Organizational Development: A Manual for Managers and ... - FPDL

Everything is like an everlasting problem-solving spiral in a continuously changing organizational
environment. And it is like that because any real problems are strategic ones. They are about
causes, which form landscape, and not about consequences that manifest themselves as various
symptoms and discomforts. The strategic management of organizational development involves
setting objectives for development, solving corresponding problems or utilizing opportunities, and
holding the reins well in hand, especially at points of bifurcation.
As our favourite Wikipedia states, “strategy formation and implementation is an on-going, neverending,
integrated process requiring continuous reassessment and reformation. Strategic
management is dynamic. It involves a complex pattern of actions and reactions. It is partially
planned and partially unplanned. Strategy is planned and emergent, dynamic, and interactive.
Some people (such as Andy Grove at Intel) feel that there are critical points at which a strategy
must take a new direction in order to be in step with a changing business environment. These
critical points of change are called strategic inflection points.” It is just great. Not so old-fashioned
at all, is it?
Who shall do it?
Any manager at any level of an organization, if he or she as a manager is responsible for
something, shall be a strategist. This responsibility is shaped (or should be shaped – see Chapter
1.3) by a set of parameters that should be kept within certain limits or should reach a certain level.
These define objectives and criteria. Any manager operates in a certain organizational
environment and depends also on certain external circumstances. That constitutes the force field.
Projection of this force field into the future through the manager’s or his team’s mental map gives
an image of the landscape.
Any manager, if he has at least something to do, should be able to influence some of factors
creating landscape parameters, and he is always able to influence the choices at bifurcation
points. If the parameters that are supposed to be under his control deviate from the state that
ensures a necessary landscape for desirable changes – then he has strategic problems to solve,
and may look for strategic opportunities.
Any manager must solve his problems by elaborating and evaluating alternative courses of
actions, making rational choices, planning and organizing his own and others’ activities to
implement them, monitoring the situation along the way, evaluating results, and so on. There is no
dilemma of a ‘top-down’ or ‘bottom-up’ approach. Anyone can do it, if he is a manager. Everyone
should be involved if he is a member of an empowered learning organization. An organization as a
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