Author: Carter McNamara

(Guest post from John Scherer, Co-Director of Scherer Leadership International. This is the fifth blog post in a six-part series about the history of Organization Development, “On the Shoulders of Giants.”

(In the last issue, we featured the work of Kurt Lewin, the ‘grandfather’ of the change movement, and the teacher of one of John’s mentors, Ron Lippitt. In this issue, we look at two people from ‘across the pond’ who dis as much as Lewin to shape how we approach change, especially in groups and larger systems. Once again, John’s conversations with his friend and colleague, Marvin Weisbord, contributes much to this issue. –The Editor)

While Kurt Lewin (the subject of the last issue) was working in America, on the other side of the Atlantic a British Psychiatrist and MD, Dr. Wilfred Bion, was responding to the emotional fall-out of World War II. Bion was asked by London’s Tavistock Institute to see what he could do for traumatized soldiers from the battlefield.

Since there were too many patients to treat individually, Bion brought them together into groups, with the intention to move around the group, working with one veteran at a time, while the rest of the group observed and supported non-verbally. In the process, he, like Lewin, discovered the power of The Group. The soldiers couldn’t sit still while Bion worked with someone, and they spontaneously began to share their experiences, reaching out to their buddies. As they helped each other, they were also learning from each other—not just from Bion, the psychiatrist and authority figure.

Bion came to see that how leaders conduct themselves creates predictable responses from those they are leading. When the leader takes responsibility for the output or ‘success’ of the group, participants will react to the authority figure with one of these three options:

• Fight—resisting or doing the opposite of whatever the leader suggests,
• Flight—finding a way to leave, physically or emotionally, or going along with the authority in a passive, subservient way.
• Pairing—forming coalitions with one or two others in the group as a safe haven.

But when the leader takes responsibility for simply raising awareness of the group’s process to the group, participants are more likely to respond with what Bion called ‘Work’, the fourth option. A participant who is engaged in ‘Work’ is not avoiding what their experience, but is authentically in touch with what is happening inside and around them and working through any conflicts to the learning that exists on the other side. Bion discovered how to empower a group to take responsibility for its’ own work and learning.

The Origin of ‘Self-Managed Work Teams’

Weisbord recounts the following anecdote, told to him by his friend and mentor, Eric Trist. It happened immediately after WWII, in parallel with Bion’s work, but not in a psychiatrist’s office. Instead, this happened in an English coal mine! As the country tried to recover economically and socially from the devastation of the war, every possible idea for aiding the country to get back on its feet was sought and examined. Here is how this discovery of self-managed work teams unfolded:

Kenneth Bamforth, a long-time unionized coal miner (and current Tavistock student of Trist’s), went back to visit the South Yorkshire coal mine where he had worked for many years. What he saw happening stunned him. His former colleagues had been experimenting with new ways that might make extracting the ore continuous. In the process, they threw out the older, traditional ‘long wall’ approach, in which miners were organized into teams which performed a single task (think ‘Taylorism’). Instead, the South Yorkshire Miners and the General Manager had gotten together–with union support–and worked out a new system.

The ‘new’ technology of roof control bing dug in the mines enabled the miners to return to an earlier (social) system—in which each miner was multi-skilled and performed all jobs—an ‘old way’ of doing things that had died under the influence of the industrial revolution and its premise that the highest productivity came when each person did only one thing. The result of letting this well-established principle go was that they could now mine coal 24 hours a day, not having to wait for an earlier shift to complete a task, since every team could do all the tasks required. Intrigued, Bamforth invited his favorite Tavistock professor, Eric Trist, to come down into the mine with him to see if this might be useful somehow to the country’s recovery.

As Trist said later, ‘I came up a different man’.

Self-Managed Teams: A Socio-Technical Innovation

The combination of a technical innovation, coupled with a social innovation, made ‘short wall’ mining possible, something considered heretofore impossible, significantly increasing both output and morale. Trist realized immediately the connection between England’s business recovery and what he had just seen, putting together his colleague Bion’s therapeutic discoveries with leaderless groups, and Lewin and his student, Ron Lippitt’s, social/behavioral science discoveries in small group dynamics.

