Chapter Two: What is Organization Development?

Contents

2.1 What is Organization Development?
2.2 OD Values
2.3 The OD Approach to Supporting Organizational Change
2.4 The OD Process
2.5 OD Ethical Guidelines
Questions for Reflection & Summary

2.1 What is Organization Development?

In general, we can say that organization development is an approach to support individuals, teams, and organizations in accomplishing changes to improve effectiveness by applying behavioral and social sciences that foster learning and development. There are several definitions of OD, but we can list essential aspects that are common across these definitions and represent the essence of the OD approach:

• It is a planned process that facilitates change by intervening in the system. The OD process seeks to understand the organizational system and work with the organization’s members to promote desired changes that will improve organizational efficiency. It involves working at the different levels of the organization – individuals, teams, and the whole organization. It is mainly used to support complex changes that will be accomplished in the medium behavioral and social sciences-long term.
• It uses social and behavioral sciences to understand how organizations operate and to facilitate change. Applied social and behavioral sciences include concepts from psychology, sociology, anthropology, and economics. This is a characteristic that makes the OD approach different than some other change approaches.
• It aims to build capacity in the organization, their teams, and employees so they can learn how to support change on their own in the future. Therefore, it necessarily involves learning and development initiatives to share knowledge and develop skills.
• It aims to improve organizational effectiveness, understanding that effectiveness can be an outcome of different things, including employee satisfaction, social and environmental impact, financial health, operational performance, and brand reputation.
• It shares values that drive decisions and actions in an OD process, including participation, personal growth, development and learning, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and social justice.

Organizational Development is also a term often used. We prefer the term Organization Development to emphasize changes not only among organizational members but also among the whole organization system. More than an approach to support organizational change, OD also incorporates a set of skills and values that guide the OD processes. In an organizational setting, any professional who knows the OD approach and has mastered OD skills can be a change facilitator.

As change is always happening in organizations, professionals who develop OD skills and values are often in high demand. Anyone can learn the OD approach and develop OD skills to leverage in the workplace, including managers, department leaders, and human resources professionals. One of the goals of this book is to provide this knowledge and activities to practice these skills so you can develop them. OD has also become a well-regarded profession. Some professionals become experts in OD and specialize in specific OD interventions, which we will learn more about in future chapters. These professionals are often called OD consultants or OD practitioners. There are OD associations, such as the OD Network, that promote knowledge sharing and serve as a guardian of OD values.

2.2 OD Values

Values are deeply rooted beliefs that guide judgments of less or more preferable behavior. They serve as internal guidelines for how individuals make choices, solve conflicts, take actions, and interact with others. The organization development field is founded on humanistic principles, and believes individuals learn mainly through reflection on personal experiences and seek learning and development to realize their full potential. Although various scholars and practitioners define OD values slightly differently, they are all rooted in a humanistic foundation. Core OD values are:

• Participation – effective change happens when individuals are willing to embrace it. Therefore, creating conditions for individuals to participate and engaging them in the change process is a key value of OD.
• Dialogue and collaboration – a fundamental part of a change process is to understand multiple perspectives and seek mutual benefits. Conflicting situations are a natural part of changing efforts. The OD approach aims to create spaces for dialogue and collaboration, where conflicts can be discussed constructively and new ideas can flourish.
• Growth, development, and learning – a core value for OD is the belief that individuals can and are willing to learn and develop. The OD approach provides opportunities for individuals, teams, and organizations to learn. OD facilitates change through learning.
• Diversity, equity, and inclusion – respect for the multiplicity of identities, backgrounds, and perspectives is essential for creating conditions conducive to participation, learning, and development.

As you will learn over the course of this book, OD values are intrinsically connected to how OD support changes.

2.3 The OD Approach to Supporting Organizational Change

Organization development theories go back to the 1950s when Kurt Lewin was working on strategies to improve group work and problem-solving approaches. Lewin developed a model called Action Research, which, to this day, serves as a foundation for most OD processes. The Action Research approach is a participatory and democratic process where organizational members collaborate to understand issues and opportunities for improvement and to develop and implement solutions. It has four main steps: defining and diagnosing the problem, planning actions to solve it, implementing actions, and evaluating the results.

In the past decades, the OD field has evolved as new approaches to solving problems and supporting change have been necessary to tackle the increased complexity and fast-changing nature of organizations and societies. Frequently, challenges in an organization are not clearly connected to some specific root causes. Instead, challenging situations can be an outcome of multiple interconnected factors that are hard to pinpoint. Additionally, as context changes quickly, organizations can not invest too much time in attempting to identify all factors contributing to the problem and finding a perfect solution because, by the time they do that, it is very likely that new elements and contextual factors are now in place and the identified solution is not the most appropriate anymore. This complex nature of problems necessitates approaches that are more adaptive so that responses to challenges can match reality and be adjusted if needed. Therefore, more than offering the best solution to a problem, OD approaches aim to equip individuals, teams, and organizations with skills and mindsets so they can learn how to deal with complex problems and adapt quickly to fast-changing realities.

New OD approaches focus significantly on nurturing dialogue between members of an organizational system as an effective way to develop these skills and mindsets. These approaches, called Dialogic OD, are grounded in a socio-constructivist understanding of organizations and believe that to support change in a complex world, solutions are not only technical, with new processes and structures. Instead, organizational members need to reflect on the way they understand the system, how they interact with each other and then develop new ways of working together. Often, organizational members need to change not only their behaviors but also their beliefs and values. Dialogic OD supports these processes by fostering conversations, inquiring into multiple perspectives, and promoting collaborative problem-solving.

