Organizational Development: A Manual for Managers and ... - FPDL
Organizational Development: A Manual for Managers and ... - FPDL
Organizational Development: A Manual for Managers and ... - FPDL
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ecommendation that should be followed everywhere. It requires from trainer to be cautious <strong>and</strong><br />
present examples of good or bad practices as illustrations of good or bad thinking out the<br />
matters, not as good or bad patterns <strong>for</strong> copying or denying.<br />
9.5 CASES. The ‘cases’ <strong>for</strong> discussion in a course of training are among most powerful <strong>and</strong><br />
dangerous tools of trainer. When given an irrelevant example, participants just lose some<br />
minutes of time <strong>and</strong> a bit of respect to trainer. When asking to do exercises with irrelevant<br />
cases, spending hours <strong>for</strong> discussing situations looking idiotic <strong>for</strong> them, they may became very<br />
angry. Irrelevance of the case to the current legislation, economic situation, culture or any<br />
specific local circumstances, would allow to some participants not to take the case seriously,<br />
while others would try to do so. Even if the conflict would not happen, the results would hardly<br />
be very encouraging.<br />
The much better outcomes may be reached when generating all cases from original<br />
environment of participants, <strong>for</strong>cing them to solve exclusively the problems they face in their<br />
practice. It works very well <strong>and</strong> provides a great incentive to implement the solutions found in a<br />
training course. That produce a multiply effect demonstrating the practical impact of training,<br />
making attitude to the ideas given by trainer much more serious, rising trust to trainer <strong>and</strong><br />
readiness to learn more. However, some conditions should be meet.<br />
First – trainee who raises the case should be ready to be very open <strong>and</strong> provide all relevant<br />
in<strong>for</strong>mation to the group, which would make possible to find realistic solution. It is not always<br />
easy. Once we had a group in which some participants were from the same city, but not all of<br />
them from local administration. In one of the sub-groups the Chief Executive of this city had<br />
proposed a problem <strong>for</strong> discussion, they have started to do it, but the sub-group was very<br />
unsuccessful <strong>and</strong> after a day of hopeless ef<strong>for</strong>ts became almost frustrated, while other subgroup<br />
went well. Finally, it became clear, there were some circumstances, which Chief<br />
Executive cannot disclose <strong>for</strong> the wider audience, <strong>and</strong> it is impossible to find realistic solution<br />
without taking in account these circumstances. The group had to choose another problem <strong>and</strong><br />
was quite successful in solving it.<br />
Second – the problem should really exist as a problem. Sometimes one of participants may try<br />
do design artificial case <strong>and</strong> propose to discuss it as a problem. It is senseless, because then<br />
he should design a lot of necessary circumstances, <strong>and</strong> would always fail to do it. In other<br />
cases, participants try to propose <strong>for</strong> discussion the problem, which was already solved<br />
somehow in their local governments. In theory, it is possible to discuss such cases. However, it<br />
is always more complicated, since the decision that was actually made influences minding.<br />
Sometimes it is risky, because the decision, which was found at the training course <strong>and</strong> based<br />
on the partial in<strong>for</strong>mation, may be used as an argument to make pressure on others when<br />
coming back to the office. Moreover, it is always not so effective, because the result of training<br />
event would not be actually useful <strong>for</strong> the practice <strong>and</strong> could not pretend to be implemented.<br />
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