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

neighbours. But he will never know if he knows enough. Thus, an honest consultant will always
behave in a way that supposes he may be non-adequately aware.
Preliminary meetings with leaders of the organization are absolutely necessary and very important,
but they never give a sufficiently full and accurate picture. Over the course of 25 years of
consulting, the author has never met a boss who would not be mistaken about even the basic
features of his organization and the main problems it faces. It is a bit like what parents think about
their children – they assume they know them well because they have known them for a long time –
and that is usually wrong. It is natural that organizational pitfalls are located in the same places,
where leader’s mental maps are deficient – that are why they cannot see these pitfalls or diagnose
the causes correctly and so they allow them to exist.
However, a leader is a part of the organization. If he or she stays with the organization long
enough – a certain correspondence between the personality of the leader and the features of the
organization is inevitable. A consultant may make a number of reasonable assumptions about
some actual issues and how they are most probably addressed in the organization – without
asking direct questions. Like an observation of the eye retina allows diagnosis of all organisms,
thus observation of a leader, and to some extent any other member of an organization, may give
information about the remaining whole.
Of course, the best way to understand what is going on in an organization is to perform a
management audit to answer many important questions and get in touch with people in the
organization who could supplement the formal assessment. Our methodology for a management
audit includes main parts, such as assessing effectiveness factors (mission, clients, products and
other system’s outcomes; quality and quantity requirements and how they are met; position in the
market or community; human outcomes; stakeholders’ satisfaction; survivability criteria), and
assessing efficiency factors (an organization’s overall design and real structure, inputs and critical
resources, costs, technology and procedures, leadership and empowerment, teamwork, culture,
etc.). Such an audit takes time and costs money, but provides valuable information about an
organization. As well proved in practice, even considerably small organizations may be fraught
with a number of surprises for their bosses. Unfortunately, a full management audit of an
organization is rarely possible.
Anyway, advance information can never be complete, and unpredictability and chaos remain in
their place. Any serious design of a training intervention will take in account these circumstances.
What will definitely happen when a trainer will meet participants for the first time – is an outburst of
information that may drastically change some preliminary assumptions. Even when the meeting is
repetitive and nearly everyone in a group is familiar to the trainer – a single new member, or
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