Stephen Billing’s Blog

Apparently my presentation on Tuesday night is fully booked already. The notification only went out a week ago.

Wow!

I am speaking at the HRINZ Wellington Organisation Development Special Interest Group on Organisation Development on Tuesday 17 Feb at 5.30pm – 7pm. Here is the information. Please feel free to come along.

What is OD? The roots of OD stretch back to Lewin’s unfreeze / change / refreeze model of the 50s, the T groups of the 70s, downsizing of the 80s and TQM, BPR and culture change of the 90s. More recently, social movements, social media and social networking are influencing the frontiers of OD practice. Throughout these changing fashions, leadership has remained a constant fascination with OD practitioners, CEOs and General Managers alike.

Chaos theory and its progeny complexity science were also fads of the 90s. And yet there is no doubt that organisations are complex. What can the insights of complexity teach us about OD now that the first flush of enthusiasm and rose-tinted spectacles are both dimmed?

There are only two key properties of complexity that are useful to OD practitioners and CEOs:

• Emergence – global patterns emerge from local interaction without the overall control of a central designer. Any CEO will attest to the lack of control they have over those who work in their organisation

• Novelty emerges only when those interacting are diverse. Without diversity of people interacting, the patterns of interaction remain the same and innovation and creativity are stifled

If our OD initiatives are to be effective, then our thinking about organisations and their development must be relatively congruent with our experience of working in organisations. Unfortunately, for most of us it is not. For all our awareness of informal networks our initiatives concentrate too much on formal lines of communications that take place in staged events, (i.e. the much-maligned ‘cascades’) and not enough on the multitudes of ’shadow’ interactions that take place each and every day, at which the CEO and OD practitioner are not present.

Join us on 17 February to explore an alternative view of OD that takes into account these two key insights of complexity, a radical perspective on human interaction, and recognition of the power relations that are at the heart of all human relating.

Expand your thinking, expand your OD effectiveness!

Level aimed at: All OD practitioners.

Venue:

HRINZ National Office
Level One
11 Chews Lane
Wellington