Author: Jim Smith

Why It’s Important to Work On Ourselves, as Consultants

The world as we experience it is the product of perception not the cause of it. As people we are not passive receptors of stimuli coming from an external world, but in a very concrete sense we create much of our reality. This is why it is so important for consultants to “work on” ourselves.

Our language shapes most of our concepts and thoughts. What also influences us is our own experience of power and powerlessness; our relations with authority and authority figures, our propensities to handle conflict one way rather than another, our capacity to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity, all these and more aid and inhibit our perception of our realities. Sometimes consulting is operating in a house of mirrors. What is me and what is not me are important to differentiate.

Differentiation itself is an act of maturity, forging an identity as a consultant and what you will do and what you will not do is important, but not as important as knowing your own issues while in the midst of others. Who am I here and what is my purpose, and what are those things that “hook” me is equally as important as knowing who your client is and how they are getting in their own way. It is always easier to see this in other people.

Growing Ourselves

I have just finished reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett, which is the story of a woman in Jackson, Mississippi during the 1960s in the midst of the civil rights struggle, writing about the lives of black maids. The narrator discovers her own assumptions and begins to see new things, which had previously been unconscious. Consulting in the field of organization development is a vehicle for personal and collective growth. As we grow we see ourselves and each other, and our reality before us differently. I referred to this two posts ago. When I was younger I had lots of ambition and passion, I was impatient. As I get older I have learned to discover compassion for others and for myself.

I would suggest our readers to explore Peter Senge’s Ladder of Inference. It is a visual tool to examine our own assumptions and fears, and see how we get in our own way of diagnosing the situation clearly. The data we select to make sense of our world is a reflection of our own beliefs and assumptions and experience.

Abraham Maslow once commented that one measure of health is the ability to perceive reality accurately. Think about it.

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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

I have been thinking about Types of Changes, which tend to fall into 3 buckets.

1. First, there is the Minor change, which is basic tuning, or adjustments to normal business life and the predictability of managing those is high.
2. Then there are the Low impact changes, small changes in people and processes where predictability is pretty accurate.
3. Then there are the Major changes where structure, roles, responsibilities and the purpose of the organization is in flux and here predictability is very low.

The general guideline I use is — the greater the change, the lower the predictability; therefore we have to attend to the impact of the change on the total system.

Truisms About Change

Here are some, what I call some “truisms about change.” We will use the common symbol for greater > and for less <

• The > the change the < the predictability…
• The > the unpredictability, the > the need for communication
• The > the amount of communication, the > the number of questions asked…
• The > the number of questions, the > the amount of time involved…
• The > the amount of time involved, the > the level of participation…
• The > the amount of participation, the > the probability that issues and potential problems will be raised…
• The >the number of problems identified early in the change process the < the probability of error…
• The > the probability of success felt by the members of the organization, the > the commitment to the change process…
• The > the commitment to the change process held by individuals in the organization, the > their efforts will be directed toward making the change succeed…
• The > their commitment to making it succeed, the > their sense of ownership for the change process…
• The > the ownership of the change process, the < resistance to the change…

So What?

This is instructive because recently I have been seeing a lot of opinion pieces about the complexity of modern life and our need to manage this uncertainty and yet the impossibility of doing do.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/opinion/28brooks.html?emc=eta1

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2010/06/how-economics-affects-the-oil.html

David Brooks is writing about risk assessment at the bloody crossroads where complex technical systems meet human psychology. He details our over-reliance on technical fixes and a tendency to match complicated technical systems with complicated governance structures. Drilling for oil at 5000 feet is over reaching if we rely on the blowout preventer and shut down safety conversations. Brooks points to the conflicting and unclear and muddled lines of authority on the Deepwater Horizon and he points to a need for improvements in the “choice architecture – to help people guard against risk creep, false security, groupthink, the good-news bias and all the rest.

Paul Solmon at the Newshour talks about the economics of pushing the “risk envelope” as a competitive reality. But the complexity, unpredictability and pace of events in our world, and the severity of global environmental stress are soaring and that what we need is more ingenuity- that is more and better ideas for solving our technical and social problems.

I do not think that more and better ideas are what we need. BP, Halliburton and Transocean were trying to bring a well on-line as fast as possible and they stopped listening. It’s as simple as that. They closed off the debate and discussion of potential problems and minimized the risk discussion. The Truisms of Change takes time. The real blowout preventer was short-circuited and the back up was merely an illusion.

What do you think?

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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

Every now and then I gift myself with the luxury of time available for reflection, and I “mine” my own learning of what existed? What made that effort a successful change process? Why did that one and that one work well? First of all, my experience is that organizational development work is a very fragile enterprise.

• People run out of energy
• Key executives change positions
• Consultants burn out from their constant marginality
• Timing is everything: Marv Weisbord talks about “harvesting” as a stage of readiness.
• LUCK often plays a large role.

Patterns in The Process

So in this fragile endeavor, there are patterns, which I have experienced, which are repeatable and above all very cyclical. And they are all combinations of action and learning. See the model, “Definition and Implementation of Organizational Change.”

To work with a client you have to develop an inquiry relationship, together you have to be able to diagnose the situation and look at alternatives. All of this work comes down to the consulting relationship and our ability to build a mutual and collective capacity to do inquiry: into individual, group and organizational conditions requiring the focus and the attention of the work. This joint inquiry results in a vision, a sense of what the leadership feels it needs to do.

