Author: naomiorgdesign

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance. (Alan Watts)

A friend in Brazil and a friend in the US have each asked me this week 'How are things with you post Brexit?'

It's a difficult question as I don't know the answer. On many day to day levels things seem the same as a pre Brexit world. It's rather like having a birthday; the movement from one year to the next is usually not that remarkable.

On the other hand it is very different. Every day since June 23 there have been predictions on what the UK will be like post Brexit. Beginning with dire warnings and now laced with indicators that 'together, they hint at how the British economy is doing after Brexit'. (Not so well).

Organisation designers could be in much demand at this point. For example, the UK Government's full list of new ministerial and government appointments: July 2016, includes:

• A totally new Department (Department for Exiting the European Union)
• A merger of The Department for Energy & Climate Change (DECC) and Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) to form the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
• Almost total change in the Ministers heading Departments which will inevitably have an impact on the way the Departments operate

The Government has a method of handling this type of thing through the Machinery of Government guidance which has an interesting infographic outlining the mechanics of the process. From this, I see that 120 days from start (is this referendum result day or day Theresa May became Prime Minister?) things 'could' have settled into 'business as usual'. So maybe the pre-Brexit and post-Brexit worlds will feel as similar as moving from aged thirty-three to thirty-four.

Except the indicators so far, are suggesting this is unlikely, and we don't know what that means. For organisations it suggests developing what the poet John Keats called our Negative Capability 'that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.' It means rejecting the 'tyranny of the quantifiable' and accepting that Brexit offers the possibility of different ways of doing things.

The financial services sector, for example, is being advised to 'look at all areas of their operations, both from a global operating model perspective, as well as the day to day operations. This review will need to cover issues such as IT infrastructure, regulatory and tax impacts, data protection and AML, talent and free movement of people, as well as clearing/payment and settlement processes'. This is a pretty comprehensive look-again which would likely benefit from a reflective and non-mechanistic approach to any necessary re-designs.

Three non-mechanistic approaches might help FS and other organisations re-designing post-Brexit.

• Facilitate conversations around 'Planned Abandonment'. This approach is discussed in a conversation between Peter Senge and Peter Drucker. Drucker says that, 'on a regular schedule, every organisation should sit down and look at every product, every service and every policy and say, 'If we didn't do this already, knowing what we know now, would we still do it?'
• Talk about welcoming and exploiting unexpected opportunities. Again this is a topic discussed in the Senge/Drucker conversation. They say that 'It's a very different mind-set to appreciate and enjoy the unexpected. You have to ask 'Is it an opportunity?'
• Take a 'dialogic' approach to re-designing. This is a form of multi-disciplinary team, collaborative and participatory design and decision making rather than a top down 'reveal' one.

Instead of taking a well-worn, top down organisation design process could the UK Government lead by example in taking a new organisation design approach based in generative conversations, with a diversity of colleagues, that are more open ended and courageous? Maybe it already started down that path when the decision was made not to do detailed contingency planning for a Brexit vote – perhaps that does herald the possibility of 'a different dance' as suggested in the opening quote?

What's your post Brexit organisation design world like? Let me know.

We're having an ongoing conversation about how we can 'transform' the organisation. We're pretty much agreed that things have to change. But there is some disagreement on whether there is the 'burning platform' or whether we even need one of these in order to 'transform'.

I think a 'burning platform' is a competitor for Lucy Kellaway's guffipedia (in fact, I just suggested it) and go along with Chip Heath's view that: 'That is one of the silliest pieces of business jargon. The idea of the burning platform is that people only change when they're scared. But fear, as an emotion, creates tunnel vision'.

Failing being able to see the burning platform our other tack is to keep asking each other 'what problem are we trying to solve here?' This is almost as pointless as searching for the burning platform, especially when things aren't 'wrong', but are in, my brother's phrase, 'bumping along'.

If there are no burning platforms, and we can't adequately answer 'what problem are we trying to solve?' Are we fine as we are?

Well, no. As I said, we are in agreement that things need to change. But the scale ranges from 'smoothing out the bumps' to 'let's be extremely radical'. No-one thinks 'let's do nothing'. In order to get to some agreement on what needs to change and/or transform we ask the question, 'What does good look like?'

