Category: Consulting & Freelancing

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

NOTE: What I have learned about Kurt Lewin I received from four main sources. My mentor and NTL buddy, Ron Lippitt (one of Lewin’s first graduate students) regaled me with many personal stories about him. Marvin Weisbord, my long-time ODN colleague and friend (also steeped in the Lewin/Lippitt school), shared his research with me both in his marvelous book, Productive Workplaces, and in personal conversations. Jack Sherwood, another well-known and experienced Lewin/Lippitt consultant, taught me about action research and how to actually BE an OD consultant in ‘the Lewinian way’. Finally, Marrow’s thorough book on Lewin, The Practical Theorist, fills in the story about this amazing man, the Grandfather of applied behavioral science—and thereby of OD.

This may be my writing, but it is based on insights from these people. Like St. Paul said at one point, ‘I am only passing on that which I received. . .’

Can people change? This next OD ancestor of ours sure thought so. . .

Anyone who has ever heard or used words like ‘feedback’ or ‘action research’ or ‘group dynamics’ or ‘force field,’ has been impacted by Kurt Lewin. Known today as ‘the grandfather of applied behavioral science,’ Lewin, a Polish-born, Berlin-educated Jew majoring in Social Psychology, left Nazi-dominated Germany for the USA in 1933, saying, ‘I will not teach in a country where my daughter cannot be a student.’ This practical way of thinking about real world situations led him to create his revolutionary conceptual models for human behavior. As he was so fond of saying, ‘There is nothing so practical as a good theory.’ This is because a theory (from the Greek theorein, to see) allows one to see what is happening in new ways.

Many of his new ways of seeing things were put to work in a single, well-documented change project that began in 1939. In response to an urgent request from the manager at Harwood Manufacturing Company in rural Virginia for help in raising production levels, John R.P. French (an external consultant from the University of Michigan and dyed-in-the-wool Lewianian) went to see what could be done. Working with an internal personnel manager, Lester Coch, they designed and carried out what was probably the first ‘action research process.’ Harwood, a new pajama-making facility, was losing money rapidly, with very high turnover and absenteeism, in spite of higher wages and greater benefits than workers were making elsewhere. Supervisors there had tried every carrot and stick motivation and reward system they knew, all with little or no effect.

When the consultants arrived, they initiated what was then a radically different process, one that you will recognize as standard practice for OD facilitators today. First they interviewed the plant manager, then the other managers and supervisors, then, in a strange move, they also met with a representative cross-section of front line employees. After observing the system in action for a while, they made recommendations to the management team. The gist of their proposal: begin an experiment with the front line people, to learn what might make a difference in their productivity. It is hard for us to understand how revolutionary this was in 1939! One can imagine some managers and supervisors thinking, ‘Oh, great. . . we’re going to let the inmates run the prison. . .’

In support of this process they also recommended:

• That supervisors stop trying to raise production levels by addressing the work of individuals, and work instead on a system emphasizing and involving entire work teams, and
• That management set production goals that are clearly attainable by workers (when they appear impossible, there is no sense of failure when they are not reached).

Engaging the Workforce ca 1939

When production increased slightly, French and Coch began to hold informal weekly meetings with a group of high-producing workers to discuss what difficulties they encountered and how they might be overcome. Management, having nothing to lose, agreed to consider trying whatever this group suggested.

After getting management’s permission, the high-performing group was invited to vote on what the production goal for individual workers should be. They raised the existing piecework targets from 75 to 87, a level never attained before, and said they would get there in five days—which they did, much to the astonishment of management. Meanwhile other individuals and groups in the plant doing the same work had no appreciable increase in productivity.

The Lewin-oriented consultants hypothesized that motivational initiatives alone are not sufficient to create lasting change. The missing link is provided by people making decisions that affect them. His conclusion: a simple process like decision-making, which takes only a few moments, is able to affect workers’ conduct for a long time. The making of a decision seems to have a ‘freezing’ effect, Lewin hypothesized, which is partly due to the individual’s tendency to ‘stick to his decisions’ and partly due to their wanting to be a part of ‘the commitment of the group.’

Force Field Analysis

The consultants then had the small group of involved workers plan their own hourly production rates by using ‘pacing cards.’ This group hit and maintained an amazing pace, going from 67 units prior to the experiment, to 82 and stabilizing there. The other groups stayed where they were. Why?