Learning It By Doing It

The vision is the trigger of the Design and Start Up phase. When leaders start to public their vision they discover the implications of the change and as they discuss these, there are additional values that get clarified and the vision has to clearly define the intent of the effort.

As the leadership group starts to involve others, the focus shifts to: Evolving the Intervention Strategy. I always talk about this as “the trip planned” and “the trip taken”- there are always differences between what I expect and how we need to capitalize in the moment to shift an understanding of what might be needed to support the change. When we are clear about this we move forward with the design into Implementation, we execute the process, we do it and we learn and adjust the change and only then does the momentum change from cycling backwards in feedback loops, to moving forward and looking downstream.

Adjustments Along The Way

As I experience this I have learned that through each of these phases we see ourselves and others and the problem before us in different ways as we move through the change process. It is the inquiry relationship that is the foundation of the work that follows. Who has done serious inquiry and not come out changed? Through this we learn to see things we had not previously appreciated and we realize that much of what we thought we knew was based on assumptions, which I now see. There is no going back from that. If done well, it provides the courage to begin design and start up of a needed constructive effort, which involves influencing others in system change.

What do you think?

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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

Marv Weisbord’s Model – Two Critical Paths to Change

Marv Weisbord’s model “Two Critical Paths for Improving Organizations” suggests, that when it comes to improving our organizations, the first question is, “Who is going to be involved? The second question is, “What is it they are to go about improving?”

The answer to the first question is on the one hand, “experts,” and on the other hand, “everyone.” The response to the second question is on the one hand, “isolated problems,” and on the other hand, “whole systems.”

Historically We Used “Experts” to Guide Change

As he points out, historically we have thrown “experts” at isolated problems. We have brought in outside consultants to provide recommendations and prescriptions about the problems that plague us. Experts have advised us how to improve productivity and how to improve communications.

This is dealing with problems as “technocratic challenges.” We believe that these decisions and solutions are made visible to us by expertise. Functional specialists determine what needs to be done, by other people who have to implement.

We need to be astute in locating and gaining this expertise, setting the conditions where they can analyze the problems, and making sure people do what they are told to do to solve the problem. This is the way we tend to go after our problems and we have a lot of them.

Historical Approaches Weren’t Integrated

During the late 1960’s and 1970’s, the Quality Circle movement took root and managers tried to get everybody to address these isolated problems. The problems still were not integrated into a meaningful perspective, because most managers had many demands and problems, and no real sense of how all their efforts tied together.

Without thinking systemically, most people were trying to do the best they could within their areas of influence. The idea was to mobilize everybody’s focus and energy to try to improve. This got reduced into trivia; people spent hours discussing the quality and color of hand towels in the rest rooms.

The movement was abandoned after awhile and lost credibility, although more than a few local improvements were made although the quality movement has contributed immensely in statistical process analysis and many other tools.

Advent of a Whole Systems Perspective

At the same time, a few reflective scholarly consulting practitioners were experimenting with ways to improve whole systems. (Starting with the work of Emery and Trist and others in the socio-technical approach to organization development, consultants were being influenced by the “systems view” espoused by Bertalanffy, C.W. Churchman, Kenneth Boulding and Katz and Kahn to name a few.)

Systems’ thinking was taking hold in the academic and consulting community — today it is a well-grounded perspective. Everyone in organizations talks about systems, and new hires into organizations can go on at length about the theories and concepts. The problem has been getting this knowledge used in highly functional organizations.

The early specialists were not just interested in elegant industrial designs. They were aware that organization effectiveness is a function of technical and social systems integration, and that true performance was the joint optimization of both variables in the design of work. Thirty years of research and collective wisdom has produced the insight that performance change can only be achieved when everyone is involved in improving the whole system.

So What’s Next for Guiding Change?

The trick is how to make that happen.

• How do we get everyone involved in improving whole systems?
• How does change happen without a “hand off” or a “roll out”?
• How do leaders make it happen in “real time” not just talk about it, but do it in the process of learning how to do it.

These questions have been central in Organization Development for the last few years and certainly will be thought about for a long time to come.

What do you think?

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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.

We live in traditional organizations that are functional and vertically managed. The design is similar to creating and operating a “marching organization.” Work is aligned by function and managed vertically up and down the line. When errors happen, they are pushed up to the next level of command. A control structure reinforces the hierarchy of power. The traditional structure has worked historically when the environment around the organization was less complex and certainly more stable than today.

Today our organizations are flat and horizontal. Work is being organized by process as much as function, it is managed by multi-functional teams, which are quicker in producing customer driven results. Are you seeing these?

I guess we all need to get quicker, better and faster but it seems like we are taking a long time to get there. The problems we face, or the opportunities I might add, is the change in culture that is necessary in most significant organizational change efforts.

From vertical to horizontal is an example of a vision that might be valued. The challenge is cultural and political, not technical.

But then we see an example of all the various law enforcement agencies involved in capturing the person who threatened the people of Times Square. The cooperation and collaboration of all of the people involved is an awesome reminder of what is possible in organizational learning and adaptive action. The integration of their information and decision making process transcended mere structure.

What do you think?

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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.