This isn't a very helpful question as there isn't a whole lot of consensus on what it would look like even at the level of just trying to smooth out the bumps and if we want transformation it is even less worth asking as, 'the overall goal of transformation is not just to execute a defined change -— but to reinvent the organization and discover a new or revised business model based on a vision for the future. It's much more unpredictable, iterative, and experimental. It entails much higher risk.' (Ron Ashkenas). Using this definition it is impossible to answer 'What does good look like?' because it emerges through the process of transforming.

So what might work to help us decide how far down the continuum we want to travel? Over the last several weeks as I've worked with this, four important principles have emerged:

Engage in the history of the organisation. This is often over-looked by reformists who come in as 'new blood' intent on changing stuff. In a conversation last week someone referred to Chesterton's fence effectively saying that 'reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood'. (It's from G K Chesterton's 1929 book 'The Thing' and delightfully explained by him. Reforming zeal can turn off otherwise kindly people if they feel their history is being ignored.

Listen generously to different views and perspectives. This is hard (I am practicing) but worth doing . Here's one person's description of it. 'To listen generously is to give of oneself to another, to let go of assumptions conceived outside of this particular evolving relationship. It means to be aware of different worldviews and meet another in a safe-enough space where true listening occurs. Generous listening allows us to move away from the positivist tendency towards criticism and into a space where we allow other's questions to help guide our own journeys.' Generous listening allows space for people to build relationships and learn from different perspectives.

Check you are speaking the same language – or have a common understanding of the words you are using. We've found that there are words that we think we understand when someone else uses them but we don't. Technical jargon is fairly off-putting if you're not in that technical discipline but even more commonly used words – 'service', 'customer', 'product' etc. mean different things to different people.

If you are the consultant in a transformation process – learn to be a good adviser, that is:

• Know how and where to go and find reliable knowledge,
• Be skilled at assessing the expertise of others at its true worth,
• Be able to spot the strong and weak points in any situation at short notice
• Be credible in advising how to handle a complex situation

(Adapted from Sir Edward Bridges, Head of the Civil Service, 'Portrait of a Profession: 1950' )

How do you get a 'transformation' discussion going if there is no 'burning platform', things are 'bumping along nicely' and you can't know what good looks like? Let me know.

There's an inherent promise in the idea that 'big data' will help us unlock various mysteries, solve all types of problems, and see or understand things from new perspectives. At a meeting I was at last week on 'Big Data in organisation design, development and workforce planning' this seemed to be the line we were taking.

By 'big data' I think we meant the vast amounts of structured and unstructured information amenable to being captured and coded into a computer where it is stored, manipulated and analysed through skills of data scientists who have expertise in machine learning, computational analysis, maths and statistics. But don't worry if you aren't sure what 'big data' is – take a look at an article that offers the varied definitions from 40 big data scientists.

For organisation design work using 'big data' and data visualisation is useful for developing scenarios and models, costing changes, assessing impacts of various changes that could be made and so on (See Rupert Morrison's book Data Driven Organisation Design for more on this.)

However, we have to be careful if we rely on the 'big data' interpretations and analysis as our only source of decisions about organisational design. Data based logic has both negative and positive possibilities. A striking 'graphic manifesto' from Jonathan Harris points to this.

It opens with the sentences. 'Data will help us remember, but will it let us forget? It will help politicians get elected, but will it help them lead?' It continues through a series of haunting questions which, months after the exhibition where I saw this, are still alive in my mind.

Although some of the ethical and moral implications of big data (see, for example, the US Council for Big Data, Ethics, and Society for more on this) are being researched, less explored seems to be the impact of the data scientist's cultural orientation and design thinking that must have a bearing on how the data is captured, manipulated and analysed. The way we manipulate and present big data isn't neutral. It has a level of subjectivity that can keep important questions at bay: 'It will help farmers engineer crops to produce bigger yields, but will it keep corporations from patenting our food?'

