Tag: Organisation development

Unseeing

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to notice when I am unseeing.  It’s hard, falling into the realms of the ‘known, unknowns’ and the ‘unknown unknowns’.   But it’s useful to practice as I’m wondering how much of organisational life we unsee and what effect that has on us.

Unseeing is the concept that underpins China Mieville’s detective novel, ‘The City and the City’ which I’ve just finished reading and now discover is a TV series (that I can’t bring myself to watch, in case it destroys my sense of the book).  The book is gripping and brilliantly written, set in two cities, each with aspects of their own dress codes, language, culture, subcultures, control systems, and system challengers – no different from two organisations.

The difference that makes the book compelling is that the two cities are set in/on exactly the same geographic/physical space. ‘The city of Beszel exists in the same space as the city of Ul Qoma. Citizens of each city can dimly make out the other but are forbidden on pain of severe penalties (administered by a supreme authority known simply as Breach) to see it.’  They must ‘unsee’ the city that they are not a citizen of.  The word ‘unsee’ comes up repeatedly.

‘A person in Beszel can be walking the sidewalk right next to someone in Ul Qoma. They are side by side, but a whole city, and a whole reality away.’  Citizens of each city are taught the habit of ‘unseeing’ any aspect of the other city – ‘The cities have different airports, international dialling codes, internet links. Cars navigate instinctively around one another; police officers cooperate but are not allowed to stop or investigate crimes committed in the other city’.  This is deliberate and controlled ‘unseeing’ – a different concept from simply not noticing.

The habit of ‘unseeing’ doesn’t always have to be taught in a conscious way – cultural norms imbue patterns of ‘unseeing’, sometimes, as in The City and the City,  in ways that act to reinforce the deliberate control mechanisms.   Additionally, what we see visually, heavily influences what we think culturally, and conversely, our culture influences what we actually see.  Some interesting research explores this link between culture and visual interpretation.  The start-point for the research was the statement: ‘We presume that people from different cultures, who grew up in different visual environments, associate different words with the same object. By analyzing the nature of cross -cultural word associations and word category frequency counts in respondents’ answers, we are hoping to understand the connection between culture, verbalized thoughts, and object judgments.’

What the researchers found was that, ‘Comparison of the most frequent words has shown [when subjects were asked to freely associate words with a picture of an animal] that American and Japanese subjects are quite different in terms of what they think when they look at an object (an animal, in this case), except in aesthetic judgments.’

You can’t generalize from one research example, but this finding continued my thinking on what it is that people unsee and what effect it might have on organisational design and development.

The film Hidden Figures, for example, exposes the way the contribution three real-life African-American female pioneers: Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson made to NASA’s organisation design/development as they gradually moved from being unseen to being seen.

‘There’s a moment halfway into Hidden Figures when head NASA engineer Paul Stafford refuses the request of Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) to attend an editorial meeting about John Glenn’s upcoming mission to become the first American to orbit the Earth. Stafford’s response is dismissive—”There’s no protocol for women attending.” Johnson replies, “There’s no protocol for a man circling Earth either, sir.”

Another protagonist, Mary Jackson, ‘needed to take after-work graduate courses held at segregated Hampton High School [in order to become an engineer]. Jackson petitioned the City of Hampton to be able to learn next to her white peers. She won, completed the courses, and was promoted to engineer in 1958, making her NASA’s first African-American female engineer.’

As the unseeing scales drop so positive change starts to happen.   But the scales don’t just drop.  It more a question of consciously removing them and you find when you start the removal processes that the scales are more like onion layers – you have to keep peeling them off.

For example, it’s easy to look at spreadsheets of organisational management information and yet unsee much of what they are telling you.   Once you ask yourself if you might be unseeing something you may be able to discern a pattern about, say, pay differentials, and then this leads to seeing something about gender imbalance,  and moves on to telling a story about social mobility.  All of these elements might be present in the original spreadsheets but it is not easy to see them either initially or in one go if they are in your realm of unseen.

Learning what you’re unseeing is, as I said, not easy and doing something about it is even less easy.  In the same week I finished reading The City and the City, I read the quote from Miyamoto Musashi, who, in The Book of Five Rings, tells readers to ‘Perceive that which cannot be seen with the eye’  in order to be successful in any endeavour.   He spent a lifetime practicing this.

Now that the concept of unseeing is with me,  I am practicing walking down a familiar street trying to see what I’ve previously unseen.  Moving into plain sight are the many, previously invisible to me, homeless people that I’m now wondering what I can do to help. James Attlee writing (a whole book, Isolarian) about Cowley Street, Oxford, noticed the names of the phone services he passed:  Mama Africa, Pakistan Connect, Hello Arab, Jamaica Direct, Eastern Eurovoice, Taj Mahal.   In his case, it started him musing on the patterns of immigration and ‘inflammatory politicians articulating (or set on creating) a fear in the native population’.

It’s very easy to ‘unsee’.   It is less easy to stop unseeing, but I think to stop unseeing is a skill to be practiced. What’s your viewing on unseeing and stopping unseeing?  Let me know.

