Organisation Development Pro Tips for Improving Performance - Part 2 - OrgDev Episode 89

Top tips from leading Organisation Development and Design Experts

This is part 2 of a special highlights episode. This year has been a big one for us.
We recorded 44 episodes, and the podcast reached listeners in 109 countries.

Our guests joined us from as far afield as California, Spain and Australia – as well as Austria, the Netherlands and Sweden, and together we covered a broad spectrum of practice – from neuroscience and psychological safety, to systems thinking, agility, self-organising teams, imposter syndrome, and organisation design.

What we’ve pulled together here is a curated set of highlights from those conversations.

Wish you had a handy recap of the episode? So did we.

That’s why each week in our Next Step to Better newsletter, we’re sharing From Pod to Practice – a 2-page visual summary of each episode designed to help you take the learning from the podcast and into your work.

You’ll get:
■ Key insights from the episode
■ A reflection prompt
■ A suggested action

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About Us

We’re Dani and Garin – Organisation Development (OD) practitioners who help leaders and people professionals tackle the messiness of organisational life. We focus on building leadership capability, strengthening team effectiveness, and designing practical, systemic development programmes that help you deliver on your team and organisational goals. We also offer coaching to support individual growth and change.

Find out more at www.distinction.live

We'd love to connect with you on Linked In:
linkedin.com/in/danibacon478
https://www.linkedin.com/in/garinrouch

