Everyone wants to be accepted for who they are.  Mothers are great for that.  While they have high hopes for us, the bottom line is that mothers want us to be happy.  Mothers also quickly learn how their children are similar and how they are are different from them.  The good mothers foster and encourage those differences.  I had a mother like, that even though she worried all the time about me.

My mother tried hard to manage me . . . she figured out pretty quickly that I wasn’t at all like her, but more like her sister.  As a child, she treated me as though I had the same personality as her sister. Worse, my mother felt it was her duty to make sure I learned certain lessons.  It became evident in my teens that I was much more a female clone of my Dad.  So, she got some things wrong.  Fortunately, it wasn’t serious and I think she got most of it right.  All my life she would apologize for thinking that, before I hit my teens, I was probably going to grow up to be a “dumb blond”.  You see, she took the obvious route . . . I seemed similar to her sister and so she made some assumptions.  How many times have we heard one family member say to another? “You are so just like your ______”?  (Fill in the blank with what you heard.)  Do you agree or not?

We do this kind of stereotyping in the workplace all the time.  We look at other people and quickly try to size them up as “like us” or not.  If we think they look like us then we feel comfortable to act in our familiar patterns.  And if they aren’t like us, then we stay on our toes or best behaviour.  We look out for cues and signs.  We actively listen to what is being said and not said.   Those that are different in language, gender, religion or looks stand out immediately and, yes, we sometimes do treat them differently.  Those that are unable to make these distinctions get sent on sensitivity training.

It is passé to say that we need leaders to encourage diversity and inclusion.  The research is clear; diversity has a competitive value. Many attitudes are changing if not behaviours.   There are certain skills and knowledge that can be taught to help us avoid the cultural landmines.  We could all benefit from training on the different cultural dimensions. We need to understand our own mindsets and those of others.  I don’t believe in diversity programs or quotas but that’s another post.

A good example of issues that we need to understand can be found in Hofstede dimensions of  national culture:

• Power Distance
• Uncertainty Avoidance
• Individualism versus Collectivism
• Masculinity versus Femininity
• Long-Term Orientation
• Indulgence versus Restraint

While long term orientation has cultural significance, studies have shown that the ability of delayed gratification shows up in all cultures by the age of four.  I wrote about Marshmallow Experiment in another blog post which indicates that children who are able to wait are more likely to be successful as adults.  Discussing our own concepts and expectations around time can be very enlightening. I like to do exercises around this idea when working with teams.

Inititally, I have found that focusing on individual communication style is a good and neutral way to start the process of embracing differences.  I love to use simple models like The Platinum Rule^® and True Colors^® to bring out and validate the differences and the gifts that each one brings to the team.  This generic approach looks beyond cultural aspects and addresses the different styles in ALL of us.  It respects that while we may fall into one of four categories or types, we are all unique and combination of the styles.  It is pretty easy to create an awareness that we need these differences in order to be as productive and creative as possible.

The real challenge for leaders is how to integrate all the wonderful differences that each of us bring to the work place – regardless of our upbringings.  Leaders must create a space for everyone as well as manage the tensions that differences will bring forth. True, it is not always easy.  What happens when style or values gets in the way and leads to dissension and disagreement?  It takes courage on the part of leaders to deal directly and in a culturally appropriate way.  It means that leaders must be able to manage their own stress while allowing others to express theirs.

While it is “politically incorrect” to disregard the glaring diversity before us, it continues.  Much has been written on gender differences and still in Europe the issue of diversity is usually interpreted at the lack of women in senior positions.  Everywhere it seems OK to treat everyone who is “similar” as if they share our values.  Americans often think Canadians are just like them, but perhaps a little more polite.  We are not.  We may be seen as “respectable”, but sometimes I suspect our perceived politeness comes for a hidden sense of superiority.  As someone who lives with a French Canadian, I assure you that despite sharing a country of origin, we are totally different due to opposite cultural upbringings.  I find us blind to the vast diversity right under our noses. I include myself here.  These days, I am far more concerned about encouraging and embracing the smaller differences amongst us as human beings.

In the end, my Mum discovered she had two very unique children who were quite different from her.  She spent years trying to understand us; often she was unsuccessful. It didn’t stop her from trying or from loving us totally.  From her and my Dad, I learned to give them the same courtesy. I chose to respect their choices.  I worry that I am not as considerate of my own children.

