Letter From: Paul Larsen Membership Director-Let's Connect

Tuesday in June dawned with a cool mist draping over the boundaries of the ancient city of Hanoi, Vietnam. With a moderate temperature of 55 degrees Fahrenheit and a patchy blue sky, it looked to be another fair and quiet day in this serene capital of this southeastern Asian country. A sleepy town that takes awhile to wake up, you can stroll the city in the morning and not see anyone else or hear a car or scooter for hours on end.

AND THEN…I WOKE UP…!

In reality, the chaos and stifling heat and humidity that is summertime in modern-day Hanoi is a symbolism of life as a whole. Vibrant is too boring of a word to describe the street scene that is this metropolis of almost 7 million. Life is not hidden, it is lived right out in the open and on the jammed streets, alleyways and sidewalks for all to experience. Sights, sounds, colors, smells…there is something here to entice the curiosity of all of our senses.

I was in Vietnam to teach English at a SOS Children’s Village, a well-run orphanage outside of Hanoi. I was part of a small project team volunteering my time with a great organization called Global Volunteers, which provides community-based “volunteer vacations” around the world. Our task was to create and teach a full two-week summer school English workshop for about 50 Vietnamese children ranging in age from 8 to 14. And by-the-way, I do not know any Vietnamese.

Now, as an OD practitioner with solid some corporate experience as part of my legacy, I have often found myself in some uncomfortable, sensitive and unpredictable works situations. But as we have been trained to do, we follow our models, our agendas, our outlines and most importantly, our gut…and we eventually succeed with our purpose. But this past June, with 100 sets of “young” eyes watching my every move with extreme curiosity and eagerness…all of my models, agendas and outlines “flew out” the dusty window of the classroom and my gut found itself very much alone. And that is where the magic began.

In OD, we are blessed to be able to work with a wide-variety of experienced and incredibly talented colleagues. We are also lucky to work in a field that is ever-changing and deals with getting people and organizations to connect with their purpose, values, vision, principles, and ______(fill in the blank with a word of your choice). That day…in that Vietnamese classroom with those students, I learned the true value of connecting. I didn’t have a model, book or diagram. I didn’t have a laptop or smartphone or lcd projector. All I had was my years of experience as a person….one that has been blessed with many rich experiences…reaching out to connect with these young students of a distinctly different culture and life history. And isn’t that what we do everyday in od? Use our experience to assess and facilitate change…no matter how big or small?

In that hot and muggy classroom…a connection was made at a level that required no technology. We connected at a level that required no model or flow chart. We connected at a level that required no tweet, status update or online profile. We connected as humans who wanted to learn from and understand each other. And in doing so we made our global community a little smaller.

In today’s 24x7 world, we have every technological means available to us to connect with each other. But it seems that the more ways we have to connect, the less real connecting we are doing as people. We are so busy tapping into our BlackBerrys or “friending” someone on our iPhones, that we are losing the opportunity (and some would say) the true skill of connecting. It is this art of creating “simple connections” that was my biggest lesson from this experience. Here I was thousands of miles away from my “nest” in a completely different country with different values and norms, yet I was making an impact with these students and they were certainly making an impact on me. The roles of teacher and student were blurred at times, since I was allowing my true “od-self” to adsorb, evolve and learn as we progressed through the weeks. I came away from the project a more fulfilled person who can appreciate the need we have to connect as people and who will want to bring these lessons into my evolving practice as an od professional.

After my short tenure in Vietnam, it is no wonder organizations and their community members need our services, since we can help in fulfilling a very basic need for all…the need to connect. Connection leads to change. Change leads to progress. Progress is required for individuals and organizations to not become obsolete. You don’t need to go as far as I did to experience this art of creating simple connections….try it the next time you are home or in a client environment. It requires no technology or sign-in, all it requires is the thirst and willingness to explore…and as od practitioners, that is something I know we all are passionate to do. And we certainly have the capability.

I look forward to “connecting” with all of our BAodn members and the expanding OD community as your new Membership Director this year. Onwards and upwards...

Viewpoint: Resistance to Change

I was recently asked, “What is the single biggest reason people resist change?” Of course, my opinion is not intended to be the definitive final answer. In fact, the best I can hope for are your challenges to my assumptions and opinion liberties. I do hope you have other perceptions, and your responses are both welcomed and encouraged.