Transcript

(00:00) Hi and welcome to this special episode of the org dev podcast. This is the second highlights video we're sharing catching some of the many brilliant guests we've had over the past year. Over the last 12 months, the org dev podcast has continued to grow at speed. We're now reaching 109 countries and becoming a genuinely global space for organization development and design.
(00:22) In that time alone, Danny and I have recorded 44 hours of interviews um with leading academics, practitioners, and authors alongside people shaping organizations from the inside. The breadth of perspectives has been far wider than we could ever capture in a single highlights video. So, this is not merely a best of, it's more of an introduction to organization development and design, which is a global, evolving, and increasingly central approach to how organizations adapt and perform.
(00:49) So, if something you're watching here resonates, don't just stop at the highlights. Go and explore the full episodes. Follow the feeds, follow the threads, choose the conversations that matter most to your practice. And we want to say a huge thank you to all of our first class guests who've given their time, insights, and experience so generously.
(01:07) Without them, we don't have a podcast. And thank you to you, the viewers, and listeners for being part of our growing community and supporting the work that Danny and I do. If you haven't already, please hit the button and subscribe to the channel. This is what allows us to continue to invite such brilliant guests and help these conversations to continue.
(01:25) So, thank you so much and please enjoy the highlights. So one of the questions I want to ask is how do you get senior leaders to actually look beneath the surface at the flow, the blockers, the dynamics instead of just arranging these boxes. >> You have to start by changing the question. So it's not what's the right structure.
(01:54) It's more what's getting in the way of flow. From there, you can help your leaders look beyond the chart and into what's actually happening beneath the surface. So, where are decisions getting stuck or bouncing around? Where are people stepping in or quietly stepping back, right? Who technically has the authority and then who is really the one that's influencing the outcomes.
(02:19) So you have to ask targeted grounded questions and then we play back what we see objectively and without drama. And this work can have a lot of drama and that too can be a huge distraction that people get kind of bogged down in. So you have to strip out the noise for this to work. All of the gossip, all of the emotion, all of the politics.
(02:42) We're when we talk about org design, we're talking about probably the biggest hot button of humanity. So you're you're looking at titles, levels, compensation. Sometimes these are highly loaded topics. Uh and you you have to do what you can to quiet the noise and create an infrastructure or a framework to support these conversations.
(03:06) When you do that, people can finally start to see the systems clearly. And that is when that's when things start to shift. A lot of times what's been called a team issue is just a trust issue uh maybe a blurry role or a decision that nobody really owns. So design work begins when leaders stop reacting to the symptoms and they start to be honest about how work is actually moving through the organizational system.
(03:34) Just tell us a bit more about what do we mean but what do you mean by that when you talk about a kind of self-managed organization? What does that look like? So self-management really acknowledges that actually all people in an organization have the capability to to make decisions and where we traditionally in a more hierarchical command and control environment we almost implicitly expect leaders and managers to make all the decisions for the workers for the people on the front line.
(04:02) In a self-managing organization a lot of that decision making power is actually pushed as much as possible to the front line. So that means that in an extreme case you may not even need any managers. You may not even need any uh hierarchy because people on the front line is essentially together make all the decisions and organize the work in a way that is required to address the demands from from the market whether that's clients or patients or anything like that.
(04:27) >> And what do people get wrong about the concept? What are some of the myths that you see or the misunderstandings? >> Well, there's a lot of the is it myths? Is it fear? I'm not entirely sure but a combination of the two perhaps um is that self-management leads to chaos um because if there's no manager to to make decisions then people will enter into never- ending conflicts no work gets done because meetings are endless and there's always going to be debate of what to what to do next and ultimately the organization is going to be less
(04:57) effective rather than more effective. What we actually see in self-managing organizations is is that they're much more conscious about these processes that are going on and much more challenged themselves to ask themselves the question why does this decision need to be made by a single individual who's not immediately affected by the outcomes of thes
(05:19) e decisions i.e. the manager sitting somewhere in an office rather than the person on the front line who actually sees the effect of those decisions on a day-to-day basis. And that then really requires those organizations to find solutions to how to make that work. And that that conscious effort to almost break down again the principles of how organizations work and then put them back together in a different way results in that very effective working together and making use of the collective intelligence that organizations have.
