Author: naomiorgdesign

I've just been looking at the stuff I've collected this week in relation to the value of social contact in the workplace. It's a topic of interest to me right now as in the project we are currently working on the requirement to help the workforce develop skills in sustaining healthy social interactions amongst their virtual team members as well as face to face ones is beginning to loom large.

There's no doubt that healthy social interaction is positively related to productivity and organizational commitment . Additionally close friendships in general prove good for people's physiological health. As the Gallup organization reports "Relationships serve as a buffer during tough times, which in turn improves our cardiovascular functioning and decreases stress levels. On the other hand, people with very few social ties have nearly twice the risk of dying from heart disease and are twice as likely to catch colds – even though they are less likely to have the exposure to germs that comes from frequent social contact." And beyond that having a network of supportive relationships contributes to psychological well-being. Specifically a network gives people a sense of belonging, feelings of self-worth, and the comfort of security.

So, strong social interactions are known to be important contributors to individual productivity, and to physiological and psychological health, while denying social interaction, as in the practice of putting prisoners into solitary confinement as a punishment has been shown to cause serious psychological and sometimes physiological ill effects, sometimes within a matter of days. (International Psychological Trauma Symposium, 2008).

Much of the research talks about 'strong social interactions' without specifying what strong looks and feels like. But after some digging around and comparisons of ideas it seems reasonable to say that strong social interactions are characterized by the parties involved having the skills and abilities to:

• Accept that people are different and that a diversity of views and opinions builds organizational strength
• Co-operate with others in matters of work or social activity
• Sensitively assert their real thoughts and opinions in a way that respects others
• Be open and confident about themselves, their vulnerabilities and their strengths
• Listen attentively to others and respond without judgment or harshness
• Empathize with colleagues – be able to understand how they are feeling
• Respect and trust other people regardless of differences of opinion

The Gallup piece suggests that developing these strong ties requires proximity and time noting that "the sheer amount of time we spend socializing matters. The data suggest that to have a thriving day, we need six hours of social time. When we get at least six hours of daily social time, it increases our wellbeing and minimizes stress and worry. Just so you don't think that six hours of social time is unattainable in one day, it's important to note that the six hours includes time at work, at home, on the telephone, talking to friends, sending e-mail, and other communication."

This notion of hours of time spent in social interaction is kind of echoed in a piece I came across by Luc Galoppin Social Architecture (a manifesto). He is intriguing on the topic of types of literacy, ranging them in a hierarchy from speech to text to image to moving image to navigation to collaboration. He says that:

"Collaboration is the new literacy. But it requires managers to replace systems of control with platforms of trust. The internet is the first medium to honor multiple intelligences. For instance, let's have a look at literacy. In our narrow view of the world literacy involves only text, but there is also image and screen literacy.

On the next level we find the ability to "read" multimedia texts. The new literacy, triggered by the internet, is one of information navigation. Information Navigation is a new layer of literacy that adds itself to our multiple intelligence. No need to be afraid of unlearning any previously acquired literacy. My ability to watch TV does not exclude my reading abilities, just as my ability to tweet does not exclude my ability to have a decent conversation at the dinner table."

I am not clear (yet) whether collaboration is a new form of social interaction, or a different form, or what it always has been but has finally arrived at the top of the hierarchy with a new and snazzy label. I'm hazarding a guess that it's the last and has a different label because it's no longer just face to face but includes all sorts of social media and digital interaction. However I'm assuming that it retains the same productivity, physiological and psychological benefits. So I'm left with the original challenge – but it's turned into a question. What do we need to do differently to develop strong social relationships as we live, learn and work in the collaborative digital world in order to avoid the pitfalls outlined in Sherry Turkle's book, Alone Together?

If you have any ideas let me know.

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

So what would go into the business case? I've been thinking about this during the week and it seems that there's a step that needs to happen before the business case. That is showing the executive that they are working in a system, and if they each go off and sort out their bit then there is likely to be confusion among staff and disconnected projects running the outcome of which will be financial cost and loss of employee productivity.

The back of the envelope approach is a classic response of people who are thinking about their patch and not the whole enterprise, and also smacks of political game-playing. In one organization I worked in we used to encourage managers to use "big hat thinking and not little hat". An executive team has to work at a whole enterprise level or it's not an executive team.

To help the team understand this, my tack would be to take one of the issues they want to resolve, say "Making more effective use of our tightening resources" and then individually in a 1:1 discussion ask each of the executive team what this means to them and how they would operationalize it in their area. With that information gathered, I'm guessing that it will expose the fact that there are several different views of what 'effective use' means that if acted on in individual business units would have a negative rather than positive enterprise impact.

I would then take this back to the whole team showing that individual efforts within business units would not have the desired outcomes.

Then rather than potentially irritating the executive team with the jargon of organization design I would suggest writing a business case based on a whole enterprise resolution of the problems rather than a piecemeal/business unit approach. So the business case title would be something on the lines of "An enterprise solution to enterprise issues". Included in this would be some background that noted the risks inherent in taking a 'small hat' approach including duplication of effort, risk of confusing employees, danger of spending more resources on individual effort that would be the case if a collective effort was made, and so on

Why do this? Because one of the things I've noted in my career is that the language you couch things in is critical. You may do exactly what you intended but the difference the words make counts. It's important to use the vocabulary and language of the people you are working with.

