Reaction to the 6 P’s of Organizational Development

Last year, I attended the OD Network‘s annual conference and found the participants there to be thoughtful, insightful, and committed professionals in the field of organizational development (OD).  One interesting dialogue at the conference was about how the profession should define OD.  Tom Lockwood, one of the speakers, challenged the OD professionals present to come up with a memorable, concise definition of the profession that would resonate with the lay public.  I enjoy a challenge and published with the following definition on this blog:

OD is the principled application of practices from the behavioral sciences to change power dynamics in a manner that unleashes organizational potential in order to improve performance and create profits.

Reactions

In the intervening time, I have received both positive feedback and some criticism for this definition.  In the spirit of keeping up the dialogue, I wanted to share with you several comments by OD and change management professionals who took issue with my definition.  The three most common criticisms are listed below:

• Too Trite – Some felt that the use of “6 P’s” came across as too cutesy and therefore unprofessional.  After all, some argued, why P’s?  Why not “7 T’s” or “three S’s”?
• Missing P – The second criticism was more about the content of the definition.  Some professionals felt that I had missed one important P, people .  OD professionals always put people at the center of their practice.  One OD colleague suggested that, with this inclusion, the definition should be the 7 P’s of Organizational Development.
• Making Profits – Finally, many practitioners felt that my focus on “profits” as the last P unnecessarily narrowed the breath and depth of change that OD is trying to produce or limited its appeal to change efforts in the private sector.

Responses to Criticism

• Must Be Memorable – The “6 P’s of Organizational Development” was deliberately chosen to be memorable.  Too often OD professionals cannot or are unwilling to boil down what the profession is about to a bumper sticker, however, this is exactly the point of the challenge.  In a world of sound bites, OD needs to have its own sound bite and repeat that sound bite often enough that it gets picked up by the mainstream.  Of course, as OD professionals, we do more than six things but the public needs an easy way to understand and remember what we do before they will engage us in a deeper dialogue about how we can help.  Think of the 6 P’s as a “mental appetizer” before the full “OD meal.”  The 6 P’s stimulate the mind to want more.
• Of Course We Need People –  For those OD professionals who felt that I missed people as one of  the P’s in my definition, I would argue that the inclusion of people was implied.  Whenever you change the “power dynamics” in an organization, you are inherently talking about changing how people think and act.  After all, it is people who set up differences in power, authority, and decision-making rights within organizations, not some external force of nature.  However, if you wanted to hit the pubic over the head with the idea that OD takes a people-centric focus to analyzing and improving organizations, I could be persuaded to include the following, “OD is the principled application of practices from the behavioral sciences to change power dynamics in a manner that unleashes organizational potential in order to improve people’s performance and create profits.  
• Profit is Important – The strongest reaction by far was to the use of “profit” as the final P.  This reaction was very curious to me because it came mostly from individual consultants who get paid for their services by a whole slew of organizations and have to make a profit themselves in order to stay in business.  Profit is a measure of organizational survival.  Those organizations that make sustainable profits, whether they are distributed to shareholders (i.e., like most public companies) or reinvested in the organization (i.e., like most non-profits), are more likely to survive in a competitive and dynamic environment.  While I agree that the changes OD unleashes in organizations is not solely confined to making money, saving money, or managing risks, all OD interventions should be about enhancing organizational performance in a way that leads to organizational survive.  Profits are just a prerequisite for that survival.

Bottom Line:  Thank you to all the OD and change management professionals who engaged me in both off-line and on-line discussions about developing a memorable “laymen’s” definition of OD.  One of the things that this whole exercise points out is that in order for a profession to be clearly understood and gain wider traction with the public, we all need to be able to talk about what we do, how we do it, and, most importantly, why what we do is important to the public in a way that is easy to understand and memorable.