(05:49) I mean we all are used to making important decisions in our day-to-day private lives. We decide to get married. we decide to move house, we decide to maybe have children, decide to buy a car, all these big decisions that we make in our day-to-day life are actually not questioned. But as soon as we enter the workplace, all of a sudden we leave that decision-making power at at the door, that doesn't seem to make sense.
(06:13) So these self-managing organizations, it really try to harness garner muster >> all of them. All of them. You can tell I'm a foreigner. So sometimes I will be looking for words or or still using the wrong words. Actually, I hope you try you understand what I'm trying to say. They try to bring together that the collective brain power of their organizations and the collective passion and energy that all these colleagues and and employees can can bring to the four.
(06:41) >> How frustrating is it when it's misaligned? How frustrating is it when everybody sees things are disconnected? fragmentation from the pandemic, I think, perpetuated an appetite for finding out about how can we connect better together. Connection doesn't seem to be a word that's still sort of associated with technology, but I think increasingly because of the complexity in in organizations and the unpredictability of the environments that we work in, alignment is now seemed to be crucial for adaptivity and
(07:09) resilience. How can a team adapt? Well, it needs to know where is it, where are we at, and what are we going to do on a on an iterative basis, that's the basis of adaptivity. So, when we talk about or adaptability, when we talk about appetite for alignment, it's almost like there's this sort of like what do what's this people problem? I wouldn't use those words.
(07:32) What's this people problem that we're perceiving? It's so difficult. We're pushing stuff uphill. It's all so difficult. People are leaving. Everybody wants to be a freelancer. You know, who's going to stay in the game? How how are they really working at home? This kind of coasting kind of presenteeism issue. People are struggling with that.
(07:49) How do we get on top of that? And I think it's not like there's a silver bullet, but that but alignment is a big contributor to that. Who's going to be engaged if they're not first aligned, etc. So, the gains are significant. Um, but it's difficult to describe again. It's like a sliding doors moment. [music] And I think, you know, we're we're we just keep experiencing the same challenges over and over because they're polarities.
(08:18) >> Yeah. Right. They're not problems to solve, but we keep coming at them from that problem solving lens and try to trying to find the solution, >> right? What is the solution to this challenge? Yeah. And I mean, we just face this in the states, right, with our election and I we've got such polarization. It's so deep.
(08:36) And what that why that happens is because these are values. They're deeply held values that are so meaningful for us. And what people don't understand is you don't have to give up what you value to be open and receptive to the other value because we have to have them both. But most people hang on tightly because they feel like they have to give theirs up to accept or be open to the other.
(09:02) But when you know it's a polarity, then you know it's both. And it's never about either or. It's always about both. And so and one pull is not more important than the other. But because we don't understand this concept and how all polarities work, we continue to fight against it. And it just gets more and more complex.
(09:20) And there are a multitude of polarities. They're everywhere. Everywhere, right? And uh and so the more complex our world gets, the more the more polarities there are at play that are not being addressed. They're not being leveraged. systems thinking really there's a lot of confusion out there.
(09:36) If you Google it, you're going to get all kinds of confusion about what it is, but it's actually pretty simple. We live in systems are we live in families, we live in organizations, we live on the universe, in ecologies, you know, on Earth, in countries, you name it. These are systems that we live inside of and situations that we live inside of.
(10:00) And systems thinking is about how do we think more in alignment with those systems because the systems we live in are pretty complex. They're multi- aent. There lots of interactions going on. There's lots of change. And how do we get our thinking to be more kind of accustomed to dealing with the systems that we live in every day? So it really applies to everything.
(10:24) you know how to lead a better family life, how to lead a person better personal life, better professional life. It's very pragmatic and and it's also based on a lot of science and and theory as well. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting that DSRP is really not my model. It's it's nature's model. The So, it comes out of nature. Nature makes distinctions.
(10:48) Our brains make distinctions. We organize things into groupings. That's the S systems. Make make groupings out of things. We relate things. Things are related in in the real world systems. And everything kind of happens based on what position or perspective you're coming from. So if you shift your perspective, you might shift the distinctions that you see or the relationships that are relevant or the way you group things.
(11:18) And just those four simple patterns which we call DSR and P are sort of fundamental to the way information is organized both in nature in the universe but also in this little universe of our brain. >> If I could just add to that also based on what Derrick just said the last part is the way we organize. If you think about anytime you're taking in information from the world through any of your senses, the process by which you make meaning around that information is you're distinguishing it.
(11:51) You're organizing it into part hole systems. You're relating it to other things and you're taking a perspective if not many perspectives on it. So DSRP is to me the the basil process by which we build understanding of anything and it's the awareness of that because that's happening subconsciously unconsciously and what systems thinking and what we're trying to do is bring all of that unconscious stuff to your consciousness so you're aware of how you're building your ideas, how you're thinking things through. And that to me is the greatest