The business case would then follow the standard outline of
Project objectives
Scope
Approach, including how you are going to involve stakeholders, the roles of the project sponsors, the structure and operation that will deliver the proposal (e.g. steering group, programme manager, project co-ordinators, project stream leaders, the style and phases of designing and delivering the proposal
Key deliverables and milestones/timescale
Measures of success
Issues and risks (including dependencies and assumptions)
Costs and resources
Benefits to be delivered

Beyond the small hat/big hat challenge, and the language of organization design, executives often balk at the thought that it will all take too much time, and become a cottage industry rather than a swiftly and efficiently delivered project.

Tackling any organizational issues takes time (and it takes more time if you have to go back and re-work something that you haven't spent enough time on in the first place). There are eight strategies for helping executives meet the challenge of not enough time that I discuss with my clients. They are adapted from Peter Senge's book The Dance of Change. Then I make sure that what time I am asking from them is worth it from their perspective given that they are working to the guidelines below.

1 Integrate initiatives
Combine several different initiatives into one, even if they started with different champions and participants. The common goal is to enable progress on key issues.

2 Schedule time for focus and concentration
Re-arrange time to encourage focus, concentration, and intensive work. The same activities scheduled in a three day block instead of three one-day blocks can move along much further because people can focus together.

3 Trust people to control their own use of time
Allow people to schedule themselves and be rewarded for the results they produce instead of for being visible. Letting people schedule their time is a great trust builder.

4 Value unstructured time
Allow people informal slack time to encounter one another casually without rushing into decisions or being under pressure to produce immediate results.

5 Build the capability to eliminate unnecessary tasks
Many organisations now expect one person to do the same work that was previously performed by more than one. For example, clerical and administrative work, once handled by support staff is now done by the person who had the support staff – adding an additional burden of work. Some tasks can be eliminated.

6 Say 'no' to political games-playing
Check that what you do is not about giving bosses the answers you think they want to hear, but about delivering value to customers.

7 Say 'no' to non-essential demands
Check that what you do is essential. Distinguish between urgent and important. Cut out the non-essentials.

8 Experiment with time
Answer the questions 'If our purpose is vital, how can we avoid wasting the time we have to get there?' Assess the problems with time flexibility – what controls the amount of time you have available. Take meetings for example – answer these questions for yourself:

Does this meeting absolutely require my attendance?
What specifically will I contribute to it?
What value will attending this meeting add to my doing my job?
Who else could attend in my place?
What would make this an effective meeting?
Will I be able to exploit or develop any of my strengths and skills in this meeting?
Assess the value of the meeting before agreeing to attend.

So how do you make sure that what you offer your clients is in their language and makes good use of their time? Comments welcome.

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!

All this is a long preamble to getting round to saying that I am not able to easily and quickly recommend stuff because. I have to trawl around various 'libraries' for want of a better word, all of them using a different classification system. Thus I frequently fallback to Google Desktop but sadly, at this point it doesn't hit my Amazon lists. However, this may be ok because I've just read a blog from Michael Schrage on the HBR blog network called Tip for Getting More Organized: Don't. He says

"that IBM researchers observed that email users who "searched" rather than set up files and folders for their correspondence typically found what they were looking for faster and with fewer errors. Time and overhead associated with creating and managing email folders were, effectively, a waste. By combining threading with search, technology makes an economic virtue of virtual disorganization. The personal productivity issue knowledge workers and effective executives need to ponder is whether habits of efficiency that once improved performance have decayed into mindless ruts that delay or undermine desired outcomes."

Good, I feel much better now.

So maybe I can stop looking at types of consolidator programs like Mendeley that apparently organizes all one's articles. And Evernote that somehow claims to organize material from a range of sources but both require time learning how to operate them (at least it looks that way to me). My brother recommended a kind of card index system where you set up a topic – say project management, and then note every single item you come across related to project management. I tried that for a week or so and still got stuck on the keywords bit. (Project management or program management, for example).

Anyway in answer to the two questions I started with which boil down to a) HR related tools b) organization and building design. Here is my pick of ten websites for each. Additions welcome from any of you.

HR related tools – but really more business related as I have observed that HR people spend far too little time getting business savvy and far too much time working on stuff that may have become "an organizational mindless rut that delays or undermines desired outcomes".
1. Rapid BI Business & Organizational Development tools, training and services – Human Resources, OD & Leadership. Has over 400 Management Models, Leadership Models, Coaching Models and Business Models
2. Change management learning center (sponsored by Prosci) has a series of tutorials designed to provide consultants, managers and practitioners with insight into the field and practice of change management
3. MIT's Innovative Leaders video series conversations with innovative leaders from various companies.
4. HBR Idea Cast: A weekly audio podcast on a topic of interest to business, often an interview with the author of a new book.
5. Human Systems Dynamics Institute: Has some free tools and resources plus a page of links to related websites in humans systems and organization development
6. Edge: "To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves."
7. Mind Tools toolkit contains more than 600 management, career and thinking skills.
8. Management Innovation Exchange "is an open innovation project aimed at reinventing management for the 21st century. The premise: while "modern" management is one of humankind's most important inventions, it is now a mature technology that must be reinvented for a new age. In order to thrive in the future, organizations must become as adaptable, innovative, inspiring and socially accountable as the people inside them. "
9. Business balls a free ethical learning and development resource for people and organizations
10.Value based management – an enormous array of management tools, models, and theories arranged

