Author: Jim Smith

(See Part 2 of 3)

Warren Bennis taught me to ask three questions:

1. What’s So?
2. So What?
3. What Now?”

How we handle uncertainty and how we deal with it personally is critical in how we manage change. Given the uncertainty and complexity in our organizations, dealing with ambiguity is a critical skill for consultants. This has been my self-development path for sharpening my consulting skills. Sometimes I have to push myself into this Land Of I Don’t Know because it helps me retain my edge. I have learned not to get too comfortable and certain in my world-view. In consulting, what I think I know always gets me in trouble because it is usually not accurate in the moment. I have a little slice of the picture and recognizing that I can stay open (and I don’t use that word lightly) I can stay open to the moment and there-by access more information.

We learn about our work as OD Practitioners, when we step outside our culture and collaborate with other kinds of communities. Learning and change occur at the boundary between the known and the unknown. We clarify values and beliefs and assumptions, as we see the boundaries around our own thinking and we incorporate those learning’s into our practice. The clearest place to see ourselves is when we step out of the routine and all the assumptions that go with it. As Nevis says in Organizational Consulting: A Gestalt Approach we have a long tradition of marginality that includes neutrality, open mindedness and flexibility. We thrive on conflict, ambiguity and stress. We often facilitate a bridge between systems having differing values and norms which demands a slowing into the awareness moment to allow learning and reconfiguration of the meaning before closing to action. This is imperative learning for OD practitioners.

Sometimes we lose the basics in the “press” of our work. The moments of truth, as practitioners, when we are indeed living our values on the edge are those moments when we see the path to “good practice” and have the courage to move the situation. As OD practitioners we are always pushing ourselves to stay on the cutting edge of our practice and keeping our own character growth in movement because we see this as the foundation of our practice. On the other hand, we have been in this field for 20 years. There isn’t much OD work we haven’t touched. Staying on our own cutting edge means getting way outside our comfort zones. We had to find our own edge, our own frontier, we had to venture into, what for us was a wilderness, never mind that the wilderness was into cultures many thousands of years older than our own. Kierkegaard said that to venture causes anxiety; not to venture is to lose oneself.

By putting ourselves “beyond the edge” of our comfort zone, beyond the edge of what is known to us, we have discovered assumptions we are carrying that no longer serve and core assumptions that guide our practice. What appeared to be an outward journey, to seek out new lands, new projects, turned out to be an inward journey of the heart, mind and soul. We went to celebrate the unknown and learned to appreciate the unknown in our own spirit. We found new aliveness at the edge of discovery and growth.

When one crosses from the land of I know into the land of I don’t know they have to attain a beginners mind, to be non-judgmental and to go into situations admitting that they know nothing at all. ” Experiences like this helps us understand what is of real value to us. These life experiences reframe who we are, and create a space to re-examine everything and discover those moments when we can’t take anything for granted and through those moments we are changed. We say we are change agents, and we are all the time leading people into the wilderness. We take clients into the unknown all the time and we need to foster a direct experience of it ourselves.

Venturing into developing nations or any form of the unknown is a robust methodology for developing servant leadership, understanding the formation of groups, the nature of intact community, the power of reflection, dialogue and journaling and how it reveals core values about our work and purpose. It certainly has deepened our appreciation for our client’s courage to go into the unknown with us.

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For more resources, see the Library topics Consulting and Organizational Development.

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Jim Smith has over 40 years of organization development experience in a wide range of organizations. He can be reached at ChangeAgents@gmail.com

(See part 1 of 3.)

The personal development lessons come from putting myself into what Richard Leider called “The Land Of I Don’t Know. “ Putting myself into a total situation where I literally do not know how to survive on my own or I literally do not know what is going on half the time, or how things work. Imagine putting yourself in a small village in Western Kenya for a month. Living without electricity, getting water from a well, or rainwater collected in tanks. Imagine you do not know how to cook without poisoning yourself and your comrades. Most of the food in the local market doesn’t look much like what you are use to and the bed sags and the rooster wakes you up too early to imagine.

