A Tribute to O.D. Legend Don Cole: A Conversation with a Socially Responsible Pioneer at a Castle in Vienna

Gus: Don, first I'd like to learn about the birth or beginnings of the O.D. Institute. Please think back to when you first started thinking about the need for, or notion of, an organization like the O.D. Institute. What was going on in your mind, your life, your environment or the world at that time that created a need / opportunity for the O.D. Institute? Please tell me the story of how the O.D. Institute was born.

Don: Well, if you like, I could start earlier than the O.D. Institute? I could go back to when I first saw a need for the discipline of 'organization development'.

Gus: Please.

Don: It occurred in 1956 when I was asked by the state of Washington to develop a residential treatment center for emotionally disturbed children, on the grounds of a custodial hospital. I was concerned about trying to do a treatment unit within the administrative structure of a custodial state hospital -- and I wrote to all of the major residential treatment centers in the United States at that time, asking if they knew of any instance when a residential treatment center had been able to get itself built in a custodial-oriented environment. And the answer that came back to me was that nobody had ever seen this done. As a matter of fact, there was a custodial children's unit in upstate New York where they had fired the entire staff, hoping to create a treatment environment out of a custodial environment. And, even though they fired the entire staff, they were unable to do that. Somehow, the custodial value system lingered on.

The other thing that had an impact on me was recognizing that the mental health problems of the world would most likely never be solved by a clinical one-on-one approach. There just are not enough clinicians around to make that happen. And we had to find some kind of technology that would enable us to promote good mental health more efficiently and effectively than a one-to-one clinical relationships.

There was a guy by the name of Bruno Bettelheim in Chicago who wrote several books in which he talked about a concept called 'milieu therapy.' And milieu therapy was the creation of an environment which would help resolve mental health problems.

This whole situation was compounded when I was asked to start a research project at TRW - a very big aerospace corporation - on professional suicide. The corporation defined the problem as being something which bright engineers and managers did to themselves. So I saw them as a clinician, trying to help them with their problems because I had spent 10 years learning how to do this. Eventually I began to listen to what they were telling me - and what they were telling me was that they had a nice family, nice kids and a nice wife - but they didn't get to see them very often. The thing that was driving them nuts was the company. So I began to look for ways in which the company needed to be changed in order for these people not just to survive, but in order for them to be productive.

At about that time, I ran across a fellow by the name of Herb Shepherd at Case Western Reserve and they were starting the first OD Program in the United States.

Gus: What time frame was this?

Don: We met in 1964. In 1965, TRW sent me for training to the organization intern program at Bethel, Maine, so I had 5 weeks of training in organization development from them. Then I went back the following year for a 2 week program with Will Schutz on Conflict Resolution and I started taking courses at Case Western Reserve. I was at CWRU for 3 years -taking courses in OD.

So I was in industry involved with laboratory learning and there were other people in industry that were also interested in laboratory learning as a way of helping corporations run better. Laboratory learning started out being focused on the educational environment. The original NTL was a research arm of the National Education Association. The educators were looking for a way to teach people better and this new concept of laboratory learning seemed to fit the bill, so laboratory learning was going on in education. And then it spread into religious organizations and in 1963, began to spread into corporations.

Then NTL established something they called the 'Industrial Network', for people working in industry who had some laboratory experience background and wanted to use this to help their companies improve. Unfortunately, NTL went bankrupt, so they could no longer support this. So, they set-up an independent organization which was called the 'Organization Development Network' with Warner Burke as the Chief Executive.

The charter meeting of the Organization Development Network was held in 1968 outside Cleveland. I was there. Recognizing that many of us would be fighting lonely battles, the group suggested that we should divide into geographical sub-units. There was a Boston group, a New York City group, a Philadelphia group, a Chicago group, a California group, and an Ohio group.

We all met to talk about how we could be of support to one another. I met with the Ohio group. We decided to meet twice a year in Columbus. So twice a year, I would travel 400 miles for an all day meeting in Columbus with the other three founders.

After about 3 years of meeting as just the four of us, we began to invite other people to come and meet with us. We decided it would be useful for us if after we had shared our databanks with one another to see what the top names in the field had to say. So, I initiated a program called 'A Day With….' and we did a day with Chris Argyris, a day with Ed Schein, a day with Gordon Lippitt - a day with most of the big names in the field. The thing that came out of that for us was that the things that we were doing seemed to be more exciting and more up-to-date than the things that the leaders in the field were doing.

So recognizing that, we then started a conference based on the 'show-and-tell' model. We would invite everyone that came to the conference to talk about what they were doing and share any difficulties that they were having. It's a model we still use.

Gus: And the attendees to those conferences were mostly practitioners, rather than academics?

Don: Yes. Then people began to find out about what we were doing and pretty soon, we began to attract people from outside of Ohio. For awhile we called ourselves the 'Midwest OD Network'. Then our fame spread from coast-to-coast and 'Midwest' was no longer an appropriate name - and I didn't really want to butt heads with the OD Network. The OD Network was already running one conference on the east coast and one conference on the west coast - so we decided to go international. We called ourselves the 'Organization Development Institute' and we began to actively search for people doing OD outside the United States.

Gus: What vehicle did you use?

Don: Word of mouth, or just being alert to who was doing something - and then I'd write to them. One of the people I wrote to was an OD guy in Mexico City. I asked him if he would like to start an OD network in Mexico and he said 'no'. There weren't many OD people in Mexico and he said OD was the product of an affluent society, inappropriate for a poor country like Mexico. He also said that Mexico was a pre-industrial society, so he was busily creating bureaucracies -- and of course, I was in the United States trying to help organizations get rid of bureaucracies - and it seemed as though we were working at cross purposes. So out of that, I organized a conference in Toronto, Canada called 'International OD' - in which we invited people from all around the world to come and talk about the kinds of OD that they were doing.

One of the learnings from that conference was the situation in India. In India, there were family companies and when they became successful, the head of the family would send their son to Harvard Business School. And the son would come back from HBS saying we need a personnel department, a manufacturing department, a marketing department - and they would departmentalize the organization. Whereas in the United States, we were taking departmentalized organizations and building teams. And they had teams going before they sent their sons to Harvard.

So it seemed as though that when developing countries utilize our physical science technology - they also take over and adopt our social science technology, even though the social technology which they have in place is superior to that they are adopting. Another example of that, of course, is the whole medical system and 'rooming in'. Most advanced hospitals in the United States are only just beginning to develop rooming in where mothers have contact with their babies. That's very common in underdeveloped countries. So it seems as though we have lots to learn from developing countries, as well as we have things for them to learn.

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