Untapped Strategic Advantage
The organizational challenges that businesses face have become more complicated, harder to anticipate, more diverse in their cultural implications, and there exist more matters that require agility and adaptation (Schein, 2015). Today’s organizations are tasked with being dynamic in the solutions they bring to market, supportive of their human capital, and technologically advanced in all areas. That is no small effort.
Organization development or (OD), is a practice that can revitalize the way organizations think about and support their people. Organizations that leverage its potential gain strategic advantage and deeper insights into their business, their people, and optimizing their performance.
As globalization continues alongside the increasing versatility of remote work, the idea that business should be devoid of organization development processes becomes archaic. Despite this realization many organizations have failed to fully shift into transformation of their processes and systems.
Bradford and Burke deliver insights into key observations around the causes for a lack of organization development processes. They describe how practitioners are not often a part of the “table of power”, nor is it realized that they have a breadth of knowledge in broader systems strategy (2005).
We find that while there are organizations that support the practice of OD, practitioners are not often close enough to the decisions being made to have a significant impact. Instead, they may live within organizations facilitating meetings, focusing on team dynamics and conflict resolution, supporting development initiatives, and conducting focus groups. (Bradford & Burke, 2015). These are important functions that have impact in their own ways. The emphasis falls on the fact that these individuals are often bound to roles that lack the influence to implement organizational strategy that would improve organizational effectiveness in a significant way.
How might you empower your practitioners to better support your OD effort?
The need to make adjustments that better support OD as a practice are vital. Heracleous suggests that there is a degree of learning required, not in an incremental way but in a way that ruptures foundational thought and encourages critical analysis and reflection (2000). For leaders to want to adopt OD, it is imperative to understand its full capacity.
Explore your change efforts, what is working? what is thriving? what is falling short?
There is no one-way to implement an OD practice. The mechanisms employed must be substantially fluid, such that their primacy is made both lasting and broad (Bradford & Burke, 2015). If there is a key tenant that can be applied universally, it would be to consider that an organizations’ mission and vision should be the lighthouses by which all improvement efforts are held against.
How well are your vision and mission translating to tactics? Where can you improve efficiency? accountability?
In doing this an organization roots their intentional effort into the heart of why they exist. The benefit being that outcomes remain highly intuitive, dynamic, and authentic to the respective organization.
Bradford, D. L., & Burke, W. W. (Eds.). (2005). Reinventing organization development: New approaches to change in organizations. John Wiley & Sons.
Schein, E. H. (2015). Dialogic organization development: The theory and practice of transformational change. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
Heracleous, L. (2000). The role of strategy implementation in organization development. Organization Development Journal, 18(3), 75–86.
Jones, B. B., & Brazzel, M. (2014). The NTL handbook of organization development and change: principles, practices, and perspectives. Wiley.
