Dialogic Organization Development

The Theory and Practice of Transformational Change

Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

Contents

Introduction to the Dialogic Organization Development Mindset

It is our contention that any specific instance of Organization Development practice is a product of the mindset of the practitioner; the combination of theories, beliefs, assumptions, and values that shape how one sees and engages the world. In this chapter we provide a brief introduction to what we call the "Dialogic OD Mindset." Because we believe the practice of Dialogic OD involves a way of thinking that is significantly different from Diagnostic OD, we begin by contrasting it with a Diagnostic Mindset. It is important to understand that we do not believe that Dialogic and Diagnostic Mindsets are mutually exclusive. Most OD practitioners will be influenced to some extent by both. However, most OD textbooks currently teach only the Diagnostic Mindset, so we briefly highlight what we think that is and contrast it with the Dialogic Mindset. We then describe eight key premises about the nature of organizations and change, and three underlying change processes that are central to the ways in which Dialogic OD practitioners think about and engage in practices that differ in form and/or intent from the ones described in most OD textbooks. We conclude the chapter by discussing the similarities between the Diagnostic and Dialogic Mindsets, and why they are both variants of organization development.

The Foundational, Diagnostic Mindset

The Diagnostic OD Mindset and associated practices are based substantially on the social psychology and change theories developed in the 1940s and 1950s by Kurt Lewin and Ron Lippitt and their colleagues and followers (Lewin, 1947; Lippitt, Watson, and Westley, 1958). In this view, behavior is shaped by a field of forces that exist in a quasi-stable equilibrium. That field of forces is mainly a product of the social equilibrium within the groups that people belong to. Therefore, the focus of change in Lewinian thinking was the small group, not the individual. Change is conceptualized as a planned process of "unfreezing" a current social equilibrium, creating "movement" to a new and more desirable future equilibrium that then needs to be "refrozen" to sustain the change. While different strategies exist for how to promote change, OD rests mainly on a "normative-re-educative" change strategy (Chin and Benne, 1961) that requires the involvement of groups in learning processes. A central technique is participatory action research, involving those the practitioner wants to change in a process of self-study. Traditionally, action research begins with a "diagnosis" of the existing situation—the elements, factors, and forces maintaining the current state—in order to know where and how to intervene to induce unfreezing and movement in the direction of the desired state. The Diagnostic OD Mindset assumes that without diagnosis there are unclear or even mistaken beliefs about the causes for what ever problems or concerns managers and organizations face, and that collection and correct interpretation of the facts is a critical first step in addressing them (Marshak, 2013). Indeed, giving clients advice or taking action without first performing a diagnosis is considered malpractice by the Diagnostic OD Mindset. Hence Lewin's famous dictum "No research without action, no action without research" (Marrow, 1969).

A second key element of the Diagnostic Mindset came from Lewin's conception that within the social field of forces, some forces promote and some resist what ever change is desired. Lewin argued that reducing resistance was a more productive route to change than adding more force for change. As a result, the Diagnostic Mindset is especially interested in methods of identifying and reducing resistance. Participation in decision making is the key solution OD offers, aligned as it is with democratic and humanistic values and the need for a collective learning process to support change. This learning process usually involves engaging small groups (teams, task forces, diagonal slices of the organization) in an action research process intended to diagnose the real factors and forces impacting a situation, and thereby to create the motivation and commitment needed for unfreezing, movement, and refreezing. Ideally, those impacted by a change are involved in and/or perform the data collection, analysis, decision making, and action taking with the guidance of the OD consultant.

