How Did OD Emerge?

Note: This and the next few items are reprinted from another blog I previously created. You will find a thematic connection to the exploration of how our assumptions shape our work and our lives. Your comments and questions are invited.

Organization Development (OD) has been understood--and misunderstood--in a variety of ways by different people at different times. It can be helpful to know how the field got started.

When I was a grad student at UCLA, I learned from mentors like Bob Tannenbaum and Jim Clark that OD emerged from the growing awareness that Management Development, even when very successful, had major limitations. Key managers could be immersed in powerful training experiences like T Groups, developing a fundamentally different understanding of themselves and their interaction with people, but when they returned to their own organization they faced three difficult choices:

1. They could become change agents, leading their organization toward significant new ways of being and working--very few people managed to do this.

2. They could become trouble-makers, out of step with their peers and subordinates' assumptions and expectations, working uphill to create change that nobody seemed to believe in or want. Some people did this for a while, and then gave up; or they were neutralized or expelled from their organization as alien organisms. A few left purposely, and even changed their chosen profession, becoming writers, sculptors, etc.

3. They could unlearn what they had learned and go back to their old way of doing things, encapsulating their brief departure from the corporate cultural norm as a temporary aberration, hopeful but naive; most managers chose this option, and achieved it rather quickly.

So there was something not working with Management Development--the development of managers as individuals. The underlying assumption that you could change an organization by changing individuals did not pan out. Time for a paradigm shift.

Borrowing from what were then new developments in family therapy, such as the work of Virginia Satir, some applied social scientists and consultants began to consider the need to develop the organization as a whole, not just the individuals within it. Family therapists were learning that they could treat a problem child with apparent success, but on returning to the family s/he promptly reverted to the previous problem behavior. The problem was not in the child as an individual, but in the family as a system. Similarly, an organization could be improved not by developing individuals within it, but by changing the organization as a whole--hence the shift in thinking--from management development, to organization development.

Think about some problem in your own organization. Consider how it can be interpreted in terms of the problematic behavior of a particular individual. Then consider how this behavior might be an expression of the organization's unacknowledged, perhaps unmentionable problematic patterns.

What thoughts or questions do you have about this, or about OD, or about the OD Program at Sonoma State? Use the Comments link to respond to or comment on this entry.

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