Architectural and organization design
1. IDEO – human centered design toolkit
2. Design with Intent tool kit
3. Haworth Workplace Library a good collection of white papers highlighting topics and issues around workspace and organization
4. Fast Company frequently has articles that cover the intersections between architecture and organization. Linda Tischler is their main writer on this. They also have a site co-design where they "try to bridge the fuzzy border between design and business."
5. Steelcase has a useful magazine 360 that covers workplace and organizational matters and also a collection of research papers
6. Rotman School of Management, Business Design has videos, articles and information about business design and 'pure' design.
7. A list on Amazon called Design Thinking for Business lists some useful books
8. Roger Martin's own website. (He is the Dean of the Rotman School of Management)
9. Podcasts Design Matters with Debbie Millman
10.The Design Observer Group

As I said, any additions to either list would be most welcome.

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.

A low-income single person in the US who fulfills eligibility requirements gets an average of $133.79 for food (set in 2010) per month, under SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). This is around $31.50 per week. I decided I would spend the first week of the new year seeing how I would fare on $31.50 – rather as an organization that has to downsize by some massive amount might approach the challenge. Indeed I thought it would be rather a good challenge for organizations. "If you had to slash your budget by 75% or thereabouts how would you ensure that you could thrive and meet your business goals." (Of course, this type of thing may happen for government departments in the US, UK and elsewhere so perhaps worth thinking about).

In the normal course of events I don't think too much about how much I spend on food. I am not doing the regular quarterly reviews of operating processes or the 'planned abandonment' exercises I advocate in the organization design work I do. I know almost daily I buy a coffee at nearly $4.50, and I don't take my own lunch to work but buy it in a local deli. I'm in a very fortunate position to be able to do that. So like a successful organization that rarely reviews operating processes or looks for different ways of continuously improving I was blinded to risks of circumstances suddenly changing, developing resilience to cope in a crisis, and so on.

With this in mind, I thought a little practical scenario work would be good for me. I planned the sudden drop in income a week ahead of time, roughing out my menu and shopping around to find out the best places (within walking distance) to buy the items. My daughter amused me by seeming shocked that I was planning to eat the same thing every day. My rationale for this – I could buy a relatively nutritious basket of goods without having any waste. I put my menu through http://www.Fitday.com which provides a nutritional analysis of all foods and discovered that if I lived on this diet for a longish period I would apparently be slightly deficient in some nutrients. SNAP does not count vitamin supplements as food. This seems shortsighted as through a different program people who get sick will receive medical attention at often very high cost. An organizational parallel here is not looking at the whole system but focusing on single elements of it.

In the event my planned menu was not exactly the same as my actual menu, which indicated a certain ability to adapt on my part. For organizations this is one of the most useful organizational traits to demonstrate. Anyway my daily diet comprised

Breakfast: oatmeal with edamame beans
Lunch: peanut butter sandwich (wholewheat bread) with marmite
Snack: banana
Dinner: soup made from black beans or baked beans, sweet corn or other frozen veg, salsa
Before bed: cup of soy milk with cocoa powder.

Beyond the nightcap of hot cocoa I only drank water (but see below on this). I went from Monday to Sunday, seven days, spending a total of $20.91, so have in hand just under $10, and I have left ¼ jar peanut butter, third of a loaf of bread, equivalent of one packet frozen veg. But had I not been sick for the first day, eating nothing and felt off color the next I think I would have exhausted my supplies.

So what did I learn from this exercise?
1. Accessibility to cheap, nutritious food is essential. I live in a city with supermarkets that have bulk food, special offers, coupons, and all within walking distance from my apartment.
2. Knowledge of what constitutes a healthy diet is critical – I adjusted some of my purchases to minimize nutrient deficiency but this is not easy on a tight budget.
3. It takes time to shop around, plan ahead, think through choices.
4. It's easy to be mindless about the choices when I have the money. I think I'll be more conscious in the future about what I'm spending.
5. There are sources of free food to look out for – supermarket samples, a sudden work event with food, etc. (this happened a couple of times in the week but I had to be careful not to compromise the plant based diet).
6. Social events are difficult if people are expected to pay their way. (I was invited for a drink and said I was trying out this experiment and the invitee said she would buy the drink, which she did, but that raised ethical questions or at least a moral dilemma about reciprocity).
7. There are choices to be made about what's in or out of the experiment. Are 'legacy' cupboard items ok? I had decided not – that I would work from a zero base. But in the event I cracked on cocoa powder that was in my cupboard to have in the hot milk, and on Marmite which I'd brought back from the UK last time I was there. (I rationalized this by saying that the $10 I had over could have paid for these anyway).
8. It was not half as difficult as I expected to stick to the menu and not buy anything outside it.
9. Bringing my own lunch to work makes good economic sense.
10. It was, as my daughter predicted, rather boring. I started to wish for chips with mushy peas as sold in the chippy in Swinegate, York UK (why this I don't know, and sadly nothing remotely similar is available here in DC).

