Radical Organisation Development

Mark Cole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429955969
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Development
• Index: Business

Contemporary organisation development (OD) in practice draws on sophisticated theory and tools to advance organisational change, using a range of concepts and techniques including positive psychology, appreciation, and active engagement with the workforce. OD is considered to be humanistic and, as a result, progressive. Mark Cole's original and thought-provoking treatise points at a hole at the heart of OD practice: it fails to consider the role of power in the workplace – and the result is disempowering.

Drawing from critical theory as a radical means to redefine practice, Mark Cole exposes this paradox and reveals the significant limitations and negative impacts of current OD practice. We need to replace the idea of the organisation with a focus on active human organising to enable individuals within systems to effect change from the grassroots up: this concept is Radical OD.

Essential reading for students, practitioners, and academics of OD; the wider HR community, and all with an interest in developing their understanding of organisational life, this ground-breaking manifesto offers unique and challenging insight into the corporate presence of OD – and challenges the willing reader to reimagine the focus and intent of this work.

1

INTRODUCTION

Back in 2017, I was leafing through an edition of Fortune magazine. There was article about a factory in the Mexican city of Nazareno, a supplier to Levi Strauss, the US jeans manufacturer. The report suggested the rewriting of the prevailing notion of the maquiladora as a sweatshop where poorly paid people cheaply create products which, on making the short journey over the border, acquire a substantial price tag. It was not so much the story itself as the illustration that accompanied it that piqued my interest and set me thinking.

It was a photo of a group of 25 or so people from the workforce from Linea 1 in the factory who were involved in a team-building exercise, which involved them standing in a circle and passing a ball of wool to one another. The article explained that,

The players from Linea 1 are finishing a 10-week course designed to teach them about health, hygiene, and sanitation, as well as communication and critical thinking. The string game? That’s intended to make everyone feel personally invested in and accountable for acting on what they’ve learned. The cat’s cradle is a web of commitments, representing their new connectedness—a physical reminder that their bonds are stronger, surer than before.

(Fry, 2017)

This was part of Levi’s wider initiative that carried the title ‘Improving Worker Well-Being.’ And, in that regard, it was asserted that, ‘The goal is to build a network of more productive, better-run factories—with happier, healthier employees and lower rates of costly absenteeism and turnover’ (Fry, 2017). The report went on to suggest that the overall initiative was having a positive impact, in terms of engagement and hence productivity.

And yet, and yet. There was something about the photo which made me bridle somewhat. Certainly, it showed 25 or so people in what looked like a modern and clean manufacturing location engaged in something that most of us have been involved in at some point in our working lives. The article asserted that everyone looked happy – and drew attention to the number of people seen smiling. My take was a little different, though: some wore smiles but could not really be said to be smiling. And they could be read – and this, I am content to concede, was interpretative on my part – as smiles that might have derived from one or two possible circumstances: either they were the lightly worn smiles of a group of workmates watching each other do something that, by and large, looks foolish; or they were the smiles of those who were being paid at that time to pass around a ball of wool rather than sit on a production line and produce pair after pair of jeans for a global market.

The latter suggestion resonated with something shared with me by a colleague a while back. He tells the story of a Chief Executive who ran a number of ‘town hall’ meetings around his organisation and was consistently impressed by the fact that these gatherings regularly overran in terms of timing and that those from the shop floor seemed to have come armed with the most questions. My friend queried this with people in the workforce, who more or less confirmed that they preferred to sit on comfy chairs and ask pointless questions than spend that time at the hard edge of the work. I felt that something similar might apply in the picture from the Mexican factory; moreover, I was forced to wonder the extent to which, with a global mega-brand breathing down their necks, the employees in the photograph felt that they had any choice but to be absorbed into Levi’s intrusive initiative to improve their well-being.

I was also moved to observe that there was an express connection being made between organisational effectiveness and the programme that was being offered to these employees. It was not an altruistic effort to improve the lot of the workers in and of itself: it was quite blatantly an exercise to incorporate the workforce in order to extract greater output from them. Now, one might argue that no one is being harmed in this: the employees are developing through the initiative and the employer is getting a bigger bang for their wage-buck. But I was intrigued at the transparency of this, as an approach, when oftentimes this sort of activity foregrounds the humanistic aspect and veils the payoff that is anticipated from a corporate perspective.

This coincided with a shift in my professional thinking as I found myself becoming more critical of what I was asked to do in the field of organisation development (OD) and the ways in which I might then approach to do it. Traditionally, I have worked in learning and development, by and large in (or around) the National Health Service. More recently, I have spent an increasing amount of my time engaged in OD activity, where I have worked under the personal suppositions that this work is humanistic and progressive. It is, after all, a field wherein practitioners focus positively on the way in which the workforce can be supported to gain more from their work – and thence enable the organisation to be more effective, in terms of its business performance.

