O.D. Institute Newsletter

August 2009

Where Have All The O.D. Programs Gone?

Terry Armstrong, R.O.D.C.

In an attempt to answer the question, “Where have all the O.D. programs gone?” I decided to ask six past chairs of the Academy of Management’s Organizational Change and Development Division and Management Consulting Division, three from each division, what they believed the reasons for the decrease in the number of Academic Programs might be.  All were knowledgeable about Academic O.D. programs and have been teaching O.D. for over twenty years.  This was just a preliminary attempt at looking for an answer. I plan on doing a more thorough investigation, but thought that the readers of this newsletter might also be interested in hearing about my very tentative findings.  I also hope sharing my provisional findings might be an effective way of widening my investigation to a readership beyond the Academic Community. I certainly would appreciate your ideas on the subject.

When I started chairing the Organization Development Institute’s Committee on Accreditation in 1984 I ran into program directors who were excited and wanted to attempt getting their programs accredited, and others who felt it was irrelevant or that their programs were not financially solid enough to seek accreditation.  Several were too concerned to even talk to their deans about it.  Even then, program directors were fighting to keep their programs alive.  This was true for at least two well know programs at the time. Therefore, I thought that the decrease in Academic O.D. programs since 2000 was primarily due to College Deans responding to dimensioning budgets.  Having been an academic administrator I had felt that issue myself. However, the responses I received from my panel of experts were different from my best guess.  Here is what I heard:

The market for professionally qualified practitioners has dried up.

O.D. has been taken over by HR.

O.D. is no longer “the in thing” in the US.  It’s still strong in Africa, Latin America and Europe

Applications for our degree program have been dropping for several years.

It’s been dead for a long time.  How long has it been since Michael Beer pronounced O.D. dead?

AI has taken over.

I heard what my panel of experts was saying, but somehow it didn’t ring true.  Then I reflected on a more unobtrusive measure: the number of job announcements coming into the O.D. Institute. There was a time when the O.D. Institute was flooded with inquires by organizations looking for people to fill permanent and consulting O.D. positions.  As any current reader of this newsletter would quickly realize, such openings have dropped off substantially.  Does this mean the marketing effort of business for O.D. Practitioners has changed?  Have those hiring O.D. Practitioners switched to a different media, i.e., the internet?  I decided to do a Google search for jobs in O.D. and besides the listings on the Organization Development Institute’s Web Site I only found one O.D. position posted.  I can remember the days when I could find job openings advertised in the New York Times and in a number of trade association journals and magazines.  I can also remember when a Google search would turn up many jobs from entry level to senior practitioner. Hum, maybe the market has dried up.

Then I decided to see if it might be true that O.D. had been succumbed by HR by calling some long time HR professionals who I had worked with in the past.  I made a few calls on my faithful cell phone since it has now become my electronic rolodex.  Wow, how times have changed!  I remember going from my shoe box filing system to a fancy rolodex; in the last year I transferred my rolodex to my cell phone.  Anyway, a few phone calls later I had more insights.  The first call was to a VP of HR at a large Midwest company.  He was blunt.  Their head O.D. person had no training that he knew of, but was the president’s girl friend.  He couldn’t hide his anger.  It hadn’t been that many years ago when he had called me looking for someone they might hire to lead a new O.D. program. So much for O.D. at that company!  The next call there was no answer, so I left a message on the voice mail. The third call to the HR department at a large service firm in Chicago relayed to me that they had outsourced O.D. to a firm in New York that specializes in succession planning.  During the fourth call to a Fortune 100 Company I learned that indeed O.D. was now a part of their HR department and except for a small elite group of senior O.D. consultants working with “C” Officers they only had O.D. Types in corporate training and employee development.  Though my sample was small, I began to wonder if O.D. had been transferred to HR.   Had it been sent to the equivalent of Siberia

So what about O.D. no longer being the “In thing” in American business?  How could I check that out?  I decided to call some CEOs I knew to see what they knew about the latest fads in organizational change. CEO number 1 though it was all about the internet and even twitter and social networking.  CEO number 2 was concerned with Net Promoter Scores.  CEO number 3 could only talk about the latest marketing Guru.  I didn’t have the heart to call the next three on my list.

Well, maybe, AI has taken over. Given my criticism of AI and what Steve Fitzgerald calls “The Shadow Side of AI” no one would expect me to be hoping for AI as the O.D. savior.  But out of death the Sphinx arises. The Benedictine programs with their focus on AI are certainly growing.  In fact, they are growing while others are shrinking and even being closed down.  Maybe the old OD that so many of us cherished with its foundations in applied social science is dead.  Maybe the new O.D., built on hope and positive psychology, is the future of O.D.  This new form of O.D., known as AI, is alive in the imaginations of many.  Wasn’t good O.D. always a child of the imagination and theatrics?  Maybe there is nothing to be concerned about after all? 

