and another 'development'. I haven't had time yet to go through and consolidate/rationalize and consequently have to look in both for something I know I put somewhere.
• My two Dropboxes which have slightly different folder titles, but essentially for the same type of thing.
• With both Dropboxes I have an 'articles' catch all with folders in it - again somewhat different, but I have to remember that I've taken all the organization design articles out of the articles folder and got them in a separate folder in the high level list. On more than one occasion my heart has lurched when I think that Dropbox has deleted my organization design articles folder that I know I have in 'articles'!
• My Amazon wish lists - both public and private ones that house all the books I wishfully think I'm going to read. The lists relate to my book titles rather than the specific topic so if I'm looking for a book I know I put on a wish list I have to remember which book I was writing at the time I listed the book I'm looking for!

Continue reading...

Writing my new book on organizational health has made me even more aware of the parallels between organizational and individual health. So when I saw the documentary Forks over Knives which is about eating a completely plant based diet in order to avoid, as far as possible common chronic and degenerative diseases including diabetes, heart disease, cancer and strokes, I wondered whether some of the common 'diets' of organizations - increasing shareholder value, looking at short-term quarterly results, revering charismatic leaders, kneeling at the feet of management gurus, and so on - which lead to taking short cuts, ethical misdemeanors, jaded management, vast expenditure on not very much, and other chronic organizational diseases (ok I'm wildly oversimplifying) could be reversed by something equivalent to a plant based diet.

My first thought on the plant based diet was that it was fine for food savvy people who'd seen the documentary, read Michael Pollan's books, who could afford fresh fruits and vegetables, and who had access to sources of this type of food. I wondered how the mass of people who suffer from 'food insecurity' - a euphemism for 'not enough money to buy food' used here - would fare. It seems that they are the ones most likely to go for the cheap and easily available fast food options that offer none of the benefits of a plant based diet. I emailed Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, one of the documentary's key presenters on this topic and got a very nice reply with some helpful hints.

Continue reading...

Taking advantage of sudden work stoppage, at least for some of us, due to Holiday Season. I've used the time to write and send off the third chapter of my forthcoming book on organizational health and start on the fourth chapter. Writing is a challenging process but I love doing it. Not just for the writing piece, in fact probably less for the writing and more for all the research that goes into the writing. I can spend hours on what someone called an 'internet binge' following lines of enquiry, but it's pretty much always worth the time investment. I learn a lot in the process and this feeds into my teaching and consulting work, and quite often I can send useful articles and websites to people I know would be interested in them. Thus fostering that skill we're all supposed to be developing of 'collaboration'.

So this current chapter is on control. What I've noticed is that there is some confusion between 'power' and 'control'. In my view they are different. Power is the ability of someone to impose their will even against resistance from others and results primarily from position in a social structure. This is known as positional power. And there are others sources of power: someone who controls access to resources may have little positional power but is able to use that resource power.

Continue reading...

In a recent organization development course I was facilitating someone asked the question "How can you challenge a leader if you think he or she is making the wrong decision about an organizational change?"

I get a lot of questions like this and it seems to me that they are really about how to recognize and use your sources of power. Why do OD consultants need to think about their sources of power? There are two main reasons. First, because often OD consultants are of a lower level in the organization's hierarchy as it appears on the organization chart than the managers they are working with. Typically organisational managers and leaders draw on formal authority, control of resources, and use of organisational structure, rules and regulations. Their status and power are signalled in the organization chart. These higher level managers have what is called 'positional power' which gives them certain privileges and responsibilities that the lower level OD consultant does not have. The closer someone is to the top of the chart the more they are perceived to have the right to ask for things and not be challenged or questioned. In these circumstances the OD consultants feel that they must do what the higher level person tells them to do without questioning it.

Continue reading...

This past week has been exceptionally busy for me, but reflecting on it a theme has emerged as, among other things, I've read three articles on healthy communities, participated in a discussion on organization development in China, and read a lovely article about a woman in her 70s who is an excellent runner and has developed her form using Chi running techniques, and commented on a wellness white paper a colleague sent me.

The connection between all these is close, albeit from different perspectives. They are all concerned with creating and using positive energies and emotions. Doing this leads to individual and organization health and high performance. I'm glad that I've recognized the theme and can now re-group myself as by Friday I felt thoroughly pulled down by the inertia, politics, and power plays of organizational life. (Not helped by watching the movie All the King's Men about a politician,Willie Stark, who "begins his political career as an idealistic man of the people but soon becomes corrupted by success and caught between dreams of service and an insatiable lust for power")

Continue reading...