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A. Business and Economics
- The accelerating pace of business is increasingly requiring quick
decisions about critical matters, based on inadequate and ambiguous information.
Innovative intervention methods must support individuals and organizations toward
managing the exponentially increasing rate and magnitude of change. We need to help
client organizations to evolve from a limiting paradigm of expert individual decision-makers,
toward new methods, assumptions and technologies of group, networked, and distributed
nodes for decision-making, problem-solving, and meaning-creating.
- Increasing economic interdependence and resulting chain reactions
require OD professionals to use whole-systems perspectives and systems thinking tools
with client organizations. Intervention designs must build capacity to think, make
decisions, and take action systemically, i.e. see the big picture; build in effective
feedback loops; recognize or anticipate and adjust for unintended, delayed and counterintuitive
long-term consequences.
- We will need to work and understand the issues of working virtually
in temporary teams, think systemically beyond the walls of the existing organization
using concepts of value networks, and understand the principles of the knowledge
economy.
- OD can help organizations focus on moving from the old SWOT approach
in strategic planning to a more Appreciative Inquiry based approach focused on Strengths
and Opportunities. Focusing on Weaknesses and Threats is increasingly becoming a
wasted activity in a world that is evolving at such an increasing pace that the future
increasingly looks nothing like the past and the present is so transitory as to barely
exist. It is important when we talk about AI to make sure that people understand
that the term "appreciative" does not refer to "gratefulness"
but rather to the accounting concept of "accrual" wherein we build on our
assets.
- Given economic interdependence, and chain reactions fueled by
bottom line criteria in making decisions -- OD needs to foster the capability to
make collaborative decisions at the periphery of organizations based on consistency
with organizational Purpose and Principles. This means helping develop a truly empowered
environment and collaborative problem-identification and problem-solving skills.
It also means training team members at all levels to become effective facilitators
of the collaborative process.
- We need to evolve better ways for HR and OD professionals and
organizations to collaborate as companies evolve and refine a joint HR/OD Strategic
Business Partner role, especially since there may be budget for just one incumbent
(to span what has traditionally been two separate internal positions).
- The business environment has become so complex traditional OD
interventions are not adequate to deal with the size of the problem. Meta-organizational
and multiple organizational techniques will have to be created.
- Our clients are demanding that we develop ways to identify and
monitor metrics that measure impact on intended results, rather than success of and
satisfaction with tactical interventions. In the economy of today, businesses need
proven and verifiable methods to increase efficiency (i.e. more and better alignment,
precision and speed). OD can integrate methods that do this with our collaborative
process methodologies to achieve sustainable progress and results.
- If Globalization and the concentration of wealth will tend to
increase hatred and decrease mutual understanding around the World, OD practitioners
should be joining global networks such as ODI and IODA, to stimulate global thinking.
Alliances will need to be built that lead to OD involvement in global public policy
groups as well.
- Increased opportunities for OD to coach and support leaders looking
to find meaning and purpose and to provide an environment that supports the whole
person. We may need to more actively advocate our beliefs and values for individuals
and workplaces.
- OD professionals can assist companies in effectively building
parterships and share information with other companies by helping companies look
at their organizational boundaries. First OD professionals need to assist organizations
break down boundaries within the traditional company structure so sharing information
is non-threatening. Concurrently OD interventions to increase the involvement of
customers, supplies, and external stakeholders in developing and implementing business
strategies will help shift the mental paradigm of today's definition of a "company".
B. Science and Technology
- New high-speed and wireless communication technologies may create
a role for "virtual facilitators" with traditional facilitator skills plus
high tech computer/internet knowledge. OD practitioners need first to learn how to
do this themselves, and then how to teach it to others on a mass scale.
- OD must implement effective ways to use the internet with virtual
team. Just as this process uses Webcouncil to create and refine new knowledge, clients'
issues can be handled using this powerful tool. There are most likely numerous OD
strategies and intervention models that can also be effectively implemented using
this virtual team system. OD professionals will need to hone their knowledge and
skills as virtual team guides and thought organizers, much as Saul is doing for this
process; technologies such as Webcouncil will need to continue to evolve as the interventions
required increase in complexity.
- Because technology will continue to play a large role in business
organizations, facilitation and facilitation skills need to be recognized as a critical
leadership competency versus an OD intervention.
C. Government and Politics
- Due to problems created by global business networks that they
are not responsible to solve, and which governments increasingly do not have the
power to solve, public-private partnerships involving government, business, and voluntary
sectors could be a great growth industry for OD professionals. Here is the opportunity
for initially pro-bono work to stimulate interest and awareness. This could lead
to ongoing work as facilitators of the process of creating and operating public-private
partnerships. Socio-economic-ecologic responsibility needs to be a part of basic
Purpose and Principles of such activities.