Teams, it appeared, if given the proper managerial support and resources, could manage their own work—and produce at high levels.

Today, with our 50+ years of hindsight, it is hard for us to realize the dramatic impact of this insight!

You can clearly see the similarity between Trist’s work and the ones Lewin and his successors were having as the T-Group evolved. It was inevitable that cross-pollenization would occur, and it did, as members of the US-formed A.K. Rice Institute, trained in Bion’s ‘Group Relations’ work, connected with people trained in the emerging ‘applied behavioral science’ work of Lewin and his followers, Ken Benne, Ron Lippitt, Warren Bennis, Ed Schein and others.

Awareness of the Larger System

In the late 1940‘s and early 1950‘s, Bion and The Tavistock Institute soon recognized the importance of the larger organizational environment (think ‘social system’) to the group’s work structure and the existing technical system, setting the stage for the naming and exploration of ‘Systems Thinking’ as we know it today. It is not enough to focus on individuals or groups internally; you have to look at the structures and systems that surround them. Work re-design and job enrichment, as well systems approaches to worker motivation, emerged, with Frederick Herzberg being the foremost explorer of applying the insights from Bion to motivating people.

All of these approaches recognized that an employee’s productivity and creativity have more to do with the way the job was designed and the system around that employee than with the characteristics of the person, something the Tavistock Institute had seen and highlighted in their earlier coal mine studies much earlier.

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Reference List of Books from This Series

• References List of Books from This Series

For More Resources About Organization Development, see These Free Management Library Topics:

• History of OD: Part 1 of 6 – Prehistoric OD
• History of OD: Part 2 of 6 – The Psychologists
• History of OD: Part 3 of 6 — A Timeline of Who Did What and When
• History of OD: Part 4 of 6 — Frederick Taylor, the First Modern ‘Change’ Consultant
• Organizational Change
• Organization Development
• Consulting

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John Scherer is Co-Director of Scherer Leadership International, and Billie Alban is President of Alban & Williams, Ltd. This blog is an adaptation of their chapter in the ‘bible’ of the field of OD, Practicing Organization Development (3rd Edition, 2009, Rothwell, W.J., Stavros, J.M., Sullivan. R.L. and Sullivan, A. Editors). Many colleagues contributed, among them Warner Burke, John Adams, Saul Eisen, Edie Seashore, Denny Gallagher, Marvin Weisbord Juanita Brown and others. They have drawn heavily from Weisbord’s wonderfully rich, easy-to-read, and well-documented description of the origins of the field in Productive Workplaces (1987 and revised in 2012).

(Guest post from John Scherer, Co-Director of Scherer Leadership International. This is the fourth blog post in a six-part series about the history of Organization Development, “On the Shoulders of Giants.”

NOTE: Most of what I have learned about Frederick Taylor I received from my long-time OD colleague, Marvin Wseibord, both in personal conversations and from his marvelous book, Productive Workplaces. Marv has had this extraordinary ability to help us see a unique ‘twist’ on OD ‘giants’ and their lives, creating a kind of ‘Satori moment’ that makes the well-known person more human, more real. It was in conversations with him some years ago—and many readings of PW (as fans call the book)—that led to this treatment of Frederick Taylor, based entirely on Marv’s work. This may be my writing, but it is Marv’s insights. . .

Following the Civil War in America (1861-1965), industrialization went rampant. Large factories started dotting the landscape where farms had stood before. Machines, the exciting new technology, were promising to make business owners wealthier than ever—if only they could ‘get those lazy and greedy front line workers to use those machines to their maximum potential’. Over time, an ever-widening gulf appeared between the wealthy business owners who wanted more productivity and the disgruntled and exhausted workers who were doing the work. One outcome of this push/pull was the growth of unions, which aimed to provide leverage for protecting front-line employees from turning into essentially slaves-with-a-paycheck.

