OD – What’s the big secret?

One side effect of the new CIPD HR Profession Map is that I and my fellow advisers found ourselves with new job titles.  Hence I recently found myself labelled adviser OD and Engagement. Engagement I could handle but the term OD sent ripples of panic down my spine. I had always assumed that rather loftily termed “OD Consultants” knew far more than I did and that some secret science that I was yet to discover differentiated this from more mundane approaches to change management.

So I rushed off to Google Scholar to read all things OD and hopefully find some answers.  As I read I discovered that an absolute definition of what OD is and what it can do for the organisation remains elusive.  Growing out of the US humanist tradition it is more a field of practice embracing a wide variety of tools and techniques than a function.  Roffey Park Institute, long associated with all things OD, describe it rather broadly in their “Guide to understanding the role of OD in the workplace” as “a planned, holistic approach to improving organisational effectiveness - one that aligns strategy, people and processes.”

Is this not what HR is all about, I thought? Have we not been talking about alignment and strategic HR for at least a couple of decades?

And then it came to me - an epiphany.  There’s no big secret about OD after all.  Essentially it’s a framework for bringing about sustained performance improvement by generating information, processing the key messages and acting on the outcomes, all the while recognising that people have a significant role to play in making this happen. 

However, as with most things, that was probably easier to say than it is to do.  So my next thought is what is it that HR needs to know to be good at OD? Is there a whole set of skills to be learned or is it about re-focussing what we already know about strategic HRM and the power of good quality management information?

My quick trawl though Google Scholar confirmed there’s a lot of material out there, presented in varying degrees of complexity.  However, the three key questions seem to be:

1.    What is it and how do we recognise OD activities?

2.    Why should we use it – what’s the business case?

3.    What should HR be doing to make it successful?

I am not going to try to answer these questions alone.  Instead I have written a discussion paper and posed these and other questions in the form of a poll.  So if you want to help me please read the discussion paper and complete the poll.

Maybe then I will get an idea of what HR, and I, need to know and set about developing some guidance to enable us to put this knowledge into action.