Image:  Synesthesia

Sacred cows make the best burgers

‘The relevance of organisational development has never been more critical, given the complex issues facing communities, organisations and wider society. This raises the question of how we as OD practitioners can play a role beyond that which we do currently.’  This statement introduces this year’s European Organisation Development Network conference which takes place 25, 26 April 2018.

Without thinking too much about it, several months ago I agreed to speak at the conference.  I can’t quite remember how we got to the topic of my presentation ‘Sacred Cows Make the Best Burgers’ but it’s a title of a business book on change readiness by Robert Kriegel and David Brandt that I read years ago.  It opens by telling readers to round up sacred cows –  the well-worn or outmoded beliefs, assumptions, and practices that inhibit organisational change and prevent responsiveness to new opportunities.

Here is my starter list of five sacred cows of organisation development that, in my view, merit discussion on whether they should be rounded up or whether they have continuing value.

  1. Organisation development is a distinct discipline requiring specialist skills, attributes, practitioner training. There is little to suggest that OD is a ‘distinct discipline’.  In Revisioning Organization Development: Diagnostic and Dialogic Premises and Patterns of Practice, for example, the authors ‘are trying to open up the possibility that there are different enough forms of OD in terms of theoretical and philosophical premises, and not just practice technologies or underlying values, to warrant closer inquiry and recognition in the official literature(s) of this field. Right now, in most academic and practitioner publications there is only one, monolithic OD, presumed to be practiced using variations of the same foundational premises. In our experience, this leads to confusion and misunderstandings especially when people without much theoretical background try to combine, for example, objective diagnosis with self-organizing ’ Backing this up, Linda Holbeche, a writer in the OD field,  suggests that OD is a ‘scavenger discipline …  an eclectic field that borrows from many other disciplines and theories’. (Impact, Issue 26, February 2009).
  2. Organisation development activity is for the betterment of organisations and organisational members. There are several who argue that OD is coercive – think of the language of ‘getting’ people to do things, or ‘changing mindsets’.  An article by Marie McKendall, The Tyranny of Change: OD revisited, exemplifies this point of view.  The abstract reads:  ‘The premise of this paper is that planned organizational change, commonly known as organizational development, induces compliance and conformity in organizational members and thereby increases the power of management. These consequences occur because organizational development efforts create uncertainty, interfere with the informal organization, reinforce the position of management, and further entrench management purposes. These consequences occur regardless of the intentions of management and regardless of whether the goals of the organizational development intervention were achieved. Instead of examining these consequences, practitioners and theorists have engaged in self-deception and depoliticized the practice of induced organizational change by creating a field known as Organizational Development.’
  3. Organisations can be ‘developed’. The implied question in this sacred cow is whether there is a single organisational entity that can be developed or whether it only that individual members of the organisation can be developed (assuming you think they can). Their collective development contributing to whole organisational development.  Derek Pugh devised an OD matrix – a conceptual framework for understanding and diagnosing what change is necessary in an organisation, what methods to consider, and which directions to go in initiating the change process, which seems to suggest that whole organisations can be ‘developed’.
  4. Organisation development activity can deliver tangible business results. There’s a commonly heard statement – a sacred cow in itself, perhaps –  that 70% of change intervention fails.  Attributing an ROI to OD work is not easy to do.  (Does anyone do it?).   Yet in his article ‘Do 70 per cent of all organisational change initiatives really fail?’ Mark Hughes ‘highlights the absence of valid and reliable empirical evidence in support of the espoused 70 per cent failure rate.’  However, in rounding up that sacred cow, Hughes fails to provide any valid and reliable empirical evidence that change initiatives actually do deliver tangible business results.   A report by Liz Finney and Carol Jefkins, Roffey Park, Best Practice in OD Evaluation, says ‘We approached our research aware that there are many practitioners in the field of OD who believe that its systemic nature makes it hard to measure; some hold a world view that says it’s inappropriate even to try. Some talk about the evaluation of OD interventions as a ‘holy grail,’ perhaps implying that to seek it would be a hopeless quest. Evaluation is something which is often overlooked, avoided, or included only as an after-thought when an OD intervention has already taken place.’ In the absence of no evidence of OD success can we provide evidence that it delivers business results?
  5. Organisation development practitioners share humanist, democratic and ethical values. A special issue of the journal Organization ‘reveal[s] the shifting, ambiguous and inherently political arena lying beneath and beyond the bland cliches, pious nostrums and simplistic recipes that are the stock in trade of organizational change management.’  The author points out that the financial demands inherent in much organisation development work (headcount reduction, mergers, efficiency gains, technology implementation, etc), often with the requirement to make these financial gains speedily, conflict with the humanistic, democratic and ethical ‘practice values’ that, in Cheung-Judge’s/Holbeche’s words give organisations and OD work ‘a rudder and bearing’.

I have a reserve list of five more sacred cows but I’m hoping that the above will spark a  conversation.  To facilitate this I’m asking four questions adapted from a Cartesian quadrant –  What happens if we accept the sacred cow?  What happens if we don’t accept the sacred cow? What won’t happen if we accept the sacred cow? What won’t happen if we don’t accept the sacred cow?

What are your OD sacred cows?  Let me know.

Image: Attack on the sacred cow,  Andriy Zholudyev