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

interventions’: natural experience, experiential learning, on-the-job training, simulation, role-play,
laboratory training, classroom training (live or virtual), and self-study (Robinson and Robinson,
1998). The kind of training that the author and his colleagues have done over the course of last ten
years is not on the list, although it could involve most of the applications mentioned above. We are
going to discuss this training in a bit more detail. But first we will distinguish it from other categories
of training events.
The key question for us is always: ‘Why do organizations live the way they live?‘ What should be
addressed by organizational development training? One of the most important issues is usually
related to the way people think about the organization and themselves.
People act in the way they think is rational for them, however: What they think depends on what
they know.
o What they know depends on what they see.
o What they ‘see’ is a matter of perception of facts – not facts themselves.
o What they perceive is a matter of interpretation (also misinterpretation or ignoring
perceptions).
o What they ‘see’ depends on what they think.
There is a cycle. It may be a rising spiral of organizational learning. It may also be a vicious cycle
of organizational decline (consider ‘groupthink’ as an example). And it may be a kind of
organizational stagnation, when further movement is blocked by old ways of thinking. Positive
incentives are balanced by inertia of the cycle - then a cycle must be broken to give way to the
spiral.
We often observe that an organization remains where it is, although this state is not comfortable
any longer; the organization could and should be somewhere else. They can, in fact, get some
additional funding, hire new people, change technology, or the way they work with clients, etc. –
but it does not take place, because everything seems to them to be how it should be. What
members of the organization (and the organization as an entity) think about themselves,
colleagues, bosses, subordinates, clients, procedures, products, mission, and the construction of
the universe, etc. – directly influences their behaviour and the end results. That is why it should be
addressed by training.
The first step in initiating organizational change is to expand the base of acceptable patterns of
organizing and behaving – enlighten people in the organization about matters they have never
learned before (or never had a chance to think about before) – this may cause certain changes in
the understanding and perception of reality and a corresponding change in behaviour.
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