Observations

We think an emerging now of OD incorporates both episodic change and continuous change processes equally, utilizing the capacity of internal change agents and external consultants.

Socio-economic crisis has resulted in feelings of powerlessness and uncertainty within families, communities, organizations, and societies, with a longing to “return to normal.” Few experts claim to know how this contemporary turbulence will resolve, warning citizens and employees to adjust to the reality of continuous change. Against this context, OD struggles to help organizations cope with the stress of endless change, the need to engage in daily operations, as well as to make time “on top of everything else” to think about and implement change.

Some well-recognized OD scholars anticipated this upheaval advising that established OD methodology should be updated to become more effective under conditions of continuous change (Marshak, 2009). Indeed, debates against episodic change and system theory are frequent; notions of cyclical planned change and work organization design are being criticized as old fashioned in a context of continuous change. Some cooler heads advocate the alignment of both episodic and continuous change processes as inevitable (Livne-Tarandach & Bartunek, 2009).

For many years OD was taught predominately as if its overall methodology should be applied in a professionally recognizable, often external fashion, regardless of the nature of the OD work or the human systems context in which OD practitioners work. Approaches assuming an outsider enters an existing situation to assist with change often prove difficult for those OD practitioners working inside the organization. Internal OD practitioners often are left carrying the ball on how to implement and operationalize interventions initiated by externals. OD emerging now involves new approaches to internal change agentry with closer collaborations between internals and externals as they co-create an easier configuration of OD interventions and change implementation systems.

How Lewin Applies

Current circumstances demand that OD practitioners find their way to a more principled practice of action research with OD practices supporting more capacity building between internal change agents and external consultants. Lewin’s “constructive method rule” invites us to find useful conceptualizations for the challenges facing internal and external OD practitioners and their client systems as they engage in human systems development (Neumann, 2012). This rule does not push us to apply the conceptualizations that Lewin and his colleagues found useful post-WWII. Instead, we are encouraged to investigate the particular nature of the co-existence of personality, behavior, and environment in the total situations we help develop. Our conceptualizations are meant to help those involved feel understood and explore how they can deal with their circumstances. Practically, this may result in a reframed goal to guide actions in search of a degree of freedom in the face of uncertainty, complexity, and feelings of powerlessness.

In his “dynamic approach rule” Lewin showed the need for professional attention regardless of the focus for an OD task (Neumann, 2011). This highlights the necessity for internals and externals to jointly identify and consider all elements of any situation in which OD work unfolds. No matter which level we enter—individual, interpersonal, group, inter-group, organizational or inter-organizational—the internal-external collaboration works to notice and hypothesize about connections between and across the boundaries of these levels. Together, they build their capacity to customize OD based on multiple energizing and motivating forces.

Observations

We think emerging OD responds to organizational survival with equanimity toward other change management approaches while asserting its unique contribution to human systems development.

Many OD efforts in organizations today exist as medium- to high-level process consultation work, often about improvement but not change. Often, when deeper issues about change, an organization’s survival or future, are being discussed, OD practitioners are not invited to the table or are only considered when deemed a useful but secondary support to management consulting or functional change management expertise. Executives and buyers of OD services consider OD as a “nice to have” when an organization is flourishing but ancillary when real organizational choice points are being confronted. This lack of confidence in OD capabilities and the fragmentation between OD and other change processes have become more pronounced as decreased budgets and economic downturns become a way of life. Despite many excellent attempts to bring a results or outcome focus to OD, much of our work is still seen as conceptual, theoretical, or even romantic musings to improve employees’ feelings at work.

OD practitioners themselves have contributed to this situation with either an overly apologetic attitude or an intellectual arrogance, not wanting to deal with the hard core issues of organizational performance and results. Additionally, many practitioners focus too narrowly on their own change methodologies at the expense of learning about and examining the value added of the entire field of OD to organizational life. The OD industry more widely has undermined itself with insufficient resources being directed to research and the metrics that would generate confidence in OD’s ability to create improvement in organizations. We tend to emphasize a practical methodology at the expense of OD’s scientific identity and added value.

How Lewin Applies

Lewin’s re-educative process (Lewin & Grabbe, 1945) is a lens for reviewing identities when an individual, group, or organization is out of step with reality. Lewin hypotheses that the processes governing the acquisition of the normal and abnormal are fundamentally alike with the means responsible for the creation of illusions identical in nature to those giving rise to reality. We consider that executives and organizational leaders must undergo such a re-educative process in order to understand OD’s role in effecting change in organizations. This re-educative process is the task of acculturating executives, organizational leaders, and OD-ers alike to the cognitive processes, goals, and values of OD. Only in so doing can our market’s perception of OD be changed.