In answer to two predictable questions: a) I did not lose any weight on this regime b) I am not planning another week of this right now (and just to repeat count myself extremely fortunate that I do not have to) so I find myself already slipping back to a cup of morning tea, looking forward to a coffee, and inviting my friend for a drink.

Some organizational lessons that could be drawn from this individual experiment:
1. Review and planned abandonment of some of the known ways of operating do open up better and more efficient/effective ways of operating and help preparation for the unforeseen.
2. Prevention of issues arising takes more conscious choices and planning than reaction but has a higher chance of being a better investment in the longer term.
3. Legacies from the past have a bearing on current actions and can be rationalized. (Legacies and rationalizations may or may not be helpful but they are forces to contend with).
4. Dire circumstances force action that may have good outcomes
5. If there is no real incentive or supporting infrastructure to carry on in the new ways then things snap back to previous ways.

What individual experiments could you try out that might inform the way you think about your organization design work?

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.

Control is manifested in things like formal rules such as those that give authority to supervisors in an organization, and thus grant them power to control the behavior of others. Control then is defined as the purposeful deployment of various mechanisms that act to corral organizations down a path that keeps them moving towards achievement of their business strategy and goals.

However, given that the noun 'control' has at least eleven meanings and the verb 'control' has eight, I start the chapter with some boundary setting around the word as it is played out in organizations. My plan for the chapter is to look at control in organizations from three perspectives

a) the formal controls that are used within organizations to keep performance and productivity in line with goals
b) the informal cultural controls that keep people in line with norms and mores
c) the leadership control, both by formal and informal leaders, who have positional power and influence to wield the various control devices, approaches, and techniques that impact performance and productivity

Sometimes the plan doesn't turn into the reality as I start writing, and sometimes it does for me but not for the editor. So things may change on the chapter content. But things are ok so far. What I'm not going to tackle in the chapter is the whole piece pertaining to organizational controls from external sources governments, professional associations, shareholders, and so on although I do touch on them at points.

I relate each one of the definitions of controls to each of the four system types: mechanistic, animate, social and ecological, proposed by Russell Ackoff. His systems work is being developed at the University of Pennsylvania in a 'collabratory', ACASA . Healthy systems are the topic of chapter 3 of the book.

Sidebar:This whole investigation into systems theory took me to Ervin Laszlo and a new university he was instrumental in setting up the Giordano Bruno GlobalShift University, that opens its doors on January 12 2012 and guess what? I registered for their on-line course, "2012: Know the World, Know Yourself.. . So if the book deadline has to be extended this may be one of the reasons.

Looking at controls in relation to systems makes the point that the range and variety of controls available for organizational use is vast. At their best the controls keep the organization running in a healthy way. But if controls are left unmonitored or deployed poorly or thoughtlessly then there are likely to be unfortunate repercussions as Apple Inc found out in 2010 when it appeared that worker conditions, including long working hours, and highly regimented operations in one of the factories, Foxconn, that supplied its parts were implicated in the rash of worker suicides at the plant. In the wave of publicity that hit Apple and in the face of criticism of plant conditions Terry Gou, Chairman of Foxconn Technology, said "We're reviewing everything. We will leave no stone unturned and we'll make sure to find a way to reduce these suicide tendencies".

What's interesting about control mechanisms is that they can be formal – those which are officially sanctioned and usually codified like rules and procedures. And they can be informal and derive from the norms and beliefs that guide employee actions and behaviours. What I'd like to know more about is how and whether controls are actively chosen in a whole systems way that guides the organization effectively. My experience is that there is very little conscious thought about what makes for a sensible control and what is a daft one. (Both formal and informal controls can be sensible or daft I've found).

But whether control methods are consciously chosen and if so in what circumstances and how this happens is another book altogether. For my purposes I am taking the line that some controls are chosen, e.g. the design of a performance appraisal system, some are imposed, and some arise from the history, culture and experience of the organizational members.

On this last, I read a delightful piece in Fast Company on Lenovo (the PC company) illustrating the part culture plays in attitudes to organizational control. In 2005 Lenovo, a Chinese PC company bought IBM's PC business for $1.75 billion. At the time things did not go so well. Lenovo's leadership team did not speak English and had no multi-cultural experience. There was also a significant culture divide. In one example quoted Liu, Leonovo's Chairman used to insist that late arrivals to a meeting stand in the corner, "a punishment he imposed even on himself." (Salter, 2011) Of course, I can imagine that a US/UK leader would love to stick latecomers to meetings in a corner but are prevented by various controls like bullying and harassment policies.

Recognizing the complexity of control 'choice' it is clear that organizations have scope to determine how and what constitute effective controls for their organization. But again, I wonder how many organizations look at their portfolio of controls and really work out how they are contributing to the value of the organization. A look at the controls in relation to the business model and impact these have on operational performance could end up saving a lot of money.

