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A. Business and the Economy
- With the growing demand for market responsiveness, companies will
search for partners to complement and enhance their business portfolios. Successful
partnerships will depend upon a company's ability to develop core competence in relationship
building, sharing information, influence and collaboration, oftentimes shifting from
a competitive and/or adversarial position. This will create opportunities for OD
practitioners to help build effective partnerships and help to develop processes
to manage differences in practice and in culture.
- Increasing economic interdependence and resulting chain reactions
require OD as well as other professionals (i.e., finance, legal, etc.) to develop
and bring a whole-systems perspective and systems thinking tools to our client organizations,
and help develop their 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 consequences; etc.
- The accelerating pace of business will increasingly require quick
decisions about critical matters, based on inadequate and ambiguous information.
Individuals and organizations must become far more effective in managing the exponentially
increasing rate and magnitude of change.
- The increasing need by global organizations for tactical and strategic
partnering will impact the historically conflictful relationship between OD and HR.
Transactional HR will be increasingly automated (i.e., service centers staffed by
time zone so managers can speak to the same person again) and the evolving HR/OD
business partner role will require expertise in both strategic HR and OD, as well
as a strong understanding of business drivers and needs.
- The accelerating rate of change in the competitive environment
will demand that successful organizations constantly innovate around how to increase
responsiveness. Strategically, this may take the form of: developing resilience at
both organizational and individual levels; building high-commitment work environments
where front-line staff can take immediate (& aligned) action when confronted
with new/unfamiliar situations; seeking new partnerships when core competencies required
to pursue new market opportunities exist outside the organization, etc.
- The punishing pace of business has implications for OD practitioners
working in organizations where people are working long hours and burning out. What
is our response to help employees cope, or to change the pace of the organization?
And is that even possible given the business environment. OD needs to be able to
balance the conflicting tensions between the high-speed movement of global business
on the one hand, and promoting people-centeredness as the way of maintaining core
competence on the other.
- When the bottom line is the only criterion in making a decision
there are inevitable consequences to responsible decision-making for the wider community.
This is undoing social order in the world and creating a "tragedy of the commons."
A rich society is not necessarily the same as a good society. The challenge is how
to change this model of organizations wherein the "purpose" is seen as
profit at any (social) cost.
- Organizations need to rise above the concept of mission as guiding
force; mission is simply what you do, how you do it and for whom you do it. The driving
force of organizations must become purpose-- the reason the organization exists.
Beyond mission or vision, this is the aspect of the organization that legitimizes
it as having a positive value to the socio-economic environment, and at least a symbiotic
relationship with the ecological environment.
- The demands of the business world will require managers, consultants,
and others to have a strong grasp of the complex set of relationships (stakeholders,
financial, etc.) in which most large organizations function. A great deal of knowledge
- or access to it - will be required in order to navigate successfully.
- Globalization and the concentration of wealth will tend to increase
hatred and decrease mutual understanding. People need to know more; to understand
and be more sensitive to each other.
- Shorter employment tenure would have an impact on the way we look
at recruiting, training, development, knowledge management and strategies. We will
need to focus on innovative and creative solutions to the business challenges we
face.
- As organizations shrink in size and require more from key individuals,
there will be a growing demand for staff to have a broader base of knowledge and
skills. In addition to specialized skills, core staff will need to have a broader
understanding of business, economic and political issues that impact their business.
Staff will need to have opportunities for continuous learning and organizations will
need to provide for learning.
- If the core of tomorrow´s corporations will be relatively
small groups, we will need capabilities to link smaller groups of professionals with
each other in various configurations to meet global business and human needs. This
may prove to be the ultimate test of loosely-coupled organizations to handle turbulent
systems. The opportunity for OD practitioners is to help groups develop relationships
with stakeholders while maintaining a sense of identity.
B. Science and Technology
- With the emphasis on science and technology we will need to focus
on balancing the skills needed to keep up with technological innovation as well as
interpersonal skills--balance high-tech with high-touch and prepare people to effectively
communicate and work in virtual teams, as well as actual teams. OD needs to be able
to work with the technology AND keep the people in systems agenda together.
- New high-speed and wireless communication technologies may create
a role for "virtual facilitators" with traditional facilitator skills plus
high tech computer/internet knowledge.
- As we continue to shift toward an information-based economy, a
major challenge for "knowledge workers" will be sorting and sifting relevant
information from the unbelievable amounts of available data, most of which is irrelevant,
and some of which is crucial. Can people in a state of information overload make
good decisions?
- The potential harm from technology to ecology and society call
for new forms of corporate organizations; e.g., Dee Hock's chaordic model; or Richard
Engdahl's natural change model, wherein the organization behaves more like a living
organism that adjusts or evolves with the environment, rather than trying to control
or modify it, or even worse, treat it as expendable.