In Jonathan Harris's words 'in fields ranging from education, to government, to healthcare, to advertising, to dating, to science, to war, we're abandoning timeless decision-making tools like wisdom, morality, and personal experience for a new kind of logic which simply says: "show me the data."'

A couple of FutureLearn course that I've taken (Big Data: from data to decisions, and Big Data: data visualisations) both of which are excellent in many respects lack the mention of the moral, ethical or subjective limitations of making decisions based on big data interpretation, or of visualizing data in a particular way.

As a small group of us, at the meeting I mentioned above, discussed big data in organisation design we focused on the limitations of a simply data driven approach. 'Evidence' is not enough to balance intuition, hunches, experiences, emotions, political machinations, and all the stuff that contributes to an organisation design but is not capturable.

In a previous role I had where we were using Decision Lens (a data driven tool) to support our organisation design work I had to laugh when we went through the whole data based decision making process and came up with 'the answer', only to have one of the leadership team say – 'Well my hunch is that this is the wrong answer. I don't think we should go with it.'

Big data can inform us and it can leave us uninformed. Let us be aware of the downsides of trying to data-ify subjectivity or shelve the pathways of wisdom, morality, philosophy, and human experiences in helping us make careful organisation design choices. Let us be aware of the inherent risks in relying on just big data to give us good insightful information that lead to human and high-performing organisations.

What's your view on Big Data as an organisation design tool? Let me know.

The opposite of a systems approach to organisation design and development is a 'thingifying' approach. (And many thanks to Fiona for giving me the word). This considers viewing something problematic going on in an organisation as a 'thing' to be addressed. Philosopher Theodore Gendlin explaining, another philosopher, Martin Heidegger's essay 'What is a thing?' says:

'The "thing," as we have things today, is a certain sort of explanatory scheme, a certain sort of approach to anything studied. … It is an approach that renders whatever we study as some thing in space, located over there, subsisting separate from and over against us and having certain properties of its own. It is as obvious as "that orange-colored chair over there," or "an atom," "a cell," "a self," "a sense datum," "a body."'

I come across thingifying a lot in my day to day working life, particularly in relationship to leadership and culture. If we think of leadership as a 'thing' in the definition above we reach for 'tools' to fix it. You can get any number of leadership tools. Here's one that you can use to assess your leadership skills. You score yourself and depending on your score get some ideas to improve your skills. For example if you score between 35 and 52

'You're doing OK as a leader, but you have the potential to do much better. While you've built the foundation of effective leadership, this is your opportunity to improve your skills, and become the best you can be. Examine the areas where you lost points, and determine what you can do to develop skills in these areas'.

As one of my colleagues noted 'tools can be handy', but quantifying and scoring are not going to give information on the experience of being led by someone whose score you know is 39 (or necessarily change your own leadership style and interactions if you know your own score is 39).

Similar tools exist to assess 'culture'. A commonly used one is Human Synergistics Organizational Culture Inventory. The info on it tells us that 'Quantifying and managing organizational culture is critical for bringing an organization's values "to life," supporting the implementation of its strategies, and promoting adaptation, goal attainment, and sustainability.' I made the point in my book on organisation culture that 'An organisation's culture is not a 'thing' where a label suffices to 'tell it how it is', nor is it a set of discrete elements that can be manipulated either separately or together to get a desired outcome. Nevertheless people want still want thingify culture or leadership in order to solve a problem with it.

If the problem at hand is treated only or mainly as a 'thing' little value will come from any activity associated with trying to solve it. This week's Economist has an article on immigration 'What's the Point?' It discusses a points system for work permit allocation. Immigration, treated in this way has become a 'thing'. In all the countries discussed (Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Czech Republic, Denmark, Singapore) the discovery was the same treating immigration as a 'thing' didn't work for anyone.

Given as Gendlin puts it 'The thing-model is, despite our current attitudes on getting beyond mere models by appealing to the wider context of ordinary living, still second nature to us' what can we do to over-ride our thingifying tendencies in favour of better approaches to look at leadership or culture or other similar organisational preoccupations (employee engagement, customer experience, etc)?