Lewin had observed that the output of a worker was ‘quasi-stationary’ and existed, not in a vacuum, but in a constantly-shifting ‘field of forces,’ some helping and some hindering the desired change. Theoretically, changes in performance could be achieved by either a) strengthening a ‘driving’ force, or b) weakening a ‘restraining’ force. The increases created at Harwood, however, were not achieved by increasing driving forces, like more pressure to produce, or management-driven motivational methods, or even paying for performance, all of which had been tried and failed. This is because a top-down, driving-force approach creates its own back-lash of worker resistance, fatigue, anxiety and roller coaster productivity. The results at Harwood, the consultants believed, came from involving the people themselves in discovering and then reducing selected restraining forces holding production back.

B = f(p x e)

One of Lewin’s most significant conceptual inputs into the OD process is this formula: individual behavior (B) is a function (f) of personal factors (p), multiplied by the impact of the current social environment (e). This model explains why some training-oriented OD efforts aimed at the individual often fail. Like the alcoholic treated alone and then sent back to an unchanged family system, OD efforts that do not take into account making changes in the (social) environment (or ‘the field’ in Gestalt terms) will not sustain themselves. This is because personal factors are multiplied by environmental factors. Ron Lippitt, one of Lewin’s first graduate students—and my mentor in OD—quoted this Lewin saying to me once, ‘I have found it easier to change the group than to change one individual in the group.’

The Housewives Experiment

Another important Lewin action research (read OD) project occurred during WW II with the U.S. Military, a result of Ron Lippitt and Ron’s colleague, Margaret Mead’s, connections with the U.S. Navy Department. The government was interested in finding out how to get housewives to use what were euphemistically called ‘variety meats’ (basically Spam), rather than prime cuts, since there was a meat shortage, and meat was needed for the soldiers overseas. In this action research project there were two groups made up of housewives. One heard presentations (lectures) on the nutritious value of variety meats and why they should try the recipes that were handed out. The second group, while they attended the same lectures on the topic, also attended a group discussion on the topic, where they could share their thoughts, concerns, reasons for resisting the idea, and discuss recipes.

At the end of the day, they were asked who would be willing to try some of the recipes based on variety meats instead of better cuts. Many of the women in both groups made a public commitment to trying the recipes. The follow-up research, however, found that the discussion method—which allowed people to voice their resistance—had actually lowered their resistance and been far more effective than the simple ‘telling’ approach in generating long-term change in the housewives’ attitude and behavior. Lewin’s notion of the field of forces and how to reduce resistance by surfacing and accepting it was validated again.

A Few of Lewin’s Change Principles

No action without research—no research without action.

Work with the group (the human environment), not just individuals.

Involve the people who need to change in the planning of the change initiative and the decision-making in that process.

My summary of Lewin’s gift to us: Finding out what is actually happening (research)—and why it is happening—and getting all that data ‘on the table’ where it is seen, discussed and decided about with those affected in a safe process, has the power to change people and larger systems (action).

A Personal Note:

Marvin Weisbord, a long-time friend and colleague, has done more research and writing on our OD ‘ancestors’ than anyone I know, and I am indebted to his marvelous book, Productive Workplaces, for much of what I have written here about both Lewin, Taylor and Trist. He has a way of making these OD pioneers and the early moments in our birthing process come alive, and often has a unique ‘twist’ on how we have seen someone like Lewin or Frederick Taylor, showing us another side of these giants in a way that, for me, makes them more human—and more real.

I learned most of what I know about the practice of OD from Ron Lippitt, Jack Sherwood, a student of Lippitt’s, and Herb Shepard, who—along with Dick Beckhard—actually named OD. Being fortunately so close to ‘The Ancient Ones’ has given me great motivation to ‘pass on that which I received’, and Carter’s blog series is one effort to see to it that as many people as possible know and practice some of the ‘original’ principles for helping change happen.

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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

—

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 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

—

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.

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

Introduction to this Blog Series

• In our work as OD practitioners, whose shoulders are we standing on?
• Whose ‘conceptual DNA’ runs in our veins?
• What are our operating assumptions and where did they come from?

Believe it or not, there was a time when things like involving people in action-planning, group decision-making, action research, feedback, high-performance/high-satisfaction team-development, leadership and management coaching, the stages in the consulting process—and a host of other standard OD practices—did not exist. Who figured them out—and passed them on to us?