As a child did you feel pigeon holed at school or at home? Perhaps nobody took the time to check their assumptions about you.  In the work place, let’s not continue to make the same mistake. Let us not think that everyone needs to learn the cultural lessons of the organization.  There may be greater diversity, creativity and talent that is being negated due to organizational pressure to adopt a culture of values that doesn’t fit for all employees. It is up to the leader in each of us to make sure those on the fringes feel that there is a place for them to show themselves and thereby want to remain.  It is up to the leader in each of us to honour each difference and encourage each difference to be expressed.  It is not just the right thing to do – it is good business.

What is Future Search?

Future search is a PLANNING MEETING that helps people transform their capability for action very quickly. The meeting is task-focused. It brings together 60 to 80 people in one room or hundreds in parallel rooms.

Future search brings people from all walks of life into the same conversation – those with resources, expertise, formal authority and need. They meet for 16 hours spread across three days. People tell stories about their past, present and desired future. Through dialogue they discover their common ground. Only then do they make concrete action plans.  (From the Future Search Network web site where you can find out more about the philosophy and methodology.)

Below is a recent interview with Marvin Weisbord and Sandra Janoff, founders of Future Search Network, whose members practice one of the first and most successful participative methods for whole system interactive planning and organizational development. This is a unique philosophy and method that enables communities and organizations to transform their capability for action.

Future Search Interview Marvin Weisbord & Sandra Janoff from KaapZ – Vorm, Inhoud en Proces on Vimeo.

“The methodology is a journey.” (Sandra Janoff)

Why do I like Future Search?

Marv Weisbord is one of my OD heroes.  In my very first training with NTL Institute I was introduced to Weisbord’s 6 Box Model in his book “Organizational Diagnosis”.  I still keep that book accessible on my bookshelf.  It was a privilege to work with him and  Sandra learning how to do the Future Search Conference method back in the early 90′s.  This was some of the best OD training that I have received.  I continue to use the principles, theories and methodology to this day.

It wasn’t until 2007 , that I got to see Sandra again.  This time it was at the International Facilitator’s Association Conference in Edinburgh where we both happened to be presenting.  She, Sandy Weiner (my business partner) and I had a great diner one evening.

I am the first person to believe that transparency is a good thing. I often preach it.  After reading a respected colleague of mine who does a lot work in the Middle East and Asia, I began to have a few reservations. So here are some thoughts for discussion. I’d love to hear your views.

In the above video, I mention the book “Transparency: How Leaders Create a Culture of Candor“  by Warren Bennis, Daniel Goleman, James O’Toole.  You can find a nice little video of O’Toole discussing the book here.  Below is the other video I mention.

What does transparency mean to your company?

There are lots of definitions of organization development (OD) but let me begin by saying it is not the same as managing change!  Look at the words themselves . . . development of the organization implies organic, holistic, engaging and full of potential. While the other is more systematic and linear and implies that change can be organized, planned, directed and controlled. *

For the past 12 years I have taught Organization Development courses on and off and all I ask of my students are two things; first, to remember that

OD ? Managing Change

and second, the following definition based on the work of Richard Beckhard ** as follows.

Organization Development:

1. is a planned change effort.
2. involves the total system.
3. is managed from the top.
4. is designed to increase organization effectiveness and health.
5. achieves its goals through planned interventions using behavioural science knowledge.

Planned

This is less about action planning and more about action research as defined by Kurt Lewin (often considered the father of organization development). See model to the right. While many believe that the old model of Unfreezing / Changing / Refreezing is no longer a relevant model, Wendell L French and Cecil Bell  whose text book is usually the definitive text for teaching organization development (, define OD at one point as “organization improvement through action research”. Planning means diagnosis and there are various tools that OD consultant use:

• action research methodology
• gap analysis (e.g. SWOT)
• force field analysis
• various data collection techniques from interviews to surveys
• feedback

System

A system is a set of interacting or interdependent entities forming an integrated whole. In OD the total system is considered even if the intervention is for a part of the organization, because any action has an impact on the whole.

Managed at the top

Perhaps you might think that this should simply be updated to read “Led from the top”.  I disagree.   The biggest complaint and excuse that I have heard over the years is that change is impossible without a champion from the top.  People still feel that they need to be led.  In today’s environment, I would probably change this to “inspired” from the top. The process is both top down and bottom up and it is an unbelievable challenge if engagement is only at one level of the organization.  Hence the choices of interventions is so critical and can not be either mechanical or canned.

Health and Behavioural Science

Simply stated this is the belief and principle that when people are open and feel safe, share a common vision, are engaged and supportive, are contributing to their fullest potential, then the organization can be effective and fully achieve its goals.  For a system to be healthy it needs to be:

• trusting
• collaborative
• future oriented
• process savvy
• embracing ambiguity
• considerate of the environment
• socially responsible
  

What do you mean by “interventions”?

