Real OD in a Virtual World
Bilingual Consultants' Perspective
Bill Bruck, Lisa Kimball & Amy Eunice
Caucus Systems Inc., Arlington, VA
Computer technology influences organizational culture. Indeed, it may be one of today’s primary influences. Organizational cultures are rapidly expanding to include technology and in many cases technology drives organizational cultures.
The advent of the Web has allowed for the creation of virtual businesses and virtual teams. These terms are probably starting to make their way into your and your client's vocabularies.
As you read these words, computer technology is busily changing organizational culture in even more profound ways. Its effect on shared customs, beliefs and values within the organization is immense.
In many organizations, the IT departments make decisions with little or no input from other managers. People see them as "technology decisions," especially because they are made according to criteria such as security and server loads that few people outside of the IT world can offer informed opinions on.
However, if these decisions do not clearly include criteria that are wider in scope, then the organization's culture will be changing in a chaotic way, rather than managed with knowledge and wisdom. In this way, organizational development has to play a role.
Those who influence technology decisions are organizational change agents. Those who control the technology have great influence in the direction of that change. To be organizational change agents, OD professionals must be part of these conversations.
Many OD professionals just don't think of themselves as information technology (IT) types. They seem to be in another world — which, in fact, they are. We might say, to paraphrase John Gray's famous phrase, IT is from Mars, OD is from Venus.
Literally, of course, IT and OD are not on different planets, but in a very real way, these professionals inhabit different worlds. They have different world views — different beliefs, values and attitudes — especially about computer technology.
Often, we have a negative gut reaction to computer technology. We know we need it, and we need to incorporate it into our practice, but …
What's that "but …" about? When we talk to many OD professionals, we hear things such as:
“Technology can be so dehumanizing.”
“Computers take people away from other people.”
And often:
“I’m just not sure that I can keep up with it!”
These observations have a real validity. Every new technology that offers benefits also creates new problems and barriers. What motivates us in OD to look more closely at the problems and barriers while other people look more closely at the benefits?
We think that, to some large degree, the reticence that many of us feel about computer technology comes from the underlying values that drew us in to the OD field in the first place. OD practitioners tend to hold fairly humanistic values. We are concerned with opening lines of communication, with organizational growth, with the actualization of personal potential.
In short, OD folks are “people” people. What we fear, sometimes, is that the increasing computerization of society may bring about an Orwellian future of alienation and anomie.
Unfortunately, this reticence may inhibit our ability to interact effectively with essential components of today’s organization especially the “computer types” in IT.
However, if we are to be change agents, we must be part of the IT conversations. To be part of the conversations, we must be able to understand and be understood. We need to be bilingual in the languages of OD and IT.
Aikido is a modern, nonviolent Japanese martial art. In Aikido, you merge with an attacker so that his aggressive energy is transformed in a way that hurts neither you nor him: a truly nonviolent way of resolving conflict.
The word Aikido is made up of three characters: Ai (harmony or love), Ki (the fundamental energy of life and breath - seen in many of the world's wisdom traditions as prana, chi or the "breath of life") and Do (way or path - Tao in Chinese). Thus, literally, Aikido means "the way of harmony with the universal life energy."
An "aiki" approach is thus one that harmonizes with the energy of the situation. It is matching the speed of the traffic while you are in the merge lane so that you easily move into the flow without disrupting it. It is letting the other know you understand by seeing her point of view, rather than merely trying to put forward your own.
What does this mean for the OD consultant who wishes to be an effective change agent in a technological environment? Does an OD consultant need a master's in IT and to be able to converse effectively about TCP/IP, network topology, Cisco routers and the latest security holes in Microsoft's Internet Information Server?
Actually, this level of discourse can be counterproductive for the OD professional. It reduces our conversation to the level of the technical, and us to being technical experts. Instead, we need to be able to meld with IT at a strategic level.
The OD professional does need a fundamental knowledge base, but it's of a different sort. We need to understand the capabilities of our clients' computers from the end-user and from the organizational standpoint. We need to know what Microsoft Office's electronic revision feature is and whether it can benefit our client. We need to know what distance learning technologies exist, what their relative strengths are and how we can apply them to help our client create a learning organization. We need to understand technology's use — not its details.
Further, our conversations must be informed by our understanding of the fundamental beliefs, values and attitudes that IT professionals hold — both consciously and unconsciously.