But my questioning nature got the best of me.  Just what might be the best way to find out what is actually happening in the field?  At least what might be an effective way to determine what is happening in O.D.?  Well, why not just ask Google?  I did, and discovered some interesting information.  I discovered that in Scotland four universities had started O.D. programs since 1996.  Another interesting finding emerged in a piece by Fiona Ellis of the Bath Consulting Group. In her PDF article The benefits of partnership for OD & HR: The changing Roles of OD and HR, she says “the boundaries between OD and HR are increasingly blurred.” www.bathconsultancygroup.com/documents/the_benefits_of_partnership_for_od_and_hr.p

Has the strategic shift in HR moved it to center stage?  It has also become clear to me that HR has done a  better job of politically positioning itself than has O.D.  A quick review of the Society of Human Resource Management’s, SHRMs, website compared to the OD Nets website quickly demonstrated how effectively SHRM has positioned itself with management.  From what I can determine the various O.D. organizations have focused on the discipline of O.D. or on individual consultants; whereas, HR has put most of its effort into getting a seat at the table for HR and on the development of the profession as a whole.  Looking at job openings on the SHRM web site I discovered they had 360 job listings with 8 of those being in organization development.

Now that I have gotten into this Google thing I decided to take a look at “Leadership Development.”  I found a plethora of sites dedicated to leadership development.  Reviewing these sites I saw that leadership development has been slowly shifting from a focusing on the individual leader to focusing on the team and the organization.  It looked to me that the leadership development focus of old had moved in on O.D. and had taken a nice slice of the O.D. market.  It also looked like HR has captured the leadership market as well – they had several listings on their job site for leadership development and trainers in the area of leadership.  However, even though HR appears to have done a better job of position itself it still is not a strategic partner with top management though it has been trying to get there for years. 

Then I decided to see how many graduate programs there are in HR and O.D.  Using http://www.gradschools.com I found 427 graduate programs in Human Resource Management and O.D. wasn’t even listed.  This is only one source for finding graduate programs but with the popularity of the internet this is very telling.  Maybe the O.D. Institute needs to do even more than we are doing to promote O.D.

Bringing up Google again I searched for “organizational jobs in Europe” just to see if it’s true that O.D. is growing in Europe.  To my dismay I came up with 1,630,000 hits.  A closer look at the first 200 and it became clear that a few are really in the U.S. and some are even in China.  Why not see what shows up for a Google search “organizational jobs in Africa.”  Well, just 1,300,000 hits.  Obviously something is very different about O.D. in Europe and Africa than in the U.S.  A closer look at some of the hits shows that a number are traditional O.D. type jobs but it is clear that O.D. is not defined the same way in Europe and Africa as it is in the U.S.  So I type in Graduate Organizational Development Programs in Europe and Google comes up with 140,000.  A close look at these and it’s clear that in Europe they throw a lot of things under the title of O.D. that we would label differently such as Leadership, and MBA Programs.  So rather than just search for “graduate programs in organization development I search for graduate programs in organization development in the United States” and come up with 2,790,000 hits.  Yet, when I searched http://www.gradschools.com I found no hits for graduate programs in O.D.  Something just isn’t quite right here.  Maybe it is that I haven’t figured out how to use Google.

Just as I was about to draw a conclusion my second HR call was returned.  She had received my message and had already started thinking about my question.  As an HR internal to a Fortune 100 company and now an independent consultant it was her observation that staffing firms had taken over much of the work in large companies and that many of the HR functions had been outsourced. Except for a small flurry of activity she had seen in labor relations she hadn’t seen companies looking for many HR or OD people. Even though she has all the SHRM certificates and many years in HR and OD she is looking into a line position which might include opening her own manufacturing company.  She had concluded that HR had not become a strategic partner to top management and the only way to be a real player was to join top manager or purchasing a business.

This is only a very tentative investigation.  I will continue my research on this topic in order to gain a more complete answer to my tantalizing question: “Where Have All the O.D. Programs Gone?” Though I haven’t come up with a conclusion to my question I certainly have a better understanding of why folks are confused about O.D. Anyone who would like to join in on a search to find and answer please e-mail me at odtrainer@aol.com.

Editor: Terry Armstrong, RODC, odtrainer@aol.com