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

organization, is also mandatory. There is no sense in doing training for organizational development
if those who oppose the necessary change are not involved.
Another important resource is time. This is often linked with money. But the time is more important.
Training is the process. Any process needs a certain amount of time. Some processes cannot be
stopped half way and continued somewhere in a future, let’s say ‘next month’ or ‘when we have
time’. One more analogy with surgery suggests itself – if there is not enough time to complete the
process, then isn’t it better not to do a cut at all?
When training intervention is considered as one of the general instruments for facilitating
organizational change (not an urgent surgery for a special occasion), then entry points may be
different. In our practice, it was always very good to start with training on Problem Solving (after a
general introduction and overview of all main aspects of the organization and all main managerial
tools). This training produces a lot of relevant information for planning the following interventions,
gives participants motivation to apply very effective instruments, allows them to understand how
useful and enjoyable it may be working in a group with others (even not experts in the matter), and
so on. But this training is very hard. Nothing is more difficult, both for trainer and for participants.
Another good entry point proved to be Customer Service and Quality Assurance. These themes
allow the right emphasis from the very beginning. Communication Skills and Internal Relations
Management are safer, easier to start, easier to manage, allow participants to get acquainted, but
cannot produce very serious impact to overcome inertia and initiate the process of real
organizational changes.
With the Strategic Management course we usually prefer to complete the cycle (the whole cycle
takes about 4-5 training interventions over the course of about a year for most organizations), but
sometimes it was the best option to start working with the organization. This happened when only
top management and shareholders were involved in the first training. In general, it always better to
start the intervention from the training for top decision makers. Their involvement and commitment
then becomes a good sign for others.
Control during the process of training is also specific. One cannot control whether the situation is
where it supposed to be at a certain moment in time because nobody knows where exactly it
should be at any given moment. Conventional ‘training for learning things’ may follow a fairly
predictable path in accordance with a pre-designed agenda – and produce more or less standard
expected outputs. Organizational development training should be pre-designed in as much detail
as possible, keeping in mind however, that it will never go that way. It is not a plan for a trip on a
well-known road. It is rather a plan for finding the way through an unknown forest. Thus,
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