Organization Development

What organization development is

Organization development (التطوير التنظيمي), also called organizational development, is a planned and continuing effort to raise the effectiveness of an organisation and its capacity to adapt. The effort works on three things at once: the organisation’s structure, its processes and the behaviour of the people who work in it. It addresses the three together, not one of them in place of the others.

Two aims sit side by side in the definition. One is effectiveness. The other is the capacity to adapt. The effort is described as planned, so it is undertaken deliberately, and as continuing, so it does not come to an end when one piece of work is complete. What it acts on is the combination of structure, processes and behaviour, and the definition places all three inside a single effort rather than in three separate efforts. An effort aimed only at the structure, only at the processes or only at the behaviour of the people would be working on one of the three alone, and the definition excludes that.

What organization development works on

Organization development works on three areas, and each one covers a different part of how the organisation operates:

• Structure. It covers the organisational structure, the distribution of authority across that structure, and the span of control, meaning the number of people who report directly to a single manager.
• Processes. It covers how work flows between departments, and the points along that flow at which the work stops and waits for another department before it can continue.
• Behaviour. It covers how decisions are taken in practice, how a mistake is dealt with once it has been made, and what conduct the organisation rewards.

Working on one of these areas while leaving the other two untouched can be a reason that initiatives stall. A new structure placed on top of old processes reproduces the problem under different names. The units and the titles change, but the work still flows, stops and waits between departments as it did before.

How organization development begins

Organization development proceeds through four steps, and the last of them turns the sequence into a cycle:

1. Diagnosis. It begins from a concrete symptom that can be pointed to in the organisation’s work. The symptom may be a recurring delay, in which the same work arrives late more than once. It may be a decision that takes weeks to reach. Or it may be a standing disagreement between two departments, one that persists rather than arising once and being settled.
2. Identifying the structural cause, not the personal one. The question at this step is whether the symptom comes from how the organisation is designed or from the particular people involved. If the symptom recurs with different people, that suggests the cause lies in the design rather than in the people.
3. A defined intervention. It is given a set scope, a set duration and a set measure. The scope states what the intervention covers, the duration states how long it runs, and the measure states how its result will be judged. The intervention is bounded by all three, so its limits are known before it begins.
4. Measurement and adjustment. The result of the intervention is measured against the measure set for it, and the intervention is then adjusted in light of what the measurement shows.

Organization development is a cycle, not a project that comes to an end once it has been delivered. The fourth step does not close the work: measuring the result leads to an adjustment, and the adjusted intervention is measured again. That is the sense in which the definition calls the effort continuing.

The second step separates two kinds of cause. A structural cause lies in the design of the organisation. A personal cause lies in the particular individuals involved. The test the step applies is repetition across people: a symptom that keeps appearing after the people concerned have changed points away from those people and towards the design in which they work.

The condition organization development cannot do without

Organization development touches authority, the question of who decides what. The distribution of authority is part of the structure that organization development works on, and the work therefore extends to it. For that reason organization development cannot be handed over in full to a consultancy, or left to the human resources function on its own.

The condition is limited in what it excludes. It does not keep a consultancy or the human resources function out of the work. What it rules out is handing the work to a consultancy entirely, or leaving it with the human resources function alone.

The reason lies in who holds the power to make the change. Whoever has the power to change who decides what is the person who holds the decision itself. Recommendations that change authority therefore need that person in order to be carried out. Without that person’s participation, the recommendations turn into a report that is filed away rather than acted on.

How organization development differs from change management

Organization development is continuing and comprehensive. It is continuing because it runs as a cycle of diagnosis, intervention, measurement and adjustment. It is comprehensive because it works on the structure, the processes and the behaviour together. Its aim is to raise the organisation’s capacity to adapt in general, rather than its readiness for any single transformation.

Change management, by contrast, is tied to one particular transformation: this system, this merger, this procedure. Its scope is set by the transformation it serves. A new system being introduced, a merger being carried through or a procedure being replaced each gives change management its object, and the work is defined by that object.

The difference between the two lies in what each does with capacity. Organization development builds the capacity to adapt, working across the structure, the processes and the behaviour of the people. Change management puts that capacity to work in a particular event: the one system, merger or procedure to which it is tied.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.