This view was reinforced by what is broadly said about OD. There are myriad definitions of the work and how it is done, with every writer seemingly having their own. There are however themes that seem to either recur or speak strongly to the way in which the work is done in practice, which includes the efforts tend to be planned and long-term; it is underpinned by behavioural science (latterly, the blandishments of positive psychology) and demonstrates some obeisance to psychodynamics; it tends to pivot around the notion of change and its delivery, with a special emphasis on workforce participation in that; and it is ordinarily commissioned from the top of the organisation (Alban & Scherer, 2005, p. 103). Others have shaped a notion of what the work involves by articulating the circumstances where it might best be invoked: the overarching prerequisite in this respect is said to be that ‘…somebody in a strategic position really feels the need for change. In other words, somebody or something is really hurting’ (Beckhard, 2006, p. 10).

It seems to me that this underscores just how flaky and imprecise the whole area of OD can be. There may be many people in work who are genuinely hurting: they are working at great intensity over long hours; they are poorly rewarded for their efforts; they are juggling myriad pressures outwith of work, whilst trying to stay focused in an environment where their performance is endlessly surveilled; there is a daily sense of insecurity, with the ongoing threat of upheaval and lay-offs, and flexible working practices such as zero-hours contracts. But I think that it is fair to say that senior leaders are not ‘hurting’ on the basis of wanting to commission some change in their firms. Underneath this notion of a senior leader ‘jonesing’ to transform the environment in which people work is an assumption that OD can usefully be deployed to engender change, a change envisioned and articulated solely from the top of the organisation. OD will manifest itself where there is a need to change culture, collaboration, and communication across an organisational setting. Moreover, it intervenes to work on people’s motivations and their capacity for adaptation (Beckhard, 2006, pp. 10–12). But, behind these platitudes, there is for me a general sense of OD engendering compliance amongst the workforce in respect to new managerial imperatives.

If one looks for a point of origin for contemporary OD, it is possible to suggest that it emerged as a distinct field by invitation in 1939, when some of the key ideas of Kurt Lewin, one of the key figures in the history of this sort of work, were put into practice. In broad outline, the approach of Lewin, it is argued, ‘…meant, …, letting go of control and trusting the people themselves to figure out – with some support and guidance – what to do’ (Alban & Scherer, 2005, p. 85). When asked in 1930 to enhance production levels at a pyjama company called The Harwood Manufacturing Company in the USA, a consultant and adherent of Lewin, John French, worked with a manager in the company called Lester Coch to suggest ‘…an experiment with the front-line people, to learn what might make a difference in their productivity’ (Alban & Scherer, 2005, p. 86). All of which means that OD is generally seen as a way of working in the business setting where you seek to actively and meaningfully engage the workforce to resolve the problems faced by a business. This is, of course, a somewhat corporatist notion: it can be seen – and invariably is – as a humanising and engaging way of addressing these issues of effectiveness, although it is also possible to see it as compelling the workforce to be actively complicit in their ongoing exploitation.

It is also asserted that Lewin did not merely provide OD with its foundational ideas and practices; he also crafted the process through which practitioners would work in and through the organisations where they sought to consult. Turning his back on the standard tools of his trade as a social psychologist, Lewin instead took as his precept that ‘…you cannot know an institution until you try to change it. This meant studying companies with full immersion in their cultures, in partnership with managers who wanted to make changes’ (Kleiner, 2008, p. 22). Hence, OD practitioners largely approach their work through a carefully crafted process of engagement, which often requires their immersion in the workplace. Obviously, this tends to carry a sense of something akin to scientific method itself, so neglects – in many ways – the very character of the workplace and, alongside that, the difficulty of using a method with an anthropological edge in a relatively superficial fashion.

Hence, the provenance of OD and the way in which most practitioners speak of it reassured me that I was doing work that was democratic and meaningful, in terms of giving people voice in the workplace. But something about that picture from the Mexican factory niggled at me, as did a more general and burgeoning sense of the significant limitations to what I could do and was doing as a practitioner. I was becoming increasingly critical of what I was being called to do – and the ways that were open to me by which to do it. Most significantly, there was sense for me that there was a disparity between what I assumed were my values (and those of OD at large) and what felt to me to be the reality of my practice.

Let me explain through the example of one element of my work. In one organisation in which I worked, I was responsible for overseeing the annual staff survey. This is a large-scale exercise that takes place across the whole NHS every autumn. Organisations become intensely focused on this work and on its apparent outcomes. At face value – and this was a view to which I very much subscribed – this seemed to be vital, from an OD perspective: it invites the workforce to give voice to the issues that they face day to day and thence prompts the whole organisation to take seriously and act upon the issues that flow from the responses that are received. Certainly, at the very beginning, I would throw myself into this work, trying to ensure maximum engagement, analysing the results in close detail when they appeared early each new year, and actively working to deliver an action plan that would be speedily crafted off the back of those results.

My first niggle came when there seemed to be a subtle shift in organisational attitude to the survey. From a laissez-faire approach, my organisation moved almost unnoticeably to a position of quite forcefully pressuring the workforce to complete the survey, even going so far as setting a key performance target for its HR function in terms of staff participation. This landed at around 55% and was a figure drawn from the ether on the basis of the participation rate in the previous year. Suddenly, the invitation to the workforce to complete the survey became a management imperative, with the learning and OD team as part of the wider HR function being charged with making this happen. Hence, we saw the situation where HR staff were sent out across the organisation to physically deliver the follow-up reminders to those who had not completed the survey.