And also imagine that you are in a loving tribe whose physical space is in your face and touching you to see if that color rubs off. You are in a world of children and adults who beam to see you and greet you and bless you and want to hear and learn from you. It is a world where no one passes on the road without shaking hands and greeting each other as if it has been years since we saw each other yesterday.

It would sharpen your perceptions. It would help you to get clear about who you are and who you are not. You would extend your physical and mental antennae to not miss a cue that might be a clue as to how to operate successfully as a stranger in a strange land. You would spend a lot more time making sure you understand and are being understood. It would teach you a lot about yourself.

To Live In The Land Of I Don’t Know is to question assumptions in uncertain situations, where we experience every now and then moments of insight into the ambiguity of it all. Stepping into this land requires social sensitivity and behavioral flexibility. You have to be able to “read” what’s going on and respond appropriately. You have to work hard for communication clarity and getting at what’s behind the words. You have to hear the words and “dwell in” the non-verbal meaning. You have to make the environment your own – even if you are scared. Oh of course, we don’t get scared- we get anxious. Who wants to admit to being scared? But then what do we do when we get anxious? What do we do (behaviorally) when we feel like we are losing control? Do we deepen our listening or do we get in our own way.

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For more resources, see the Library topics Consulting and Organizational Development.

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Jim Smith has over 40 years of organization development experience in a wide range of organizations. He can be reached at ChangeAgents@gmail.com

(Part 1 of 3)

I have been in Africa for the past month. I am still in re-entry. About once ever 12-18 months my partner and I take teams of people into developing nations to work in villages to build clinics, or schools, or other projects to assist the local community as a whole. We have been doing this for over 15 years. There are consulting lessons in this work as well as personal development lessons for people who hope to do consulting. This is the subject of my next three posts here.

The foundation for this work is an organization called Global Citizens Network. GCN is based in Minneapolis and works in 20 countries around the world. The vision of the network is a network of people committed to:

• The shared values of peace, justice, respect, cross-cultural understanding and global cooperation;
• The preservation of indigenous cultures, traditions and ecologies;
• The enhancement of quality of life around the world.

The consulting lessons are a part of the agreement (the contract), which we make with the village as a whole.

First, we are there to provide help to the village as a whole, not to any particular person or group.

So we define the whole system, as best we can define it, as our client.

Second, we only do work that the village elders or committee has defined as their need.

We do not go in and say, “This is what you ought to do.” We are driven by our client’s needs, not our desires to make it all better, or do what we are interested in at the time. This is our content goal. The goal is owned and driven by the village and so is the technology of the work itself. We use local masons to perform the work in a way that is consistent with their culture and methods. We do not tell them we know a thousand way to make this work better, cheaper, less labor intensive or what-ever; we go in to work with them where they are not where we wish them to be.

Third, if we bring 10 volunteers to work, the village has to provide an equal number of volunteers to work along side our team.

The idea of course is to maximize interaction with the local folks. For our work the clinic is a vehicle for the mutual understanding between people, which is our process goal. We are working to build trust and to support local self-organizing and sustainable development.

In my next post I will look at the personal development lessons of this experience.

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For more resources, see the Library topics Consulting and Organizational Development.

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Jim Smith has over 40 years of organization development experience in a wide range of organizations. He can be reached at ChangeAgents@gmail.com

The news is filled with the exploits of more than a few examples of dishonesty and greed, leaders who purposefully worked in their own behalf, rather than from a sense of responsibility for institutional integrity. We know the list and it keeps getting bigger.

For the last 50 years it has not been fashionable to talk about moral development, yet the subject of moral development is all about being a grown up. Our children and the youngest workers among us learn from watching and experiencing what it looks like to get ahead and what is permissible, indeed what is expected. The world needs more “grown ups.”