Heidegger (via Gendlin) offers three suggestions:

• First is not stop at thingifying it (the organisational issue)
• Second is to consider the attitudes, procedures, context, norms and expectations regarding the organisational issue that you have thingified
• Third is to inquire on 'the totality of these two in interdependence'

However, taking these three steps makes addressing an issue complicated and risks alienating people who want a quick 'answer' as in 42 is the meaning of life, the universe and everything ( Douglas Adams, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy). But organisational issues are not amenable to solving through 'thingifying '– they are part of a wider system. As the immigration points people found: 'Migration systems are complicated because people are complicated'.

What's your view on thingifying? Let me know.

One of my colleagues has posed us the question 'What can and can't we do in the service of creating a more human and high performing organisation?' I started by wondering what she meant by 'creating', 'more human' and 'high performing'. That got me nowhere but led me to a different question: can organisations be human without being high performing or high performing without being human? I think so. (And I don't mean 'being human' as in the TV series). The issue lies in being both human and high performing.

My book on organisational health covers a lot of ground on this and so do several of my blogs. Looking back through them one I wrote in 2011 is still relevant. It is about creating and using positive energies and emotions. Positivity leads to individual and organization health and high performance.

5 years ago in that blog, I referenced Margaret Wheatley's interview in strategy+business. This reinforced my view that creating positivity requires leadership activity. She made the point that 'In a time like this of economic and emotional distress, every organization needs leaders who can help people regain their capacity, energy and desire to contribute'.

2016 and we are again/still in a time of distress. Sadly, in 2011, Wheatley also said that people are reporting that 'mean-spiritedness is on the rise in their companies. And there seems to be a growing climate of disrespect for individual experience and competence.' My observation is that this trend has accelerated since she wrote 5 years ago.

At that point she thought that mean-spiritedness was due to the uncharted territory that we (individuals and organizations) are in. It leads us to 'running scared'.

Today there are lots of things which are making us 'run scared'. Take your pick by looking at newspaper headlines and social media. But Wheatley has some antidotes to this response including taking time to reflect, making informed – rather than pure emotional – choices, and learning how to find the place beyond hope and fear.

In another article (2009) of hers she quotes Rudolf Bahro, a prominent German activist and iconoclast: 'When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure.' Bahro offers insecurity as a positive trait, 'especially necessary in times of disintegration.'

Howard Zinn, a historian, in The Optimism of Uncertainty mines a similar vein. He says 'In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy?' He answers this saying: 'I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. … The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvellous victory.'

I'm with Wheatley, Bahro and Zinn. At all times, and even more so in times of uncertainty and insecurity I think all of us working in organisation design and development must defy mean-spiritedness and power playing. Instead we must act for trust, respect, shared decent values, and positive and energizing relationships. Only by doing this is there the hope – but not the guarantee – of developing human and high-performing organisations.

What's your view? Let me know.

We all know that the UK population voted on its view of community on Thursday, about which I am not going to comment, except for noting that whatever the size of 'community', there are certain things that identify a group of people as being a community:

• Feelings of membership: feelings of belonging to, and identifying with, the community.
• Feelings of influence: feelings of having influence on, and being influenced by, the community.
• Integration and fulfilment of needs: feelings of being supported by others in the community while also supporting them.
• Shared emotional connection: feelings of relationships, shared history, and a "spirit" of community.

But as two people contacted me last week with questions about 'community' I thought I'd be topical – and give them a response. They asked:

• 'What I am looking for is anything that would stimulate the debate about is there a transformation leadership community, if there is who are they and what distinguishes them as a community and how do we create that?'
• 'We are keen to start a conversation with the wider organisation design community about next steps in building our community and developing our collective capacity – can you give us your views on this?'

What struck me about the two requests I got were the statements about 'stimulate the debate' and 'start a conversation' about creating/building a community around a specific interest or identity – in these cases 'transformation leadership' and 'organisation design'.

There seemed to be an implied assumption that a 'community' is a good thing and that one can be created or constructed, which, I think, are assumptions worth testing. My experience is that to create a community involves energy, enthusiasm, commitment from a 'prime-mover', time, money, leadership and organisation. In an organisation that is jockeying for resources you'd have to show that the effort of creating and maintaining the community was adding some type of value. I've found they need a lot of support and co-ordination to set up and run successfully.