The “6Ps” of Organizational Development

Recently, I was at the OD Network‘s 2011 annual conference in Baltimore.  One of the keynote speakers, Tom Lockwood, challenged the organizational development (OD) community to develop a tagline that would be as memorable as the “4Ps” of Marketing (product, place, promotion, and price) in order to help ourselves to define this field in a way that was more accessible.  His point was that people think in terms of design and the “4Ps” are an easy way to understand what marketing is all about.  I thought that this was an excellent challenge to the OD community, which often has trouble defining what we even mean by “organizational development” to ourselves, our clients, and the wider world.  So I came up with the “6Ps” of OD:  principles, practices, power, potential, performance, and profit.

• Principles – The field of organizational development arose as a humanist reaction to the abuses of Taylorism in many workplaces.  These roots are solidly grounded in inclusiveness and democratic decision-making.  Thus, the field itself rests on certain principles that practitioners should espouse or they are not practicing OD.
• Practices – These are the methods defined by the behavioral sciences, especially those having to do with group decision-making and communication, that OD practitioners employ in order to foment, direct, and sustain change in organizations.
• Power –  Because the field is grounded in both inclusiveness and democratic decision-making, it requires that practitioners be concerned with power – who has it, how it is exercised, whether it is shared, and how people feel empowered or powerless in an organization.  This focus on power is unique to OD.
• Potential – Every OD practitioner believes that every organization is its own “problem” and the foundation of its own “solution.”  The goal of the OD practitioner is to work with the people in an organization in order to help them recognize that the answer they have been looking for is right in front of them.
• Performance –  This is the sum total of both a person’s behaviors and the resulting accomplishments.  I find that performance is often what is meant when OD practitioners talk about helping an organization and its employees “to improve,” or “become more effective,” or “align better with the environment.”
• Profit – There has to be an end that OD practitioners are trying to achieve.  While many will take exception to the term “profit,” I believe that profit is a key indicator of  OD success because a profit enables an organization to survive and, in the long-term, to thrive.  While turning a profit many not be the only goal of OD interventions, those interventions that don’t save money, make money, or enhance an organization’s ability to manage risks are probably not worth investing in.

Bottom Line:  OD is the principled application of practices from the behavioral sciences to change power dynamics in a manner that unleashes organizational potential in order to improve performance and create profit.

Engineering Great Collaboration

People frequently ask me, “How do you get great collaboration?”  The answer is two-fold.

Step #1:  Do No Harm

First, collaboration is NOT a panacea for all organizational problems so make sure that you really need to collaborate because there are significant costs to doing so.  Morten T. Hansen points out that the benefits of collaboration must outweight the costs or collaboration does not make business sense.  He suggests using the Collaboration Quotient to determine when the benefits of collaboration are greater than the costs.  More recently, Andrew Campbell has pointed out that collaboration is situational and should be used sparingly.  So the first step in engineering great collaboration is to ensure that you really need it to accomplish your objective.

Step #2:  Align the Performance Factors

The second step is to look at collaboration from a “systems” point of view.  The systems framework that I have found most useful is Carl Binder‘s Six Boxes Model, which is based on the Behavioral Engineering Model (BEM) created by the founder of Human Performance Technology (HPT), Thomas Gilbert.  The Six Boxes organize the key performance factors that affect behavior, including collaboration.

There are three clusters of performance factors in the organizational environment:  information and feedback, resources and tools, as well as consequences and rewards.  These factors in the organizational environment account for anywhere from 60-75% of the influence on successful performance.  That means great collaboration requires:

• Information and Feedback – Collaborators need deep information on the issue they are supposed to solve, access to the stakeholders for that issue, and timely, specific feedback from one another throughout the process.
• Resources and Tools – Collaborators need to have time to collaborate effectively.  If the collaboration is seen as tangential to their “real” work, the collaboration will quickly fall apart.  Time is the most precious resource that we have and collaboration takes time.  In addition, colleagues are going to need to be able to connect, especially those geographically dispersed.  Tools such as webcasting, tele-presence, and social media technologies can help close the distance gap.
• Consequences and Rewards – If the result of engaging in collaboration is negative, either personally or professionally, people will not collaborate.  You need to ensure that the personal and professional outcomes for people engaged in collaboration enhance rather than detract from their individual goals.  Additionally, incentives that promote good interpersonal dynamics between colleagues will go a long way in creating a more productive collaboration.