Becoming a grown up does not happen all at once, indeed there are lots of people that it never happens to, and at best, it is a life time endeavor. There seem to be a series of moral plateaus or stages. In a sense, each of the major stages represents a point in time and space at which a person has stopped in their developmental process. A stage represents the way a person looks at and copes with the world. Each stage or ego level is characterized by distinct emotional preoccupations, cognitive styles, and manners of behaving towards others. (J. Loevinger, Ego Development. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1976)

1. The Impulsive

The impulsive/controlling character does not recognize rules or see an action as bad only if they get punished for it. The impulsive is always treating people as a means to an end and they have a mindset that is simple and dichotomous, concrete and egocentric.

2. The Self -Protective

These people know the rules but obey them only when it is to their advantage. This is a person of expediency, it is bad if they get caught, and then they blame others. These people are manipulative, distrusting and opportunistic. These folks play a zero sum game and they have a mindset as self-centered as the impulsive.

3. The Conformist

These people have internalized the rules, and obey them without question. These folks are all concerned with the “shoulds” and they feel shame at consequences. For the first time the idea of reciprocity and trust emerges. They want to belong to an in-group and they distrust others. These people think stereotypically and have little need or capacity for introspection.

4. The Conscious

They operate from self-evaluated standards. They tend to feel guilt at consequences. They have a sense of responsibility and mutual obligation and can communicate differentiated expressions of feeling. They are conceptually complex with a sense of consequences and priorities. They understand contingencies and sees alternatives. They also see themselves in the context of a community & society.

5. The Autonomous

These folks build on the insights and skills of the Conscious; they have in addition, a sense that behavior is an expression of moral principles. They want autonomy in relationships and they are a catalyst in helping others. They are tolerant, respectful of others; they can see paradox and live with uncertainty.

6. The Integrated

They have all of the characteristics of the conscious and the autonomous, plus they can truly reconcile their inner conflicts with external demands. They can renounce the unattainable and they cherish individuality and justice. These folks have an integrated sense of their own identity and a sense of themselves as a part of the flow of the human condition.

It is not hard to look around and see that our organizations are filled with people at all these various plateaus. In fact I think it is fair to say in our systems-based world; that people at all of these plateaus create our organizations, and at the same time our organization reinforce people on all of their various plateaus. I am sure we have all seen groups operate from these various stages, or plateaus. We can observe groups operating at various stages of moral development in their assumptions and behaviors. Some organizations are just more highly evolved than others.

Consciousness is the entry-level to being a mature grown up and it is the gateway to becoming a more mature group. The conscious operate from a self-evaluated set of standards. They know they have choice and they feel a sense of responsibility both to themselves and others. At the same time they understand different viewpoints and options in a social context.

Isn’t this what practitioners of organization development are trying to help organizations do? To build into people’s muscles the capacity to examine reality and make conscious choices. That’s what organization effectiveness is all about as a field of study and practice.

• Here’s more information about leadership development and ethics.

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For more resources, see the Library topics Consulting and Organizational Development.

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Jim Smith has over 40 years of organization development experience in a wide range of organizations. He can be reached at ChangeAgents@gmail.com

In my last half-dozen posts I have been focusing on system theories of organization. I have done this because practitioners of organization development depend upon theories about what makes organizations tick. Nothing so practical as a good theory said Kurt Lewin, the mind behind action research. Well thought out theories helps us sort patterns and produces hypotheses about how it all hangs together- this system before us. Good theories are a basis for action. As we test our theories we develop design solutions, which have to be tested. Organization development is a diagnostic process and a design process. This is designing change. . . . .

(Read Part 1 before reading this Part 2.)

Eight Design Principles: PART TWO

To review- The first 4 principles are: the design process is important, how you do it needs to be complementary with what you are trying to accomplish. Don’t over-structure it, allow room for influence and change. Look for where it goes wrong and promote self-directed learning at the source of errors. Define the strategy and design a process to enable people to self-manage. To continue-

5. Boundary Location and Control:

Supervisors and managers have to grow to become more comfortable performing a role as a group resource, a beacon of coming changes and a coordinator across task group boundaries.

