Anything we do is an intervention. There is no such thing as pure diagnosis. This step thus overlaps with the previous ones. After having a better idea of what is going on in your organisation we department, we can look at designing more meaningful interventions. This step involves tailor making standard organisational development methods to the specific circumstances of your department or organisation. The list below gives a menu of possible actions which we will
Capacity Assessments. The paradox is that conducting such assessments itself requires capacity. Existing capacity is often not sufficient to distinguish between the symptoms of low capacity and and their root causes. My assistance in identifying the capacity issues will first of all involve testing the validity of existing diagnoses and help think through the advantages and disadvantages of embarking on a capacity development initiative. It is realistic to assume that a capacity development initiative will constitute a formidable threat to some members of the client organisation. Some individuals or groups may see their privileges, prestige and prerogatives in danger, and feel compelled to protect themselves. The greatest challenges, however, may come from the organisational context, i.e. the organisational culture and climate. For a capacity development initiative to be successful, there must be a critical mass of individuals or groups whose commitment is necessary to provide the energy required to make change happen. The questions can be addressed in a commitment plan. Commitment charting can be used to draw up such a plan to enable leaders to determine the extent to which each of them is committed to the capacity development effort.
Project Management Workshops. Project Management needs to take a holistic view. Project Managers who believe that a large and complex project will be successful if they do things by the book act naively. Most project cycle management guidelines ignore some of the most important questions relating to ownership, power, driving and restraining forces, and the network of relationships in which the project is embedded. In our project management workshops we analyse issues dealing with problem definition, client systems and target groups, constraints and taboos, history, timing, indicators and project management skills, leadership and project team, resources and exit strategies, decision making structures, steering and supervision mechanisms, division of roles - etc.
Task Management Meetings. Until we really know what limits the capacity of an organisation or group, it is best to focus on the immediate goals that the group or organisation is trying to achieve. The main question in this category is how the group or organisation addresses its tasks, i.e. how it solves problems and makes decisions. This area is often mishandled by managers and regularly limits the ability of groups and organisations to get the job done. Group members may not listen to each other, interrupt one another, engage in pointless arguments and conflicts, and waste time on trivial issues. As a consequence, groups may fail to meet their objectives altogether. In order for an organisation to move forward toward accomplishing its tasks it must fulfill a number of process functions. My role will be to help the organisation in identifying and (temporarily) fulfilling missing functions.
Strategic Planning Workshops. In planning forward, people have the tendency to waste time and energy with focusing on problems and differences rather than on agreement and common ground. In doing so they lose sight of the big picture. The methodology I use for the design of strategic planning workshops is called Future Search, and helps to avoid these tendencies. Future Search is an advanced participative planning method, designed to help stakeholder groups in discovering common ground for their future activities, developing a joint vision, and committing to action. It meets two goals at the same time, (1) helping large diverse groups discover values, purposes, and projects they hold in common; and (2) enabling people to create a desired future together and to start working toward it right away. Future search is especially helpful in uncertain, fast-changing situations. Participants need no training or expertise. A future search usually involves groups of people that are large enough to include many perspectives and small enough that the full group can be in dialogue at each step in the process.
Team Building and Maintenance Workshops. Teams are the basis for creating value in an organisation. But teams can work well, or less well. This section provides the basic concept of team work, describes the critical forces promoting and hampering it and gives tools for diagnosing team effectiveness. While the importance of teamwork is becoming generally accepted, there are several truths about team which still cause confusion. Firstly, teams require development and maintenance in order to remain successful in the long-term. Secondly, team work is more than a “touchy-feely” condition, i.e. a careful optimisation of what happens in a group. Thirdly, teamwork is relevant not only on the lower levels of an organisation, but also and particularly on the higher management levels where the performance of coordination and control functions is decisive for an organisation’s success or failure.
Functional Reviews. In larger organisations structure can be thought of as the stable, recurring patterns that are taught to newcomers as “the way we work around here”, e.g. mission, goals, strategies, organisation structure, procedures, systems, etc. Structure is thus mainly an extension of process, in that it refers to processes which are stable over time and independent from contents, and the departure and arrival of individual members. These regularities pertain mainly to the organisation’s survival in its external environment. All groups face at least five basic survival problems, which can provide a focus for the development agency staff’s or consultant’s observations. It is not easy for outsiders to intervene constructively in issues of structure. Whether or not interventions in this area can be effective depends on the degree to which the group or organisation is aware of its structure and the need to change it. Structure is what provides member of a groups or organisation with predictability, meaning and security. Consequently, changes in structure will be perceived as a threat and involve high levels of anxiety and resistance. I will get involved in helping groups or organisations confront their structure and culture only when these groups or organisations really want to address these issues.
Cultural Assessments. Culture is probably the most stable aspect of an organisation, and so difficult to change, because it represents the accumulated learning of a group - the ways of thinking, feeling and perceiving the world, which have made the group successful. Culture is often described as the way things are done in an organisation, the values, the leadership style, etc. These statements oversimplify the complexity of culture. It is useful instead to assume that culture exists at three levels: artefacts, espoused values and shared tacit assumptions. Organisational culture can thus be more appropriately defined as the sum total of all the shared, taken for granted assumptions which a group has learned throughout its history and as such it is the residue of success. Understanding culture thus means to find out about these deep cultural assumptions. As a general principle, the way to assess deeper cultural levels is through identifying the inconsistencies and conflicts you observe between overt behaviour, policies, rules and practices (the artefacts) and the espoused values as formulated in vision statements, policies and other managerial communications.