What's your view on organization/management controls? Do you think most controls were designed for bureaucratic, hierarchical organizations? What different controls are needed for today's flatter, networked and virtual organizations?

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.

Second the OD consultants are usually based in Human Resources functions and managers tend to think of HR as a service function that does what it is told to do by operational managers. In this case the managers feel that they are in a position to control other parts of the organization because some parts, including HR, are thought of as 'support' functions, while others are 'delivery' functions. In most companies the delivery functions are considered more important than the support functions.

So how can an organization development consultant do to remove the barriers of positional power and control of support organizations? The first step is to recognize that organization development work always involves challenging and questioning. This means learning how to ask a lot of questions in way that is not in a combative or confrontational but careful, constructive, and confident. The second step is to develop really excellent business knowledge and, more importantly, keep it up to date.

Read this extract from an advertisement placed by a large multi-national company for an OD consultant and you will see how the challenging and questioning ability is described in terms of influencing skills:

This is largely a role of influence, balance between strategy and tactics is critical. This will be a person who leads from behind. It is critical that he/she has a customer-focused perspective and orientation to the process. To make the point again, this person must be exceptionally strong in a role of influence and flawless in their approach related to managing people and expectations.

Being able to influence without authority is at the heart of an OD practitioner's ability to challenge and question effectively – often a tricky thing to do in difficult situations where, for example, there is no opportunity for a second chance, or there is a lot of resistance from another person or group.

Further on in the job spec for the OD consultant comes the requirement for a "business-oriented" approach:

While this person will be expected to have deep technical skills in organizational development, their holistic business acumen and practical results-orientation will be critical for their internal credibility. This position's success will be measured by the job holder's business orientation and the continuing demand for their involvement by operational line executives throughout the company.

So in order to be able to challenge and question effectively the OD practitioner needs to have excellent influencing skills and a strong sense of the business. This ability to talk the same business language as line managers, and to realize that they have time, budget, and cost constraints as they try to drive performance is an essential part of OD consultants proving that they are truly business aware.

The first step in learning how to influence effectively is to find out what your current influencing capability is. There are many influencing skills surveys available and it is worth finding out more about these as a good diagnosis can help you find out where to focus your efforts to develop your influencing skills. One assessment tool suggests that there are 5 core skills required for effectively influencing others.

1. Openness which asks how well you set agendas, build trust, handle concerns, and manage the other person's expectations.
2. Investigation which assesses your ability to diagnose the situation, ask good questions to uncover needs, listen attentively, and help people take another look at their decisions.
3. Presence that examines the way you can help people consider the potential consequences of their choices and decisions and how they might benefit from exploring a range of options.
4. Confirmation that explores how well you do at handling concerns and gaining agreement even if there are a number of different ideas in the room.
5. Rapport building that considers your ability to build long-term relationships that are mutually beneficial

Once you have done this look for courses or books that will give you some information and some practical exercises you can apply as you learn to influence. A useful book on this is Influencing: Skills and Techniques for Business Success, Fiona Dent and Mike Brent, published by Palgrave MacMillan. Then keep on practicing.

To develop business acumen you need to learn about the industry sector that your company operates in, the market conditions, the competitors and so on. There are usually specialist journals by industry available. Additionally there are numerous business journals and magazines. Some to read are the Harvard Business Review, McKinsey Quarterly, and strategy + business. All of these have websites that you can learn more from.

But as you are developing these sources of power remember that you already have some. You have the technical skills related to human resource matters and employment conditions. You have a certain amount of resource power – the manager wants you to do something so you are a resource to him/her and you can do the work 'going the extra mile', or you can do it just well enough.

Use your power skillfully and take action to develop your influencing skills and business knowledge. My next step in doing this is to take a program, Know the World, Know Yourself at the newly founded Global Shift University.

Good wishes for 2012.

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")

Meg Wheatley's interview in strategy+businessreinforces my view that community matters. She makes 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". Unfortunately, she also says that people are reporting that "mean-spritedness is on the rise in their companies. And there seems to be a growing climate of disrespect for individual experience and competence." Partly she thinks this is due the uncharted territory that we (organizations) are in. Certainly in my work this week I've heard the phrase 'we're doing things we've never done before' echoed several times, and that is somewhat scary and I've observed that people are reacting in a scared way.

Wheatley has some antidotes to this 'running scared' mentality including taking time to reflect, making choices, and learning how to find the place beyond hope and fear. In another article 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."

As she rightly points out living with insecurity and taking a reflective and thoughtful path to manage it positively is a lot easier said than done but nevertheless has huge benefits, and pays dividends in terms of higher motivation, and performance as well as increased feelings of individual well-being that ultimately contribute to the creation of organizational health (the collectivities of individual well-being among other factors).

In the November issue of ACSM's Certified News, Margaret Moore (aka Coach Meg) of Wellcoaches Corporation discusses the 'pivotal role of positive emotions in successful group performance', drawing on the work of Marcial Losada and Barbara Frederickson to argue that groups and communities that have positive emotions and participative management practices are higher performing than those that are fear driven, rule bound, and risk averse. Her article has a nice illustration of the butterfly effect (Lorenz equation) that I learned about while taking a program on chaos theory.