For me, understanding the resistance to change is certainly much easier than removing the root cause and components to meaningful, sustainable and continuous change. I believe at the simplest level, fear is the single largest impediment to any form of real change. Our culture has largely been built on the reward/punishment system where mistakes are not tolerated, and in corporate America especially, the consequences can be dramatic, life and career altering.

Organizations ask for change, but punish (loosely translated) failure. It is the classic “carrot and stick” metaphor. People fear the stick over the benefit of the carrot. When individuals perceive they have more to loose than gain in a changing environment, they will resist when possible. Choosing instead, to cling to their perceptual safe zone. The fear of the unknown has been woven into the very fabric of our culture and professional DNA. Simply put, when fear is present, innovation is not. Change is a steep, uphill climb.

So if fear is the problem, what does that mean to managers of change? I would postulate that fear is at the starting gate of change. And, until that gate is unlocked and satisficed to align with the removal of fear and installation of safety, transformational change does not have a realistic chance at achieving long term success.

What is needed is a complete overhaul of corporate culture (albeit, an unrealistic idea). A culture that celebrates mistakes and turns them into learning opportunities becomes opportunistic and gains immensely and continuously. This concept is easier to integrate in a start-up environment, since “fearless” can be baked into the founding culture. Older, larger organizations will have a difficult time switching gears to varying degrees, and some organizations will never be able to make this level of fundamental change. So what is the solution to fear resolution?

A culture and environment accepting failure as a part of the success process is going to produce much stronger results. Maybe we call it “positive failure” to assist in its adoptability and improve its stickiness. The element of failure as a critical element to success, reminds me of a company called IDEO and its Director, David Kelly. One of his quotes resonates with me to my very core, “Fail often, in order to succeed earlier”. In other words, the faster you fail, the faster you can succeed. IDEO is one example of a fearless culture where failure is encouraged, expected and rewarded.

For anyone managing change, whether practicing from the soft sciences or simply a manager tasked with change, I would encourage you to take a look at IDEO for a perspective a good distance from our norms. You can view a terrific video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M66ZU2PCIcM

Opinion ends here. I look forward to your feedback, additional discussion and perspectives on the topic.
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 Jeff is currently the Principal Consultant at iBridged Consulting, a sales and sell-through performance management consulting firm. He has of two decades of executive sales leadership experience leading people and companies to reach goals previously thought to be unattainable. Working with and for brand name companies like Apple, HP, Xerox, Microsoft and many others, Jeff understands the complexity and strategic nature of the tools, systems and processes necessary to improve sell-through in any organization.


Jeff serves on the Board of Directors at Bay Area Organization Development Network, leading the organizations' communication strategy and implementation. Jeff holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Management and is currently completing a Masters of Science in Organization Development at the University of San Francisco.

Spotlight on: Edie Seashore & Michael Bloom

Ms. Edith Whitfield Seashore and Dr. Michael Broom are presenting a BAODN workshop on Sept. 23rd called “Becoming a Change Agent”. The following post merges separate interviews with Edie and Michael about their upcoming workshop, the two key disciplines they are focusing on, and the state of OD today.

Edie and Michael are a multicultural team who have worked together for many years. Both are psychologists and seasoned change management professionals who have worked both internally and externally and are well known and published in the field.

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In your upcoming workshop, you’re focusing on the disciplines of conscious-use-of-self and infinite power? Why did you choose these two?

Michael: We want to give the audience a strong dose of two of our eight disciplines critical to any OD practitioner. Both Edie Seashore and I have taught at Hopkins, Georgetown, McGill, plus more. Graduates are struggling to apply what they learned. Academia is based on knowledge, but how to apply that knowledge? We focus on the ‘conscious use of self’ -- that's where change in any system starts. If I cannot manage myself effectively it's going to be difficult to support you in you managing yourself effectively, so that you can manage the changes in your organization.

Edie: The whole premise on which our program is based is the conscious use of self, so that's obvious why we would choose that one. We think that everything that any of us do would be enhanced by our being more aware and conscious of how we choose to lead ourselves. So that’s a baseline.

Michael: We go through life mostly on automatic, and most of the time automatic works just fine. We get up out of bed a certain way, brush my teeth a certain way, cook my dinner a certain way---I don't have to think about it. But if we really want to manage change and not have things be the same as they have been then we really need to be aware of when we have slipped into automatic and get ourselves off of automatic so that we can behave, think, feel and have beliefs that support all that.