You may know some of the people on whose shoulders you are standing, certainly you have read the works of earlier ‘elders’ who have shaped your work, but many of those who developed ways to improve their social systems are lost in the mists of time. . .

NOTE: This site distinguishes the difference between “organizational development” and “Organization Development.” The former phrase refers to the nature and scope of change in organizations, i.e., the change is to the entire organization or to a significant portion of the organization. The latter phrase refers to a field of well-trained people with expertise in guiding successful organizational development.

In the first segment of this series, we looked at some of our ancient ancestors in the practice of OD, going all the way back to ‘Karg’, the Neanderthal hunter who was looking for a way to kill the mastodon without losing so many of his buddies. Thanks to several comments from readers of that segment, let’s say it was ‘Marg’, one of the women around the fire in the cave who stepped forward and made the suggestions regarding longer spears and a better strategy, the first ‘socio-tech’ intervention.

Then there was the ancient story of the Biblical conversation between Moses and his Father-in-Law, Jethro, one of the first recorded ‘executive coaching’ sessions. There were also the Egyptian ‘consulting engineers’ who maintained the Nile’s effectiveness, and even later, the court jesters, who made kings and queens laugh, finding ways to ‘speak truth to power’, affecting decisions from a ‘consulting’ position.

These historical attempts to have more effective organizations were missing several important ingredients, especially the distinction between content (where most of the above ‘consulting’ almost certainly focused) and process (something yet to be discovered). It was up to the unique exploration of more recent minds and hearts to discover and apply the principles that launched what we would recognize today as Organization Development. While many people’s work fed into the formation of our field, as you will see, it was primarily social psychologists (groups and larger systems) and psychologists (individuals and groups) who contributed the most.

In this blog segment we will name some of the psychologists whose thinking contributed their focus on changing individuals to our field, and in the next several segments we will look at ‘The Big Four (or Five)’ from several other fields who more directly shaped OD.

Psychological Branches in Our OD Family Tree

Since 1900, these psychologists have contributed concepts important in shaping our work:

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), was one of the first to postulate the existence of an inner world that drives what human beings do—something we hold today as obvious as gravity, and his concepts of Superego, Ego and Id led almost directly to Transactional Analysis’ concepts of Parent, Adult and Child.

Carl Jung (1875-1971) postulated the power of archetypes operating in the human psyche and emphasized the role of the Shadow, those aspects of who we are that have not yet been integrated. He also legitimated the world of dreams and intuition and suggested that we were more than rational beings living in a Cartesian or Newtonian world.

Mary Parker Follet (1868-1933) was a community leader and innovative organizer focusing on what happened in groups and how they functioned long before her better-known male colleagues. Although relatively unknown to many in our field, she was a pioneer in both how groups functioned and the key role of leadership in their effectiveness.

B.F. Skinner (1904-1990) took the Russian Ivan Pavlov’s salivating dogs to the next (human) level, theorizing that we are not making free-will decisions at all, but are products of what he called ‘stimulus/response-driven operant conditioning’. His principle: what gets rewarded gets repeated. (Today’s field of Performance Management comes directly from this school of thought.)

Erik Erikson (1902-1994) saw a human being’s life as a developmental journey with predictable ‘epigenetic stages’ or phases that must be successfully traversed in the process of becoming a healthy adult. All the life cycle and developmental models of today owe a debt to his thinking.

Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) showed that what motivates people varies, depending on where they are in their ‘hierarchy of needs’, and that we should be investigating not just ‘sick’ people, but those who are doing ‘well,’ to discover what makes us tick. (Appreciative Inquiry, one of the more recent innovations in OD, is a direct descendant of Maslow in this regard.)

Carl Rogers (1902-1987), along with Maslow, initiated what came to be called Third Force (or Humanistic) Psychology, an alternative to the Operant Conditioning of Skinner and the Psychoanalytical model of Freud. Rogers also showed that increasing people’s effectiveness happened within a relationship between the helper and the helpee, and that the movement toward wholeness was accelerated by empathy rather than advice-giving.

Eric Berne (1910-1970), creator of Transactional Analysis, pioneered the current self-help movement by simplifying the principles of personal effectiveness and making them available to lay people. He saw the role of an internal Adult mediating between the internal Child and Parent, and showed people the ‘Games’ they were playing inside their ‘Life Script.’