Clearly, this caused not inconsiderable consternation amongst the workforce, who felt the dead hand of bureaucracy on their arm, forcing them to complete the questionnaires that are, as a key facet of the exercise, promoted to respondents as being completely anonymous. The negative reaction that I personally experienced whilst chasing down those who were yet to make a submission suggested a high level of both cynicism about the whole process (with people wondering aloud what the point of the initiative might be, when patently nothing ever really changed) and a significant degree of distrust of the leadership of the organisation, in respect to what their motivation might be in terms of enticing people to respond. As an OD practitioner, it was my job to assuage these concerns, despite the fact that – in my heart of hearts – I shared much of the scepticism that was apparent across large swathes of the workforce. I mentally embedded this exercise into my positive thinking about OD as an involving practice, setting aside any critical engagement with this notion.

My second concern came about as – over the course of a number of years, where I was charged to oversee this work – I came to feel that there was a ritual developing where the senior leadership actively invited the workforce to engage in the survey; the results were pondered (often with great concern over what the staff were saying about their experience of working in the organisation); and an action plan was designed, richly detailed in terms of timelines and anticipated outputs and outcomes. All this happened, of course, even as people came to realise that the results gave a superficial impression of what was happening but did not show us what was actually going on and, most importantly, why it was taking place. Even when one year we built some focus group meetings for staff off the back of the results and a carefully crafted follow up internal survey, the engagement was miniscule and the upshot utterly negligible. But OD, of course, had generated the illusion of concern and genuine response.

That said, it was interesting to see how this painfully and obviously limited engagement was parlayed by the leadership (and me, of course, as the OD practitioner, trying to pilot this to some sort of positive upshot) into something meaningful. And this reinforced to me how the ritual worked and how – as a result – nothing actually happened, although the illusion of action was supposedly generated. A standard response to survey results began to take shape, broadly a defensive reaction where the leadership desperately wanted to broadcast the fact that they had heard the voice of the workforce and were doing something about what they had heard: it manifested itself in organisational communication of a ‘You said, we did’ message – although the extent to which the reactions outlined therein could actually be seen at the grassroots of the organisation, let alone felt by the workforce, was a moot issue.

This, then, led me to cast an extremely critical eye over my own practice – and to what now looked to be a chasm between the espoused values of OD as a practice (and my consonant values in this regard) and the practicality of the work on a day to day basis. This personal investigation was overlaid by my orientation in terms of engaging with the world from a critical perspective. This derives largely from the work I undertook as part of my doctoral thesis, where I investigated the use of what is called reflective practice in the healthcare professions through an appreciation of the thought of the French philosopher Michel Foucault. This enticed me to look beyond the surface, to explore how OD nestled into organisational life and how it impacted and shaped that context. Similarly, this conceptual approach nudged me towards an exploration of this work with a foregrounding of novel ideas of power in the workplace.

For instance, in regard to the staff surveys that appeared each year, a regular theme that appeared across the whole NHS, by and large, was a high reported incidence of bullying and harassment. In 2018, for instance, 28.3% of all respondents across the whole NHS reported experiencing bullying and harassment, a slight uptick on 2017 (Currie, 2019). Responses to this year on year did little to impact on that experience, not least – in my view – because the conversation that took place in the organisation in light of this included a great deal but omitted a number of key issues, which seemed to be wholly unacknowledged, let alone openly spoken about. Chief among these was the utter failure to allow the presence and nature of workplace power to be recognised and interrogated in this context. This was especially noteworthy in respect to the disconnect between a service committed to caring existing in a management context that seems at odds with that. Hence,

For nurses in public sector agencies subjected to neoliberal management reforms, increasingly, the struggle has become how to perform caring work in a genuine and authentic manner while located in institutions that, despite claims to the contrary, have cultures that are antithetical to the value of caring.

(Hutchinson & Jackson, 2015, p. 13)

With the key facet of power disregarded in this way, it meant that no one in my context could find the space to raise the deeper question of the extent to which the management and leadership culture of the NHS in general, with its continued reliance on command and control and the encouragement of an atmosphere of blame and penalisation, was, in itself, bullying and therefore gave permission for bullying to take place up, down and across the organisations. This led me into two linked positions: first, I began to shape up in my mind a deep critique of OD, particularly in respect to what seems to motivate many of us to do it, how it is experienced in practice, and what effect it might generate in light of how these two positions might run counter to one another. Second, I began to envisage a practice in respect to OD that genuinely embodied the values of humanism and engagement, one that abandoned the current approach to involve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 A Foucauldian preamble
• 3 A genealogy of the organisationally developed workplace
• 4 What does OD achieve?
• 5 Towards a truly Radical OD practice
• 6 And we land, where?
• Epilogue
• Index