If you want to create an organisational community of interest or identity, the professional field of community organising is one to look at and learn from. Trained community organisers tend to take the view that the task is one of 'engaging' people in supporting something specific e.g. creating a community garden and they have a number of tools and techniques for generating that engagement.

Take a look at the community planning toolkit guide on Community Engagement. And for ideas on engaging an on-line community Bang the Table has 100 in downloadable format.

There also a Scottish National Standard for Community Engagement that can stimulate ideas and gives pointers that would be useful for anyone in an organisation hoping to create a community of interest.

What are your experiences of creating a community of interest? Have you got tips to share? Let me know.

The other day I read something about a broom that someone had used for 20 years and during the period it had needed 7 new handles and 8 new heads. The question was 'Is it the same broom as it was when it was bought?' Apparently this is a variant of the philosophical paradox the 'Ship of Theseus'. (90 second explanation here. 8 minute explanation here).

It seemed relevant as I'm gearing myself up to write the 3rd edition of my book Organisation Design: Engaging with Change. The first edition was published in 2004 and the second in 2014. Although I'd promised myself and my family I'd never write another book after that second edition I let myself be persuaded by the editor who assured me that 'I would expect updating for a third edition to be a smaller job than it was previously. The jump from first to second edition saw a big overhaul of the text (given that almost a decade had passed), while I imagine that the crucial changes this time around would be more manageable.'

The editor asked me to suggest what I would do differently in a third edition – which was the easy bit – and then sent these ideas + a copy of the second edition to 5 reviewers asking whether a third edition should go ahead.

Now comes the hard bit, because I've just thoroughly read the reviews and although I see that the reviewers feel a 3rd edition is a good idea this is caveated by statements on the lines of 'If substantially revised.' So it seems that 2 years is the new 10 years in terms of organisation design.

The suggestions on the substantial revisions seem to boil down to:

a) Be clearer about the target audience – am I writing for a student on a business studies/organisation design course who needs more of a text book or for an OD practitioner who needs more of the practical application and tools?

b)In either case reviewers felt the book would benefit from a connection 'to the fundamental conceptual building blocks of organisation design and the underlying theories as well as current [evidence based] research in the field'.

c) Include less on the UK and more on international and global organisations – with an emphasis on: innovative forms of organising, disruptive industries, new business development and market shifts, the 24/7/365 organisation, organisation design technology, use of big data/analytics, neuro-science and behavioural economics. Some of these I had on my list already but additional to the reviewers suggestions I think I need to add or introduce info on:

• Business strategy, target operating models and business capabilities
• The role of leaders in organisation design work
• Designing ethical, diverse and inclusive organisations. (There's very little on ethics in org design or how to, for example, design gender parity into orgs)
• Evaluating the success of org design activity

c) Underplay the 5-stage model for organisation design that organises the chapters in the 2nd edition book in favour of an approach that recognises 'the inevitability of the need for adaptation and customisation' and the interdependence of organisation design and organisation development.

Most helpfully 2 reviewers gave extensive chapter-by-chapter suggestions on how to make these revisions and the others made less extensive but equally useful suggestions. But I'm left thinking why did I agree to do this? Writing the third edition now seems akin to the task of replacing a great deal more planks on the Ship of Theseus than I thought. Will it still be the original book or will I be writing a new book (with the level of effort that involves?) Let me know?

I spent last week walking the Great Glen Way in Scotland. It's a glorious route and we were lucky with both the weather and the lack of midges. If I believe all the research then I should be back at work this week more productive, thinking more positively, being more creative, and with a fresh perspective.

Not only that, walking is supposed to have miracle benefits too so, in theory, I will be well able to deal with whatever has happened in my week off but I can't tell yet as I am writing this on Sunday evening, before I switch on my work laptop to find out what has been going on. I'm taking comfort in the statement that '[Work] life won't fall apart if you take two weeks off -— in fact your work might actually improve'. (I wonder, does it hold if you only take one week off?)