But none of these extraordinary people have had more direct impact on the conception, birth and early growth of OD than the next four. Frederick Taylor, the first in chronological order, set the stage; the second and third (Kurt Lewin and Wilfred Bion) developed and applied the principles; and the last (Douglas McGregor), made them available to managers of organizations and the general public. They are also the first names on Billie Alban’s very useful Origins of OD Time-Line. Tune in next time for that time-line—and some fascinating facts about Frederick Taylor, ‘The Father of Scientific Management’.

? What’s your reaction to this history of OD?

—

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
• 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, and Billie Alban, President of Alban & Williams, Ltd. This is the first blog post in a six-part series about the history of OD.)

Introduction to this Blog Series

• In our work as OD practitioners, whose shoulders are we standing on?
• Whose ‘conceptual DNA’ runs in our veins?
• What are our operating assumptions and where did they come from?

Believe it or not, there was a time when things like involving people in action-planning, group decision-making, action research, feedback, high-performance/high-satisfaction team-development, leadership and management coaching, the stages in the consulting process—and a host of other standard OD practices—did not exist. Who figured them out—and passed them on to us?

You may know some of the people on whose shoulders you are standing, certainly you have read the works of earlier ‘elders’ who have shaped your work, but many of those who developed ways to improve their social systems are lost in the mists of time. . .

NOTE: This site distinguishes the difference between “organizational development” and “Organization Development.” The former phrase refers to the nature and scope of change in organizations, i.e., the change is to the entire organization or to a significant portion of the organization. The latter phrase refers to a field of well-trained people with expertise in guiding successful organizational development.

Pre-Historic OD?

We have no way of knowing, but imagine a group of Neanderthal men, sitting around their fire in the cave, when Karg, a more free-thinking hunter, using whatever grunts and motions he had available, speaks to his buddies. ‘You know, guys, we got the mastodon today, but I wonder how we could kill them without losing so many of us in the process?!’

Now imagine the group dynamics that might have ensued. Assuming that the leader—the fiercest hunter and warrior—allowed this discussion to continue, perhaps another hunter made a suggestion about using longer spears (technology). Maybe one of the more courageous women listening in suggested that a few hunters draw the mastodon’s attention in one direction while the best spear-throwers came at it from the other side (teamwork). Perhaps someone else said, ‘Let’s do both!’ (polarity management). Maybe the shaman suggested that they should all drink the animal’s blood to strengthen people’s ability to hunt (human resources). The result: the world’s first ‘socio-technical OD intervention’.

We would not still be here as a species if learning had not taken place at crucial points in our development. Our ancient ancestors faced real-time, real-world consequences (feedback) on a daily basis and did everything they could to solve life-and-death challenges with a combination of improved technology and smarter teamwork.

Around 10,000 BCE, as humans began to multiply more rapidly and settle down—especially around The Fertile Crescent in what is now Iraq—the tribal social system, which served so well as long as people moved around, began to break down. When humans put down roots to live in one place because of climate, water supply and/or the presence of game, a more complex social system was required. New roles and new forms of organization had to be invented. Now some people had to not hunt or farm, but stay back to guard that which had been garnered. Someone now needed to count quantities and weights and keep track of who got what. Someone had to make decisions and control the group’s effort and direction. (See Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel for a fascinating exploration of the rise of civilization and the changing role of leadership.)

The First Consulting Engineers—circa 5,000 BCE

There is evidence that the Egyptian culture during the time of the Pharaohs had what we would call ‘consulting engineers’, whose job it was to go around to the major construction projects and make sure they were ‘on time and under budget.’ When the Nile flooded every year, communication and cooperation all up and down a thousand miles of river was necessary, leading to command and control structures and enforcement capabilities. If one community astride the river failed to maintain their section of the dam or did not channel the water properly, the ensuing flood would wash away crops all along the river, threatening the very survival of the entire region.

This emergence of larger social systems also inevitably led to the emergence of a new kind of leader who was not simply the best hunter or fighter, but who was good at what we would call strategic planning and decision-making. The leader then needed people below them (read ‘managers’) who did the organizing and controlling. Just think, all this was in place centuries before the shop floors of the Industrial Revolution.