There are also three cluster of performance factors in each individual:  skills and knowledge, talent and innate capabilities, as well as motivations and preferences.

These factors in the each individual account for anywhere from 25-40% of the influence on performance.  That means great collaboration requires:

• Skills and Knowledge –  There are two sets of skills that collaborators need:  subject matter expertise and process-oriented facilitation.  Colleagues must have unique skills, knowledge, and perspectives so that the group can tap into this expertise.  Also, colleagues need skills at interpersonal communication, conflict resolution, consensus building, and group dynamics to create a manageable and sustainable process for working together.
• Talent and Innate Capabilities – Some people are just “wired” to want to work together while others are really better off as individual contributors.  Recruit the former to the collaboration but bring in the latter at strategically significant points to help the group achieve their goal (and then move these individual contributions onto other endeavors).
• Motivations and Preferences – All collaborations are a mix of individual and group accomplishments.  Provide recognition and praise for individual actions that advances the group’s goal or contributes to the group’s internal effectiveness.  Early in the collaboration, get some “wins on the board” so that the group knows it can achieve what it set out to accomplish.

With the right organizational and individual performance factors in place, collaboration is much more likely to result in solving important issues.

Bottom Line:  Once you have determined that collaboration is required to solve an issue and aligned both the organizational and individual performance factors (with emphasis on the organizational factors since they have a greater impact on performance), you and your colleagues are ready to reap the benefits of great collaboration.

Building a Collaborative Culture: Enterprise-wide versus Productive Pockets

Can organizations build enterprise-wide collaborations?  Answering this question is the focus of an article by Paul Adler, Charles Heckscher, and Laurence Prusak.  Their argument is that in the previous century a few companies who mastered the ability to reliably meet the mass market demand succeeded and became household names:  General Motors, DuPont, etc.  However, in today’s competitive, global economy reliability is a “given” not a competitive advantage.  Instead, these researchers suggest that the real competitive advantage is delivery of sustained, large-scale, and efficient innovation.  They argue that in order to create this competitive advantage, a “matrixed” organizational design would be best because it is positioned to fully utilize four winning practices that drive this type of enterprise-wide innovation.  The four winning practices are:

• A Shared Purpose
• An Ethic of Contribution
• Interdependent Processes
• Infrastructure that Rewards Collaboration

To their credit, the authors acknowledge the difficulty of managing in a matrixed organization and that this type of organizational design has a high failure rate.  They believe that a matrixed organization with these four winning practices embedded deeply in their culture will not degenerate into political bickering.  In any case, they state that the matrixed organization is more likely to provide the competitive advantage of sustainable, large scale, and efficient innovation than either organizations designed around traditional heirarchy or free-agent autonomy.

While I agree with their argument up to a point (sustainable innovation is the new competitive advantage and collaboration does help to drive innovation better than free-agency), I am skeptical that enterprise-wide collaboration is really the answer given the recent history of this type of collaboration at Cisco.  Yet, there might be an alternative to the matrix design proposed in this article that would also allow sustainable, large scale, and efficient innovation.  Let’s call this alternative design Productive Pockets.  Instead of making the whole organization a matrix or seek to have a collaborative culture throughout the organization, a Productive Pocket design would focus on instituting the four winning practices above in certain parts of the organization charged with innovating new products and services to meet changing customer needs, while leaving much of the organization in more of a traditional heirarchy to ensure reliable delivery to those customers.  The Productive Pockets approach would seek to build a collaborative culture in parts of the organization where it is appropriate and leave other parts of the business with a different, but hopefully, complementary culture.

The Productive Pockets design is even suggested in the researchers’ article.  They observed a unit of Citibank called e-Solutions.  This unit was charged with creating web-based solutions for the core cash-managment and trading businesses so customers would not have to go elsewhere.  The organizational re-design did nto turn Citibank into a matrixed organization but allowed the e-Solutions unit to develop its own collaborative culture alongside the more traditional banking culture that existed at Citibank.  The e-Solutions group was charged with innovating, adopted the four winning practices, and effectively became a Productive Pocket within the larger Citibank organization.

