Abstract by Eric Gaynor Butterfield: Conference on Organizational Change and Development - The Organization Development Institute International, Latin America; www.theodinstitute.org
Recently, Dr. Terry Armstrong (“Organizations and Change”; August 2004 - Newsletter of The Organization Development Institute), stated that many of his graduate students asked him about “What did they have to do to get started in the profession of Organizational Development "
In recent years the corporate and organizational world has been quite convulsed, within which "the Consultant" was an actor with a presence, regardless of whether he was a "main actor" or a "supporting actor". Let's analyze some facts.
1. During my presentation at the World Congress held by The Organization Development Institute in Dublin in July 1999, one of the most interesting questions that arose and was asked me is related to the Profession of Consultant or the Profession of Organizational Development in the different Latin American countries.
2. In the last three years, several people have visited our website and show interest in many of the articles, cases and experiences included there that are related to improvement processes within business corporations in particular and also in relation to the organizational world.
3. We receive in our Institute some calls from professionals who tell us that they are interested in “learning about certain books that they should read” in the areas of Development and Organizational Change.
4. During Congresses and Conferences on Organizational Change and Development, some questions arise in this order: What IS what they must do (in their capacity as professionals graduated from very good Universities) to practice the profession of Consultant?
5. We have been consulted by executives, managers and professionals regarding the importance of "Behavioral Sciences" and what use can be made of them to improve "their" organizations.
6. Executives in charge of the Human Resources area consult us more and more regarding their interest in “training regarding techniques, tools and methodologies” of Organizational Change and Development with a view to deploying services as Internal Consultant in the companies that are working in the security that this has to help them consolidate their position.
7. There is a growing interest to revitalize the previous internal areas called "Organization and Methods" and "Re-engineering" and redefine it as "Organizational Development" or something similar.
8. About three months ago a very experienced trainer in content such as motivation, leadership, NLP, emotional intelligence, sales, among others, asked us for "material related to" organizational change "since a Client had required him to present a proposal to dictate an Organizational Change Workshop.
9. Informal meetings with different professionals (who define themselves as consultants) result in dialogues where it is usually stated to us that "they have more and more problems getting Clients" and "that consulting work has greatly diminished."
We are not going to dare in a few pages to find a resolution to so many questions, but we are going to make the best attempt to explore ways to answer them or, even better, to be able to re-formulate the questions so that we can see the phenomenon from a new and broader perspective.
We must make a series of clarifications in this regard and we are going to detail them one by one.
One of the premises linked to the profession of Consultant is based on the fact that not always the own and internal vision of each one - both at an individual, group or organizational level - can help us to solve the situations that we confront.
All people usually talk about change and also about "resistance to change" but it is rarely spoken in terms of "our own resistance to change" or "that people resist change when they do not know in advance the possible consequences of change in question".
The ignorance of the Consultants regarding the state of the science of Organizational Theories. In a work published on www.Gestiópolis.com, reference is made to some 60 notable authors who make real contributions to understanding the behavior of organizations. A field work (Eric Gaynor Butterfield: “Congreso de Desarrollo Organizacional”, Buenos Aires - 1997) shows that the majority of internal professionals in companies and consultants are unaware of the vast majority of these conceptual frameworks and their consequent possible applications.
The familiarity of most Consultants with “some point practice” regarding how to introduce improvements in the business and corporate world. Here also the reader can go to the work published in www.Gestiópolis.com "Organizational Development: An effort to integrate WHAT is what we should do with HOW we should do it" where more than 60 "Best Practices" that different practitioners had made use of during his interventions in companies.
The consultants' familiarity with only some of these "Best Practices" - and consequently the ignorance of the total universe - makes an effective practice of the Consultant profession vulnerable.
From the previous point, some questions arise and among them we can formulate the following: If a consultant is specialized in one or two "Best Practices" and they are used at the time of carrying out the consulting intervention, how is it possible to expect organizational improvement if this intervention In particular, the consultant does not take into account the "Best Practices" already implemented previously or the option of countless other "Best Practices" that have not yet been implemented? We have made reference to the “3 T” on several occasions and we still do not notice that the Consultants have incorporated a clear distinction between them in the development of their profession, especially in the development of their own consulting intervention.
The changes within the tradition are less than the transitional changes and the latter do not bear any kind of relationship with the transformational changes. And in order to deal with transformational changes, it is essential to know - and of course then be in a position to effectively apply - the state of Behavioral Sciences.
It is extremely unfortunate that a large number of prestigious Universities have not reached the level of Universities in other countries with respect to theories, practices, research and values / ethics related to the Behavioral Sciences.
