In order to explain to the reader the value of Organisational Development in business organisations today, we need to define Organisational Development practically. I will illustrate the meaning through focusing on each of the words, namely “organisations” and “development”. “Organisation” is a cluster reference, a holistic term defining everything that organisations consists of. Organisations consist out of stakeholders; it consists out of a market; it consists out of funds and assets; it consists out of resources, employees; it consists out of intangible things like knowledge; it consists out of technologies and systems. The second word, which is very important, is “development” and development means, by default improvement, movement and change. Organisational Development does not refer to only one component of organisations; it refers to all the components that need to be developed. The term Organisational Development is exceptionally important and often we do not understand and acknowledge the two critical words.
Historically, Organisational Development has been driven by management thinking primarily addressing two perspectives, i.e. the Socio-technical management tradition on the one hand, as well as the Socio–behavioural management tradition on the other. The Socio-technical management tradition emphasises change processes applicable to the design and sustainable implementation of an effective organisational architecture, focusing on strategies, processes, structure, systems and governance. The Socio–behavioural management tradition focuses on change processes applicable to the design of programmes that will enhance the effectiveness of an organisation’s culture. The emphasis of this tradition is capability and competency, behaviour and attitudes, leadership style, as well as values. Throughout history, these two traditions have been oscillating and influenced the development of Organisational Development Methodology. Organisational Development however cannot be one or the other. The biggest problem with Organisational Development is that it has been defined too narrowly and as people practitioners our definition of Organisational Development has been socio-behavioural and only elements of socio-behavioural, which makes it even worse. There is no way any practitioner that deals with organisations can actually make businesses effective if you only deal with socio- behavioural elements in isolation.
On a practical level, if we approaches Organisational Development from a holistic, systems perspective, we would be dealing with all the elements touching a typical OD value chain, such as stakeholders, shareholders, the market, products and services, processes, structures, resources including people and technology, as well as organisational systems. On the socio-behavioural side we are confronted with questions like how do we pay people, what policies do we develop, how do we govern people, what control mechanisms do we put into place when making decisions, what supporting, enabling and compliance systems do we put into place? Those are all additional sub-systems that one really needs in a business to actually ensure that it functions properly.
We position Organisational Development in the 21st Century with a merger approach between the above mentioned perspectives (i.e. Socio-technical management tradition, as well as the Socio–behavioural management tradition) to create an integrated, multi-disciplinary but also a strategic solution to provide a true definition of Organisational Development, namely:
“OD is the strategic practice of merging management and behavioural science with aims to constantly reposition the organisation in an ever changing environment, so as to ensure optimal competitiveness and well being.”
This definition emphasizes concepts like strategic, transformative, integrated, organised, multi-disciplinary, pro-active, efficient, as well as wellness based.
The value and impact of an Organisational Development intervention is rooted in its definition of what Organisational Development is, namely a structured programme(s) seeking to enhance organisations’ overall effectiveness, sustainability and well being. If the OD intervention cannot achieve that then by default you have not done the Organisational Development intervention - you have done an improvement programme within one of the elements of Organisational Development. Organisational Development interventions are there to make businesses and all its components, which include people, more effective and thereby enhancing the organisation and its sub-components including people’s well-being. When we deal with employee well-being in isolation, it is wrong. We need to be dealing with organisation well-being. People are part of that. You cannot provide therapy to employees or individuals without understanding and managing the context in which the individual functions.
Organisational Development has emerged into a practical, applied discipline, offering true value and ROI to organisations against the context of a continuously changing business environment.
Lastly, I want to address the aspect of OD as a religion. I recently interviewed, Martin Lewis as part of my fieldwork for my PhD studies and I cannot summarise it more aptly than he did:
“Very few people actually have the ability to understand the doctrine or the faith of OD. They only believe, like many religious sects or cultures or religious sects out there in a certain component of it. You have got to believe in the whole Bible. It is a religion. There are too many practitioners out there that actually only believe in parts of the religion. Therefore you have got to question whether they are religious or not. In other words are they OD practitioners if they only understand one component and they do not understand how it actually fits in? They are rhetorical in their words in terms of “yes I understand the strategy” but when you talk to them they actually do not fundamentally understand the ethos and nature of that organisation’s business and if you do not understand it how do you actually manage the solution to be effective in the first place, let alone appropriate. That is why most OD solutions driven by people that are working only from one system tend to be inappropriate. They develop competencies and do assessments but they have no clue how it fits into the business. They do not understand what the value add is going to be.”
A true OD Consultant therefore needs to have a multi-disciplinary knowledge base, a sound and intimate knowledge of the business, the sector, the industry in which the organisation functions. In other words you have to also understand the technical competencies required for the organisation; not just the behavioural competencies.