The Evolution of Work: Reimagining Organization Development for a Rapidly Changing World

Organization Development (OD) is a concept best understood by considering an organization's environment and external forces. Organizations are defined by their boundaries, created through agreements to achieve common goals, and are distinct in their system properties from individual or group efforts. The organizational system takes resources from its environment, transforms them, and outputs offerings back to the environment. OD consultants primarily work within this process realm, impacting everything from politics to outcomes within an organization.

The nature of organizational life is undergoing drastic changes, affecting the foundational experiences within organizations. This includes a transition from physical office spaces to virtual environments. The response to these changes is not rooted in reconciling different views on what organizations should be but in recognizing and adjusting to these new realities.

Selecting topics for consideration within this context is challenging due to the intertwined nature of globalization, structural social change, and technology. These factors are deeply intertwined, rendering the separation nearly impractical. This perspective assumes that trends in all of these areas impact all members of an organization. This outlook posits that these global trends influence organizational members at all levels. Nonetheless, the emphasis is placed on the impact these trends have on organizational leadership, suggesting that the repercussions for OD strategies are far-reaching, not only affecting consulting practices aimed at top-tier management but also influencing broader organizational practices and structures.

Technology

Many have written on the tidal shift and tsunami-like impact of technology in life. The introduction of technology is occurring with frequencies and speeds previously unimaginable. Technology is making for a smaller world. Every day, in organizations of every size, it's not uncommon to interact with others in different towns, cities, counties, states, and beyond. These shifts began in guild times and are accelerating in the age of information and technology. Driving up to a McDonald's window in your hometown, you may be placing your order with someone sitting thousands of miles away, only to have your order prepared and delivered by those just a short distance from your vehicle. This technology-enabled event enables focus on skills at different sites, enabling expected improvements in customer experience. And what about the impact on those physically closest to the customer?  What should we make of that? Is the assembly-line approach good?  And what about bigger at all costs?  Hosts of managerial and leadership issues arise from new encounters with technology.

In some ways, we are removing hunches, guts, and intuition from decision-making due to technology. Increasingly, industries are transforming as a result of the practical implications of big data. Merging many data sources, agriculture is rapidly changing, for example. Farms are fertilized and watered based not only on elemental forces but also on the forces of supply and demand. New decision-making issues arise when a manager has precise data on the perfect patterns to route delivery trucks in previously unconsidered ways. Managers will rely less on guts for decision-making and act in ways prescribed by data, and employees will indeed feel the effects created by this shift.

Technology eliminates routine from many jobs and increases service experience. For example, robots handle some of the most routine tasks, and service and ordering a car service in a metropolitan area are becoming increasingly pleasant experiences, particularly when you know who is meeting you, when they are arriving, and that you can follow and track your journey.

Today, there are many channels of information available to organizational leaders. The increased availability of channels contributes to managerial experience in two ways. First, it exposes and opens the world to many. Increased availability also comes with increasing distraction, causing managers and leaders to lose focus. Rather than speak to a colleague, some will engage in endless emails when a quick voice conversation would address an issue. Now, also bombarded with texts, tweets, and various push notices, portable devices, and smartphones are the newest form of organizational handcuffs. Managers need to balance broader opportunities with the need to create focused human-to-human interactions.

Technology allows for speed in ways that previous generations of managers did not experience. Speed makes some forgetful about the importance of decorum and presence. If you are an American who celebrates Thanksgiving, it may be one thing to get a call from your boss on that day about a project than on a regular workday. Suppose we encourage greater integration of the individual and their work, which technology further makes possible. In that case, we need to account for new relationships based on honesty and truth and less about cover-up and going along.

On a final note, technology also evolves how we think about organizations. Supply chain management provides robust views into an organization's capability to produce goods and services. Knowledge gained from improved understanding produced by supply chain approaches affects the interdependence of organizations. Knowledge and understanding of these interdependencies promote systems thinking. Consequently, new organizational forms will benefit from an improved understanding of competitive landscapes.