Moses and Jethro: The First Recorded Coaching Consultation for Large-Scale Change

What may be the earliest written account of ‘consulting for organizational change’ can be found in the biblical story of an exchange between Moses and his father-in-law, Jethro. (See Exodus 18:13-27.) Moses had just led the motley bunch of former slaves through the desert, turning South after escaping Pharaoh’s army to rest awhile in Jethro’s domain, the Land of Midian. Moses was probably there to check in on his new wife, Leah. Just a thought, but since Jethro was a Midianite, he would be seen by the client (Moses) and the client system (the Hebrew people) as ‘from out of town,’ and therefore perceived as neutral regarding substantive issues and solutions. (One of Richard Walton’s criteria for predicting a consultant’s effectiveness. . .) As the ancient tale goes, caught in a state of complete overwhelm, Moses turns to his father-in-law, Jethro, for help.

Now, we don’t know what exactly happened back then in that conversation, but here is one paraphrase:

• ‘I can’t handle it any more!’ Moses says one night to Jethro.
• ‘What’s the problem?’ says Jethro, caring deeply about this wild man who is married to his favorite daughter.
• ‘I’ve just got too many people coming to me for decisions and advice. All day long. . . It’s all I do now. Hundreds of people bringing me every little problem they have, wanting a decision or a judgment. It’s driving me crazy! I’m exhausted. . . What can I do?!’
• Jethro thinks for a while and says, ‘Yes. . . This is going to be a problem all along your journey, son. People are going to want solutions from you as long as you are their leader. . .’ He thinks some more. ‘Well. . . How about this? What if you set up some of your best decision-makers to be responsible for a hundred people, and a few of your very best to be responsible for a thousand people. That way, some handle the little stuff, others handle the not-so-little stuff, leaving you to take care of the really big stuff.’
• ‘Hey!’ says Moses. ‘I like that!’ and he did what Jethro suggested, creating a hierarchical organization much like the one you probably work in—or consult to—today. (Only it sounds like Moses had a slightly wider span of control. . .)

There is a lot about OD consulting, albeit the more traditional ‘expert’ variety, embedded in this ancient vignette:

• There was real-world pressure for change, and sufficient dissonance in the client. Moses is hard-working—you might say even driven—and is experiencing some strong dissonance between his idea of how this wilderness trip was supposed to go and what was actually happening.
• They had sufficient mutual trust for this conversation. Jethro is older, more experienced, knows his way around, and is someone Moses respects.
• Jethro had the emotional distance and clarity to help his client from behind a solid boundary. He didn’t get reactive to Moses’ complaining.
• Moses was trapped inside his old paradigm—the one that came out of his promise to Yahweh about getting everyone to the promised land all by himself—and couldn’t see his way to a solution.
• Moses asked for help. The feedback and coaching was requested. This opened Moses’ heart and mind to receive his coach’s radical idea. (The typical hierarchical organization chart that he recommended is so familiar to us today that we fail to understand just how strange that proposal would seem, especially to someone who thought he had to do it all. . . alone. . . for Yahweh.)
• Jethro first affirms what will not change in the situation. He stands in reality, not in ‘pie-in-the-sky’ thinking. ‘Yes, Moses, these people are going to keep coming to you—or someone—for a long time. . .’ (This observation is from the creative theologically-trained mind of OD consultant and good friend, Mike Murray.)
• Jethro then suggests something for Moses’ consideration. He doesn’t try to force or ‘sell’ his idea. It is an offering, not a command. Like a good consultant, he offers an idea, he did not use positional power with his client (which he would have had as a father-in-law in those days), but rather relied on the validity of the idea itself.
• Moses acts on the coaching. He sets up the organization suggested by Jethro and sees it through.

So we OD consultants of the last 50-60 years are not the first in history to attempt to improve the quality of leadership and/or the effectiveness of the organizations around us. Written records are not available for many others, but surely kings and princes and religious leaders around the world had advisors they would turn to from time to time for help in matters military, economic, spiritual or political—or maybe even personal. Just as today, we can look back in time and see what a leader has decided—and the results. What we can’t see is the process by which that decision came into being—and who contributed.

There was the court jester who played a very important role in the medieval halls of power. The jester’s job was to hold up a mirror, playfully, to make a point in such a way that decision-makers and their hangers-on could laugh at what they saw. Then, on reflection, the more thoughtful participants could possibly see the folly in a particular decision or situation, and either change it or do things differently next time. If we think getting fired by a client is bad news, imagine what our ancestors faced every time they pushed the leader’s face in their own mess!