Although I can't tell whether my productivity and positive thinking has improved I can talk about the fresh perspectives. I came home with three:

1. In a second-hand bookshop in Inverness I bought Midges in Scotland. (It's a best-seller!) I learned that:

   'Without a sound understanding of how and why midges behave the way they do, then all the chemical sprayings, repellents, and biological controls in the world become a waste of effort and money … this simple message has not always been appreciated. … [people] want action and want it now. The trigger on finger on the chemical spray gun gets very twitchy. .. [the] almost instinctive urge to reach for the spraygun has proved, time after time, to be a costly mistake.'

   Reading this made me laugh: the urge to action (usually change the org chart) over sound understanding (what's going on the system) that I meet every day at work is paralleled in people's responses. The scientist author proposes several routes to understanding midge behaviour in order to discover better ways of managing them: field trials, open discussion, co-ordinated cross-discipline research and learning, evaluating the extent and cost of the current situation, determining where focused effort would yield the highest pay-back, providing better data for forecasting, etc. These techniques are discipline neutral and I realised that each/all could bring new perspectives to organisation design work.

2. My walk companion was an architect who saw completely different things from me as we walked the route. He marvelled at the design of some of the wooden bridges we crossed, down to the use of a particular type of screw. I looked at all the galvanized steel gates through his eyes as he explained their significantly different designs and design purposes. He was alert to the many gravel types that we crunched over – how it was laid why that type had been chosen, and he loved the specific shade of blue of the sign posting and the way it was used to unify different forms of signage.

   Seeing his landscape which I was unnoticing of till he pointed it out reminded me of the value of inviting and valuing different perspectives on a problem, plan, situation or intervention.

3. Although I'd determined not to look at any newspaper or news bulletin for the week there were eerie echoes of what is going in the world right now. Along the route are numerous, very well produced interpretive panels giving information on the history related to the particular stretch. There was nothing that isn't current today: on the downside – land and settlement clearances, people being forced to flee in boats, livelihoods lost through war, clan rivalry and bitter feuding (lasting 350 years in one case) bringing ferocious loss of life, huge income disparity, resources tightly controlled by a few in power, and some overbearing chiefs. And on the upside some sparks of innovation e.g. in lock design and instances of courage and dedication.

Getting this historical perspective made me wonder about repeating patterns – are we all in a fractal universe? How could fractal and chaos theories be applied to the way we do organisation design?

What new perspectives have you got from a work break that could inform your organisation design work? Let me know.

If I'd started by reading the last chapter of Iris Bohnet's book, What Works: Gender Equality by Design first instead of beginning at the first chapter and working my way through to the end, I would have found out that

a) we can reduce gender inequality rapidly if we are 'armed with data'
b) 'a good leader is a behavioral designer'
c) she would offer 'thirty-six research-grounded design suggestions' to help the good leaders reduce gender inequality.

I might have been sceptical of the first two assertions, and dubious about the efficacy of thirty-six suggestions. (Thus demonstrating some of the cognitive biases she talks about). As it was, I started at the beginning and was immediately hooked into her persuasive arguments on how to rapidly reduce gender inequality, backed up by research studies and masses of examples. I noted pages to revisit. The list is long. The book is full of nuggets of interest to explore further. As I read I was looking for stuff that was immediately practical, that we could try out in our organisation and that might have a positive impact on gender equality. (In 2013 we had a total workforce that was 68.9% female and 31.1% male, but at the highest levels the numbers reverse to 39.5% female and 60.5% male).

Bohnet presents some intriguing information, I'll pick out three examples – out of many – that alerted me to things that might be going on in the organisation I work in.

1. Diversity training including unconscious bias training is 'unlikely to change attitudes, let alone behavior, if they set out only to make employees aware of their biases' (which most do). In fact there is some evidence to show that 'diversity training programs were associated with a small drop in the likelihood that under-represented groups became managers'.

2. Leadership training programs are not providing women with the support and capacity building that they need to close the gender gap – see a McKinsey article Why leadership development programs fail which Bohnet refers to. She discusses how leadership development programs underestimate the strength of existing mindsets and also how there is often a failure to evaluate carefully whether there is any behavioral change attributable to the program.

