Creating Benign Cycles in Organizations

Here's my elevator speech about what Organization Development is (OK, it's a long elevator ride, but a good one):

Just like individuals need to make a living by doing something useful, every organization does something useful to make its living. This means producing something people want to buy, or providing a service that is worth paying for. Organizations need to make that product or provide that service in ways that are effective in terms of the cost to the consumer and with satisfactory quality and reliability, compared to competitors. OD practitioners help people to make their own organizations more effective in producing whatever they produce. This is an important part of OD, but not all there is.

In order for an organization to function effectively, the people in it need to communicate in sane and constructive ways. Without that kind of communication organizations devolve into environments that look like the Dilbert comic strip (which, by the way, is based on letters about real events in organizations, continually sent to the cartoonist). As new technologies are introduced, or new competitors enter the market, or new needs emerge from customers, people in organizations need to talk and work together sanely, effectively, creatively, to adapt and innovate. Otherwise the organization soon goes out of business, or loses its funding.

As a consultant, I generally find dysfunctional task processing arrangements that are caused or maintained by dysfunctional interaction patterns among its people. Over the years, new employees are taught the dysfunctional procedures, which may have originally been temporary work-arounds, as the right way to do things ("Don't ask--that's the way it's done here.")

OK, it keeps getting interesting: Much of the reason for dysfunctional patterns of interaction among people in organizations is that the task procedures, technologies, work structures and hierarchies, tend to isolate people, pit them against each other, and limit their ability to engage their full intelligence and creativity in the work setting. So dysfunctional task structures create or maintain dysfunctional interaction patterns, which prevent people for making sensible changes to the task structures. It's a vicious cycle.

The good news is that when you find a vicious cycle you can reverse it by reversing any of its elements. When we bring people together in a collaborative creative context they spontaneously generate significant design improvements to the task structure. As new task structures are implemented, these tend to reduce the crazy-making qualities of the task arrangements, and interaction patterns continue to improve. It becomes a benign cycle. This is true OD.

People who claim to do OD and work only on "bottom line" improvements, or only on touchy-feely "team-building" experiences are not doing real OD. Those partial approaches tend not to work, or to actually make things worse. OD is about working with people to improve their own task structures and interaction patterns by improving both.

I'm looking for examples of what I'm describing here. I welcome your short stories.