Bottom Line:  Executives need to think about their organizational design and how it both liberates and inhibits innovation, the new competitive advantage.  However, they should be skeptical of wholesale organizational change to an enterprise-wide collaborative structure, when they can selectively empower a collaborative culture to grow up and between certain business units (leaving other parts of their businesses untouched by collaboration).

The Self-organizing Sales Process: A Radical Concept

One of the best articles in the latest issue of Harvard Business Review, was written by John Abele, founder of Boston Scientific.  The article focused on the successful collaborations that he witnessed throughout his business career.  The one I found most interesting was his story about Jack Whitehead’s radical, self-organizing sales process.

Brief background, Jack had bought the rights to a machine that analyzed bodily fluids using a new process of spectrometry.  As a result of this machine, multiple samples of blood, urine, and other organic fluids could be analyzed in minutes instead of the labor-intensive process that characterized hospital labs at the time.  Jack recognized the truly revolutionary nature of this invention and ensured that the machine was protected by several long-term patents.

In order to sell this revolutionary machine (for which there was not existing market), he decided that the target customers should be early adopters who shared his excitement about the technology.  After pointing out the ironclad patents protecting the technology, Jack invited clinical scientists to spend a week at this factory and pay for the technology up front.  This was radical – take up customers’ precious time and position a pretty aggressive pricing strategy.  Yet, this approach made the early adopters among these clinical scientists a close, tight-knit group who spent a week with Jack and his employees.  This small group setting offered the opportunity for the early adopters to self-organize around the technology not solely as individual customers but also as pioneers on the cutting edge of something new.

In small groups during the week-long sessions, they learned how to use the technology, common issues with the machine, and how to create new analytic procedures using the technology.  The small group dynamics made the early adopters feel more like partners with Jack and his team rather than customers.  As a result, they went back out to their hospitals with a sense of “ownership” over what revolutionary new analyses the technology was capable of creating.  This in turn made them a cadre of evangelists for the technology as the group developed new applications, published papers, and established standards for the technology.  Jack created successful sales by turning his own customers into the technology’s biggest advocates and turning conventional sales advice on its head.

Bottom Line: In order to create a market, one needs a compelling vision around a new technology empowered by a small group process to build a collaborative platform for the technology’s actual adoption in the marketplace.  (And a good patent attorney does not hurt either!)

Principle #2: A Non-collaborative Culture Wins Every Time

“If you put a good person against a bad system, the system wins every time.”  – Geary Rummler

The collaborative corollary to the Rummler quote above is, “If you put a collaborative person in a non-collaborative culture, the culture wins every time.”  This principle is grounded in human performance technology (HPT) research that continuously shows the workplace environment has a much bigger effect on results than individual traits such as skills, innate capabilities, and motivation.  In other words, the larger social forces of a workplace swamp individual abilities.

Workplace culture, defined as a system of meaning, shapes assumptions and perceptions about individual’s norms of behavior.  For example, in a collaborative culture, a request to bring experts together in order to pool talent on a persistent issues might be interpreted as rather routine.  In a non-collaborative culture, the same convening of talent might be viewed as a “waste of time” or worse as usurping important resources from management.  In such a non-supportive culture the professional who favors working collaboratively would be viewed with suspicion.

It is important to keep this second principle of collaboration in mind at all times.  Because we often think of collaboration as interactions between two or more people across departmental (or functional) boundaries, it is easy to assume that the most important factors in a collaboration’s success are at the interpersonal level.  This would be a mistake.  Collaborations are only consistently productive and successful when they both follow the first principle (discussed previously) and take place in an organizational context that values collaboration as a means of achieving results.

While I have written extensively in the past on some of the characteristics of a good collaborator (e.g., courage and humility) and the number one characteristic of poor collaborators (e.g., arrogance), it would be a mistake to interpret this interpersonal focus as meaning most collaborations succeed or fail because of individual traits.  Most collaborations fail because they are either unnecessary (they failure to meet the collaboration premium described in the first principle) or because the organization’s culture is hostile to collaboration.

