Organization Development Articles
Informative articles about organization development, the most powerful technology that exists to create positive and profound change in organizations. Change practitioners and leaders will use these articles to immediate effect.
Synergy, Beauty, Curiosity, & Productivity
In a middle-sized software organization, Althea leads a team of engineers that regularly produce blocks of code that are efficient, innovative, and beautiful. Results that go beyond her expectations. She says there isn’t a superstar on her team. They are all pretty...
How Your Mind Gets in Your Way!
As a leader, you have many things to distract you. Employee interpersonal issues; personal responsibilities; stakeholders, media, and public expectations; and too many emails are just a few. However, a major distraction is our own mind. Our minds offer us assumptions,...
Understanding Teams as Human Systems, The Secret Sauce for Making Teams Work
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.” -- Margaret Mead She was furious! She couldn't make her team work. As the new leader of a perennial best-company-to-work-for, she was...
Data-Gathering, A Cornerstone of Organization Development
Data gathering is not seen as glamorous part of organization development. Many practitioners think of it as the precursor to the exciting things that practitioners do that really make a difference. Some consider it optional and could be skipped. They are mistaken....
Creating Possibility, A Core Skill of the Organization Development Practitioner
The best organization development practitioners are possibilists. "I am neither an optimist nor pessimist, but a possibilist," wrote Max Lerner, summing up how he saw himself. We believe in the infinite possibilities that working with human systems can bring into...
The Value of Being Unproductive
“I feel like I’ve always got to be productive,” a client told me. She continued, “I feel on the edge of burnout though.” I ask, “Do you ever take time off?” Then I add, “I love days when I’ve got little or nothing to do. In fact, I often plan my week to be sure I’ve...
Worthlessness Is a Worthless Fiction We Were All Taught!
I grew up with a humiliating stutter. I was asthmatic and puny. I saw myself as pretty worthless. I had a friend, a psychologist, who used to say that everyone has their “core of rot.” We all have some aspect of ourselves that we consider worthless and unworthy. Thank...
Managing Your Intentions and Impact
A frustrated leader screams at a valued employee in public. Another talks over a subordinate while wondering why his people don’t speak up more. Both leaders have done something (with no conscious intention) that is likely to damage their effectiveness as leaders. We...
The Power of Conscious Choice
A power that the best of leaders have is the power of conscious choice. All of us have the power of choice. It’s just that the best leaders multiply it by using it consciously. Most of us make the myriad choices of daily life automatically, though expedient and...
Anatomy of a Diversity Initiative
Meaningful interest in diversity, inclusion, and equity have waxed and waned in the United States since the 1940s and probably much earlier. World War II saw women taking an active role in the workplace for the first time. In 1948, President Truman of signed Executive...
Alone Does Not Mean Lonely
The holidays are done. Christmas and New Year's Day having followed Thanksgiving less than a month before. Times to be with family and those you’re close to. But for me, I’ll dined alone. I’ve had folks tell me how sorry they were that I was alone. Others would invite...
Creating Safe Teams
Contact Us An important key to having great teams and organizations is their sense of safety. Their members do not fear censure should their all-too-human egos and emotions become evident. They feel free to speak, to dissent, to be radical, and even outlandish. This...
Get to Critical Mass Support with System Mapping
Creating change in human systems such as teams and organizations is a matter of developing a critical mass of support for the change goal. Of course, developing that critical mass may involve working through whatever resistances there are and resolving the conflicts...
Resolving Conflict in Teams & Organizations
A few months ago, I was working with five faculty members of a university sociology department. They were having difficulty getting along with each other. There were lots of conflicts and negative judgments were abundant. I interviewed each one. They were all...
Don’t Waste Your Strategic Plan
Don't waste your strategic plan. A good strategic plan serves as the focal point for how an organization toward both long and short-range success. It provides… Direction for aligning an organization's staff and activities Criteria for organizational decision-making....
Definition of Organization Development
Not too long ago, I was having dinner with a client during a project that was going well. At some point my client looked up at me and said, “I’m glad you’re not one of those OD people.” After recovering from my surprise, we had an excellent discussion about what...
Quick and Easy Consensus Decision-Making
Consensus decision-making has the reputation of being very time-consuming. It needn’t be if the steps outlined below are followed. The failure of most supposed consensus procedures result from failing to ask those objecting if they are willing to accede to the...
Sustainable Interventions
You used all of your skills to move your team from being dysfunctional to one with a high level of productivity, full engagement of all team members, and they even had some fun together. But will your success last? Will they revert back to dysfunction when you can’t...
Six Ways to Cure the Dysfunctional Team Blues
The CEO was at wits end! She is the CEO of a major health care organization and, like many other organization leaders, believes in teams. She has project teams, functional teams, cross-functional teams, process improvement teams, etc. A few of those teams work very...
The Why, What, & How of Organization Development
An upated and restructured definition of organization development
It Takes Dragons
People ask me why I use a rather fierce looking dragon as my Center for Human Systems’ logo. Dragons are known throughout the world in all climates, cultures, and eras. There are dragons with horns, claws, breath of fire, great size (some small), wondrous wings (some...
OD Is Not A Recipe!
Lean, Six Sigma, Prosci, and other formulized change management methodologies all offer an orderly set steps to take—a recipe for ending waste, improving productivity, and otherwise accomplishing desired changes. There are, of course, several recipes from organization...
Give Your Clients What They Need, Not What They Want
A CEO of a medium-sized hospital asked me to train his front-line patient-facing staff in how to be pleasant to patients. The head of IT department asked me to facilitate “an advance” for her and her staff. She pointedly told me that everything was working well; that...
The Power and The Problem of Organization Development
Organization development is the most powerful technology we have for managing change in human systems. Yet, that focus on human systems, which is the heart of OD’s power, is also its problem. OD is misunderstood and misrepresented most often because Westerns in...