For instance, at a conscious level, many IT professionals have clear values about information technology. One IT director expressed his priorities very clearly. "My No. 1 priority is to preserve the integrity of the corporate data I'm responsible for. My second priority is to give appropriate people access to that data. My third priority is to give end-users the tools at their desktop that they need and to ensure that the computers and software are working properly."
From a larger perspective, the OD consultant may notice some gaps in this set of priorities. There is no focus on the goal of information technology — to improve productivity, to enhance current capabilities, to build new capabilities. From this rather common IT perspective, these don't fall into his job description. As a result, the staffing pattern within IT may be very heavy on network administrators and very light on application specialists who can modify Word to produce correspondence in 10% of the time.
Thus this creates a gap in many organizations where the line managers know their production goals but don't know how technology could help them achieve them better.
IT professionals know the technology but don't see productivity as within their purview. What do they need? A bilingual consultant to put the pieces together.
When you work with a situation like this, an Aiki approach is relatively easy to implement. You can do it by ensuring that you recognize the IT department's explicit concerns and priorities and integrate them into the process that you use and any recommendations you propose.
The situation is slightly different when the IT professional has never explicitly clarified his goals and priorities in his own mind. It is extremely more complex in those instances in which the IT professional has unconscious needs for power and control.
However, the principle is the same: Understanding the values, beliefs and motivations of all parties and blending them together.
This might sound interesting in theory, but what does it mean in practice?
At a high performance level, this means being able to say, "Here's a problem we haven't been able to solve before that's in our portfolio," for instance, improving life for employees. Is there any computer technology that could help us with that?
What would be the process by which we could engage it?
Select a sample issue such as diversity. How might we use computer technology to solve it? How can we get everyone — from line managers through HR to IT — aboard on this? What are the goals? Can online dialogue play a role in supporting and attaining those goals?
When we can combine OD principles with an understanding of technical capabilities and the values and beliefs of those that manage the technology, many new possibilities emerge for OD interventions. See the examples below.
We notice that our client's corporate intranet has become the central spot in "virtual space" where everyone logs in several times a day. It has the corporate calendar, news of the day and other valuable resources. How could we integrate this observation with one of our goals, which is to promote diversity?
What would happen if the home page’s look and feel changed for a special “Celebrate Diversity: The African Culture” month? The color scheme could change to reflect the earth tones common in African motifs. Icons of masks or traditional African symbols could replace the regular bullets. The calendar might reflect an African holiday or birthdays of famous African-Americans, with a link for more information.
Another link might start an audio track or video. And, of course, the next month it might be a celebration of Arabic culture, a South American theme or a display of Asian motifs. Does this sound like a way technology can play a role in supporting awareness of diversity? There are many other ideas and examples on the Web too.
One of our charges might be to help the organization’s strategic planning process by doing an “environmental scan.” In the past, we may have done this by doing research that culminated in a report that we briefed to the strategic planning committee.
How might technology facilitate this process? What would it be like if, every morning, the active desktop of the computers on decision makers' desks had a series of headlines of events happening in the industry? We could link these to one-paragraph executive summaries that we could, in turn, link to a full report on the issue, complete with Web-based references. A library would save all the summaries and reports, indexed for easy searching, so the decision maker could get a complete background on any issue he desired at any time.
Isn't this a lot of work? Possibly, but so is that report you'd be writing. This process helps turn the Web from a source of useless data into vital information, and it gets that information where it needs to go with as little effort required as possible on the part of the decision maker. What a service you'd be providing! And some of the bells and whistles available to spice up your online presentation are an added bonus.
What other ways could you integrate technology into critical OD processes — shaping organizational culture, visioning the future, enhancing team performance, etc.?
In what ways can your OD knowledge combine with available technology to:
- Facilitate distributed work teams that can't easily meet face to face?
- Create a learning organization?
- Improve the quality of life for staff?
As an OD professional, it's important to always "know your game" — to find ways to be confident where you can work effortlessly and yet be immensely effective.
Our game is changing. Our clients now work in increasingly technological environments. Our challenge is to learn to “play our game” on this new playing field.
Just like a tennis player shifting from clay to grass, it requires slightly different balance and somewhat different strategies. We don't need to know how to tend to the grass or prepare the clay — that's the groundskeepers' job. We do need to know how this new type of "court" changes the game.
We need to be bilingual in OD and IT and be able to blend the two to arrive at new solutions for traditional problems: OD-IT Aiki.
Bilingual OD consulting!