It was inside of this social cauldron that Frederick Taylor (born April, 1856, died March, 1915) developed and implemented the first truly systematic and scientific approach to resolving workplace production problems.

No one in our long chain of OD ancestors is as controversial as Taylor. Many see him as the first well-known hard-hearted efficiency expert-with-a-stopwatch, whose goal was to increase the efficiency of a factory by re-making every employee into the exact image of the perfect worker who could do a specific task the fastest and the best. To accomplish this, Taylor laid out four fundamental Principles of ‘Scientific Management’ (a 1911 term he used after Supreme Court Justice Brandeis coined it in a 1910 railroad court case). Management should:

1. Replace much-used ‘rules of thumb’ methods of doing a job with principles based on the scientific study of the tasks involved.

2. Select employees scientifically, based on specific job requirements and train them intentionally, rather than letting them train themselves or just hoping they learn how to do what they need to do.

3. Develop and provide detailed instructions for each task and supervise (measure) them in their performance.

4. Create an equal division of labor between themselves and front-line employees, with managers applying the principles of scientific management to workers who do the work.

Unlike the majority of OD people today who pursue their field via graduate school, Taylor spurned a scholarship to Harvard Law School (his eyesight was poor and he didn’t want to be embarrassed in court) to become an apprentice pattern maker and machinist! He started at the bottom and after finishing his four-year apprenticeship, started working at a steel plant, where he made his way up through the ranks from Gang-Boss over the lathe workers, Machine Shop Foreman, and eventually Chief Engineer. Taylor’s first-hand experience on the shop floor showed him that few, if any, workers were putting out as much as they were capable of and he set out to do something about that. Through a correspondence course (!), he earned a degree in Mechanical Engineering and created a consulting firm with business cards that read:

Frederick Taylor

Consulting Engineer

Systematizing Shop Management and Manufacturing Costs

a Specialty

One story used to underscore the image of Taylor as a productivity-obsessed management ally: during one of his engagements with a coal company he searched among the workers for the fastest pig iron shoveler, and found him in a man named Schmidt. Taylor and his team of consultants studied Schmidt to find out how he was able to shovel more pig iron than anyone else. They analyzed everything they could about him:

• The shape, weight, capacity, and design of the shovel he was using.
• The number of shovel loads he was moving per minute.
• His technique—how he held the shovel, moved his body and swung the load.
• How he structured his work and rest periods during a typical day.

What they found surprised management and a few people following the study. One example: Schmidt’s arms were free of any load 57% of the day. Far from being the driving, efficiency-at-any-cost, push workers to their limits person, Taylor was focused on making work easier, not harder. In fact, according to one Taylor biographer, Schmidt jogged to and from work each day for two months, and built a house in his spare time!

It is easy, however, to see how history has missed Taylor’s ‘human’ side and seen him as a friend of management, driven to squeeze every possible ounce of energy from every worker. Taylor figured out that processes could be made more efficient by breaking things down into discreet tasks, with each worker becoming an expert on one of those tasks. This approach of breaking a work flow into pieces still rules in some production facilities, but, as you will see later, it leads to a ‘thicker’ and ‘wider’ workforce which, given today’s wage structure, is untenable. The other inherent problem with Taylor’s approach is quality: with everyone along they way only responsible for their single piece of the process, who ‘owns’ the final product?!

But few people realize that Taylor was the father of matrix management, seeing the need for certain specialties that would support the entire production line process. He usually instituted an incentive wage system, which paid the person, not the job. He was in many ways the champion of the front line worker, seeking to instill greater labor-management cooperation to solve problems. Taylor believed that respect in the workplace should be based on knowledge and performance, not position, and, believe it or not, Taylor was the one who championed ‘servant leadership’ among supervisors. As Marvin Weisbord points out in Productive Workplaces, his wonderful book about all this, unbeknownst to many OD people, Taylor’s overriding objective was productive labor-management cooperation, not simply time-and-motion efficiency.

