Practicing Organization Development (A guide for Consultants) - Part 13. Organization development (OD) is about planned change. As change has turned into the only constant, many managers and other people are pursuing change strategies with vigor. OD is a major strategy for leading and managing change at the individual, group, intergroup, organizational, interorganizational, and large systems levels. This book is about what it takes to be an effective change manager, change leader, and OD consultant | ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS 91 significantly increasing both hard output and morale. Trist realized immediately the connection between England s business recovery and what he had just seen putting together the therapeutic work Bion had done with leaderless groups and Lewin s work in small group dynamics. Teams it appeared if given the proper support and resources could manage their own work and produce at high levels. Because of our fifty years of OD hindsight it is hard for us to realize the dramatic impact of this discovery You can see the similarity between Trist s insights and the ones Lewin and his successors were having as the T-group evolved. It was inevitable that cross-pollination would occur and it did as members of the . Rice Institute trained in Bion s Group Relations work connected with people trained in the emerging applied behavioral science work of Lewin and his successors Ken Benne Ron Lippitt Warren Bennis Jack Gibb Ed Schein and others. The Tavistock coal mine study had an impact on several European and Scandinavian companies that began to experiment with self-managed teams including Volvo of Sweden Shell Oil in Canada and Esso in Norway. A few . companies such as Scott Paper and Procter Gamble also applied Bion s approach to self-managed work teams with mixed results. Bion and The Tavistock Institute recognized in the late 1940s and early 1950s the relationship of the larger social network to the work structure and the technical system setting the stage for the naming and exploration of the systems thinking we know today. Their finding It was not enough to focus on individuals or groups internally you had to look at the structures and systems that surrounded them. Work redesign and job enrichment were also systems approaches to worker motivation with Frederick Herzberg 1959 being the foremost explorer of applying the insights from Bion to motivating employees. These approaches recognized that an employee s productivity and .
