Category: Consulting & Freelancing

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

Here’s an Example of a Disconnected Conversation

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine and I were talking about a particular consulting project. We just weren’t connecting in our conversation somehow — I kept repeating my points and he kept repeating his. It felt like we were disagreeing somehow, but neither of us were actually saying that we disagreed with the other. Still, we felt increasingly frustrated.

He kept asserting that the client’s CEO needed to show stronger leadership, including by being more participative.

I kept agreeing. I suggested one-on-one with his managers, ensuring time in staff meetings to hear from each manager, and using a technique for consensus when making decisions.

My friend didn’t seem convinced — and seemed even more frustrated. He asserted that the CEO needs to read “Servant Leadership” by Robert Greenleaf. I agreed.

My friend asserted that the CEO needs to do a better job of bringing out the best in his people. I agreed.

Results Versus Methods — We Should Talk About Both

Finally, it hit me — my friend was talking about overall outcomes, and I was talking about activities to achieve those outcomes. Although we both wanted the same thing, we were focusing on different aspects of that result.

I find this type of disconnected conversation occurs more than we realize, especially about grand topics, such as leadership, accountability, transparency and performance.

It’s most powerful and poignant to talk about outcomes. It can be boring and even tedious to talk about methods to achieve those outcomes.

But we owe it to our clients and ourselves to go beyond preaching at them about outcomes. That can get that from reading a book. We owe it to them to produce some relevant and realistic ideas about how to achieve those outcomes.

What do you think?

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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.

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

As a consultant, your perception of project “success” is the basis from which your client and you conclude, for example, whether the project is of high quality, that money paid to you was well spent, that you did a good job as a consultant, and whether you might be hired again (if you are an external consultant). Early in the project, it is important for you and your client to discuss how to determine the success of the project.

Unfortunately, determining whether a project was successful or not is not nearly as easy as it might seem because there are numerous perspectives on what is project “success.” Therefore, it is important to consider all of these perspectives, especially about a complex – and usually changing – project

Consider the following possible definitions of what might be considered as “success” in your consulting project, and work with your client to select one or more.

Definition of Success #1: Desired outcomes and results listed in the project agreement are achieved.

Both you and your client should somehow specify the overall results that the project is to achieve. Ideally, the results are described in terms such that you both could readily discern if the results were achieved or not. This outcome is often a measure as to whether the project was successful or not.

Definition of Success #2: The client’s problem is solved.

More times than people realize, the originally specified project results have little to do with actually solving the most important problem in your client’s organization. That occurs because, as you and your client work together to examine and address their overall problem, you both realize that there is a more important problem to address. At that time, it is wise to change your project plans if both of you agree. Discuss the new results that you prefer and how you will know whether or not they are achieved.

Still, later on, your client might believe that any agreed-to results that were achieved from the project were not as important as addressing any current, unsolved problems, so your client might still conclude that the project was not as successful as it should have been. Or, your client might believe that any achieved results were actually more useful than addressing the original problem that you discussed, so your client might still conclude that the project was highly successful.

Definition of Success #3: The project is finished on time and within budget.

Often, your client has limited resources in terms of money and time. Therefore, any project that did not require more time and money than expected might be considered successful. That might be true, especially if your client has the philosophy that there are always problems to be solved in any organization and that the project was done as best as could be done.

Definition of Success #4: You and your client maintain a high-quality, working relationship.

The quality of your relationship with your client is often directly associated with what the client perceives to be the quality of the project. In a highly collaborative approach to consulting, you want your relationship with your client to be as open, honest and trusting as possible. The nature of the relationship supports your client’s strong, ongoing commitment and participation in the project itself, which, in turn, helps to ensure that the project effectively addresses problems in their organization.

Definition of Success #5: Your client learns to address similar problems by themselves in the future.

This outcome should be one of the major goals for any consultant. However, the exact nature of the problem may never arise in the client’s organization again, so it is often difficult to assess if the client has learned to solve that problem. Also, few consultants are willing to scope a project to the time required to assess whether a client really can solve the same type of problem in the future.

Definition of Success #6: Your client says that they would hire you again (if you are an external consultant).

One of the most powerful outcomes is that you both are willing to work with each other again. One of the ethical considerations for any consultant is to avoid creating a dependency of the client on the consultant – where the client cannot capably participate in the organization without the ongoing services of the consultant.

However, it is not uncommon that the client strongly believes that the quality of the relationship with the consultant is as important as the consultant’s expertise. The client might choose to use that consultant wherever and whenever they can in the future.

Definition of Success #7: You get paid in full.

However, you might feel good about the quality and progress of a project only to conclude, later on, if you have not been paid as promised, that the project was not successful.

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

(This blog post was adapted from the Field Guide to Consulting and Organizational Development by Carter McNamara, MBA, PhD, Authenticity Consulting, LLC

What do you think?

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Carter McNamara, MBA, PhD – Authenticity Consulting, LLC – 763-971-8890
Read my weekly blogs: Boards, Consulting and OD, Nonprofits and Strategic Planning.

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