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

The art of management lies in the ability to control the process of organizational development,
which depends on the combined influence of numerous controllable and uncontrollable factors,
spontaneous self-controlled processes, accidental fluctuations and dynamic chaos, both inside and
outside the organization.
It is not necessary to know absolutely everything about recent and future processes and conditions
in order to be able to make smart decisions. It is impossible to know everything in the world when
the uncertainty of the present and future states is an inalienable attribute. However, one should
take into account that a smart decision in the stochastic world is not the same as it might be if
everything could be determined and known in advance. Any kind of uncertainty should be
estimated and met with the most relevant response. The presence of uncertainty is an absolutely
certain feature of nature. Thus, the ability of an organization’s leadership to deal with uncertainty is
essential for its survival in the real world.
Fortunately, it is not necessary to control everything to be able to control the direction of
organizational development. Any one of many factors affects the direction. Thus changing one of
the parameters or a few of them may be quite enough to ensure the necessary change in the
overall direction. On the other hand, things and issues within organizations are interdependent.
They are linked in cycles and chains and create a net of complicated cause-and-effect
relationships. In this net, only a few ‘causes’ may generate many consequences.
Some causes may be controllable and others may not. It may not be possible to directly affect
everything that goes wrong. However, it is not necessary to deal with everything to ensure
comprehensive control over the situation in an organization. When some causes are out of control,
it may be necessary to address consequences; but there is no need to directly address all
consequences. The factor that lies immediately beneath the uncontrollable cause but precedes the
next sequential controllable consequence – should be dealt with first. In most cases, it is quite
enough to eliminate the roots of deterioration and plant some new and healthy sprouts. The
wisdom of management lies in a rational choice among the objects of influence. For that to
happen, it is necessary to see everything that is seeable and foresee everything that is foreseeable
in order to be able to choose key variables, and design and implement proper changes.
Control capacity
To be able to adequately respond to the multitude of situations, a controlling subject (director)
should possess a variety of states or options not less than the variety of situations, which require
different responses. It is known in cybernetics as the ‘law of minimal requisite variety.’
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