Dear Amritha,
Rarely on this forum we get queries related to Organisation Development (OD). I would have responded your query promptly nevertheless, I thought of waiting for the OD consultants to respond. However, no OD consultant worth of his/her salt has come forward to address your query. If you had raised query on training or consulting on OD, consultants of all hues would have jostled to show how “expert” were they in providing their services to you. Few would have stretched their imagination and told you how psychometric tests or outbound training is a classic OD activity. A week has been passed since you have posted your query and still our experts are silent. However, value addition through their reticence, since it perfectly fits within the rules of this forum, let me move on to my reply.
It appears that you have not read sufficient books on the subject of OD. OD is not an event so that its success or failure can be measured so easily. OD can be defined as a change effort that is (a) planned (b) focused on an entire organisation or a large subsystem (c) managed from the top (d) aimed at enhancing organisational health and effectiveness and (e) based on planned interventions made with the help of a change agent (manager) or external consultant who is well versed in the behavioural sciences.
Major features of organisational development are: -
a) The change is planned and proactive rather than reactive.
b) The changes are aimed at a whole organisation or a large division or a department rather than one small group or narrow aspect such as inventory system or compensation system.
c) Top management recognises the need for change but the change effort itself involves the cooperation of organisation members at other level also.
d) The major focus is on increasing the capacity for long-run effectiveness, even though OD solves immediate problems as well.
e) OD relies on use of interventions which are OD change strategies developed and initiated with the help of a change agent (internal and external) which acts as a [b]catalyst[b] to initiate improvements.
From the above features it can be deduced that OD is a complex process which may take a year or more to design and implement and the process may continue indefinitely. It tries to move an organisation from where it is now to where it should be after some time .
The query that you have raised shows that you are under a notion that OD is some isolated activity.
Example of Infosys and HP: - Since Mr Vishal Sikka has taken over as CEO of Infosys, he has launched organisation-wide programme called “design thinking’. This is a major shift to make Infosys a product-based IT company from a service-based company. The second example is of HP. This company was one time very strong in computer hardware. However, as the sales of computers started dwindling, it made a major shift to the cloud technology.
General Example of OD: - In order to optimise the utilisation of resources, suppose some big company decides to implement Operations Research (OR) techniques across the organisations, then mere hiring OR consultants is not enough. Staff need to be educated on how they can support the consultants. Once this goes on for the couple of years, the decrease in consumption of resources or reduction in turnaround time of various processes is the success of OD intervention. Introduction of lean manufacturing, six sigma, ISO 9000 could be OD interventions albeit partially if not fully.
The above two examples show that the OD interventions are in support of organisation’s strategy. I am saying “strategy” and not “vision” or “mission”, please note. Sans the strategic direction, if OD interventions are conducted in isolation or when HR launches few interventions on their own, these are bound to fail. The second important factor of OD interventions is that HR should be empowered sufficiently. There are cases wherein strategy was executed even though HR played insignificant role.
You will find reply to your query in HR related or business related magazines. HR Heads write articles on the success of OD intervention in their organisation. As far as failure in OD interventions is concerned, hardly you will get that example as nobody discloses their failures or in India there are no failures!
For Mr RDS Yadav: - Though Amritha could have written full-form of OD rather than just abbreviation, let me specify that abbreviation OD in HR is used predominantly for “Organisation Development” and not for “Organisational Dynamics”. There are consultants for organisational development and not for organisational dynamics.
Thanks,
Dinesh Divekar