Taylor’s thinking dramatically shaped the world’s workplace and its leaders in the early 1900’s and continues to shape them—and our OD work—today. But his undoing came as a result of his absolutist beliefs in a) maintaining tight personal control of his interventions to ensure implementation of changes, and b) piecework—breaking down tasks into their simplest ‘chunks’ and requiring a single person do a single task. It was left to our next OD ancestor, Kurt Lewin, to discover an even better way to discover good ideas for work improvement, and get people to actually follow through with them. Lewin’s approach meant, however, letting go of control and trusting the people themselves to figure out—with some support and guidance—what to do. Stay tuned next time for more on Lewin and the extraordinary debt we owe him!

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Reference List of Books from This Series

• References List of Books from This Series

For More Resources About Organization Development, see These Free Management Library Topics:

• History of OD: Part 1 of 6 – Prehistoric OD
• History of OD: Part 2 of 6 – The Psychologists
• History of OD: Part 3 of 6 — A Timeline of Who Did What and When
• Organizational Change
• Organization Development
• Consulting

—

John Scherer is Co-Director of Scherer Leadership International, and Billie Alban is President of Alban & Williams, Ltd. This blog is an adaptation of their chapter in the ‘bible’ of the field of OD, Practicing Organization Development (3rd Edition, 2009, Rothwell, W.J., Stavros, J.M., Sullivan. R.L. and Sullivan, A. Editors). Many colleagues contributed, among them Warner Burke, John Adams, Saul Eisen, Edie Seashore, Denny Gallagher, Marvin Weisbord Juanita Brown and others. They have drawn heavily from Weisbord’s wonderfully rich, easy-to-read, and well-documented description of the origins of the field in Productive Workplaces (1987 and revised in 2012).

(Guest post from John Scherer, Co-Director of Scherer Leadership International, with Billie Alban, President of Alban & Williams, Ltd. This is the third blog post in a six-part series about the history of OD.)

Introduction to this Blog Series

In the first part of this series, we explored some of our ancient ancestors in the practice of changing the way people in groups and larger human systems get things done. In Part 2 we named some of the most significant people from psychology whose ideas have shaped our current way of doing Organization Development.

In this segment, we want you to see and even study the following OD Time Line, created by Billie Alban, that shows the major players and movements in the field, starting with Kurt Lewin in the mid-1940’s. (Hundreds of people have contributed to this field of OD. We had to make choices, and apologize to those who do not find their names listed.)

To see the timeline, click here.

The Origins of OD Time-Line

Colleague Billie Alban has done everyone who practices OD a huge service by creating what is known as ‘The OD Time-Line.’ Billie and her colleagues developed it for use in their now well-established practice of Large Scale Change (See Alban & Bunker, 1997). Barbara Bunker and myself (Billie Alban) developed the Time Line concept, and Sara Shea did the graphics.

The time-line shows:

a) What was happening as OD came into being—and evolved,

b) The core OD concepts and when they emerged,

c) The major contributors—theorists, researchers, writers, practitioners,

d) The significant external forces and events that paralleled—and impacted—the birth and early years of our field, and

e) The institutions that were first to adapt OD as part of their workplace culture.

How to Read and Use the Time Line

As you can see, the horizontal axis is time, with the decades rolling from left to right. Along the side, vertically, are Core Concepts. (Even though, for graphic reasons, they are shown to run across the page as discreet elements, they are often merging and blending with other elements. For instance, data feedback is also used in team building, and systems theory is applied in many of the core concepts.)

Action Research

Lewin’s now-classic postulate—’No research without action; no action without research’—defines this element on the chart. One of OD’s fundamental principles is the use of data-gathering as the basis for planning subsequent interventions.

The survey-feedback process was pioneered by Ron Lippitt and is a staple in every OD consultant’s repertoire today. Ron Lippitt and his brother, Gordon Lippitt, pioneered methods for feeding back the data and for ‘implication derivation,’ something they insisted needed to be done with the client, not for the client.