That’s a little more complicated. Before we even get to the actual intervention, we have to consider the various data gathering and diagnostic tools mentioned above. But let’s say we done the proper analysis. Then a whole number of OD interventions are available, often in combination with others. Some of them are:

• individual coaching
• process consultation
• team building
• survey and feedback
• training
• whole systems change (e.g. World Cafes, Future Search, Real Time Strategic Change, Open Space, Appreciative Inquiry)
• work redesign / re-engineering

Reference:

* R. Alex Mackenzie. “The Management Process in 3-D” Harvard Business Review, Nov./Dec. 1969, pp. 80-87.

** Richard Beckhard (1969). Organization development: strategies and models. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley. pp. 114.

Wendell L French; Cecil Bell. Organization development: behavioral science interventions for organization improvement. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Finally, someone has captured the full scope of the sustainability issue and resolved some of the inner conflict I have been experiencing lately.  Protecting the natural environment isn’t the whole story: companies must consider their social, economic, and cultural impact as well.  Sustainability is good business and therefore corporate social responsibility makes good sense to businesses and all of us. Intuitively I knew this but try to explain the logic in a ROI sense and it sometimes takes a leap of faith.  It is sort of like trying to convince people that “motivated” employees are more productive.  One doesn’t necessarily focus on just motivation.  Similarly, the focus isn’t just on sustainability but on a broader vision and (North Star) goal that is more holistic and longer term.  Adam Werback brings the issues together in a straight forward and simple way that is compelling.

The McKinsey article, When sustainability means more than ‘green’, is adapted from Adam Werback’s new book, Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto and  reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Press. Copyright © 2009.  Adam Werbach is the CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, a former president of the Sierra Club (at age 23 in 1996), and the author of many works on sustainability, including the 1997 book Act Now, Apologize Later. I strongly encourage you to view this accompanying video interview, and then read the article.

True sustainability has four equal components:

• social, to address conditions that affect us all, including poverty, violence, injustice, education, public health, and labor and human rights
• economic, to help people and businesses meet their economic needs—for people: securing food, water, shelter, and creature comforts; for businesses: turning a profit
• environmental, to protect and restore the Earth—for example, by controlling climate change, preserving natural resources, and preventing waste
• cultural, to protect and value the diversity through which communities manifest their identity and cultivate traditions across generations

A fellow consultant, Holger Nauheimer, asked this question on his Change Management Blog a couple of months ago:  Will we still talk about Change Management, in 10 years? I had a lot of thoughts on the subject and my mind started to ramble  . . . and time passed but I did want to address this issue so here are some of my thoughts on the subject.

I don’t do Change Management – never have; never will.

I have never called myself a Change Consultant but I have slipped into saying that I do “Change Management”. Sometimes it is easier to say that you “do” change management than try to explain OD.  Sometimes it is even easier to say that you do leadership development and training. I had the official title of “Organization Effectiveness Consultant in 1982 for a Hi Tech Telecommunications Company (that recently went bankrupt).  For the past 25 years, whenever I explain to people that specialize in Organizational Development, it seems that their eyes glaze over. It isn’t that I can’t define it quite succinctly. I have always used Dick Bechard’s definiton – which may be slightly dated but still holds the essence of OD:

Organization development is an effort (1) planned, (2) organization-wide, and (3) managed from top, to (4) increase organization effectiveness and health through (5) planned interventions in the organization’s “processes,” using behavioral science knowledge. (Richard Bechard, 1969)

I will come back to what I think needs to shift in the definition in today’s environment but first, let me explain why I do not like the term “change management”. The concept of OD is very specific, if not complicated, but “change management” is a moving target. Historically, change management has taken a mechanical perspective that “focuses on observable, measurable business elements that can be changed or improved, including business strategy, processes, systems, organizational structures and job roles.”

Today it is far more nebulous – like empowerment, leadership or engagement. It can be all things to all people. Today it encompasses both the human aspects of change as well as the technical side. A good and simple explanation of this evolution can be found here. The human side of change was only appropriated when those engineering the change finally realized that their efforts were failing.

In ten years we will still be talking about “it” but “it” will be called change leadership! However, I would like to take OD to the next level and maybe it will be called Iterative Sustainable Change.

What is missing in OD today?

The process can no longer be planned nor take the length of time it has in the past. It needs to be designed, co-designed. (Hence, interventions may be planned.) It needs to happen fast, which will be more transformative and truly systemic. This means that it has to be a collaborative process like we have not seen. It will not be managed from the top but lead by each person and managed through out the organization. This means everyone, and I do mean everyone, has to be engaged. Engagement does not mean “involved” or “participating”. I repeat, it will be co-designed by everyone. It will be iterative and sustainable because it happens from the inside out. And my role and the role of all “change consultants” or “change facilitators” will be to help create and hold that safe space.