Among many concerns will be the implication of these and other technology-induced changes on OD. OD practitioners can begin to work on increasing transparency in organizations. This may show up in organizational values or leadership practices, but the number of cover-ups that continue to be reported in media outlets underscores the need for continuing work in this area. Internals need to think more broadly about working agendas outside of organizational contexts and continuing drives for growth. Skillful OD practitioners will introduce new thinking to organizational leaders that encourage consideration of alternative futures, not because of technology but because of the desire to foster the human spirit. Without any hint or illusion of the risk of adding improvements in communication to the practitioner's agenda, the promotion of understanding is becoming central to internal practice. In other words, OD practice will increasingly focus on making meaning and fostering alignment, two practices that will advantage the use of technology in human experience.

Globalization

Today, many ask what it means to be global. Does it mean offices in different countries?  With presences on multiple continents?  What is the role of the nation, the corporation, and the region globally?  In this external characterization of the global environment, the very questions are rooted in a particular national context, as a citizen of the United States of America, shaped not only by its national belief systems but further shaped by many others, or perhaps as part of a dominant construct. Others might experience globalization in their neighborhood communities, whether with imported foreign labor, due to immigration, or through other personal experiences. As a result, globalization profoundly affects our experience with organizations as employees, customers, and other stakeholder groups.

Chaos theory teaches us the butterfly effect; the minor changes (the flapping of a butterfly's wings) can produce effects that ripple throughout time and space. One popular example in systems analysis theory also helps us understand what is happening here. For example, consider this:  about 2 million people commute into Manhattan daily. Let's say that many of those commuters buy lunch daily; just think for a moment about the enormous complexity of this reliable food supply every day. And, except at the most basic or exclusive establishments, it's likely that globalization affected some portion of that experience quite remarkably. The millions of coordinating parts that have to make that happen, day in and day out, reliably is baffling. That's just one approach to considering globalization.

Another approach is to consider birth in the United States. At the beginning of the last century, 1900, almost all births in the United States (US) occurred outside of a hospital. By 1969, 99% of US births occurred inside of a hospital. Today, that number is under attack but remains relatively unchanged. Therefore, nearly every American, as a consequence of being born in a hospital, has an "experience" of an organization at birth. The policies, processes, and approaches (the transformative process of inputs to outputs) affect the experience in that hospital, and that experience is likely to differ from one hospital system to another. The shift from non-hospital to hospital birth happened because of several social forces attributable to the rise of industrialism. As the age is shaped by technology, how will this impact how we experience organization early in life?  It's likely, as with healthcare systems, that organizations will remain a ubiquitous topic going forward.

Among the many positive aspects of globalization are new possibilities for innovation created by greater connectedness. Innovation refers to the unique process of putting ideas together in new ways and may be distinguishable from the original method of creativity. The story goes that the person who designed the wheel was a genius, but the person who made three other wheels and created a wagon was an innovator, relying on existing technology. Greater connectivity brought by globalization may yield innovations that improve the human experience. Successful leaders and organizations will attract talented innovators seeking to do great things. Successful recruitment of those possessing innovative thinking and approaches will be in great demand, requiring talent magnets to network in new and different ways. Leaders in the global organization will be rewarded for the ability to learn, moving beyond experiences and credentials. Innovation results in market creation, benefitting consumers and other stakeholders in the processes of production. In doing so, its market extension and reach also raises new and concerning issues related to regionalism and corporatism.

Regionalism and corporatism might be described as the rise of consumerism, symbolized by the shopping mall. Regionalism and corporatism raise cultural sensitivity and ethics issues — what may be commonplace in one country may be unlawful in another. Standards and practices vary by locales and communities. As organizations with national boundaries, which policies rule?  In the fashion industry, a once-endemic and still-present concern is child labor. If an organization is against childhood exploitation, but if corruption, practice, or legislation facilitates childhood employment, which system trumps the other?  Leaders in large organizations today must struggle, as many employees do, with the positive and negative attributes associated both in terms of products and size. Questions arise relative to a mantra of bigger is better, but complex networks of affiliated organizations bring particular efficiencies and resources. Organizations may charge for services or products in areas such as healthcare, which, at some level, is oppositional to the human desire and need to help. In these and other ways, issues relative to corporatism and its companion in regionalism are of consequence for organizations.