Edie: A discipline is [something] that you are deliberately trying to put into practice and that takes a lot of conscious use of self to do so. A lot of [the disciplines] are counter-cultural -- they aren't the way we usually operate. For instance, on the use of self, our tendency is very often to be on automatic or to blame others for what's going on instead of taking it upon ourselves to think about what choices can we make, and being accountable in every respect, even when things aren't going well. What can we do that will make a difference and try to be accountable to that rather than just going on automatic and blaming or feeling upset. That takes discipline to do that.

What is infinite power?

Edie: So automatically we go to a win/lose because that is what we have been socialized to do in this society from the time we're born, even with our own siblings, right? The infinite perspective is that we both be satisfied with the solution. I don't like the phrase win/win but I like the notion that we're both feel equally okay about how it all comes out--that take a discipline to keep playing the game long enough for that to happen, without succumbing to a win/lose. That's a big discipline.

An example: I was watching a group try to decide how to change a weekend workshop. The reason they had to change the date--there was about 25 of them involved--is because one of the faculty had misunderstood a date and couldn't do it that day. They kept trying to find out when everybody could come to another weekend, and they kept going further and further out and they were not [able to find a date] and finally one guy said "Look, this is just ridiculous. I can't change a weekend that most of you could come because it's my wedding date. However, I don't mind missing that weekend. So go ahead and do it.” And just before they decided to go ahead -- they were so relieved -- one woman said, “Let's try for one second and go further in instead of going further out.” She proposed another weekend closer and everybody could do it. And they all said "Wow." She said, “I just wasn't going to settle for him not being able to be there. So I tried one more shot at it." So the question is--can we keep the game playing for one more shot at it so everybody's ok with what the solution is? Given the pace of things in our society these days, people stop short of that. Because it does take time.

The person who suggested this was a woman. She felt very powerful when she came up with this crazy weekend that everybody could do. And all she had done was just not give up on the game. But she was very powerful, everybody was very grateful, and so it worked out.

Michael: We live in a world where most of us are on automatic and see that power is scarce. If I'm going to get my way you can't get yours. It's dog eat dog and we're either going to compete with each other or somebody is going to conform because they don't want to look like they're not playing ball. Nobody wants to be called "you're a loser" nobody wants to hear that you're not a team player. Rather than risk that kind of win/lose situation we turn ourselves into victims and go along to get along. That really trashes our own sense of self, and second it really doesn't help us get to the next discipline which is ‘learning from differences.’

When we're playing win/lose power dynamics, what we use to determine who's going to win and who's going to lose are differences. That's really important to get. Well I'm a male and you're a female and both the culture you're raised in, men win over women...and if there was a white person present both of us would lose at least in this society because of that difference. There's just many mundane differences where we've already been programmed around who's going to lose and who's going to win; such as first and second, which wins? Top/bottom which wins? Fast/slow which wins? We're already been programmed to think about that without even knowing well, fast what? More what? Now when we're using differences to determine who wins and who loses, differences become dangerous, so that I'm either going to fight about my thought that's different than yours or I'm just going to just cave and pretend that I agree.

Unless we can switch out power paradigms over to one that is much more open...which we call ‘infinite power’ where the point of the game is to keep the game going. Because if we're going to play win/lose we don’t really know who's going to win and who's going to lose until the end of the game. The point of the infinite game is "Can we keep this game going?" That means we got to take care of all the players because if any players gets hurt or gets dissatisfied, the game is in danger of ending. Something really fascinating happens there...differences are no longer dangerous. Their inherent value can then come out and the inherent value of differences is that they are the only learning that we have.

You could put in me in a room with 25 clones of Michael Broom and I already know everything that they know. But I can learn from you. I can learn from anybody because you're different than me, if I've got my learning cap on. Now Peter Senge talks about the learning organizations but Peter doesn't talk about that we can't become a learning organization unless we can switch this power dynamic away from win/lose to something much more open.

Edie: Very often the win/lose ends up taking more time because those who didn't win are trying to to figure out a way for them to get what they had in mind. They're fighting for that, so it isn't exactly always a time-saver. The question would be--is this an issue that is important enough for us to stay with? And keep working on it, so that we can actually all feel good about it?

I think incidentally women, the notion of a power is something that could be an intriguing conversation. As woman who grew up during the women's movement I was very involved in all of that. I think women are enormously powerful and the socialization was that we shouldn't be seen or heard and I think there was a reason for that....because we turn out to be quite powerful.

