O.D. Institute Newsletter

October 2009

"Working ourselves out of a job"

Arthur M. Freedman, MBA, Ph.D. 

arthurf796@aol.com

Hi Terry, 
 
I might as well get my voice in the conversation. I think I have a slightly different perspective. 
 
When I started learning about OD&C about 50 years ago, I learned that our purpose as OD&C practitioners was to "work ourselves out of a job." I have never forgotten that injunction. It meant, to me, that we refrain from inducing dependency by our client system leaders and members on us. Rather, it is our job to, in addition to helping clients to solve their immediate, urgent, systemic, unprecedented challenges; we also strive to enable them to become empowered to deal with future problems, opportunities, and dilemmas by which they will, inevitably, be confronted. I was taught it is essential to "give our technologies away to those who most need them." 
 
A measure of our success -- or a milestone, at least -- in this effort may have been the large number of internal OD&C units that client system leaders created after we, as external consultants, demonstrated the value of OD&C. 
 
If this injunction is still valid today, it seems to me that our discipline has been and will continue to be effective and, probably, successful. However, I am not sure that a very large number of graduate degree programs in OD&C are sustainable. Probably, the numbers of such exclusively OD&C programs will shrink to a core few. And, the survivors will have to make their mission or purpose crystal clear. That is, is it the intent of a program to be training and developing OD&C practitioners, exclusively? And/or is the intent to train and develop future organizational leaders who are capable of applying OD&C theory and methods as they lead for-profit, non-profit, governmental, and NGO organizations? 
 
It seems to me that there are a number of hybrid graduate programs that integrate OD&C theory and methods into some other discipline -- e.g., Dick Kilburg's MBA in OD Program at the Carey Business School, Johns Hopkins University. The boundary between the OD&C degree program and other degree programs are made permeable enough to enable non-OD&C graduate students to take OD&C courses as electives to supplement their primary areas of study. An even more permeable boundary may be exemplified by Larry Starr's Center for Organizational Dynamics at the University of Pennsylvania. I believe that Larry's program does not offer a degree per se but does offer credit-bearing courses that graduate students from all other programs may elect to supplement their core education. 
 
So, have we not been successful in giving our technologies away to those who are in the best positions to use them? I believe that we have increasing instances where OD&C scholar-practitioners are teaching OD&C courses in professional schools -- e.g., engineering, business, public administration, project management, and medicine -- not to train OD&C practitioners but to supplement the education of students enrolled in those professional programs. In part, I believe that this has been made possible by the increasing recognition that most professional schools have focused on delivering high quality professional services while ignoring or taking for granted the organizational systems through which these professional services are delivered. This indifference to the impact of organizational dynamics of professional service delivery seems to have been replaced with serious concern. Deans and faculty of such professional schools seem to be recognizing, increasingly, an obligation to enlighten and enable their students to diagnose, plan, lead, implement, and evaluate the effectiveness of intentional organizational change. 
 
To me, these trends signify that the OD&C discipline may be bifurcating: on the one hand, a few surviving institutions will continue to focus on producing OD&C practitioners while more institutions will focus on infusing their various professional degree programs with OD&C theory and methods. 
 
Take care of yourself. 
 
Arthur