These historical attempts to have more effective organizations were missing several important ingredients, especially the distinction between content—where most of the above ‘consulting’ almost certainly focused—and process, something yet to be discovered. It was up to the unique exploration of more recent minds and hearts to discover and apply the principles that launched what we would recognize today as Organization Development.

Let’s take a look at some of the ‘heavy’ contributors in the next blog. . .

? What’s your reaction to this history of OD?

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:

• 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).

Why It’s Important for Us to Know Our Paradigms, Theories and Models

Paradigms, theories and models – we all have them and work from them. Many of us don’t know it. But we really should.

When we practitioners in human development (consultants, coaches, trainers, etc.) come to conclusions about our clients and their organizations, we should closely examine those conclusions. Are they accurate? Are your client’s accurate? What did you see in your client’s situation? What might you have missed? What were your assumptions about the situation? Were they valid? What do you know that might not be so?

The more we practitioners can understand and clarify our paradigms, theories and models, the more we can learn about ourselves and the more effective we can be in our practice. Also, the more we can explain to our clients and learners about what we do and why.

The overall field of human development has grown rapidly, especially in recent decades. Accordingly, so have different perspectives and opinions, including about the following terms. The terms paradigm, theories and models are highly related and integrated. As important as coming to any standard definition of each is the readers coming to their own definitions. Obviously, the following opinions are but mine.

So, What’s a Paradigm?

The term “paradigm,” especially in the broad field of human and organization development, refers to our overall way of seeing things – our overall way of thinking about something.

For example, my field, the field of Organization Development (OD), often suggests a new paradigm about organizations. Many OD professionals assert that it’s no longer useful to have an overall “mechanistic” view of the organization – as if it’s a machine with various parts that must be controlled in a top-down, highly centralized and controlled manner – as if employees are motivated primarily by external forces, such as authority and money. These professionals assert that, because of today’s very diverse and rapidly changing world, organizations must constantly learn and adapt.

Therefore, these professionals assert that we must undertake a “paradigm shift” to a more organic view of the organization – that the organization must constantly be changing and that this change comes from more decentralized designs that empower people to act and learn at the same time.

• What’s your paradigm on organizations and people? Families? Economies?

Well, Then What’s a “Theory”?

A theory is a suggested explanation of why something occurs as it does. It suggests causes and effects. Our overall view on the world – our paradigm – greatly influences what theories we choose to learn and use. Our theories, in turn, influence our paradigms.

Perhaps the field of psychology is the best example to use here because those theories are often the basis for how we consultants, coaches and trainers work with people and organizations. We’re familiar with many of the theories of how people behave.

For example, there’s theories on what motivates people. Theory X suggests that people are naturally lazy and dislike work, so they need to be closely monitored and directed. The Theory suggests how we should design organizations and supervise people. We can see how this theory is closely aligned with the mechanistic paradigm.

Theory Y suggests that people enjoy satisfying and fulfilling work, and are self-motivated. Thus, if work is designed to be satisfying and fulfilling for them, they don’t need to be closely monitored and directed. Theory Y is closely associated with a newer paradigm on organizations and people.

Some people group theories into overall types of theories. For example, various theories in the field of psychology are often the overall types of theories held by consultants, coaches and trainers. The psychoanalytic theories (developed by Sigmund Freud) derived those of Alfred Adler and Carol Jung. The adult development theories include the solution-focused therapy, which is often referred to by the field of personal and professional coaching. Another example is Systems Theory, which includes many theories about how systems work.

• What theory or theories explain why you do what you do with your clients?
• Can you explain them?

OK, So What’s a Model? (Sometimes Referred to as a “Framework”)

A model depicts a theory. It depicts the relationships, the causes and effects suggested by the theory. For example, many coaching schools that have the same paradigms and have similar theories, but differentiate themselves by using different models.

In coaching, one of the most popular models is GROW, which is an acronym for the phases of a coaching process, including 1) clarifying goals, 2) understanding the current reality, 3) identifying relevant and realistic options to address the goals, and 4) deciding what a person will do about the situation. The GROW model probably is aligned with various theories, but certainly seems to be with Theory Y and also with a newer paradigm on organizations and people.

Some people might refer to a model as a “framework,” meaning the phases or steps and their sequence. For example, many OD consultants refer to the action research framework, which has numerous variations based largely on the sequence of 1) doing a plan, 2) taking actions based on that plan, 3) observing the results and 4) reflecting on the results to learn from them, and perhaps to modify the original plan.