The question we ask ourselves here is the following: How can professionals, executives and managers interested in change processes not visualize difficulties and problems if they do not have the arsenal of knowledge that is linked to the “behavior of people "? At the end of the day, when a consultant "chooses" a particular best practice such as "Total Quality", "Re-engineering", CRM or SCM, does he have to implement it "without people"? Or perhaps the organizational participants affected are not people, the Clients are not people, the providers are not people, and the implementers of many of these technologies, software and methodologies… are also people! We do not yet have self-generated, self-managed or self-implemented implementation methodologies.
Now we must begin to observe ourselves, as professionals and as consultants. A huge majority - practically more than 97% - of the consultants are University Graduate professionals who have graduated in various fields. Many of them are engineers in their different specialties, others are public accountants and administration graduates, there are also computer specialists, and occasionally we also meet other professionals with various specializations. These people who have defined themselves or the companies have done it for them - especially when they are employed in “large” consulting firms in terms of their institutional dispersion,number of Clients and billing and number of employed personnel - they actually perform work within the companies “which could have been done by professionals from the same organization and who find their pay at the end of each month as part of the payroll. So the consultant distinction is NOT clear in any way.
If someone wants to shed more light on this perspective, they should not fail to take into account the work of Edgar Schein (“Organization Development: Process Consultation”; Addison & Wesley - 1968) where he refers to three main forms that the work of consulting: the "purchase" method, the "doctor-patient" method, and the process consulting method.
Eric Gaynor suggests ("Ways to do consulting work": Michigan State University - 1975) refers to three particular and additional distinctions that occur within the corporate and business world within Latin American cultures.
Under these new perspectives (Edgar Schein and Eric Gaynor) a specialist in implementing an ERP under JD Edwards or SAP or who eventually participates in an intervention to implement a CRM or SCM is not necessarily a consultant, since that same job could have It was carried out through a direct hiring of the professional (self-defined as a consultant or defined by the consultancy in which he is employed) and his difference with the "others" would not have even been noticed since he would have been paid the same day in So are the other organizational members, usually at the end of the month.
Hiring "a consultant" or "a consulting firm" in this sense does not differ to a greater extent than contracting outsourced other services, such as Security, Transportation and Surveillance.
The very frequent failures of traditional consulting interventions are largely due to the conjunction of many of the factors mentioned above. But there is an additional factor that is related to the “prevailing organizational arrangement” within the corporate, organizational and business world in Latin America.
There is no doubt that the consultant's intervention is not carried out in a vacuum but is rather subject to direct action within an organization. And this is where we should stop for a while.
Field work where the different prevailing organizational typologies are consulted receive “limited” responses - to say the least - regarding consultants. They are unaware of the vast majority of the "Best Theories" and also of the "Best Practices" as mentioned in points C. and D. above, the "limited" Best Practices in which they specialize do not last very long., and those conceptual frameworks "known or heard" during the studies leading to their Diplomas in very good Universities, does not always help them to identify the variables or main dimensions of each theoretical or conceptual framework of more than 50 notable experts in organizational behavior and less even the basic hypotheses corresponding to the different organizational arrangements.
If the graduate doctors ignored the development of the Science of Medicine and the contributions of the most notable experts, their "interventions" in patients could be assimilated to what happens to many organizations when consultants or consulting firms enter.
I. Let us now spend some time to analyze and eventually be able to describe the organization that must be subject to analysis by the consultant, and how it is framed within some organizational typology or taxonomy.
Most of the managers, executives, professionals and consultants linked to the corporate and business world refer to a company placing it within a particular category. The various field works (Eric Gaynor Butterfield: "Organizational Development Congress"; Trelew - 1997) show mixed results.
The perception of managers is that their company has adopted a form that moves away from the vertical hierarchical model, while a large number of staff perceive that it is a pyramidal organization with a highly bureaucratic orientation (although they do not really know exactly the two dimensions that are implicit within the Theory of Bureaucracy developed by Max Weber - 1947). But let's move on with the assumption that "you are correct in defining your own organization."
Organizations within more developed countries have accepted for many years that pyramidal and bureaucratic organization has many dysfunctional consequences (see Alvin Gouldner; Philip Selznick; James March & Herbert Simon in "Organizations"; Wiley and Sons - 1958) that undermine both against their existence and with their growth, and they put into practice new organizational arrangements. The works of James D. Thompson - (1967); Tom Burns (1961); Tom Burns and Stalker (1967); Paul Lawrence & Jay Lorsch (1968) practically dealt a fatal blow to the pyramid organization and also to the bureaucratic one, and the practical attempts were illuminated by the enormous contribution of Robert Blake & Jane Mouton (1959) in developing a new organizational arrangement conceived as the "Matrix organization".
