organizational development – Eugene Eric Kim

Baselines and Narratives

Published April 22, 2017 by Eugene Eric Kim

I haven’t read Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s Shattered about Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign, but I have found the reviews and their virality fascinating. Here’s what the New York Times, National Review, and Rolling Stone had to say. The Amazon.com reviews are mediocre at best.

There is something lurid and compelling about reading a retrospective about a failed campaign. It’s like looking at a train wreck — it’s hard to tear your eyes away, even if you want to. Unlike a train wreck, however, it’s hard to assess how “bad” Clinton’s campaign actually was, and what I’m reading about the book doesn’t seem to help.

In my experience working with organizations and their leaders, including some very good ones, there is a baseline of dysfunction that would surprise most people. Internal effectiveness and good strategy matter (which is what keeps me employed), but they’re not the only factors that contribute to success. You have to be very careful about attribution bias, especially when dealing with complex, systemic challenges.

So far, most of the retrospectives and commentary I’ve read have reeked of attribution bias.

The one thing that stuck out for me in reading the reviews were the points about Clinton’s lack of a clear narrative. The National Review, for example, wrote:

In Shattered, we learn that ten speechwriters, consultants, and aides had a hand in writing Clinton’s announcement speech, which unsurprisingly turned out to be a long, muddled mess. Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau, briefly brought in to help, concluded that the speech (and by extension, the whole campaign) “lacked a central rationale for why Hillary was running for president, and sounded enough like standard Democratic pablum that, with the exception of the biographical details, could have been delivered by anyone within the party.”

Again, I see this all the time working with leaders. It’s hard to identify a clear and compelling narrative and to stay on message, but it’s important. In their book, Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath attribute this challenge to the Curse of Knowledge. Effective leaders have lots of knowledge, but that knowledge can get in the way of telling a clear story.

An Anthology of my Critiques of Organizational Development

Published September 20, 2014 by Eugene Eric Kim

My friend and former business partner, Kristin Cobble, recently asked me to re-share some of my critiques of the organizational development (OD) field and of OD consultants in particular. It took me some digging to pull together what I felt were the most relevant posts, so I thought I’d share them here.

The best place to start is, “Group Process on Steroids.” I make the point that OD practitioners tend to be too meeting- or tool-centric. I think they need to be more principle- and practice-driven, like chefs.

In “Disrupting Organizational Consulting,” I talk about commoditizing the low-end of the market. For most people, hiring OD (or management, for that matter) consultants is overkill, and they generally get a low return on that investment. If we created more DIY and low-end support options (which is where I’m focusing a lot of my energy right now), we could eliminate that side of the market, which would also help weed out mediocre consultants. I riff on this some more in, “What Consultants Can Learn From the Photography Field.”

In “Organizational Development as Product Design,” I compare the two fields, and I talk about what OD consultants could be learning from product designers. One of those things is about naming and testing your assumptions up-front, which would give us a baseline for measuring our effectiveness. This rarely happens, especially among social change consultants, many of whom suffer from Noble Pursuit Syndrome.

“Lessons from the NBA on Life, Learning, and Navigating Power” is more of a personal riff, but I talk a bit about the lack of openness and collaboration in organizational consulting, something I’m trying to be a lot more intentional about modeling.

Finally, this network analysis of OD and related fields shows how siloed the OD field in particular is, and discusses some of the implications.

Disrupting Organizational Consulting

Published June 8, 2013 by Eugene Eric Kim

My secret goal with Changemaker Bootcamp is to disrupt management and organizational development (OD) consulting.

My rough and totally unscientific estimate is that the budgets for 90 percent of all management and organizational development consulting projects would be better spent on capacity development for staff.

Good consultants already orient their work toward developing this capacity, but it comes at a premium cost. When compared to other consultants who are charging similar or higher costs but are providing far less value, these costs are more than justified. However, I think there’s a huge market opportunity for something that provides greater, broader value at a fraction of the cost.

Physical fitness offers an apt analogy. If you want premium service, you can hire a personal trainer. At the opposite end of the market, you can buy a book or search the web for tips on how to stay fit. There are many services in-between as well: DVDs, bootcamps, gym memberships, and so forth.

With organizational work, there are two extremes with very little in the middle, and it’s skewed heavily (and needlessly) toward the high-end.

Organizational Effectiveness Market: What Is

There’s consulting on the high-end, and there are books and articles on the low-end. Most existing training programs fall on the low-end of the spectrum as well, because they are oriented primarily around delivering information rather than on shifting behaviors.

There’s no reason why the market for organizational effectiveness should not look more like the market for physical fitness.

OE Market: What Should Be

I think organizations in general — and, by extension, society as a whole — would be much better off if it did. I think services like Changemaker Bootcamp have the potential to shift the market in this way.

An Example: Strategic Planning

Consider strategic planning. Organizations bring in consultants to help guide the process or to provide content expertise. The vast majority of strategic planning processes focus on helping the leadership team develop the “right” strategy.

Some organizations really benefit from these processes, because they understand what strategy is, and, more importantly, they understand how to act strategically. I’ve worked with several organizations like this, where my primary role was to create the space for them to have the strategic conversation. Once they had that space, they were able to align quickly and execute effectively.

The vast majority of organizations — and people, it seems — don’t fall into this category. In these cases, hiring a consultant is a waste of money. These organizations don’t have the capacity to evaluate the end result, and they’re not likely to act on it regardless.

Unfortunately, these organizations often hire consultants anyway, and the results are predictably ugly — “strategies” consisting of long lists of goals that are too general and abstract to mean anything. Not that it matters, since no one in these organizations generally knows what those goals are anyway.

The worst part about all this is that developing a good strategy is relatively easy. Acting strategically is what’s truly hard.

Acting strategically takes practice. Good consultants can help organizations practice in the same way that personal trainers help their clients. However, most consultants do not take this approach. Even if they did, there ought to be more and better ways to support practice than consulting.

Changemaker Bootcamp’s approach is to offer a set of exercises for practicing asking generative questions. These exercises don’t require any specialized skill to do, but they can help develop specialized skills if repeated often enough with constructive feedback from others.

My hypothesis is that most organizations would benefit far more from having their staff go through exercises like these than they would from hiring expensive consultants lead them through traditional planning processes.