Traditional organizations group by: time, technology or territory. The weakness of this is that boundaries interfere with the desirable sharing of knowledge and experience and so learning suffers. The consistent social-technical message is if there are supervisors, they manage the boundaries as a group resource, insuring the group has adequate resources, coordinating activities with other groups and foreseeing coming changes. More and more these resource positions are disappearing as groups become more self-regulating. Often the presence of supervisors is an indication of a lack of success in a groups design, or unwillingness at higher levels to trust based upon a poor job of building the structure. When it is done right supervisors are superfluous at best and harmful at worse.

6. Information Flow:

Teams have to be deeply involved to determine what and where information is needed for self-direction. There needs to be a management commitment to provide information for task performance and learning. Information has to be provided where it is needed for self-direction, learning, and task improvement. Control has to be subordinated to achievement.

7. Support Congruence:

Goals, reward and support systems that integrate required behaviors have to be consistent. The reward and support systems have to be consistent with goals. Incentives have to be realigned to support team-based work structures. Individual based compensation systems are being modified continually to support many different team structures. Skill-based schemes and gain sharing are foundations for high performance.

8. Design and Human Values:

Task and organization design has to be oriented toward improving both the technical and the human components of the organization. The process of design must address the need for variation and meaning in work. It has to take into account the needs for continuous learning, involvement in decision-making, help and support between colleagues, and meaningful relationship between work and outside society, a desirable future. A re-design enterprise will be successful only if it unites a process of organization development, which includes work restructuring combined with a planning process that is both interactive and participatory.

9. Incompletion:

Design is a continuous commitment, a reiterative process. A design is a solution, which inevitably has to be changed, therefore it is critical to build learning and change ability into the team. Management has to appreciate that organization design toward high performance is a continuous process. What has to be learned is the process of design because it is a never-ending necessity. Deep in our organizations, people have to learn how to periodically re-fashion their organizational arrangements. Everything falls out of balance and has to be reviewed with an eye toward deciding upon changes necessary. In the early stages learning how to redesign is often more important than the design itself. The design will change over time and learning how to do it is a team life skill.

The basic message is that if you want people to assume responsibility for the work process you have to involve them in the work redesign process itself. Responsibility is the essence of self-management. To accept responsibility people have to define and make decisions. The tendency is for management to hand the operational people an output of redesign thinking done by others, and expect them to work it. Expecting also, the supervisors to supervise the implementation of a design which management has completed. The trick of organizing for real teamwork is getting everyone involved in the total systems improvement.

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For more resources, see the Library topics Consulting and Organizational Development.

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Jim Smith has over 40 years of organization development experience in a wide range of organizations. He can be reached at ChangeAgents@gmail.com W. James Smith. Also, see his blog.

In my last half-dozen posts I have been focusing on system theories of organization. I have done this because practitioners of organization development depend upon theories about what makes organizations tick. Nothing so practical as a good theory said Kurt Lewin, the mind behind action research. Well thought out theories helps us sort patterns and produces hypotheses about how it all hangs together- this system before us. Good theories are a basis for action. As we test our theories we develop design solutions, which have to be tested. Organization development is a diagnostic process and a design process. This is designing change. . . . .

Eight Organizational Design Principles: PART ONE

Some years ago Albert Cherns, an important figure in the Norwegian work redesign efforts highlighted some important Principles of Social and Technical Systems Design. The Principles of Organization Design have been known for 30 years in the academic and consulting community. Knowing the principles and implementing them are clearly two different things. First, I will detail the principles and following that I will highlight what has made the implementation so difficult.

1. Complementarities:

How we go about restructuring needs to be compatible with what we are trying to achieve by the restructuring. The process of design must be complementary with the objectives. This means the design and implementation process is critical. If you want flexibility and participation within the work group as an output of the design, then how you go about designing the organization has to be flexible, interactive and participatory.

