Page 114 - DMGT520_ORGANIZATION_CHANGE_AND_DEVELOPMENT

Unit 7: OD Intervention

will be greatly enhanced. The flow of a change or managed learning process then is one of Notes
continuous diagnosis as one continuously intervening. The consultants must be highly attuned
to their own insights into what is going on and his or her own impact on the client system. Stage
models which emphasize up front contracting do not deal adequately with the reality that the
psychological contract is a constantly evolving one and that the degree to which it needs to be
formalized depends very much on the culture of the organisation.
Lewin’s concept of action research is absolutely fundamental to any model of working with
human systems and such action research must be viewed from a clinical perspective as a set of
interventions that must be guided primarily by their presumed impact on the client system. The
immediate implication of this is that in training consultants and change agents one should put
much more emphasis on the clinical criteria of how different interventions will affect client
systems than on the canons of how to gather scientifically valid information, calculate members
should be sent into field internships as participant observers and helpers before they are taught
all the canons of how to gather and analyze data. Both are necessary, but the order of priority is
backward in most training programs.

7.9.1 Edgar Schein’s Process Consultation

One cannot understand a System until one tries to change it. Literature is filled with the notion
that one first diagnoses a system and then intervenes to change it. This basic model perpetuates
a fundamental error in thinking, an error that Lewin learned to avoid in his own change project
sand that led him to the seminal concept of “action research.” The conceptual error is to separate
the notion of diagnosis from the notion of intervention. That distinction comes from scientific
endeavors where a greater separation exists between the researcher and the researched,
particularly where the physical processes are assumed to be somewhat independent of the
psychological processes. The consulting industry has perpetuated this model by proposing as a
major part of most projects a diagnostic, phase in which large numbers of interviews,
questionnaires and observations are made the basis of a set of recommendations given to the
client. Consultants differ on whether they feel they should also be accountable for the
implementation of the recommendations, but they tend to agree that the consultant’s basic job
is done with a set of recommendations for future intervention. If interviews or surveys are done,
the attempt is made to be as scientifically objective as possible in gathering the data and to
interfere minimally during this phase with the operation of the organisation. If one cannot
understand an organisation without trying to change it, it would not be possible to make an
adequate diagnosis without intervening. Either consultants using the classical model are getting
an incorrect picture of the organisation, or they are intervening but are denying it by labeling it
“Just Diagnosis”. This risk forces the diagnostician to think about the nature of the “diagnostic
intervention” and to apply clinical criteria what is safe, rather than purely scientific criteria of
what would seemingly give the most definitive answer.

OD specialist must approach consulting work from a clinical perspective that starts with the
assumption that everything to do with a client system is an intervention and that, unless
intervened, will not learn what some of the essential dynamics of the system really are starting
from that assumption, there is a need to develop criteria that balance the amount of information
gained from an intervention with the amount of risk to the client from making that intervention.
If the consultant is going to interview all the members of top management, he must ask whether
the amount of information gained win be worth the risk of perturbing the system by interviewing
everybody and if the answer is “yes,” must make a further determination of what is to be
learned from the reactions of the management to being interviewed. That is, the interview
process itself will change the system and the nature of that change will provide some of the most
important data about how the system works. The best information about the dynamics of the

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