Moore presents a list of Losada's findings that, if applied, would help develop the positive emotions she advocates. One that I would like to see more of is the ratio of positive and negative topics and points made in meetings staying at above 3:1. Do this focusing on "positive topics, asking positive questions, providing affirmations, exploring strengths, or success stories.

In one of the meetings I attended last week someone presented a change curve (the standard, simplified, type of visual about the emotions people feel about change), and talked, humorously, about the 'valley of despair' part of the curve that she feels in. We all enjoyed the discussion and laughed a lot so maybe humor is another way of generating positive emotions. (I'll ask her on Monday if she has moved on from the valley of despair towards 'the search for meaning').

The content of these articles relates to another article I read (in November's AARP Magazine) about Betty Holston Smith. She is in her 70s and has run eight ultramarathons in the past four years. Her running technique is based on chi running (Chi is energy – the life giving, vital energy that unites body, mind and spirit a concept that has its origins in early Chinese philosophy). Her positive energy abounds and is a testament to its contribution to high performance.

Finally a co-worker asked me to review the business plan and rationale for an organizational wellness program that looks at five areas of well-being: career, mind and body, financial, community (being a member of a goal oriented or special interest group), and social (the network of relationships a person has). The paper lists the organizational benefits of such a wellness program including – as Wheatley, and more both imply in relation to reflective behavior and positivity:

 Increased employee productivity
 Higher quality work
 Improved employee morale and job satisfaction
 The ability to innovate, implement and adapt to change
 Reduced turnover
 Fewer stress-related disabilities and illnesses
 Reduced absenteeism
 Reduced presenteeims (employees who are not engaged)

I wait to see if the program will be financed or introduced as we are currently focused on stringent cost cutting, and axing of what are seen as discretionary efforts.

The Chinese connection came up again in the discussion I had with two Chinese colleagues about organization development in China. One of them mentioned the principles of yin/yang, wondering why organization development as we know it is currently rooted in western traditions, and suggesting that organization development that flowed from Chinese traditions might have a very different aspect and approach.

It was a fascinating discussion originating in the idea that a Chinese organization I am working with would like to offer a recognized and certified organization development program to its members. The plan was to buy in an existing western one. What emerged as we talked, however, was the notion of co-creating a Chinese organization development course with, among others, people who have been on the two-day organization design and development programs that I have run there and then aim to get that one certified.

The intention of this approach would be to explore and include more of the traditional Chinese philosophies and approaches – my colleague mentioned the yin-yang complementarities – and develop a potentially very different approach to organization development that could act to counter balance the fear and anxiety noted by Meg Wheatley, whilst recognizing that both exist as part of the dynamic system of an organization.

What are you doing to balance your fear and anxiety with positive energy and emotion? I've registered to take a half day course in Chi running!

Many organizations are in the throes of supporting people as they transition from current ways of working to new ways of working. For many people the new ways of working are radically different. Among other changes they are moving from

• Own desk/office space that is assigned to them to shared space, perhaps desk sharing or hoteling
• Roaming or teleworking from the assigned space to roaming or teleworking from unassigned space
• People having private offices based on position in hierarchy to people having enclosed work space based on job function.
• Traditional one-for-one space assignment to neighborhoods or zones with fluid boundaries

In making this cultural and working practices shift people tend to concentrate on space planning and work practices and processes. But there is another factor around the cultural change that is worth investigating.

Some research by Professor Halevy of Stanford University, and others, suggests in his article Power Corrupts, Particularly When it Lacks Status that if symbols of status are removed there are consequences in the way power is used (and misused). He and his research team predicted that when people have a role that gives them power but lacks status – and the respect that comes with that status – then it can lead to demeaning behaviors. They tested this prediction and found it to be true – albeit in laboratory rather than a real world situation. Nevertheless it is an interesting finding because if it is generalizable into the world of work there may be the unforeseen consequence of negative behavior change if symbols of status i.e. private offices are removed and there are no replacement status symbols.

I asked whether the research had touched on offices as status symbols and Halevy replied: "We haven't looked at the effects of taking away status symbols on the behavior of power holders, although I suspect that, in the absence of alternative ways to signal status, taking away these status symbols might lead power holders to try to dominate others in their environment to re-establish a clear hierarchy. Thus, devising alternative, less costly ways for people to signal their status might be necessary to avoid these outcomes".

If people either consciously or unconsciously regard 'their own' private office as a status symbol (regardless of whether they say it is an essential for them to work effectively), and have an emotional attachment to this 'entitlement', what are the effects of any drive towards a working environment that has many fewer private offices and encourages people to hot-desk, desk share, 'hotel', and telework? Will power without status corrupt absolutely as the Economist article commenting on Halvey's research suggests.

In my own work I have heard people say that they would like their managers to have offices. I was a little perplexed by this but then read another article, The fluency of social hierarchy: The ease with which hierarchical relationships are seen, remembered, learned, and liked, that suggested "that relationships with more hierarchical organization are easier to see, understand, learn, and remember. This cognitive fluency of hierarchies could be one mechanism through which hierarchies persist and are enjoyed even though people often claim to want to avoid them" – it seems plausible then that private offices signal the comfort of hierarchy.

