Foreword: Observations on the State of Organization Development

SOME HISTORICAL NOTES

Organization development as a practice evolved in the 1950s out of the work of the National Training Labs (NTL) on group dynamics and leadership. At the same time, a number of social psychology departments and business schools were discovering that traditional industrial psychology no longer met the varied needs of organizations. The concepts and tools available in the early days of the field were mostly diagnostic and individual oriented, and therefore did not fully respond to the problems that many organizations were facing. Of particular importance to OD's beginning was the discovery in the T-groups (T for training) of the power of "experiential" learning in groups and in the organizational arena. This combining of new forms of intervention and new concepts of group dynamics and leadership in effect created the field of OD.

OD had come a long way by the mid-1960s. This led Dick Beckhard, Warren Bennis, and me to start to design the Addison-Wesley series on organization development. We knew that we wanted a book series rather than a single book on OD because the field was, even at that time, too diverse to lend itself to a single volume. Some practitioners saw the future in terms of new ways of looking at interpersonal dynamics. Some saw it as a new set of values for how organizations should be managed. Some focused on group and intergroup problems. Still others tried to conceptualize how a total change program for an organization would look. Many different approaches were proposed on how best to deal with organizational issues and the management of change. No one model dominated the scene, and various "experimental interventions" within organizations were the order of the day.

The most radical of these experiments was to introduce the T-group into organizational units, even work groups, to leverage the impact of here-and-now experiential learning and feedback for individual and organizational growth. But as we now know, such experiments also revealed the limitations of face-to-face feedback across hierarchical lines. Telling the boss exactly what you think of him or her has not really worked out, though the current efforts to employ 360-degree feedback is clearly a contemporary version of those original experiments.

My own involvement in the field centered on efforts to understand the deeper dynamics of personal and organizational change. I had encountered deep change processes in my earlier studies on "brainwashing" of prisoners of war and civilians captured by the Chinese communists in the early 1950s-what I came to call coercive persuasion (Schein, Schneier, & Barker, 1961). When I took on my first job in the Sloan School in 1956, I observed similar coercive persuasion processes in the indoctrination of new hires by large corporations. But exposure to experiential learning through work with NTL led me to the conclusion that coercive persuasion works only when the target person is a captive. If people can walk away from unpleasant learning situations, they will do so. Learning, therefore, has to be based on a collaboration between consultant (coach) and client (learner), the understanding of which led me to define and describe "process consultation" as the group and organizational equivalent of Rogerian therapy for the individual (Schein, 1969, 1999). In that regard, I have always considered process consultation as an essential philosophy underlying organization development, not just a tool to be taken off the shelf when needed.

Probably the biggest impact on the evolution of OD as a field-I know this is true in my case-was the result of the actual experience that individuals had as consultants to managers in real organizations. Though research was always an important dimension of OD practice, there is no doubt in my mind that the essential learning about change and how to manage it came from our own experiential learning. For example, in my historical analysis of the rise and fall of the Digital Equipment Corporation, where I was a consultant for thirty years, I pointed out how Ken Olsen, the founder and my primary client, influenced my insights on how to conduct organizational surveys (Schein, 2003). He wanted me to do an engineering department survey, and when I asked him when he wanted to see the results, he said, "I don't want to see the results. If problems are uncovered, I want them fixed." His surprising response led me to the concept of upward cascading of survey results-that is, having each group analyze and categorize its own data before anything was shared with the next higher level. This approach empowered groups to fix their own problems and to feed upward only the things that higher levels of management alone could handle.

Working with clients also made highly visible the impact of deep cultural assumptions on how organizations design themselves, determine their strategy, and develop the basic processes that they use to get the work done. It became increasingly clear to me that culture is not just about the soft stuff of communication, rewards, and morale. It is deeply connected to the fundamental issues of organizational goals and means. The deep explanation of why Digital Equipment Corporation was successful-and why, in the end, it failed as a business-is all about the cultural DNA in that organization that made innovation an imperative and more central than concerns about business efficiency. Similarly, in my work with Ciba-Geigy in the late 1970s, I could see clearly how the company's acquisition strategy was far more dominated by self-image and cultural identity than by any pure economic or market criteria (Schein, 2004).

SOME CURRENT OBSERVATIONS

What has happened to the field of organization development in the last forty years? The answer is evident in this volume. OD has evolved, yet it has maintained a conceptual core and its diversity. If one scans the table of contents, it is evident that the core has a number of elements: a concern with process, a focus on change, and an implicit as well as explicit concern for organizational effectiveness. At the same time, there is a healthy diversity of views on what processes to focus on, how to manage change, and which values should inform the concept of "organizational health."

There is as yet no consensus on what the basic goals of organization development should be. Some practitioners would argue that OD's role is to "reform" organizations: to introduce humanistic values and ensure that organizations become "better" places to work for their employees. Others would argue that OD should help client systems be more effective at whatever it is the clients are trying to do within their cultural contexts. Client values should not be challenged unless they cross some broad ethical boundary. Still others would argue that the two positions converge, in that only organizations that operate by certain humanistic values can be effective in the long run anyway.

And finally, some would argue, as I would, that organizations are complex systems and that "health" therefore has to be defined in systemic terms: does the organization have a clear identity, the requisite variety, the capacity to learn, and sufficient internal alignment among its subsystems to function. Obviously, if the system has evil goals, OD practitioners would not work with it, but systems operate in all kinds of cultural contexts and have many different kinds of value sets. In this view of the field, the role of OD is more to help the system work its internal processes of alignment and integration than to challenge or to try to change those values.

The question has been raised about whether OD is a viable and growing concern or if the field has lost its momentum. To answer that question, one must first recognize how many elements of OD have evolved into organizational routines that are nowadays taken for granted: better communications, team building, management of intergroup competition, and change management, to name just a few. At the same time, as this volume suggests, the field is continuing to grow in defining concepts and tools to tackle the even tougher problems of change and organizational dynamics in an increasingly global and diverse world. Two current issues for the field to address strike me as paramount:

1. The difficulty of creating a viable organization (system) that is geographically dispersed and consists of subsystems that are genuinely different national and occupational cultures. The positive aspects of diversity are highly touted, but the problems of alignment and integration of diverse cultural elements remain a major challenge.
2. The ongoing difficulty of getting upward informational flow in hierarchies, as illustrated by all the recent disasters in NASA and in the slow response to the New Orleans flooding from Hurricane Katrina. Even the best of managers find themselves isolated and therefore ignorant of what is really going on below them. I see little evidence that OD practice has found a cure for that fundamental organizational pathology.

Organization development will continue to flourish as a field, however, because its practitioners are unique in their concern with human processes. OD practitioners have learned as a core part of their training that process is as important as content-and sometimes more important-and often is a strong reflection of content. Process at the individual, group, or intergroup levels is what OD practitioners...