If the completed work system will depend upon high levels of meaningful flexibility in accomplishing the work, then it is through a process of meaningful flexibility that the system needs to be built. The “means” have to be complimentary with the “ends”. In other words, if you want a system where people assume responsibility, then people have to be responsibly involved in creating the work system or you won’t get it. We do not get participative highly effective organizations by fiat.

2. Minimal Critical Specification:

New technologies require people to learn and change. These abilities have to be developed through the work itself. Therefore, specify as little as possible concerning how tasks combine into jobs and how people are to interact within jobs. The creation of a well-designed work team must involve dialogue and decisions being made by the people involved. Most teams struggle from over-structure, which is based in job descriptions and compensation schemes, which result in “that’s not my job”. The trick in building a team that works is to specify no more than is absolutely necessary about the task or how jobs relate to the task, or how people relate to individual jobs. To build a high performance team the rule is to FIX as little as possible. This means to identify and specify no more than what is absolutely critical. Generally the critical information is about output expected. The vision of results is very important and has to be co-constructed with the group but more than anything you want to build an organic ability to learn and change into the team.

3. Variance Control:

Support and reward groups that deal with errors at the point of origin. Effective teams need the legitimacy to find out where things go wrong and deal with variance where it occurs. The goal is to minimize exporting problems to others. The assumption that is safe to make is that people know what good work looks like. Exporting problems and unsatisfied customer needs is the mark of a team that lacks options.

4. Clear Goals and Flexible Strategies:

Define what is expected in terms of performance early and clearly and then support adaptations toward appropriate means by which the group can achieve ends. (Do not over-specify.) This is an adaptability principle, which recognizes that we are designing living systems rather than machines. With living systems, the same ends can be reached by different means. There are a lot of ways to solve problems and meet a customers needs. What is critical here is the definition and understanding of the end goal. The “What” is to be highly specified. The “How” is open to local decision and initiative. This enables learning and an increased sense of “efficacy” on the part of team members. Efficacy is the sense that we are effective as a team that we can make a difference and do the job well. Efficacy is fragile and needs to be supported by continuous learning and improvement. High performance teams constantly “tinker” with the means by which they accomplish their results. They seldom settle on “one best way”.

(Be sure to read Part 2.)

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For more resources, see the Library topics Consulting and Organizational Development.

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Jim Smith has over 40 years of organization development experience in a wide range of organizations. He can be reached at ChangeAgents@gmail.com

Organization Development is all about change in work systems. Everybody talks about systems but what does that mean? General Systems Theory is an organizational theory. It is integrative, in that it is a study of “wholeness” and it is interdisciplinary. It is based on a biological derivative it is a method of organizing complexity. (And you thought it was just a word). I have come to believe that we need a more sophisticated understanding of systems and this is first and foremost a way of seeing the world.

Look around and you will see “systems” everywhere. The first thing you have to do is look for the boundaries. The boundary’s that encompass a team, like who is in and who is out, what is the purpose of the system and what are its boundaries? Information passes in and out through boundaries. Systems manage their boundaries, for better of for worse: too open boundaries threaten the system with a loss of identity, too tight and the systems tend to run down. All systems operate on a steady-state called homeostasis and they operate within norms and standards. There is a set performance level and gaining entry, as an outsider is tough because systems filter what’s plausible and realistic to them and who is not.

For Example,

Consider the internal consulting team where we developed, what we called our PWI Index. PWI was shorthand for a “perceived weirdness index”. What we recognized was that to cross the boundaries and be accepted as useful by the technology groups – you had to be enough like them, so they would allow you to cross the boundary and perhaps have influence upon them AND you had to be enough different to make a contribution. We were a pretty creative group, as people tend to be doing this work. The people in this consulting group were funny and they were irreverent. We knew in a trivial sense that crossing boundaries we had to put on different costumes. Working with the administrative groups, it was all suits and Land’s End; working with the lab folks (where the real work was happening) it was sneakers, sometimes without socks. A wise man once said to me that to do this work required social sensitivity and behavioral flexibility. You have to be astute in sensing the social norms and flexible enough to cross boundaries and not lose yourself.