(12:21) tool that you could give a human on the planet is the ability to understand how they're thinking about things. What do we solve? >> Yeah. I think it's it's literally things like zoom in, zoom out, right? So zoom in means whatever you're looking at, zoom into it and look at the parts and also remember to zoom out.
(12:40) One of the things for example we I mean you can teach that to little kids. One of the things probably the number one thing that executives come to us with or maybe one of three things that they come to us with for organizational issues is they're trying to train that middle level to to rise up to the higher level the seauite and they want what's called what they call enterprise thinking.
(13:04) Well, enterprise thinking is just zoom out thinking. It's it's just starting at where you're at, where your task level or department level is, and sort of saying, well, let's look at it from one at least one level up where I start to see how my department connects to other departments or how my task or my project or my initiative connects to other initiatives in the organization.
(13:25) That's what enterprise thinking is. And really, all it is is zooming out in the mountains. We triangulate to find our position. That's taking multiple perspectives on the map. So taking multiple perspectives is is something that you can easily train your brain and train your habit to do. You just have to do it enough for a few weeks to kind of it becomes a habit.
(13:49) >> There's a double-edged side to this people need to be aware of, isn't it? That they do seem more and therefore becomes more responsibility on their part. >> Yes, that's true. the you know the love reality is the loop that we get in where we're building a mental model and we want to I I call it love reality meaning you don't want to change reality to your mental model that's called confirmation bias you want to change your mental model to fit reality so when we change reality to fit our mental model that's
(14:19) confirmation bias when we change our mental model to fit reality that's us getting it right and So loving reality allows us to get it right more often. And and you're right. I mean, loving reality also causes us to have to face hard truths. >> And then when you talk about systemic practice, just for some of the audience, you might not be familiar with that.
(14:41) How would you explain that? How would you describe that? >> Very good question. Very good question. Well, you're coming from the world of OD, you know, and probably most of the people listening here are sort of familiar with with these concepts. So very often in OD you refer back to a systems approach where you sort of look at how things are connected and if you change something in one area how that impacts other areas and you try to keep the hold in mind and when you move from system thinking to systemic thinking
(15:08) then basically you don't conceive the system as something that is objectively out there but you see it as that everyone all the people in the systems they're all observers they have their own ideas about what's going on for each of them the system is an environment. They have ideas of what it means, how it relates to them as a person, as a practitioner, as a professional, in relation to their role.
(15:31) So they have their stories and they have their perceptions from their place in the system. So what then plays out is that these people together engage in patterns of how they do things in relation to their own ideas. So it becomes then less important what the system kind of really really is, but it becomes important what everyone thinks is going on.
(15:49) And that is the move from systems to systemic practice. If you want sustained high performance, you can't maximize profitability. >> Yeah. And just thinking back to the way you defined agility, that kind of building incapacity, you know, that can be quite uncomfortable for leaders and organizations that were building incapacity to because it's that that I want to be efficient, we want to be productive, we want to be seen, we don't want capacity.
(16:20) It's like but that's what you that's exactly what you need. >> I could have the cap I could have the capability to change but if I don't have the slack resources I don't have a structure that is has more capacity for growth than a than another kind of structure. You you you nailed it. That's why we put capacity in there because if the capacity doesn't exist then the capability is worthless that now that's how it links directly to sustained above average profitability.
(16:51) I can't have one does can't exist without the other now. So it really becomes important to think about I'm no longer this is this is I get into trouble so much when I talk about this. I can no longer sort of sit idly by while they talk about maximizing shareholder wealth and maximizing profitability. I can't.
(17:11) I said, "Okay, then we can't talk about agility. I'm going to I'm going to talk to you about being able to have above average profitability for a long period of time, but I'm not going to maximize the profitability because that's not sustainable sustained high performance. If you want sustained high performance, you can't maximize profitability.
(17:32) >> Let's track back to when when you ask people about teams and examples of how many high-erforming teams have you really been on. I do this quite a lot at conferences and events when I speak and most people will put their hand up and it'll be five digits or less. So very few of us have actually experienced what is it to be on a high performing team.
(17:55) So our frame of reference is actually quite weak. Secondly, when you then have people describe, give me examples of teams, they tend to be sporting teams and orchestras and the like. And then if you think about it, those teams spend more time actually practicing being teams than performing. They spend more time on the soccer pitch practicing playing the game.