Bottom Line:  It is important that those of us who value collaboration as a means of achieving sustainable, exemplary results take a hard look at our own organizations in order to determine whether the existing culture supports collaboration or can change to support collaborative efforts better.

Building a Better MBA: Change Management at B-Schools

Reinvention is part of many core products’ life cycle.  This is especially true for services.  A fascinating book was published this year, Rethinking the MBA, by Srikant M. Datar, David A. Garvin, and Patrick G. Cullen.  The basic premise of the book is pretty simple: given the changed economic environment after the great global recession and the fact that many of the people whose decision lead to the great global recession had been educated at top business schools, faculties at these business schools needed to rethink their core product – the Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree.  In a business world chiefly characterized as unstable, the MBA is no longer the “golden ticket” to job security and wealth that is once was.  The book catalogs different elite business schools’ responses to these changing market and societal pressures.

While I will go into some of the most interesting solutions that business schools adopted, one of the most striking things was how uniform the change process was across the different schools.  In general, the change management followed this framework:

• Solidifying the Case for Change – In general a dean or high-level administrator collected qualitative and quantitative data from a variety of stakeholders including: alumni, recruiters, industry executives, students, and other academics.  The purpose of this data gathering was to develop an understanding of the challenges in the environment and determine what it would take to address these changes.  I use the word “solidifying” instead of “making” because in general alumni, recruiters, and faculty all had a feeling that the MBA, as currently constituted, was missing the mark.  Often the dean was bringing people who were reaching the same conclusions together in order to share perspectives and data.
• Recruiting Senior Faculty – Since the power at a business school resides with its tenured faculty, the next step was to get this critical constituency on-board with the idea that significant changes needed to be made to the courses and structured learning involved in getting an MBA.  In general, a small cadre of senior faculty members became significantly involved in the reinvention effort – serving simultaneously as resident experts, “worker bees,” and advocates for change with the rest of the faculty.
• Breaking the Work into Chunks –  This small cadre of senior faculty then divided up the tasks of studying possible changes in the curriculum and developing these pieces of the new curriculum.  This allowed individual faculty to become more invested in what they thought most important.  In addition, a small “steering committee,” usually including the dean, coordinated between task teams.
• Developing the Budget – Once the major outline of the changes to the curriculum were known, the steering committee was often charged with coming up with an estimate of the total investment to make the curricular changes happen.  For example, at Yale University’s School of Management (SOM) the curriculum changes cost between two and five million dollars.
• Re-orienting Academic Services – In order to support and sustain the curricular changes the academic services from case-writing to technology to scheduling to study abroad to individualized coaching and career assessment had to change or, in some cases, be significantly developed from scratch.
• Voting (Up or Down) –  The “moment of truth” was when the entire faculty had to vote on whether or not to implement the changes to the curriculum.  Winning approval was not a foregone conclusions since many of these curriculum changes could have crashed on the schools’ internal, political shoals.  Often, because the senior faculty had taken the lead in developing the changes to the curriculum they became a built in constituency for making the change as well as for lobbying other faculty to support the change.  The power that the deep involvement of the faculty in the reinvention project, essentially “putting the lunatics in charge of the asylum,” cannot be underestimated.  Involving people in defining their own work environment is a powerful incentive for both creativity and engagement.
• Test Piloting and Monitoring – The curriculum changes then needed to be phased in and their impact on students monitored for feedback on what was working and if there were any problems.  In all the cases cited, the change was perceived positively by most graduate students.
• Adjusting and Embedding – The curriculum changes unleashed a great deal of energy but because this reinvention took one to two years to complete and occurred in addition to the faculties’ regular teaching and research workloads, often those most involved through task teams and on the steering committee were running on “fumes” soon after the change was implemented.  A common concern was how the change would be sustained beyond its initial two years in order to prevent faculty from sliding back into their “comfort zones” and only offering lip service to the new curriculum.

I think that the change management process used at school after school provides a “road map” for the human-side of any product or service’s successful reinvention.  The key appears to be creating a constituency for change and the most powerful constituency is the employees of that organization, in this case tenured professors at elite business schools.