Women would be more inclined to be excited about [infinite power] as we like relationships, we like to collaborate, and this has a lot of that quality to it and it also turns out to be very powerful.

What would experienced practitioners learn from your workshop?

Edie: Well most of them haven't given much thought to the kinds of things we talk about interestingly enough. We put the workshop together for experienced people. We were very astonished that ‘conscious use of self’ was not part of their repertoire. They didn't realize how enormously impactful they as human beings were being in the system and how they could help other to recognize that.

Even the people who put the wonderful models together are not necessarily caught up in how people in the system can use themselves consciously to make a better impact. The relationship between their intention and their impact is not very clear in many cases. People go into meetings and say, “There was no reason for me to be there and it was a waste of my time.” Well why would they say that if they were using themselves effectively? I think they just didn’t bring this to their consciousness. I think that we have been more impactful on the experienced people than we have been on new people. The experienced people know what they haven't been doing.

What is the state of OD today? Is it still relevant? How is it still relevant?

Michael: It's a very important question for several reasons and is one of the reasons why I got myself onto the Board of the OD network. We don't have a standard definition of what OD is. If you look in the literature then you see all the definitions, they're all kind of vague. They kind of point us in a certain direction but the really don't say what is it we do. So we've come up with a more concrete definition which goes like this:

"We collaborate with organizational leaders and their groups towards systemic change and root cause problem solving on behalf of greater productivity and increased employee satisfaction through strengthening the human processes through which they get their work done."

I think that OD is more relevant than it has been because the bulk of our issues in human systems deal with differences, and if we go back to learning from differences and the infinite power aspect and being able to use ourselves consciously, then we become much more productive, much more satisfied. Life becomes much more meaningful and many of the issues that we find not only in the workplace but at home, and in the world will just go away because essentially OD is really about fundamental life skills about how to make human systems work.

Edie: If it can go into many different parts of the organization--I don't think it has to reside in the consultant or in a position--I think the principles of OD being incorporated into the system would be fantastic. I think that every leader should be an OD practitioner, that's how relevant it is. I think it's extraordinarily relevant. But not as a discipline necessarily, but as a concept that everybody could share.

I don't think we [the OD consultants] should be the sole consumers of OD. We should be in a position to pass the principles and disciplines and concepts of OD into the system so that other people can make sense out of them and use them.

Michael: The educational process for OD practitioners is misplaced. The OD skills really belong with leaders, not necessarily with the other layer called OD practitioners. The leaders actually need these skills on a day-to-day basis. OD should be embedded in the rubic of leadership development.

Want more? Come meet Michael and Edie in person on Thursday September 23rd. For registration and details please go to www.baodn.org

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Rani H. Gill is a learning designer looking at ways to help people learn and organizations change. She speaks, manages, and designs in three languages: technology, education and business. You can find her at her blog (wanderatwill.com), twitter, or Linked-In. She currently consults with organizations interested in using learning methodologies to change their organizations. Rani is also a Speaker Series volunteer with BAodn.

Being Ourselves, Finding Our People

Recently, I looked back at the Book of Proceedings from the BAodn Best in the West 2010 Open Space: Leveraging the Power of OD in Changing Times. Have you ever analyzed text for themes? Well, skimming through the Closing Circle Comments and Reflections made the job easy. Over and over again people commented that they felt like they belonged, even if they had never been to a BAodn event before. But, that belonging was not gained through the loss of their individuality. As one person said, "everyone here is so different, even though we are the same tribe."

Another theme was the feelings people had about using Open Space rather than a traditional conference format for the meeting. Some people were grateful that they had not endured yet another day of Power Point slides from sages on the stage. Others appreciated the ability to go deeper into topics than a traditional presentation format would have allowed, with engagement from everyone in the small groups. A few people mourned the loss of a more structured approach.

It was a bold move for BAodn leadership to make the decision to try the Open Space format last year. Perhaps that bold move was a preview of a series of shifts from more traditional approaches to experimental new modes, like this blog, and BAodn's LinkedIn presence. Perhaps BAodn's new direction represents where OD is headed--distributed, ubiquitous, embedded.

This is what BAodn members are thinking about and talking about. Won't you join us?
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Katherine Kott is the Volunteer Coordinator for BAodn. When she is not matching up volunteers to interesting BAodn opportunities, she manages digital library projects for Stanford University Libraries. In her spare time, she is pursuing a PhD in Human Systems and Organizational Development at Fielding Graduate University. Contact Katherine at volunteering@baodn.org.