But this new organizational arrangement - with characteristics superior to the prevailing ones - in turn deals a severe blow to the company's own organizational participants; none of them have to report to a single superior again and it is not an easy task to report to two at work when that goes even against the biblical passage (of one God).
And this is where the dilemma of organizational transformation - please bear in mind that we are talking about organizational transformation and not organizational transition - moves to the individual transformation that is indispensable.
But people don't transform very quickly; even minor changes such as some abilities, skills and knowledge can take many years (a University Diploma takes about 16 years). Thus, the consultants who must deal with people as organizational members, as Clients, as suppliers, as bankers, as shareholders, among others, must necessarily have the skills required to connect with individuals and human beings, and they are known like Behavioral Sciences… of which most of them know - unfortunately - very little.
J. In multiple interventions within Latin American communities we have not had much evidence of post-matrix organizational arrangements. Readers, at this point, surely have to wonder what the prevailing organizational arrangement is since many of them do not "perceive" that it is operating under the pyramidal or bureaucratic scheme, thinking and suggesting that a model is ALREADY on the way to " higher".
This is where our suggestion to these readers is that they try to observe to what extent a type of “nepotic organization” may still exist and prevail where consanguinity and social ties are privileged.
It goes without saying that a nepotic-type organization is even "prior" to the pyramidal or bureaucratic organization since it dates back several centuries. This perspective of “organizational inefficiency” is even made effective by a practice that has prevailed since “financial globalization”; The motto that reads "you think globally and act locally" is well known, which makes it very clear that the organizational strategy, vision and mission is designed from the outside and it is up to the local organization to adjust to extremely specific and limited procedures and practices.
K. The question that arises at this point has also been frequently asked by many consultants as to whether it is possible to implement what is known within the discipline and Profession of Organizational Development.
No one has given a better answer to this question than the one I have heard from the president of our Institute, Dr. Donald W. Cole, in his capacity as President of The Organization Development Institute today and its Founder in 1968. The answer is initiated as a consequence of a question to the same person who asked it: When did the Industrial Revolution take place in your country? The fact is that only after 60 years of the Industrial Revolution in the United States of America the first Management book is published that has to do with how to manage an organization and a very prestigious University - Harvard University - is required to give your students something more than content since if they would not be useful to the organizational and business world,with which the famous "case method" was born.
It takes some 20 additional years to learn that the case method "is not enough" and "role playing" and another set of practical learning techniques arises, finally with the explosion of the matrix organization and its consequences on the organizational participants. light a new discipline based on Behavioral Sciences that is constituted in the Profession of Organizational Development.
This has taken about 150 years and all of us who participate in The Organization Development Institute are still learning thanks to the fact that within our members we find not only practitioners, managers and consultants but also academics and researchers who help us question the different conceptual frameworks and best best practices on the fundamental pillar constituted by the "Behavioral Sciences".
But to so much news that appears as discouraging - and please do not go to ignore that the University Diplomas already have an expiration date that is of the order of 5 years with which they keep some kind of similarity with perishable foods - we are extremely fortunate since we can develop the Profession of Organizational Development or the Profession of Consultant or the Profession of Consultant in Organizational Development, as a consequence of what is the state of the Behavioral Sciences and how much of it can be applied to introduce improvements and changes in organizations.
And we have additional very good news for all those interested in making Consulting a profession.
For more than 20 years, The Organization Development Institute has been working hard, deploying its greatest and best energies and resources to have the Competencies that are necessary for the exercise of the Profession of Consultant or Profession of Organizational Development.
And even better news: these competencies have already been discriminated for each of the different phases of a consulting intervention.
If you, as a consultant or interested in the consulting profession, still want to stick with only your University Diploma, it is possible that you are among the people who have asked us the questions that we have mentioned in the first part of this material.
If you are in a position to re-conceptualize your Profession (see proposals by Edgar Schein and Eric Gaynor as alterative models), consolidate in the knowledge and application of Behavioral Sciences, you perceive the need to train for transformational changes instead of transitional ones, develops and exercises the Competencies for the Profession of Organizational Development that we have mentioned above and finally takes into account an important suggestion of Dr.
Terry Armstrong in the mentioned Newsletter where he emphasizes that the Consultant himself, the professional in Organizational Development IS the intervention, then he has a whole world of important contributions ahead of him that will benefit you and definitely also the Clients. Many Customers have already been “hurt too much”.