(18:19) They spend more time in the rehearsal hall practicing the piece of music, more time in the pit changing the tires. than they do actually performing. And yet in organizations, it's completely the other way around. We're so focused on performance and delivery that the notion of team and practicing and working on being a team comes second, third in order.
(18:40) >> But I definitely I think we'll go back to your point. What I have seen is that there is a lack of commerciality in the conversation around organization design and organization development. And it's until you are able to have that commercial conversation that you're going to be able to uh walk in confidently and credibly into that boardroom.
(19:07) And I and that's where the conversation needs to happen. I've worked under COOs, I've worked under CEOs, I've worked under chief people officers, I've worked alongside transformation directors. um this particular capability um is strategic. It needs to have a seat at the strategic table. Otherwise, we're not really unleashing the true potential.
(19:33) Um and I'm I'm just very fortunate to have been put in situations where I was able to exercise that strategic muscle and organizations definitely saw the benefit of that and and it's represented in their growth. that's represented in their numbers and that's where we need to measure ourselves. >> There is going to be a fundamental impact on the organization's bottom line and particularly when organizations are striving to be lean and to be efficient as well.
(20:01) This can actually put more resource back into the organization can't it? I think you know the first time a team would do this they would probably have some resistance and they'd probably be thinking you know I can't say that or they might be thinking you know I've heard that all before and as they were even listening to somebody they might be thinking yeah they go on their soap box they keep talking about this no but at least you get the opportunity to have it said and hear someone and maybe empathize with a reason behind their thinking that you
(20:29) didn't really understand before that simple act of going around the room to share and seek perspectives and then they they call it coordinating perspectives which is how do we then what what do we make of that in terms of our next steps. It doesn't it is quite streamlined. You could probably do one or two key misalignment key gaps or insights whatever you want to call them.
(20:50) You could go around one of those in half an hour. Maybe one of them goes on for two hours but at least it's done if it's really important. But the impacts are colossal because if you start thinking about well tell you what let's just not do that and I'm going to have my view on what you think or I'm not going to know what you think and we're going to go forward as a team on shared objectives.
(21:10) I mean in a way it's you know I think this is why we when we picked up this chalice which is a difficult one. It's a slippery you know what's alignment and how do we sense our way forward in this field which has by the way got a ton of connected interdicciplinary research behind it. And the field of OD has a really great ethical defense mechanism called use of self.
(21:42) And use of self is essentially how do I choose to be my best most ethical self in every moment. It's a constant, it's a practice of checking your espoused values versus your values in use as Chris Argers would call it constantly and learning from experience and baking that into your next time out. So a really nice remedy to the ethical dilemmas that are scattered all throughout OD is use of self.
(22:05) So that's become another interest of mine. >> You've turned you mentioned it a few times is like test, experiment, all those kind of things. It's a word we we often hear sort of chief we want you to go out. We want you to experiment, but that's easier than done. Often there's a little bit of fear attached.
(22:19) How can you create the conditions where testing can happen? And and what kind of tests can you do? What what's safe to try or safe enough? >> Yeah. And I think to be fair also just hear test and think expense or they hear creativity and think time or they hear prototyping and think, "Oh, it's not going to be good enough.
(22:42) We shouldn't put it out there." A good example of a prototype, right, could be um I'm a designer, so I've always got a marker pen near nearby. A prototype could be we're gonna this is a bit laugh and and it's a bit kind of obvious, but an app, right? So, we think that the answer to um anxiety, human emotions, anxiety in um in waiting for a clinic appointment um is because people don't know where they are in the process, uh who they're going to see next.
(23:12) We're going to create an app which people can then kind of see in real time. Tells them where they are in in the process, what they're waiting for next, and who they're going to see. Right. Here's a prototype. Okay. So, you draw, here's your smartphone. Here's your screen. This is the thing here. This is the thing here.
(23:27) This is the thing here. That took me what, 10 seconds. You take that out into a clinic and you sit with somebody and you say, "Are we thinking along the right lines? Would that be helpful or not?" They kind of go, "That's great, but I don't have a smartphone." Okay, right. We've prototyped that out the window. >> Yeah. >> Others would develop the entire thing and then when they launched it, they would find out, wouldn't they? >> So, how much did that cost? One post-it note and about 3 minutes.
(23:56) That's prototyping. Now it can also be you know the other extreme I was being slightly kind of provocative but the other extreme of that is you could design kind of a whole pathway and a booking system and stuff and get it to the the bare bones to try but you've still invested time and energy and probably some expense and then you put it out there and that's okay too but it's kind of what's the right level of prototyping for the the thing we need to learn from and try out.