Most OD approaches, including Dialogic OD approaches, share some similarities with Action Research. In general, some elements are present in most OD approaches:

• The OD change facilitator – In most OD change efforts, there will be one or more individuals who assume the responsibility for structuring and conducting the OD process, as well as facilitating the collaboration between all the diverse stakeholders involved in the change effort. As mentioned before, anyone with knowledge of the OD approach and equipped with OD skills and values can serve in this role. It can be someone internal or external to the organization, often called an OD consultant or OD practitioner.
• The change team – As facilitating change using an OD approach is a participatory process, there is often a group of organizational members who are fully engaged in the change effort. In general, other stakeholders may also participate in the change effort on some occasions, as we will detail later.
• OD interventions – OD interventions are structured activities to support change and are based on behavioral sciences and principles of adult and organizational learning. In general, change interventions will aim to disrupt the current behaviors and relationships and promote learning and development. Chapter 7 discusses some of the most well-known OD interventions. Some examples of these interventions are assessments, feedback 360, coaching, mentoring, start-up and transition meetings, confrontation meetings, future search, word cafe, and appreciative inquiry.

2.4 The OD Process

Most OD processes will include the following five main stages (Figure 1):

• Getting Started – In this first stage, two main questions should be answered: What is the problem the organization is trying to solve, or the change they want to make? And, Who are the key stakeholders that need to be involved in this change effort? This stage is about developing an initial understanding of the organization, its context, the current apparent issues, and the desired future state. It is also a critical stage to establish ground rules for how the OD process will be conducted, align expectations, and define mutual goals and a shared direction for the change effort.
• Gathering Data – The goal of this stage is to deepen the understanding of the organizational system, its issues, and opportunities for performance improvement. Through different data-gathering methods, the change facilitator, often supported by the change team, collects internal and external information that can help to develop a broader picture of the situation and identify interconnections and root causes.
• Analyzing Data and Providing Feedback – In this stage, the data collected is analyzed, and the findings are discussed with organizational members. Frequently, leaders in organizations jump to developing solutions without attempting to understand and make sense of the situation at hand. Therefore, although it can require some time and resources, carefully gathering and analyzing data to develop a broader perspective of the challenges and opportunities for improvement is a critical step in an OD process.
• Conducting OD interventions – In this stage, the change facilitator plans and conducts OD interventions to support the change effort. Often, a set of interventions is planned over a long period. At the broader organizational level, these multiple interventions can support the identification of opportunities for improvement, alignment of desired changes, identification and prioritization of necessary actions, and the definition of an action plan and next steps. At the individual level, OD interventions promote reflection, increased self-awareness, and skills development. At the team level, OD interventions foster interpersonal relationships and improve team dynamics.
• Evaluating and Sustaining Change – This stage aims to evaluate the OD process and its outcomes and identify necessary adjustments and supporting mechanisms to sustain the change in the long term. This is the last stage of the OD process, and not uncommonly, new opportunities for change or adjustments are identified, and the OD process is reinitiated. Part of the goal of an OD approach is for the organization to be equipped with the necessary skill set to continue this new change process by itself.

Although the OD process is illustrated as a step-by-step process, oftentimes, that is not what happens. Some stages might overlap, or a need to step back and conduct a second round of conversations at some stage might arise. For example, the analysis might run in parallel with data gathering, or, on some occasions, the need for more information and additional data collection might emerge during the data analysis and feedback stage or even during interventions.

In summary, in most OD approaches, the change facilitator will work together with the organization’s members to:

• Identify areas for improvement and opportunities for positive change
• Map forces supporting and resisting the change
• Facilitate OD interventions to develop solutions and support change
• Build change capacity in the organizational system and its members
• Install strategies to evaluate change, promote adjustments, and support mechanisms

2.5 OD Ethical Guidelines

The OD process often tackles issues that can directly impact individuals in organizations that are undergoing change. Changes in the organizational components, in general, have an effect on how individuals work, interact, and develop. Several institutions focused on human resource development and organization development processes have established ethical guidelines to ensure that individuals conducting or supporting OD processes do so with care and respect for others, following the humanistic values on which OD was founded.

In simple terms, ethical guidelines are a list of statements that define acceptable and unacceptable behaviors. Many professions have their own ethical guidelines. For professional conducting or supporting OD processes, two crucial ethical standards are:

Integrity – being aware of one’s ability and limitations to support the OD process and sharing it honestly with others. Act with integrity and responsibility.

Respect – act respectfully toward others and respect their fundamental rights, striving to avoid or minimize harm and contribute to individuals’ well-being.

The Academy of Human Resource Development Standards on Ethics and Integrity provides more comprehensive ethical guidelines that can be applied to the OD process and change facilitation.

Ethical concerns may arise in different stages of the OD process. Some potential situations to be aware of:

In summary, it is critical to communicate transparently with the organization’s stakeholders involved in the change effort in all stages of the OD process and to always be mindful of your own skills and OD values.

Summary

Organization development can be defined as an approach to support individuals, teams, and organizations in accomplishing changes to improve effectiveness by applying behavioral and social sciences that foster learning and development. The OD process is usually conducted by an individual who has OD skills and comprises five stages. In the first state – getting started – an initial understanding of the problem the organization is trying to solve is provided. In the second stage – data gathering – information is collected to develop a broader perspective of the problem and opportunities for improvement, which is then shared with the organization in the third stage – diagnosis and feedback. Specific OD interventions are implemented in the fourth stage to support organizational change. Finally, an evaluation to assess the change effectiveness is conducted in the last stage of the OD Process. Besides OD skills, someone conducting an OD process must adhere to ethical guidelines, particularly integrity and respect toward others, and embrace OD values of participation, personal growth, development and learning, diversity, equity and inclusion, and social justice.