Rensis Likert developed a widely-used approach to action research using a scale of responses, allowing people to indicate how strongly they held a particular position on some item of organizational concern—thus quantifying ‘soft’ data.

Robert Blake and Jane Mouton’s Managerial Grid fast became a research tool of choice because of its strong and clear visual presentation, making it immediate useful to both the consultant and the client. (More about that in a later issue.)

If you look toward the end of this line you will note something called AAR, or ‘after action review’ something used by the US Army to analyze military engagements. The process grew, in part, from NTL’s work with Army pioneers and was based on a process called EIAG, developed by early Episcopalian NTL OD consultant/trainer, Nancy Geyer. In this model, first you Experience, something ‘happens’ or you do something. Next you Identify important points in that experience or action; you then Analyze that incident, using appropriate models or theories, and then you Generalize: What have I learned here that I need to apply to the next situation?

Survey feedback, although used initially by industrial psychologists, has been part of the OD field, and widely used, with teams as well as entire organizations. There are surveys that look at employee morale, perceptions of leadership, clarity about mission and strategy, physical plant, technology, etc. Likert’s scale, in a Profile of Organization Characteristics, demonstrated that when a ‘System Four ‘ method for making decisions was used (a participative process), it was more likely to reflect a successful organization and satisfied employees. Blake and Mouton’s Managerial Grid looked at the role of management in integrating concern for people with concern for productivity, using a system-wide approach. Data was collected from managers through surveys that were later used in workshops they attended to increase their ability to work with their subordinates, bosses and peers.

One of the first applications of computers to assist in the action research process was The People-Performance Profile, developed by John Scherer and Bob Crosby in 1978.[1] The PPP measured and fed back computer-scored information to the individual on personal factors (e.g. Exercise, Nutrition, Alcohol and Drug Use, Stress Management), to the work group (Decision-Making, Conflict Management, Problem-Solving, etc.), and top management (Strategic Planning, Physical Environment, Organizational Stress, etc.) In 1983 Ron Lippitt told the developers he considered the PPP and the high-involvement process used to share the data with clients, ‘One of the most significant contributions to action research since Lewin.’

The Internet

It will be interesting to see over time the impact of the Internet on Action Research and surveys. Many organizations are now surveying their employees in real time via the Internet, providing for the first time essentially instantaneous feedback on whatever elements need to be researched. One such survey of organizational culture, developed by a Dutch consultant Gert Hofstede, was a study of 130,000 IBM employees in 40 different countries!

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Reference List of Books from This Series

• References List of Books from This Series

For More Resources About Organization Development, see These Free Management Library Topics:

• History of OD: Part 1 of 6 – Prehistoric OD
• History of OD: Part 2 of 6 – The Psychologists
• Organizational Change
• Organization Development
• Consulting

—

John Scherer is Co-Director of Scherer Leadership International, and Billie Alban is President of Alban & Williams, Ltd. This blog is an adaptation of their chapter in the ‘bible’ of the field of OD, Practicing Organization Development (3rd Edition, 2009, Rothwell, W.J., Stavros, J.M., Sullivan. R.L. and Sullivan, A. Editors). Many colleagues contributed, among them Warner Burke, John Adams, Saul Eisen, Edie Seashore, Denny Gallagher, Marvin Weisbord Juanita Brown and others. They have drawn heavily from Weisbord’s wonderfully rich, easy-to-read, and well-documented description of the origins of the field in Productive Workplaces (1987 and revised in 2012).

The post also had contributions from OD pioneers Ron Lippitt, John Adams, John Sherwood, Tom and Susan Isgar, Flo Hoylman, Rad Wilson and Juanita Brown, and also from OD pioneers Ron Lippitt, John Adams, John Sherwood, Tom and Susan Isgar, Flo Hoylman, Rad Wilson and Juanita Brown.