For many, globalism also brings enormous opportunities for personal and professional development. In personal development, opportunities to interact with others open a larger world of possibility for the individual executive. Learning from these experiences may produce better versions of a personal self. Persons who have worked in a global context may be better equipped, in a professional sense, to deal with differing dynamics that arise in a global context. In the home situation, the manager, leader, or employee should be able to put into place an understanding of a larger world that could be better due to interaction and dialogue. The ideas of interaction and dialogue, fundamental to OD, are at a new crossroads, moving beyond skin-to-skin contact interactions to exploring identity construction and formation in social and mobile, local and global, web and cloud-based systems that construct meaning for individuals in group and organizational contexts. At the same time, some snicker when leaders self-describe as global citizens or citizens of the world. In some ways, it's code for a particular lifestyle, with its benefits and risks. The snicker arises from not having a sense of place, which is critical in many aspects of identity formation and development, which is transferred into organizational life. Today's intermediate technologies, which enable extraordinary interaction across continents, remain out of the reach of many, leaving a world on the verge of continuing to create new ways of connecting with others.

Global executives are punished and rewarded by perquisites associated with travel. Nonetheless, without these experiences, many would not move onto roles and careers leading in global environments. While mobility was often an early focus of developing global executives, many organizations now support longer-term work commitments in international assignments. Among the real consequences are to the well-being of frequent travelers. In this regard, consider the ability of jet-lagged executives to make quality decisions; after two or three hours of sleep, does one function optimally?  A significant and often unexpressed difference is between the traveling elite in organizations and those without status benefits, whether by grant or labor. It gives rise to consider the implications for OD professionals on globalization.

Internal OD practitioners will need to take an increasingly critical view of globalization, both in terms of positive impact and negative consequence. This requires an ability to consider what is beyond a given border of an organization, as the seeds of innovation may lay at the margins of the organization's inherent drive to preserve the status quo, a signal of organizational decline and one that fails to have a vision around basic research or applied innovation. To advance growth and to encourage development means coming to terms with issues outlined in this section, including arguments on global and local and other combinations of those poles. OD practitioners need to pay attention to this for their well-being and as helpers in the interest of their clients. In some ways, this promotes a holistic view of the person in the context of organization and environment. Perhaps the underlying work in this area is to deepen appreciation of diversity and leverage that appreciation to create value in the organization. OD takes the long-term view of the organization, working to sustain its growth and development in meaningful ways.

OD professionals need increasingly sophisticated critical thinking skills and the ability to synthesize disparate, conflicting, and contradictory data quickly. This fosters organizational alignment that assists in the achievement of organizational goals. This should also cause us to cease thinking in either-or ways while maintaining rigor in distinctiveness. OD professionals will need to continue to shift from problem and solution-based models to something newer. As a discipline, appreciative inquiry has failed to make any significant difference in internal OD practice based on my experience and discussions with colleagues. Organizational engineers work on a deficit-based model of human potential deeply embedded in a cultural context. Internals who wish to lead requires deep appreciation for varied approaches supporting development and the developmental transitions in maturing growth.

While Lewin's unfreeze-change-refreeze model remains a relevant foundation for action research and understanding, it is no longer sufficient. According to the neuroscientists at work on brain plasticity, elements of change are deeply patterned. In addition, some rational management models remain dominant in practice, including beliefs about change sequencing. Today, organizational change can be intermittent and discontinuous, requiring new ways of approach for OD practitioners. Finally, in an era where safety is an increasing concern, particularly among the Digital and younger generations, OD professionals will work with leaders on topics related to safety and security.

Seismic social shifts

Many factors will contribute to a new world order that emerges over the coming decades, brought by the influences of technology and globalization. These shifts will be seismic, establishing a new world order and creating shifts from competition to collaboration, from village residents to community, to increasingly extended lifespans. As with globalization, opportunities for self-expression increase, resulting in the possibility for innovation that improves life at every juncture. With prosperity as a goal, new ways of interacting with these tidal waves will demand the attention of Organization Development practitioners in surprising ways. The first surprise may come in the area of predictability. Some research by Google on Google leaders indicates that the best leadership practice is predictability. In this scenario, a predictable leader lets you know the boundaries and the freedom to work within those boundaries. This reinforces principles of autonomy. The implications for organizational leadership are significant, causing us to reconsider the role of development fostered over the last quarter-century regarding executive development. Of course, one only has to turn to any natural disaster that destroyed a firm, as several lost entire leadership teams in the NYC World Trade Center attack in September 2001, to understand the importance of succession management. Still, one must also wonder about entitlement, elitism, and privilege, which seem elements of a former age.