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For more resources, see the Library topics Consulting and Organizational Development.

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Jim Smith has over 40 years of organization development experience in a wide range of organizations. He can be reached at ChangeAgents@gmail.com

We need just a bit more theory before we can take the next step, which is broadening this monologue on systems from theory to principles of re-design and change. A little more theory might be a foundation of informed actions.

The diagram about the organization as a socio-technical system (below) is a useful view of the whole organization as an in-put Out-put System. These systems operate within boundaries subjected to the whims of environmental changes such as: economic crises, increased competitive threats and industry shifts. Customers often demand new and different things. When these happen the organization has to adjust. The organization is people and technologies, which are matched together to produce an outcome, a product or a service. People as individuals are matched to jobs and people within groups, which we call social systems, manage how the work is broken down into specialties, which have to rely on each other to coordinate steps to produce an integrated outcome.

Think of the human organization. The human system operates the technology. Think of technology in the broadest sense: Technology=Methodology. It is how we go about doing something. It is about the steps we take to produce a finished product and we call that series of steps “a process.”

Think about an accounting firm. Accounting methodology, and its structure of rules, is no less a technology than an integrated production line. Think about consultant organizations – we are humans employing methodologies that experience leads us to believe benefit organizations. We have developed processes such as action research to help us make sense of the complexity of socio-technical systems.

There are two things to remember about these input output systems. First, there is no one-to-one relationship between changes in the input and changes in the output. For example, different inputs may yield similar outputs and, different product mixes may be produced from similar inputs. Second, the technological component plays a major role in the self-regulating properties of an enterprise. The technology is a boundary, part of the internalized environment, but not only does the technological component set limits upon what can be done; but also creates demands that are reflected in the internal social organization and the organizations ends. We will see this better represented in our second systems view.

The diagram below is a broader and more encompassing view of organization which highlights that the principle challenge of leadership is to manage the uncertainty and the interdependence of the system as a whole, which is made up of people, technologies, structure, and support systems and the shifting and emerging demands on the purpose of the organization. Think of the change that has happened within this image in the last 20 years as we have moved into a global market.

Measures of Effectiveness

We have learned over the years that alignment of these various parts is critical, that the people, the structures, the tools and methods are aligned and integrated, and able to operate as a whole, is one measure of effectiveness.

If we view organization as adaptive, organic structures, then inferences about effectiveness have to be made not from static measures of output, though these may be helpful – but on the basis of the process through which the organization approaches problems. In other words, no single measurement of organizational efficiency or satisfaction- no single time slice of organizational performance can provide valid indicators of organizational health.

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For more resources, see the Library topics Consulting and Organizational Development.

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Jim Smith has over 40 years of organization development experience in a wide range of organizations. He can be reached at ChangeAgents@gmail.com

It was 1968 when an obscure academic at the University of Edmonton, Ludwig Von Bertalanffy, publish the book General Systems Theory. It was the first major look at the foundations and applications of systems thinking across a broad array of practical and scientific fields. Starting with the individual organism he demonstrated that the systems view and principles extended throughout biology, physics, chemistry, philosophy and cultural anthropology as well as sociology and psychiatry. His insights were profound because they had so many implications toward a theory of development and growth.

Living Systems

Organizations are living systems. And every living systems is essentially an open system, it is in continuous exchange with its environment. All systems work to secure in-puts of various kinds, and transform these into valued outputs and the whole organization is open to environmental influences to which the organization must respond. Input, transformation and output: this is basic process-task in the architecture of systems.