3. Gendered wording in job advertisements and role descriptions have an impact on how applicants perceive the jobs, and thus whether they think it is worth applying for them. Equally other organisational messaging and day to day language use is often gender biased. Think of the predominantly male sporting analogies in many organisations or in bureaucracies the language of 'brigading', 'in your command', and military terms more frequently associated with men than women.

Her many suggestions for tackling the continuing gender inequality all based in the behavioural sciences are equally thought provoking. For example:

• Find sponsors for women and not mentors for them. Then tie some of the sponsor's performance pay to the progress her/his 'sponsee' has made.
• 'When forming diverse teams make sure every sub-group is represented by at least three people or makes up about a third of the total. … Creating token members is in nobody's interest'
• 'Male resistance to interventions favoring women is real'. Bohnet talks of 'norm entrepreneurs' (a term coined by Cass Sunstein in his paper Social Norms and Social Rules) helping to change these types of norms.

What I learned from the book was that I could (and should) be much more conscious of the potential impact organisation design has on gender equality. So that's a start – next step is to get cracking to help reduce gender inequality. What are you doing on this? Let me know.

A few years ago I wrote an article published by Croner, 'HR and Organisation Development: what is the relationship? Is it going anywhere?' in which I said:

The history of the two disciplines [Human Resources and Organisation Design and Development – HR and ODD] makes it appropriate to ask whether they have the "gene compatibility" to converge. There are good arguments from both those who feel they should remain separate and also those who maintain either that OD is a subset of HR, or that HR is a subset of OD.'

I then explored the various arguments. Last week variants of this discussion surfaced again in multiple forums and in real life, not in theory. I won't go into the ins and outs of it but the sensitivities and tensions around it have caused me – well various emotions, thoughts, and reasons to consider the stances.

Not only that and in the usual synchronicity of stuff, this week I've been asked if I'd facilitate two workshops – two unrelated requests – later this year on skills for organisation design and development consultants, and I've been commenting on a capability guide we've been developing for internal consultants based on the Institute of Consulting's framework.

Additionally, we've been having a debate on whether HR Business Partners can be good ODD consultants.

So I'm back to similar questions I posed in the Croner article. Specifically on the HR v ODD skillsets I wrote that:

It is not sensible or right to "re-badge" HR practitioners (or training and development people) as OD people as happens in some organisations. (Notice this rarely happens the other way round). Neither is it fair to expect people to retrain or retool to one or other discipline if it is not something they want to do.

And I'm (still) of the view that an HR skillset and ODD skillset are very different. Note that way back in 1991 Robert Goldberg wrote an article now reprinted in the 2012 Handbook for Strategic HR: Best Practices in Organization Development from the OD Network in which he says 'Little did I know in my romanticized vision of becoming a change agent that the very factors that helped me succeed in human resources would be the major obstacles in my career in organizational development.'

Even though both HR and ODD fields have changed a lot since he wrote the piece I think it holds true. I regularly see many people with HR skillsets struggle to 'transform' into ODD consultants, and I still see ODD capability 'housed' in HR functions with an implied assumption that ODD is an HR 'thing' and thus subject to all the perceptions and reputations that HR has in an organisation.

But let's separate the 'thing' of HR and the relationship with the 'thing' of ODD and look the skills and capabilities that individuals need to become really good ODD consultants. We need people who can help organisations to solve issues, create value, improve business performance and find new and better ways of doing things, including developing their services, reducing costs and making savings, and growing/shrinking/changing the organisation. We need people who use their business skills to provide objective advice and expertise.

If we take this approach it doesn't matter what discipline they are rooted in, what matters is that are they are good consultants. Paradoxically, what we are looking for in a good consultant might also be what would be a good idea to look for in a good manager. An intriguing research study which formed the basis of the book Management as Consultancy, published in 2015, illustrates how the boundaries between management and consulting are changing.

Should ODD skills be vested in HR, in management, in specialist ODD consultants? Let me know.