- If the prevailing "shareholder equity" and "short
term returns" mental models make it difficult for managers to think in long
term, systems global ways, OD can help to foster greater versatility in the mental
models in use that are longer term, more creative, more inclusive, and more continuously
learning.
D. Population and Demographics
- If global companies continue to expand into developing countries,
they need to more carefully factor into their approach aspects of diversity and multiculturalism.
In addition to systems thinking, global level capability to work with diversity and
multi-culturalism must be made an education requirement.
- The ability to reach across our conceptual frames of "difference"
will be necessary -- mediation of conflict and appreciation for other ways of being
are necessary skills. In addition to management of conflict (based on a presumption
of misperceptions of mutual exclusivity of interests) it is going to be increasingly
necessary to recognize the existence of polarities and genuinely mutually exclusive
positions that need also to be dealt with on an effective basis; this may mean that
OD practitioners are going to have to recognize that "idealized philosophies"
are not always in consonance with the real world and that implementation of Dissonance
Theory based activities may be necessary on a large scale... helping to educate people
on such needs and facilitate implementation of such activities would be a definite
role for future OD.
- Diversity, conceptual frames and cultures need more prominence
in global business decisions and the tendency to spread an ethnocentric model. We
need more advanced work on relationships between groups and organizations, including
more sensitivity and skill in diversity and conflict.
E. Education and Training
- We need more blending of competence in OD and business functions,
e.g., HR, global operations, etc.
- Effective OD interventions with "stickability" must
reflect a whole systems perspective from a practical, results-oriented focus (vs.
an academic, process-oriented focus) and strategies for identifying and sustainably
effecting key leverage components. Knowledge and skill in applied systems thinking
is critical for OD practitioners and organizational leaders.
- I used to believe that the world of OB/OD was organized in two
facets... Content (what) and Process (how), but have now concluded that, like Gaul,
the organizational world is divided into three parts... Content (what), Process (how),
and Purpose (why), and that it is this third element, Purpose (WHY, why an organization
exists), that is the key to long-term success and sustainability; Purpose is tied
inexorably to Nature (in both an ecological and a quantum sense), to Evolution and
to Chaos. I think the role of OD is to first understand this and its importance,
and then to convey such understanding to the leadership of organizations.
- An area for OD focus is achieving business results and leadership
development simultaneously through action/reflection projects that use tools such
as Webcouncil to support: virtual meetings; information exchange and knowledge creation;
strategy identification, execution, and assessment; and increased leadership capacity
from participation in and reflection on such projects.
- Overall, OD / OB programs need to engage in a lot more research
of the core issues implied in our collective strategy responses in this Delphi exercise.
Really good research is absent from a lot of the OD / OB education. Most of the OB
related articles in the research-based peer-reviewed journals today has more to do
with standing room on the head of a pin than it does with the issues we are codifying
here.
F. Health and the Environment
- If sustainability is becoming an increasingly significant business
driver for US companies, it is essential to restore interdisciplinarity to OD education
by adding economics, public policy, and ecological studies to the OD / OB curricula.
G. Culture and Belief Systems
- Our view of hard-driving--and financially-driven--top executives
as problems must change, along with our view of ourselves. To the extent that we
operate from a polarized view of our role as consultants who must change our clients
to our way of thinking, we add to their problems, or are simply irrelevant. Our interventions
need to include and value the priorities of all organization participants, supporting
holistic, inclusive integration at the level of core goals of people at all levels
of hierarchy, as well as customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders.
- Because culture needs to be understood as central to what OD is
about, our intervention proposals, designs, and strategies must explicitly integrate
culture awareness and culture work as a critical focus. We must articulate the relevance
of culture work for the health and effectiveness of organizations and the people
who staff them.
- OD needs to focus on educating on the values of cultural diversity
and processes that breed inclusiveness rather than exclusiveness. In particular,
OD needs to facilitate a "diversity training" mentality that overcomes
much of what has been done in the past under that rubric that has focused on difference
awareness plus guilt and apology for the past, and that instead focuses on the present
and future in terms of awareness, legitimization and usefulness of multiplicity in
perspectives when approaching complex problems and situations.
- The search for and engagement in partnerships as a means of enhancing
business portfolios, means OD practitioners will have to not only assist organizations
in understanding the importance of bringing different corporate cultures together,
but also develop specific methods for creating "new" cultures.
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