In doing so, we'll need to see a world that is more collaborative than competitive, with new markets for ideas. In this regard, the development of the creative potential of OD consultants is necessary. I'm reminded of an assignment I was given in a class on "You Matter" by a speaker whose name I no longer recall. Each student was given a brown paper grocery sack or bag, along with a set of markers. The speaker remarked that the bags were typical of those used by food banks. He thought students in the program could make a simple difference in the lives of those receiving assistance by providing colorful grocery bags. Among the 40 in the class, I was the only individual who colored on the sides, handles, and inside of the bag, making my contribution distinctive. OD practitioners will have to be increasingly able to bring and use broader canvasses in their work, extending the benefits of OD work to larger social issues.

Any shifts related to collaboration, community, and life extension are affected by personal and system capacity to sustain at the levels of change that will occur. We will move from structured to evolutionary responses in an organization, disrupting well-established economic orders. Changes underway in the global economy are systemic, with wealth redistribution concentrated in very few hands. As a primary currency of exchange in human interaction, OD leaders will be called for assistance to struggle with new and changing situations at an unprecedented pace. In the vein of competition, many organizations will be rendered ineffective competitors. Skill gaps will persist, and learning agility will be a survival skill for the OD professional. The effects of change in this area will shift thinking to community, a trend that has been underway for some time. People will form communities based on interests and locations rather than on location alone, and these associations are made possible by technology, both in its positive and negative aspects. People will seek community at work, and skillful OD practitioners will have the skill to do this through technology.

Advances in healthcare have increased lifespan, and these advances are welcomed. In addition, the increase in lifespan is also attributable to a reduced population growth rate. Today, some organizations have five generations of workers. Midlife, in North America, is being defined in new ways, with some thinking of two mid-life periods of work. This will require us to think about sustainability differently in organizations, and OD consultants will consult on these issues. Environmentalism and sustainability are concerns of newer and older workers, and OD professionals may bring perspective to this in creating organizations that learn and adjust. Despite Google's notion regarding predictability and leadership, leaders must remain experimental. That may not be at odds with Google's findings. Still, there has too often been an approach to organizational change more akin to a science experiment than a participative inquiry leading to action. Given all of these shifts, the worker's role, but in particular possibilities arising from life extension, will create further options that give meaning to the human spirit in the organization and the work of the OD professional in nurturing that spirit.

It's important to remain optimistic about these shifts, as they may help us to think more positively about humanity. Changes in these and other areas may reduce our fragmentation, something sorely needed in education and development within organizations. Clearly, we are already experiencing the shift from command and control organizations to those that are more networked in nature and focused on growth. In other words, these newer organizational forms and the leaders within them will be good cultivators of potential, both in a personal and professional context, as well as in an organizational context.

Conclusion

Work in this area is bound to be incomplete and insufficient. Any list that reduces trends to a few points should be considered suspect. Too many events and influences shaping the world affect organizational performance and OD practice. Most of what we have explored is at the level of great truth. In other words, each pole, distinct on its own, represents truth. These are among the great questions that we are dealing with today, and that will affect the careers of all involved in OD. Some are again calling for a radical restructuring of human resources to distinguish what occupies the realms of administration and those that occupy development. This is a misplaced argument, as it fails to make some of the changes we have considered. Five years ago, a well-known consultant told a group of senior leaders that it was time to do away with performance management. The audience exploded with applause. When the same consultant made the same plea 15 years earlier, it was met with hush. Many of the systems to which HR professionals have attached their careers are outdated, and OD professionals will need to continue to distinguish their practices from the inherent challenges presented by HR.

Of course, other topics are worthy of consideration, including the important research and learning underway in the neurosciences. Progress in those areas will inform our understanding of Organization Development. This is a fertile learning and applied frontier.

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