Theories and models often generate associated tools. For example, there are numerous systems tools associated with systems theories.

• What are some of your models in your work?
• Can you explain them?
• Are they associated with any theory(s)?

What About Just Using Our “Gut Feel”? What’s Wrong With That?

Many practitioners might assert that they just operate by “gut feel” – they intuitively sense the situation, how to work with their clients, and what should occur as a result. They work almost unconsciously. Many practitioners are extremely successful with that approach.

The field of training and development often refers to stages of competences and how people must progress through them in order to achieve long-lasting development. The stages include:

1. Unconscious incompetence
2. Conscious incompetence
3. Conscious competence
4. Unconscious competence

“Gut feel” practitioners have somehow reached stage four.

But it can be extremely difficult to further develop one’s skills unless those developments go through the stages, as well. At some point, the practitioner must consciously recognize what he is doing and why in order to more fully develop their skills.

Here’s another reason to go beyond gut feel. There is increasing competition among practitioners in the fields of human and organization development. It helps tremendously if practitioners can clearly explain their models to potential clients in order to differentiate themselves from the increasing number of practitioners in the field of human development. Practitioners are not likely to be successful in this competitive environment if they explain that they go by “gut feel.”

• If you are very successful at using “gut feel,” then perhaps there are theory(s) and model(s) behind your powerful intuition. Draft a basic model that describes the basic steps and their sequence that you use with clients. Then describe to yourself, especially why you use those steps and that sequence. So is that your “model” after all?

—

In a project, whether you are conducting a formal, systematic assessment or just doing a rather informal assessment, your natural approach to gathering and processing information will influence how you work. The Myers-Briggs folks provide some useful dimensions to consider. (Myers-Briggs is a registered trademark of Consulting Psychologists Press, Inc.),

Intuitive Versus Sensing Approaches to Gathering Information

There are a variety of assessment instruments that are often referenced when helping people understand their own unique styles when solving problems and making decisions, for example, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicatorâ instrument. One of the dimensions of the Myers-Briggs is “Intuitive versus Sensing,” which considers how a person gathers information. (Myers-Briggs is a registered trademark of Consulting Psychologists Press, Inc.),

Intuitive

A highly intuitive person often gathers information instinctively. They thrive on ideas and possibilities. They might seem oblivious to what is going on around them, yet they often effectively solve problems and make decisions based on surprisingly valid information. Many times, they might not even know how they did it. Some experts on leadership and management assert that highly experienced people often have developed intuition that enables them to make quick, effective decisions. A major advantage of this approach is that it can save a great deal of time. A major challenge can be how to explain their choices to others.

Sensing

These people thrive on facts and information. They are detail-oriented and accuracy is important to them. They are aware of their physical surroundings, of who is saying what. They solve problems and make decisions by considering the “data” around them. One of the major advantages of a sensing person is that their actions are often based on valid information. Thus, they are able to explain their reasoning and their actions to others. A major challenge is the time and care required for them to solve problems and make decisions.

Thinking Versus Feeling Approaches to Process Information

Another major dimension of the Myers-Briggs Indicatorâ instrument is “Thinking versus Feelings,” which considers how a person makes decisions about information.

Thinking

A thinking person often uses a highly objective, sometimes rational approach to organizing, analyzing and making decisions about information. At their extreme, they might shun consideration of emotions. The thinking person probably prefers the rational approach to problem solving as described above in this subsection. The advantage of this approach is that it often generates valid problem solving and decision-making. A major challenge can be that it might require an extensive amount of time to come to action.

Feeling

The feeling approach is used most often by individuals who are quite sensitive to their values in processing information. When people focus on their values, emotions often come into play. A major advantage of this approach is that it can help to ensure that people are happy and fulfilled in the situation – that their values have been considered during the process and are reflected in the outcome. A major challenge is that there are a variety of short-term factors that can influence a person’s emotions other than the current major problem or decision, for example, their not having had enough sleep or having eaten right.

Also see:

• Consultant — What’s Your Natural Approach to Problem Solving?
  
• All About Consulting — Using Consultants, Doing Consulting

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Carter McNamara, MBA, PhD – Authenticity Consulting, LLC – 800-971-2250
Read my blogs: Boards, Consulting and OD, and Strategic Planning.