Lewin’s study on the social reconstruction of reality (1943), a fundamental premise of OD, discusses not only how reality is created but also how it is re-created. Since reality is socially constructed, it can also be socially reconstructed or changed. Changing an individual’s beliefs is to change his or her perception of reality and how that reality is rooted in culture. For instance, the general acceptance of the beliefs around OD’s inability to affect true and lasting organizational change is the very cause preventing this belief from ever being altered. As a traditionally trained scientist, Lewin firmly believed in the scientific maxim that anything that can be observed either in the environment or in human behavior can also be measured. His topological diagrams and experiments showed a scientific interpretation of human behavior. He would insist that an emerging now of OD exercise discipline and rigor in creating the metrics that demonstrate OD’s valence in effecting change in organizations. On the need for increased collaboration between OD and providers of functional change work, Lewin would propose that we examine this through the perspective of intergroup relations, increasing the space of free movement between the two groups. Providing more points of contact between OD and functional change will help decrease the difference in character between these entities and support closer collaboration and interdependence in pursuit of client results.

Observations

We think an emerging now of OD is embedded in ongoing business practices realized through existing organizational mechanisms and regular communications punctuated with large group events and temporary transition structures.

Many successful OD practices today integrate OD into the ongoing life and work of the organizations they serve. They utilize large group interventions (e.g., future search, world cafe, open space technology, and peer spirit circling) to elicit critical data from client systems and onboard the entire system with the desired goals and the agreed-upon path forward. More importantly, the task of change implementation is not distinct from work operations but embedded in the day-to-day routine activities of the organization carried out by middle managers, team leaders, and the groups they lead. In these situations everybody jointly identifies and brings into existence desired change and implementation activities.

Often these change projects are leader-initiated, inspired, and driven, with executives becoming adept at vividly painting organizational visions but less attention paid to regular communications that support the change process. Recent improvements now have change projects exhibiting thirty-, sixty-, and ninety-day milestones, followed by six- and twelve-month report-outs by the change team. These temporary reporting mechanisms, along with specially designated change teams (released from regular work) occupying separate offices, attests to the significance of the change agenda; but given the impermanence of this arrangement, it is uncertain whether this is the most empowering structure for creating cultural change.

How Lewin Applies

Lewin’s “Cultural Reconstruction” (1943) essay provides insight on how to support OD and culture change in organizations. His view is that changing cultures involves changing the social atmosphere of the organization and is best effected against a highly interwoven background and not just through officially recognized values. In his thinking, the change has to touch the actual group life of the individuals who inhabit that system and not be separate from it. To this end he asserts the critical role of embedded systems, including regular communications, to bring into existence the actual behavioral change. Change communications especially plays an important psychological role of allowing free movement to modify individuals’ verbal sentiments that often restrict them.

He further explains the critical role of leadership in effecting change. He insists the need for a political setting that is powerful and enduring enough to offer people at least a chance for learning new cultural values. This task is tricky as it involves dealing with intolerance against those who are intolerant to the change, which is essential for establishing a new cultural order. This must be balanced with tolerance for the tolerant, enabling commitment to the desired change.

Observations

We think an emerging now of OD is informed by both critical thinking and strength-based practices. The emerging now of OD overflows with many ways of thinking about human systems development, organization development, change leadership, and consultancy competence. All the strategies of human systems change once identified within the OD discipline (Chin & Benne, 1969) remain relevant, while at the same time, theory about, and methodologies for, application proliferate. Rational empirical strategies, power-coercive strategies, and normative, re-educative strategies interweave all change situations, often with a hefty dose of heroic leadership shaping actions (Quinn & Sonenshein, 2007).

Over the previous two decades, a strong desire for working from a position of hope influences many within normative, re-educative disciplines (of which OD is one). Positive attitudes and enabling approaches are well established as necessary elements for a developmental atmosphere under conditions of change. Several popular OD technologies encourage practitioners to base their diagnosis and intervention on the strengths and potentialities of the system and the individuals within it. During the same two decades, however, other OD approaches—well known within community, political, and societal applications—insist that a realistic OD incorporates an understanding of a power-coercive analysis. Thus, the role of negativity and conflict—as manifest in status differentials, power differences, systems psychodynamics, political interests, stereotypes, and biases—must be considered in any complete picture of a situation in which OD operates.

How Lewin Applies

It is possible that OD approaches that highlight critical issues for attention may address related but different aspects of a change situation from those OD approaches intentionally emphasizing strengths and positive attitudes—and vice versa. As a scholarly practice discipline, we have not yet found reliable ways to isolate and evaluate OD interventions when multiple, simultaneous initiatives are being undertaken together. This describes a normal complicated change situation. Anecdotes and preferences aside, attempts to compare and contrast strength-based methods with critical-theory-based approaches rarely stand up to scientific—let alone practical—scrutiny.

Fortunately, Lewin’s “field theory rule” intentionally focuses professional consideration on multiple causal conditions and interaction affects among causal conditions (Neumann, 2011). This means that, for several decades, those OD practitioners applying field theory typically attend to forces enabling change as well as to forces blocking change. According to Lewin, people and their environments need to be considered as one constellation of interdependent factors; therefore, choosing to focus on only the positive or only the negative is misguided and distorts reality. Effective change requires both critical and strengths orientations.