A third core element was added in the late 1960s when open systems theories became an integral part of OD (e.g., Emery and Trist, 1965; Katz and Kahn, 1966; Lawrence and Lorsch, 1969), leading to models of how organizational elements (mission, strategies, structures, systems, leadership, culture, etc.) needed to be aligned with each other and strategically responsive to external environments in order to position the organization for future success. The contrast of this new "organic" metaphor for organizations with the prevailing "machine" metaphor (Burns and Stalker, 1961) contributed to the notion of organizational health and healthy processes as a common element in the Diagnostic OD Mindset. Increasing organizational health was an explicit purpose in Beckhard's early definition of OD (1969). Good diagnosis would uncover the ways in which any particular group or organization varied from the "healthy" ideal or was deficient in one way or another. Such diagnostic aspirations required ideal models of "healthy," "effective," "high performing," or "world class" organizations to diagnose against (e.g., Burke, 2011; Weisbord, 1976; Nadler and Tushman, 1980). Tichy (1983), for example, offered an extensive diagnostic model of organizations composed of three interrelated subsystems: cultural, political, and technostructural. He provided methods for assessing the state of any organization in terms of those three subsystems, and guidance on how these systems should align with each other, depending on the organization's environment.

The Diagnostic Mindset continues today through widespread interest in such things as discovering best practices, benchmarking against world-class organizations, collecting the "right" data, and continual searches for the singular cause of some problematic situation that can be fixed by applying analysis and expertise. Because this orientation tends to search for the "right answer," "best solution," "latest ideas," and so on, there is also an implicit tendency to seek out experts who can supply tested solutions.

Briefly, then, the core elements of the Diagnostic OD Mindset that are most at variance with Dialogic OD involve conceptualizing organizations primarily as open systems that work best when all of their elements are in alignment and responsive to prevailing environmental conditions and competitive threats. The current state of the team, organization, or community can be diagnosed, using ideal models of organizational health to ascertain what aspects need to be changed and what means will best achieve the predetermined outcome. Change is episodic and results from a planned and managed process of unfreezing, movement, and refreezing. Furthermore, this is best done through a collaborative action research process emphasizing valid data, informed choice, and commitment (Argyris, 1973). Table 1.1, from Bushe and Marshak (2009), summarizes some of the broader differences between Diagnostic and Dialogic OD.

The Dialogic Mindset

At this point in time the nature of the Dialogic Mindset is a still-evolving convergence of newer premises, principles, and resulting practices that provides more of a fuzzy outline than a sharp definition. It is important to understand that the Dialogic OD Mindset is a newer orientation to the practice of OD that is not associated with any one specific method. There are dozens of methods that can be used dialogically, as shown in Table 1.2, but many of those methods can also be used diagnostically. It is one's mindset that determines how one thinks about and engages situations, including selecting and mixing which methods and approaches to use.

Take Appreciative Inquiry (AI), for example. No OD approach provides as much research and writing elucidating a Dialogic Mindset, yet numerous articles, some books, and most OD textbooks describe it from a Diagnostic OD perspective. The four AI phases of Discovery, Dream, Design, and Destiny are recast as phases of the familiar diagnostic process. The stories collected during Discovery become data to be analyzed to uncover the organization's "positive core." The Dream phase is cast as a way to identify a better (healthier) organization. The Design phase is used to come up with solutions for creating the desired future state. Finally, actions to realize that future state are to be implemented during the Destiny phase. Recasting AI in terms of a Diagnostic Mindset may make it seem similar to foundational OD approaches, but it also makes it more difficult to recognize and realize the potential of its dialogic premises and processes. This matters because although there is no reason AI cannot be used effectively with a Diagnostic Mindset in the right circumstances, Bushe and Kassam's (2005) research found that only AI projects operating from some of the premises we describe as the Dialogic Mindset resulted in transformational change.

In this book we will not be describing or explaining how to use any specific Dialogic OD method. There are other books, articles, and websites describing each of the approaches listed in Table 1.2, and The Change Handbook (Holman, Devane, and Cady, 2007) briefly describes most of them. Rather, we will be explaining the underlying theories and approaches that are required to use any Dialogic OD approach or method more effectively. Our contention is that consistently successful OD practitioners have an underlying base of theory that allows them to mix and match different approaches and innovate in their approach to specific situations. That theory base is what we hope this book provides—a way of looking at organizations and change that will allow OD practitioners to understand and utilize dialogic change premises and processes more thoughtfully, carefully, and successfully.