In fact, Halevy's more recent research in fact shows that power without status, while perhaps not corrupting absolutely, does breed dysfunctional relationship conflict in organizations.

So it would be interesting to do specific power/status research project on the power and status implications of moving from traditional to new ways of working. People in the following situations could be invited to participate in the research:

• Those who currently have private offices and who have not been asked to give them up
• Those who currently have private offices and might be asked to give them up
• Those who have had private offices in the past and have already given them up private offices,

The research may extend to consider other things that might qualify as status symbols such as car parking spaces or 'territory' like their own floor plate for their organization.

The findings from any such study might help with
:

• Mitigating some of the risks around impacting people's feelings about status
• Capturing ways in which employees may self-affirm to compensate for lost status symbols
• Identifying 'compensating' status elements if these are required for effective performance
• Determining whether there is any link between power use and status symbols in an organization that affects for good or ill workplace performance
• Developing a change plan that recognizes the power/status relationship

What's your view – are offices the status symbols of power? Will the exercise of power change for the worse if the status symbols are removed?

Imagine a look alike Las Vegas casino but in Johannesburg. Now imagine around 70 organization design consultants sitting in there in one of the artificially lit hotel conference rooms working through an eclectic program of presentations, exercises, flag twirling, journey mapping, world café, and other things beloved by 'interventionists'. I was one of the 70 at the New Africa Organization Design Forum Summit there. My task was to talk about the myths of organization design. At points I found myself asking myself 'am I seriously part of this community?' this question perhaps brought on by the ODD sessions. I finally worked out that ODD was an acronym (organization design and development) and not intended to be a descriptor so clearly I was confused there, but maybe not.

The program veered from the sedate, and the 'I've heard this a thousand times before', to the wacky in unpredictable sequence, each session with its own specific language and vocabulary that required a jargon buster (unfortunately not provided). Similarly it veered from participants being seated and listening attentively to a presenter with power points to scrabbling on the floor picking up the bones and beans that John Ballam sowed amongst us in his superb method of shaking us out of our known worlds of 'adaptive systems', 'holistic thinking' 'new paradigms', 'mental models', and so on leading us towards 'shamanism', 'healing', 'energy fields', 'the consistency of the unseen', and 'fractals'. His mix of theatre and chaos theory started with his own chanting, dancing and sowing and finished with all participants doing a short stomp dance with pelvic wiggles. (Odd or not? Form your own views).

The overall theme for the three days (one pre-conference) was to discuss "Aligning Organization Design and Culture to Accelerate Performance and Adaptability in the Three Horizons of Work". In case you're wondering what the 'three horizons of work are' here goes:

I. Hierarchical: Innovations in Core/Mechanistic Design
Typical structure: Hierarchy / Vertical structures
Decision culture: Controlled, authority cascaded from top, directed
Culture of change: Push-Control & Predict,conformity with prescribed culture
Best fit change method: Waterfall, strategic planning,supports status quo,
Design leaders and methods: Galbraith; Star Model, Jacques; Requisite Order, Fredrick Taylor; Mechanistic

II. Participatory: Innovations in Emerging/Humanistic Design
Typical structure: Hierarchy / Cross functional Vertical and Horizontal
Decision culture: Delegated authority from top to select teams, feedback loops influence decisions
Culture of change: Push / Pull-Proactive, engage, transfer knowledge,learning, co-created culture
Best fit change method: Engagement events and initiatives, shifts the status quo and power relations
Design leaders and methods: Axelrod; Conference Model, Emery/Weisberg;Search, Lukensmeyer; AmericaSpeaks, Owens; Open Space

III. Individual Accountability Innovations in Experimental / Organic Design
Typical structure: Flat / Networked, Circles, Fluid, focus on roles not structure
Decision culture: Distributed to all levels based on accountabilities, all make relevant decisions through dialogue
Best fit change method: Pull-Sense & Response to real time stimuli,transparency, emergent culture
Real time & built into operating process, vertical structure fades, focus shifts to results vs. structure
Design leaders and methods: Adaptive Organizations: Winby; Decision Accelerators, Robertson; Holacracy, Ressler; Results Only Work Environments

The bulk of the participants were from South Africa and worked in government, and a goodly proportion of the speakers were North American consultants. With this combination I came away with a mixed bundle of stuff. There were some good questions raised.

One that I found intriguing was 'How does the national culture of South Africa support the organization development work that you are doing?' This led to a discussion on what the South African values are: 'Ubuntu' – I am because we are – was one value that doesn't mesh with the 'what's in it for me?' attitude that I meet in my American work, similarly the South African value of 'walk together and not apart', makes one think collaboration, a value reinforced by viewing the history of apartheid exhibition in the hotel I was staying in (coincidentally the same day that someone emailed me the Malvina Reynolds song, 'It's not nice' ). 'N Boer maak n plan' was another value people mentioned. This one is about dealing pragmatically with things that go wrong. Another was 'lekgotla' which is a forum for discussion and dialogue.

Having also just been in China I wondered about the Chinese values that might contribute to organization design work. Do national cultures mean working differently even in multinational organizations? Why is organization development and design work so North American based? Noble Kumawu, from Ghana, co-author of Global OD: A Model for Africa and the World, and CEO of OCIC International started to address that question.