The systems vantage point is the whole operation within its environment operating within a steady state, which keeps it viable. The steady state is called homeostasis and relies on feedback to self-correct. It is maintained an optimal distance from equilibrium and it is what enables a system to do work. Through this steady state the system remains constant in its composition, in spite of continuous irreversible process, importing and exporting, building up and breaking down taking place. Growth is toward higher states of differentiation and complexity where there are fixed rules and flexible strategies; a principle called Eqifinality, where there are a lot of different ways to get to the same goal. One of the primary goals of any system is for balance, a regulated steady state, and there are many ways to attain balance. Systems are purposeful and they are self-controlling- they use feedback to self-correct. This is the cybernetic rather than the administrative view of the world.

Look for Boundaries to Analyze Systems

A systems structure is its components and attributes within a boundary. All systems and sub-systems act across boundaries. Management is always across boundaries. Organizations create specialized functions, which are differentiated from other parts of the system but then have to be integrated during the performance of a complex task. Integration and Differentiation are important “system principles.” Boundaries can be fairly open or tightly closed. To cross a boundary you have to be “coded” properly. Sub-systems are interrelated and experience different rates of change. Add to all this, is a very important principle of open systems: managing the polarities of the simultaneous need for both differentiation and integration. You can see this when you look at the different cognitive and emotional orientations of various managers and the formal structures around them. And at the same time we need integration, which is the quality of the collaboration that exists among departments that are required to achieve unity of effort by the environment. The questions that need to be asked are:

What are the strategic parts of the system?

What is the nature of their mutual interdependency?

What are the main processes that link the parts and facilitate their adjustment to each other?

What are the goals sought by the system?

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For more resources, see the Library topics Consulting and Organizational Development.

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Jim Smith has over 40 years of organization development experience in a wide range of organizations. He can be reached at ChangeAgents@gmail.com

Development is hard pressed to interface with operations. Yet it is extremely important that this interface be workable because developments are not relevant until they find their way into operations. This is the “reason for being” of development; to have new systems and adaptive processes and structures integrated, in the long run, to foster organizational performance and adaptation.

What’s The Difference?

An operation is charted to preserve the status quo, the current thinking and methods. Operations assumes this status quo as a “given” and works within current procedures to improve them and “operationalize” them with a high degree of efficiency. In most operations the problem is clear and solutions are knowable. Fast response is an overriding value in executing a “fix” and getting the operation back on-line.

Development, on the other hand is a constructive conspiracy. It is the development function, who’s job it is to replace the current ways of doing things, with new tools and assumptions more in line with changing business and organizational conditions. Development is rife with ambiguity; it is a searching and learning process. The overriding value is gaining commitment to change.

Innovation and Development is fragile, complex and conceptual. Nothing kills it faster than premature exploitation- rushing to capitalize on it too soon. Development is not charted but it is navagatable, it is a learned activity in action where hunches are tested and theory is developed in the process of action. The context of development is uncertainty. Operations on the other hand, works to reduce uncertainty to a program, an operational term.

Learning It While Doing It

Operations are based in control. Developments emerge and are always subject to un- intended consequences in action as development is moved toward its purpose. One of the themes of these essays is that developments are realized through the process of development, it is in effect learned in the process of doing it.

Usually there is not a great deal of organizational understanding and support for doing this. An often operation does not see the need or understand the purpose of the development itself. For this reason, development needs protection at a certain stage. Protection and understanding go hand in hand. As the development is understood the protection can be loosened which is necessary to gain the institutional support for prioritizing the resources for more disciplined development.

Boundary management means the protection and support of a differentiated development culture and the managed change of this culture when appropriate. Boundary management is a continual effort of judgment and balance because technical organizations optimize performance and their activities are always influenced by demands and feedback from a variety of sources in the global environment. Establishing and managing boundaries is both necessary and problematic.

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For more resources, see the Library topics Consulting and Organizational Development.

Jim Smith has over 40 years of organization development experience in a wide range of organizations. He can be reached at ChangeAgents@gmail.com