C. Government and Politics
- As governments face crises and challenges of increasing complexity
and significance, the inherited legacy of linear, command-and-control structures
and mind-sets may fail to respond effectively to the needs of citizens. The importance
of whole-systems thinking in the world demands that we be more visible and get the
attention of key government, education, and business leaders to think whole system
vs. linear.
- 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.
- Willis Harman used to say that the dominant institutions in society
always took responsibility for their reach of influence until economic institutions
became dominant. The challenge is for organizations to become responsible for the
welfare of everything they influence, as did the state and the church when they were
dominant. There are scads of opportunities here. When Motorola was under the leadership
of George Fisher, they had plans to invest in schools and health care across China
in order to support the national system they were investing in. Once again, the prevailing
"shareholder equity" and "short term returns" mentality makes
it difficult for managers to think in long term, systems global ways -- the opportunity
is in learning to do so.
D. Population and Demographics
- Most of the people of the world are not a part of the dominant
political-economic system, and they are increasingly prepared to do something about
their separation -- whether it be establishing a goal of a billion affluent Chinese
consumers; or the goals of the fundamentalists to take the entire world back to an
earlier time. The short-term opportunities are the long-term problem. Finding new
markets for goods in "the American way" will work for a few more years,
but it is obviously not sustainable globally. Here again, the opportunity is only
available through different mental models (recall Einstein's statement that you can't
solve a problem using the same consciousness that created it.).
- As global companies continue to expand largely into developing
countries, they need to more carefully factor into their approach aspects of diversity
and multiculturalism. They will continue to struggle with how to define those (hopefully)
"minimum critical" areas for standardization while recognizing the richness
of learning presented by local cultures and different ways of doing business.
- Given the diversity of populations, employee groups etc., a key
OD competency has to be ability to appreciate, work with, be sensitive to and learn
from all kinds of diversity and difference. Managing diversity is a special issue
in managing change in a globalized world.
- 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.
E. Education and Training
- The complex nature of most social and organizational issues requires
a systemic thinking ability that could be fostered through more integrative models
of education (beginning in primary grades!).
- As education goes virtual, old styles of apprenticeship and hands-on
learning will become more and more essential and more expensive. Just as monasteries
saved critical knowledge and expertise during the dark ages, individual scholar/practitioners
will pass on their knowledge, wisdom and expertise by the ancient means of one student
one teacher. Peers also need opportunities to learn from others through face-to-face
forums.
F. Health and the Environment
- Sustainability -- already a business driver in Europe where they
are closer to running out of physical space than in the US -- will become an increasingly
significant business driver for US companies, requiring alignment by and with government
agencies and global businesses. OD professionals can help businesses find ways to
adapt to the reality that there are limits to resources and nothing taken from or
put into the environment disappears; rather, "organizational waste" changes
form and must be accounted for on a larger scale than the closed system of an individual
business.
- The fact that poverty, illness and illiteracy breed crime, antipathy,
and terrorism (which then increase poverty, illness and illiteracy) can --and indeed
has with the War in Afghanistan-- become a driving force to focus international resources
and energy on addressing these issues rather than ignoring or just accepting them.
To do this, we must acknowledge that the US is a part of (vs. apart from or over
and above) the rest of the world, and accept that "winning" the current
war and restoring a sense of security in our nation if not the world requires not
only battlefield victory, but ultimately victory over the poverty, illness, and illiteracy
that enslaves the vast population of have-nots in the world.
- The pace of change in the environment means that OD practitioners
will be called to increasingly help our clients be "in the moment" rather
than planning based on past experience. It also means helping them understand leading
indicators versus lagging indicators.
G. Culture and Belief Systems
- We need to know more about different cultures--their values, norms
and practices in business, and their unique way of viewing their world; not to change
them, but to understand them. We even need to know more about subcultures in the
same country or continent, since they can be very different. Sensitivity and flexibility
will be required to manage in collaborative cross-cultural organizations.
- Globalization forces us to examine the values and practices of
OD developed from a Western perspective--are they applicable in non-western cultures
of the world?
- The top leaders who need us most and want nothing to do with "touchy
feely" may need to be reached in different ways. There is an opportunity to
reinvent the way we are viewed and demonstrate the value we add. We need to be able
to speak their language in financial and strategic terms, understand the demands
and pressures they face, and offer services that address needs they can understand,
including both profit and people.
- OD needs to see culture as central to what it is about, and understand
culture both in the ethnic sense of the term (race, gender etc.) and the occupational
community sense of the term in organizations (executives, IT specialists, engineers
etc.)
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