Organisation Development (OD) is a subject and approach that has emerged in its own right over the last forty-odd years or so. As it emerged as a discipline, in the late 1960’s Richard Beckhard defined its key characteristics as:
• “Planned”
• “Organisation-wide”
• “Managed from the top”
in order to:
• “Increase organisational effectiveness and health”
through interventions in the organisation’s processes using behavioural science knowledge.
Nevertheless, it was still, in the 1960’s, mainly pre-occupied with interventions at either an individual or group level, mainly to facilitate incremental change, rather than the “whole system”, large-scale interventions which characterise the strategic change efforts and initiatives we are used to today.
Organisation Development was described by French and Bell in 1978 as:
“A long range effort to improve an organisation’s problem solving and renewal processes” through “collaborative management of organisational culture”, “with the assistance of a change agent or catalyst”, influenced and shaped by emerging “theory and technology of applied behavioural science”.
It came to be known as Organisation Development through the work of some key people in the 1960’s, through the development of T groups (also in the 1960’s) and the learnings from those, from Lewin’s work on change and Force Field Analysis and from emerging understandings of organisations as open systems.
The 1970’s were characterized in this context by the emphasis on team development, training for personal growth and self-directed learning and by strategies that were designed to achieve fundamental change and shifts in organisations.
In the 1980’s, the focus moved to systems thinking (i.e the organisation as a whole system, with people being a system sub-set), the importance of vision and visioning, understanding (and being able to affect) organisational culture and behaviour and by Total Quality Management.
In other words, throughout the world, people were starting to pay more attention to the significance to organisations and their effectiveness of:
• the ways in which people learned and how to create the best conditions for learning to take place
• the ways in which people were led and managed
• the extent to which they were included and able to participate as important players and contributors in “the whole system”
• the ways in which people related to each other
• the way they reacted and behaved in certain situations and contexts and to
• the importance of how people constructed their reality and the culture of the organisation by their interactions, conversations and behavioural “norms” within an organisation
• the extent to which people in organisations (other than its senior leaders) were able to participate and collaborate in order to inform and collectively develop the organisation’s purpose or mission, vision and values and to develop strategies and plans in order to deliver them.
By the 1990’s, there was increased interest in the idea and contribution of values-driven approaches and organisational learning, but that sat sometimes uncomfortably alongside “Downsizing”, Business Process Re-engineering, “Rationalisation” (an increasingly global phenomenon) and an increasing use of particular, single approaches and methodologies.
The increasing use of management consultants to problem solve or to manage a change process sometimes led to lack of employee engagement and inclusion and to particular models and frameworks being imposed top-down, with little other ownership or contribution, which in turn led to employee sabotage of the change effort. Such mechanistic approaches were criticised for being too rigid and for taking an over-simplified view of leadership, management and organisations.
Such problems gave rise to increasing research and interest in collaborative approaches, complexity thinking and understanding (organisations as complex systems which cannot be controlled, as such) and on the need to develop facilitative leaders and managers, rather than managers whose role is to plan change, to enable organisations to develop a culture of genuine empowerment, risk-taking and experimentation.
Burns (1996) said that key organisational activities were: “information-gathering about the external environment and internal objectives and capabilities; communication – the transmission, analysis and discussion of information and learning” and “the ability to develop new skills, identify appropriate responses and draw knowledge from their own and others’ past and present actions”.