Stephen Billing’s Blog

 Preparing to write a speech, I ponder on what functions belong in organisation development these days.

I am preparing my speech for the HRINZ meeting on 17 February. It is titled "Organisation Development and Complexity" and it has got me thinking about what organisation development is.

Organisation development is such a loose term, and it seems to me that for a number of agencies in the NZ public service, organisation development has come to be a grab bag of homeless HR functions that don’t really seem to have a rightful place in any other part of Human Resources. Is OD a boarding house for the HR functions with nowhere else to go – a rather aimless collection of functions grouped together for adminstrative convenience?

I think it is quite telling to consider whether your organisation has an OD function. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. If it does, is it part of HR or separate from HR?

In my experience it is increasingly common to see OD as part of HR. Which of the following does your OD department cover? If you don’t have an OD department, then where are these functions located – with line managers, with another part of HR, or somewhere else all together?

Here is a list of OD functions I saw advertised in a job ad recently.

• Lominger competencies

• Leadership and management development

• Engagement survey / climate survey

• Recruitment

• Training projects for specific business units

• Organisation design

• Learning and development

• Graduate recruitment and development

• Psychometric testing in relation to recruitment and development of staff

If that is not a grab bag of homeless HR functions, then I don’t know what is. It is a far cry from the humanistic, personal and group development functions originally included in the origins of OD – in t-group training, survey feedback, action research and group analysis.

OD is such an indeterminate and nonspecific term that it is difficult to say what OD is, and it is correspondingly difficult to say what it is not. Any discipline that has been around as long as OD and has morphed into this boarding house of homeless HR functions must have an uncertain future.