Our last observation, based on working with the contributors to this book and on interactions with other scholars and practitioners, is that Dialogic OD practitioners may not subscribe to all of the premises and principles we describe here. Individual practitioners each have their unique mixture of premises and principles, incorporating some dialogic ones as well as framings that may be more diagnostic in origin, in various degrees and emphases. What we propose in this chapter is an "ideal type" we call the Dialogic OD Mindset to distinguish it from another ideal type, the Diagnostic OD Mindset. The concept of ideal type was developed by the sociologist Max Weber at the turn of the last century as a method to study social and organizational phenomena by formulating and contrasting an idealized set of ideas, attitudes, and behaviors with real-world observations. His famous description of "bureaucracy" as the most rational form of social organization is an example of an ideal type (Weber, 1947). While no two bureaucracies are identical, the idea of bureaucracy, like all ideal types, is a construct whose purpose is to provide us with a template that allows us to study real-world organizations, discern similarities and differences among and between them and the ideal type, and talk about them using the same or similar concepts and vocabulary.

Our analysis of a range of theories and practices that have influenced the OD practices listed in Table 1.2 suggests eight key premises that we think form the basis of the Dialogic OD Mindset as it exists today (Bushe and Marshak, 2014). These premises rest on two important intellectual movements that have reshaped how scholars and many practitioners think about organizations and change and that have come into prominence in OD starting in the 1980s and 1990s: the science of complexity and interpretivist social science. The scientific discoveries that what appeared to be chaotic systems actually produce order and that order continuously emerges in nature without planning or control have catalyzed a revolution in thinking about all human processes, from individual cognition to economic development. The evolution of complex adaptive systems theory (Kauffman, 1995), which has had a large effect on the Dialogic Mindset, is discussed in more detail in Chapters 6 and 7 and will be explored throughout this book.

Philosophical movements (oft en grouped under the label postmodernism) that challenge the key tenets of the modern scientific worldview have slowly gathered influence in the social sciences, to the point where they now verge on being dominant. We have grouped many of these under the label "interpretivist," inasmuch as they all agree that the world is not something objectively in de pen dent of us but rather is a product of how we interpret it. Social construction (Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Gergen, 2009; Searle, 1995), the idea that social reality is something created through human interaction, has been a major influence in creating the Dialogic Mindset (Coghlan, 2011), as has the belief that language does not just convey information but actively shapes how we think and therefore the world we live in (Heidegger, 1971; Rorty, 1979; Wittgenstein, 1967). These theories are explored in Chapters 3 and 4, and throughout the book the impact of interpretivism on Dialogic OD will be fully evident. Finally, as will become clearer in the chapters in the Theory and Practice sections, the eight premises and three change processes of the Dialogic Mindset are a melding of these two intellectual movements.

Key Premises of the Dialogic OD Mindset

The theories and ideas informing the Dialogic OD Mindset are briefly introduced here in the form of eight key premises and discussed in greater depth throughout the Theory and Practice sections of the book.

1. Reality and relationships are socially constructed. Many more dialogic forms of OD are now explicitly based in theories of social construction and notions of multiple "truths." Whether or not there are objective facts in the world, it is how people socially define and describe those facts that creates meaning in social systems. Furthermore, there is no single objective reality or a single authoritative voice or version of reality. Instead, a multiplicity of diverse voices and actors need to be recognized and engaged.

2. Organizations are meaning-making systems. Consistent with constructionist thinking, people and organizations are considered to be meaning-making systems in which reality/truth is continuously created and re-created through social interactions and agreements, open to many possible interpretations. What happens in organizations is influenced as much or more by how people interact and make meaning—and which people do this—than by how presumably objective external factors and forces impact the system.