(24:24) That's the rule really. So you're always looking to do it as quick and cheaply as possible as early as you can because again that will send you down the right road not down the wrong road to to what you were just saying Gary. I had somebody last week said um we were doing some design thinking session and they their kind of thing was um how can we get the voices of patients more readily into our work and inform our work.
(24:48) And somebody said, "Well, you can't." And one answer was, "Well, kind of well, we could phone them up and just kind of talk to them and listen and then seek permission." People say, "Well, you can't you can't prototype that." It's kind of like, "Well, you could. You could get permission from some people and then you can make 10 phone calls and see what you learn from it." That's prototyping.
(25:05) It would take you half an hour. Quick, cheap, early as possible, make some decisions and then you can get more sophisticated with it as you have confidence to build. If you're watching this and you want to rewind that bit, this will save your company hundreds of thousands of pounds. We know this, don't we? >> We we do. We do. Yeah.
(25:23) >> Basically, satisfy your curiosity to start with about what is OD in the broadest sense. you know, what's it about and how does what I'm doing fit with a mindset that looks out from, you know, the black and white in front of me to explore some of the grays and blues around because it's this business about if you're in a ditch and you're digging, you may not see that there's blue sky above it.
(25:59) It's only if you stick your head above the ditch that you can start to see issue in context potentially and how it links with other issues. So I think initially I'd say be curious about what is this OD systems thinking type stuff? Um how can I find out about it? Well, you know, there's tons of YouTube videos, um, webinars, um, blogs, you name it.
(26:30) You know, you don't have to do a degree in it to really get a sense of. It's actually quite a broad field. There are lots of different practitioners. In some cases, there are people who purport to be gurus. Steer clear of them. [laughter] um and work out of the things that you're hearing what would you most particularly like to develop because OD involves for instance you know things like helping top teams come to some very important strategic decisions so are you interested in that kind of thing would you want to facilitate or create a
(27:11) structure to enable you know that kind of thing to happen in which case what's your starting point, you know, where would you need to acquire the credibility to work with top teams? And it doesn't mean you have to be the most skilled facilitator, but you do probably need to have some confidence and some competence in how you put yourself over to be given the right to play.
(27:36) Equally, you know, for some people, OD is interesting from the point of view of looking at um conflict, you know, how um how you can get teams working together better or how you can get more knowledge shared across organizations between departments. How can you try and bring potentially opposing sides together to produce a better outcome? Um so again that might take you down a particular route to develop um you know which could be doing stuff around uh there are loads of models around conflict management and conflict
(28:15) resolution at different um in different ways depending on what your initial interest is. You can start to play around with some of the issues that you see as as problematic. But if you're really ambitious, you know, and you want to do something that's around helping your organization either become more effective as it is, you know, so you're carrying out an organization review to try and identify the blockages, working with people to try and overcome some of those blockages.
(28:50) Or if you're looking ahead, you know, just two or three years, you know, what's the organization becoming and doing the same kind of exercise but involving a lot more strategic scenario planning or whatever you want to do to get people realizing that there are some things coming down the line that we could be acting on now.
(29:09) Then again, you you'd be taking a particular route that takes in strategy, leadership, um facilitation of some sort. you'd be working, you know, learning how to do scenarios, scenario planning, >> you know, don't get too attached to it because you don't know and there's always new information coming through. And, you know, I think sometimes with with when you are a facilitator, it's easy to build a repertoire that's the thing and it works in this order.
(29:36) But like I said, every context is different. Every team starts in a different place. There's different levels of trust and you know, they have to engage in it in a certain way. So, we're always having to think about what's the recipe and how do we make it in a slightly different way each time.
(29:48) And that's what brings the variety, isn't it? >> Yes. And I think the the the the best model which is not a model is is actually deep questioning or inquiry because those are in the moments. Some of them you might have a recipe for asking some of these questions. I think yeah it reminds me of so Jacob Needleman is a philosopher.
(30:09) Um he basically said you know our our society has tended to solve his problems without experiencing his questions. So the questions how how to ask those questions in the moment and then you know arriving at a kind of improvised coherence that's that's the art. It's no longer a craft and I think as OD profession uh professionals and as change practitioners that's that's [music] the place we need to get to and that's that's that's a place that requires both our mind and our heart.
(30:42) So yeah. So so so I'm I'm not there yet, but I feel I'm being enabled. [music]