Please share your thoughts.

You have to have a strong ego to write blog posts that are well read by others (who have their own opinions) and then read all the comments.  Two days ago, I took exception to the term “uncoachable” that Marshall Goldsmith used in a recent in his “Ask the Coach” segment in HRB: “How to Spot the “Uncoachables“.  To his credit, Marshall responded and qualified the terms he was using. I encourage you to read the post and the comments (including mine and his responses).

Earlier today, I put up a video of Jacqueline Novogratz where she discusses the importance of learning humility.  I thought it would be interesting to tie the behaviors of self assurance and humility into the Tilt Leadership Model.*  The Tilt 360 looks takes one’s personality to the next step . . . as we are aware of our tendencies how do we manage them. As mature individuals how balanced are we in the character traits needed to be a Transcendent Leader?  An overuse of the strength of confidence (ego) can result in arrogance or being smug. What is needed to balance this is a focus on trust: humble, authentic, respectful.

I have noticed over the past few years a new sense of awareness with the “old timers” of organization development like Peter Block and W. Warner Burke. This is from hearing them speak and interact with them in person.  Marshall Goldsmith falls into this group.  He won’t remember, but I last saw him at the ICF Conference in Brussels in 2006 and I felt the shift.   I am going to go out on a limb here and say that is seems that these “old white men of privilege” finally “get it” and understand at a more fundamental level the position of power they have had over the years.  This shows up in greater humanity and an even greater sense of the whole. They are able to take their creativity and influence to a new level by balancing this ego with greater perspective and humanity.

You might well ask who am I to make such sweeping generalizations. Nobody, but I have had my own humbling experience over the past few years and I must say I have not handled it as graciously as Marshall.

Kudos to him!

Roberta

* Roberta Hill is a fellow with Tilt Inc and primary trainer and supplier in Europe.

I wrote about Large Group Intervention Strategies a little over a year ago with some links and a download.  I thought it would be a good idea to pick up on some of these tools and share a little more about them. I have chosen the World Cafe because – to be honest – I have just come across a wonderful 25 page book excerpt from Berrett-Koehler.  You can visit the World Cafe web site here.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In the first comprehensive book on the World Café, co-founders Juanita Brown and David Isaacs introduce readers to this simple yet powerful conversational process for thinking together, evoking collective intelligence, and creating actionable results. World Café principles and processes have been used successfully over the past decades with organizations and communities on six continents.

The World Cafe is a flexible, easy-to-use process for fostering collaborative dialogue, sharing mutual knowledge, and discovering new opportunities for action. Based on living systems thinking, this innovative approach creates dynamic networks of conversation that can catalyze an organization or community’s own collective intelligence around its most important questions.

The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter

Are you interested in convening and hosting a World Café?  These resources will guide you through the process. Taken together, they cover everything from considerations related to the design of the café, physical set-up of the café environment, creative application of the café design principles, and much more. All you need are people and a place to meet!

I have been negligent.  For the past couple of months I have been wanting to share the Enduring Ideas and Classic’s from McKinsey.  I have always enjoyed McKinsey articles and research and have been enjoying the interactive presentations immensely. According to them:

The central characteristic of an enduring idea is that both it and its uses evolve over time.

In September, Kevin Coyne describes the GE–McKinsey nine-box matrix, a framework that offers a systematic approach for a multi-business and decentralized corporation to prioritize its investments among its business units.   Rather than rely on each business unit’s projections of its future prospects, the company can judge a unit by two factors that will determine whether it’s going to do well in the future: the attractiveness of the relevant industry and the unit’s competitive strength within that industry.  This is important as it appears from a previous blog post here – that technology favors a decentralized approach – thus making the nine-box matrix as relevant as ever.

As of this date you can find three enduring ideas here.  The other two are  7-S, a framework introduced in the late 1970s to address the critical role of coordination, rather than structure, in organizational effectiveness and SCP, a framework whose origin dates to the 1930s.

Hear Barry Oshry, author of “Seeing Systems” and “Leading Systems” discuss the human systems dynamics underlying his groundbreaking work. Learn how to move past system blindness and toward system sight where people live and work together productively.

Barry’s 40-year career as an innovative educator, author and workshop developer is amazing.   What drives Tops to be territorial? Why do silos develop? What’s the plight of Middles? How can they become the drivers of organizational change? What does it take to build partnership up, down and across organizational lines?

At 1-Focus, we use the work and principles of Barry to help others understand the power dynamics and how to develop healthy organizations.