As a consultant, you work with clients to solve problems. Or, perhaps your philosophy is to help them address “priorities,” rather than “problems.” In any case, it’s extremely important to understand your own approach and how it affects others, especially your clients when working with them.

Different people have quite different preferences and approaches for solving problems and making decisions. Those differences can often cause conflict between people unless they each understand their own particular preferences.

The following preferences represent probably the most common preferences. It is important for you to note that any preference is not necessarily better than others. Certain preferences might work better in certain situations. The important point for you to realize is the diverse ways that people – including you – address problems and decisions. Always consider that diversity in your consulting projects.

Rational Versus Organic Approach to Problem Solving

Rational

A person with this preference often prefers using a comprehensive and logical approach similar to the following procedure. For example, the rational approach, described below, is often used when addressing large, complex matters in strategic planning.

1. Define the problem.
2. Examine all potential causes for the problem.
3. Identify all alternatives to resolve the problem.
4. Carefully select an alternative.
5. Develop an orderly implementation plan to implement that best alternative.
6. Carefully monitor implementation of the plan.
7. Verify if the problem has been resolved or not.

A major advantage of this approach is that it gives a strong sense of order in an otherwise chaotic situation and provides a common frame of reference from which people can communicate in the situation. A major disadvantage of this approach is that it can take a long time to finish. Some people might argue, too, that the world is much too chaotic for the rational approach to be useful.

Organic

Many believe that it can be quite illusory to believe that an organizational consultant is there to identify and solve problems for the client. Some people assert that the dynamics of organizations and people are not nearly so mechanistic as to be improved by solving one problem after another. Often, the quality of an organization or life comes from how one handles being “on the road” itself, rather than the “arriving at the destination.” The quality comes from the ongoing process of trying, rather than from having fixed a lot of problems. For many people it is an approach to organizational consulting. The following quote is often used when explaining the organic (or holistic) approach to problem solving.

“All the greatest and most important problems in life are fundamentally insoluble … They can never be solved, but only outgrown. This “outgrowing” proves on further investigation to require a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest appeared on the horizon and through this broadening of outlook, the insoluble lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded when confronted with a new and stronger life urge.”

—- From Jung, Carl, Psychological Types (Pantheon Books, 1923)

A major advantage of the organic approach is that it is highly adaptable to understanding and explaining the chaotic changes that occur in projects and everyday life. It also suits the nature of people who shun linear and mechanistic approaches to projects. The major disadvantage is that the approach often provides no clear frame of reference around which people can communicate, feel comfortable and measure progress toward solutions to problems.

Also see:

• Consultant — What’s Your Natural Approach to Gathering and Processing Information?
  
• All About Consulting — Using Consultants, Doing Consulting

————————————————————————-

Carter McNamara, MBA, PhD – Authenticity Consulting, LLC – 800-971-2250
Read my blogs: Boards, Consulting and OD, and Strategic Planning.

There’s a lot of money available to help small businesses, and it seems like there’ll be more available as we work to make more jobs. So OD in small businesses might be even more worthwhile.

It rarely works to market myself as “guiding change” or “change agent,” etc. Instead, I’ve been more successful with, e.g., “turnaround specialist” or “business developer.”

Assessments should use the pareto principle, i.e., focus on some “best practices” in each of the major management functions. Focus on “low hanging fruit.”

Look at life cycles. Is the business getting started, i.e., new in a market OR has it been so successful and grown fast that it needs internal systems?

Don’t be afraid to look at the “business” or “hard” data, at least to understand the cash situation of the organization. Get help to do that if you aren’t comfortable with cash flows.

Always do a proposal and contract, not just a Statement of Work, because the client will regularly want you to do more, and struggles to measure “success” in the project.

Stick to your expertise. The owner, if he/she likes you, will want you to help in a wide variety of activities, so be mindful to stick to what you know.

Interpersonal relationships with the client are the keystone to project success. Much rides on understanding the owner’s personality.

Focus on leadership and managment “systems/structures,” not on people (which can be hard to do with today’s infatuation with heroic leaders 🙂

Change takes longer because external and influences have a larger, quicker affect on the organization.

Plans for change should have multiple phases and with quick successes.

Get paid after each phase!

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

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Carter McNamara, MBA, PhD – Authenticity Consulting, LLC – 800-971-2250
Read my weekly blogs: Boards, Consulting and OD, Nonprofits and Strategic Planning.