Taking a view that questioning is the precursor to doing things differently (and hopefully better) I am now pondering national cultures, shamanism, and a whole raft of phrases that caught my attention: "Get rid of the heroes', 'selling an energy field' (not a BP or Shell thing but the psychic energy around organization development), 'find your organizational voice', 'courage is not the absence of fear but the control of it'.

I've added to my already extensive Amazon wish list with Howard Gardner, John D. Caputo, Angeles Arrien, Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins, and Julian Jaynes, all now on it. I also met up with several people to continue the conversations with. So could I go back to work and 'add value' (the CFO might ask) to my organization having invested the time and money in attending? It's possible but exactly how to measure that is still a question mark. I'm comforting myself that several speakers (and participants) felt that measures and models were old school so I may not go down the track of contortions of proving it to myself or the CFO.

The gold coins? On inspection they proved to be plastic tokens, I think someone must have brought them in from the gaming tables or slot machines. They too were scattered about but on the tables not the floor. I just hope they're not symbolic of organization design or development work that promises a lot and yields little.

I've been thinking about business models this week – what makes it easier or more difficult for companies to change or adjustment their model at regular intervals? Failure to do that has significant consequences as AT & T, a US telecoms company, found out. Originally established in 1885, in 2005 it was bought by SBC for around $16 billion. SBC was one of the 'baby bells' that was spun out of the company, known as 'Ma Bell,' as part of a 1984 court-ordered break-up.

The failure, at the time, of leaders of AT & T to change its business model in order to take advantage of new technologies such as wireless and internet were cited as reasons for the takeover. But they are not alone in this failure as Clayton Christensen, of Harvard Business School, and author of several books on innovation said on hearing that AT & T been bought. 'It is a tragic fall [for AT & T] and I lament the passing, because it was a huge disruptive success in its day. The world is filled with companies that are marvellously innovative from a technical point of view, but completely unable to innovate on a business model.'

As I was working on this I came across a white paper Retrench or Refresh? Do existing business models still deliver the goods.

The authors suggest that generally speaking, companies who are more adept at rethinking their business model have the following attributes:

1. Flexibility: to evolve to business models where a) products and services are able to be paid for on an as needed basis, for example, in the IT world from the software license model to the software as a service model, b) companies can scale up or down without loss of business continuity.

2. Ability to deliver short-term cost savings and/or efficiency gains to customers: to offer customers a greater level of granularity in the way products and services can be bought, for example Ryanair's menu of options compared with British Airway's all-in single price approach.

3. Capacity to drive innovation: to engage with those interested in participation in open-innovation (looking to people outside the organization to come up with new and/or improved product and service ideas)

4. Capability to enter new markets: to look outside their traditional markets and be in a position to offer products and services tailored to customers in these new markets.

5. Collaborative ownership structures: to achieve economies of scale and reduce competitive pressures

6. Use of the digital economy: to help reinvent what the company is capable of offering and how it offers it.

One way of developing the adeptness and attributes required was suggested by Peter Drucker (and I've written about this before). He called it 'Planned Abandonment' saying that the time to abandon a product, service, policy, rule, or other organizational element is much earlier than when it begins to cause problems. As a rule it is time to abandon when any of the three following conditions apply:

1. The product, service, market, process, or whatever still has a few good years of life
2. Its greatest virtue is that it is fully written off. Ask instead 'what is it producing?'
3. An old and declining product, service, market, process, etc is being maintained at the expense of new and growing products, services, markets, processes, etc.

Drucker suggested that the leadership team should regularly ask a series of questions aimed at pinpointing areas for abandonment. This is a good suggestion and one followed by Lenovo (a computer maker). Its team of nine leaders (down from two dozen at one time) are based in six cities and three continents, yet they meet every other month to review the business typically spending three or four days together in a key market, visiting local stores and listening to partners, customers, and employees.

The goal of these review meetings is to align the organization's goals, and take quick action where things are not working well. For example, following a leadership team visit to India, Lenovo restructured its business model there to drive growth in segments like small and medium business (SMB), government and education, which were not getting much attention earlier. The company separated SMB, earlier part of its consumer division, to make it an independent business. It also created different teams to handle its government and education business, as these required a different focus. These decisions were made because although it was the leading PC vendor in the enterprise space in India, success in that arena alone would not help to improve its share in India.

Lenovo, which launched its first personal computer in 1990, has the goal of becoming the first global consumer brand to emerge from China, and its management team is willing and able to change the company's business model as required to meet this goal. For other organizations a barrier to business model change are the skills of the management teams, and/or additionally the sheer complexity of the structures, processes, policies, and working practices that for any long established company have been in place over many years.

In a fascinating blog post, The Collapse of Complex Business Models, Clay Shirky, (writer, consultant, lecturer) discusses the idea that an organization's failure to respond to stress in the environment is not a lack of will it is simply that they cannot. One of the examples he cites is AT & T, mentioned earlier. His suggestion is that the complexities of long established organizations make them unable to change 'In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change. .. Under a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response … Furthermore, even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites.'

What's your view? How easy is it to change a business model? What are your success stories in this?