Revolutions in OD

The New and the New, New Things

Back to the Future:
OD at BEN & JERRY’S

Ice Cream Entrepreneurs

Both were committed to making the
best ice cream and having fun while
doing so.
Founders believed that that business
draws from the community and is
obliged to give something back.
 Back to the Future:
OD at BEN & JERRY’S
Company grew to sales of over $50 million
 “Social mission” that ranged from making regular donations to social
change groups to introducing “Peace Pops” (ice cream bars) whose
profit go to the peace movement.

Ben and Jerry had tried to introduce this “funky” and socially responsible
orientation inside the company.
 Late 1980’s, “funk, fun and love” was inconsistent w/ the atmosphere inside.
 The company was always short on ice cream and long on hours, pressure and problems.
 Philip H. Mirvis was commissioned to begin Organization Development and bring people and
the company together.
DIAGNOSIS:
Positive Negative

 Key managers and staff • Organizational structures and systems were not
in B & J showed them keeping pace with growth
committed to the company • People lacked clear roles and did not agree about
and comfortable in an corporate priorities
environment where they could
• Human organization had not jelled behind any
“be themselves”.
encompassing company mission.
 Back to the Future:
OD at BEN & JERRY’S
Pragmatic Issues to Address:
 Managers did not see themselves as a team nor had they worked together to formulate
goals and responsibilities.
Matters of Principle:
 Many managers had no prior experience leading a company dedicated to social
responsibility.
 And several did not fully buy into socially oriented company policies, including active
association with the peace movement.
 Overall, people were chafing at the founders’ mandate to have “fun” at work while
achieving record production at superior quality standards.
OLD-FASHIONED AND
NEWFANGLED OD

Building on the Old

• B&J
• OD’s traditional top down
change model (Shephard 1975)
 Introducing the New
• OD Efforts at B&J also illustrates Revolutionary Ideas and New Practices
• The goals of the change program were not simply to improve relationships
and organizational effectiveness- traditional OD aims.
• To develop a sense of unity in the company culture and gain commitment to
a complex business mission.
What were some of the other new ideas that informed the
change effort at B&J?
• OD was oriented primarily toward personal growth and interpersonal
relations. (Tannenbaum & Davis, 1969)
• Its emphasis on human development drew from the humanistic theories of
Maslow (1954).
• Its interpersonal emphasis was informed by understanding social
orientations (Schutz, 1958), styles of interaction (Bales, 1951), and
emotional congruence (Luft, 1963)
* New forms of intervention were developed to help people surface
and speak to their identities, confront structural and ideological
differences, and redress power imbalances.
* On the organizational side, OD was originally applied to the
human problems in social systems.
 EVOLUTION VERSUS REVOLUTION
IN OD
• Evolutionary models are premised on continuity: they assume that processes of
variation, selection, and retention are ongoing, slow, and gradual.
• What is the result of evolutionary versus revolutionary development?
• Evolution is renewal as developed from a system’s existing base.
Evolutionary Versus Revolutionary Models of Development
Evolution Revolution

The Process

Continuous Discontinuos
Linear, ordely Nonlinear,chaotic
Sequence, incremental Reciprocal, simultaneous
The Results

Renewal, fine-tuning Death, rebirth

Quantitative change Qualitative change
New content New Context
Path to known state Odyssey to unknown state
NEW THEORY: FROM CHANGE TO
TRANSFORMATION
• Kurt Lewin’s – Theory of personality and principles of topological psychology.
• Stages of Change in Social Field:
 ORGANIZATIONAL
TRANSFORMATION
• Organisational Transformation is a term referring collectively to such
activities as reengineering, redesigning and redefining business system.
• Transformational change
• Three Types of Transformation
1. Improving Operation
• 2. Strategic Transformation
• 3. Corporate Self-Renewal:
 MODEL I AND II
Gregory Bateson He located a second-order self-correction capability in
human mind and contended it enables us to learn how
to learn. (Steps to an Ecology of the Mind)
Chris Argyris Found a gap between people’s “espoused theory”
(what they say are the beliefs and values behind their
actions) and their “theory in use” (the beliefs and values
implied by what they do).
Argyris and Shön Model I learning or first order change
Model II-groups combine inquiry and advocacy to
publicly test assumptions, definitions of the situation
and so forth.
 HIGH STAGE ORGANIZING
• Bill Torbert (1987) –one of the first to develop theory that
expressed double loop learning and reflective practice in the
form of organizational structures and processes.
• Openly chosen structure
• This refers to an organization whose culture supports an open
examination of beliefs and values and encourages the search for new
modes of organizing.
• A culture guided by Liberating Disciplines
• People freely choose a more egalitarian and inclusive mode of
organizing and adopt a high minded purpose for their enterprise .
How does an organization reach this high stage of organizing?

Vaill (1982) Identified the characteristics of high-performance work teams as building blocks

Lawler (1986) Devised principles for high-involvement management.

Nelson and Burns (1984) Identified a range of cultural interventions to move an organization through stages of
reactivity and responsiveness toward proactivity and sustained high performance.

Senge Stressed the importance of team learning and systems thinking.

On the contrary, moving to high-stage organizing requires transformation of a company’s guiding beliefs
and purposes.
What makes OT different from OD in large
scale change?
• Effective leadership has always been integral to the OD
change paradigm. OT, however challenged leaders with
purposing their organization (Vaill, 1982) and stewarding
its guiding beliefs (Davis 1984).
THANK YOU!

[continuation…]

NEW, NEW PROCESS: OD AS ART

• The general point is that visionary art anticipates the new before it is
expressed in accepted theory or makes its way into professional fields of
practice.
• Taylor and Hansen (2005) differentiate presentational knowing from formal
propositional knowledge and colloquial know how. They contend that
presentational forms of expression, such as drawing, music and drama, tap
into and life.
• Act one begins with a dance of collaborative inquiry, symbolizing birth, life,
and death and offering opportunity for people to access deep feelings and
the creative potential from reliving their life course.
Internal Dialogues and playacting are important components in
transformational change. The former allow people to reflect on how
their frames of reference define their reality and guide everyday
actions.
• The Theatre of Inquiry
• Was launched to introduce the art of organizing guided by
“living inquiry”.
• Torbert’s belief that the political literary philosophical
frameworks people use to order their world were causing many
of its problems people basically lacked workable frameworks to
organize the fundamentals of late twentieth-century.
 NEW, NEW PROCESS: OD AS SPIRIT

• Creating organizational conditions that foster employee

spirit at work.
• Many employees feel insecure at work, they are less committed to their
employer, and their productivity has decreased.
• At the same time, employees are experiencing an increased desire for
meaningfulness and fulfilment at work.