Reflections on Rocket Science
The Dynamic Dimensions of Organization Development Consulting Practices
“This isn’t rocket science.” The statement was made to me recently by a fellow organization development consultant. His metaphor has rather clear implications. The work we do is not complicated. It is not difficult to understand. It is not filled with complex formulas and interactions. It is merely a matter of using common sense to help people and the organizations in which they work improve their performance.
I shook my head politely, but internally I was, shall I say, significantly disturbed by what he said. His comment demeans the profession in general and, by association, me. I hope that we can pick up this conversation in the not-too-distant future so I can suggest to my colleague that his perspective is less than accurate, to put it nicely.
If he really believes that our work is “not rocket science,” how does he justify any kind of expenditure of time or money for an organization development process? He must not ask his clients to pay much attention to what he does or to how much they will spend on his services. His work is so easy, in fact, that they could probably do it themselves. That point of view represents our largest form of competition. Our clients decide they will do this “not rocket science” work themselves.
Perhaps I shouldn’t wake up my colleague who competes with me, but I beg to differ with his less than stellar opinion of the work we do. In fact, I would suggest that there is no activity more complex and dynamic than working with human beings in trying to help them improve the systems, strategies, structures, and skills that interact to form what we commonly term an organization. No, this isn’t rocket science. It is far more complicated than that!
I suspect my colleague’s point of view is fairly common both within our profession and outside of it. I don’t want to make our work more complicated than it has to be, but I believe we would be well served to take a bit of a deeper look at what is required of us in our day-to-day organization development, human resource development, or training and development consulting practices. I want to suggest that there are eight dimensions of consulting practice that are simultaneously at work as we interact with our clients. These eight dimensions are complex – there are many factors in each dimension – and dynamic – the myriad factors interact in constantly changing ways – so that we experience them, to quote Peter Vaill, as “perpetual white water” (Vaill, 1996).
Books have been and will yet be written on each of these dimensions, so nothing exhaustive is offered here. What I would like us to see is the broad view of the landscape of our work as consultants. There is certainly nothing sacred about the eight dimensions I offer below. One could certainly argue for seven or seventeen. They are the dimensions I have found useful in helping me understand the complexities and dynamics of the work I do from day-to-day. The eight dimensions of consulting include (1) context, (2) heart, (3) image, (4) awareness, (5) relationships, (6) resources, (7) service, and (8) measures. Any consultant is experiencing these dimensions in her practice on multiple levels (as an individual, within a team, department, division, or organization, between individuals, teams, departments, divisions, and organizations, and often between multiple teams, departments, divisions, and organizations).
Context
On any given day a consultant has to be somewhat aware of the corporate and social culture in which she works (Schein, 1992; Harrison & Huntington, 2000), the market conditions that affect that culture, the economic factors at work, the nuances of the industry in which an organization exists – distribution, manufacturing, retail, medical, legal, transportation, entertainment, finance, marketing, hospitality, education, religion, and government, to name a few with which I have worked in the past six years – and the legal regulations that affect those organizations. The strategies people adopt, their resistance or resilience toward change, the sense of urgency they have toward the need to develop, the value they place on a strategic initiative, innovation, or intervention, and more are integrally related to the context in which those people live. Then there is the matter of historical context (9/11 has affected us all) and the nuances involved in gender and ethnic positionality (Gilley, Dean, & Bierema, 2001). Consultants of any variety are required to be attuned to the dynamics of the context in which they work.
Heart
When we think of heart, we might immediately think of passion, courage, or commitment to a cause. Yet the courage that consultants have reflects the assumptions, beliefs, and values by which they are motivated to act in a given manner. Hearts are tested when differing beliefs collide. Consultants and their clients have a diversity of perspectives regarding what should be done and why, how a course of action should be justified, and the overall ethical purposes that individuals or organizations should pursue. They each espouse standards of excellence in practice, standards of quality in production, and standards of return on investment for profitability. Their espoused standards may or may not be congruent with their standards in use and there are different levels of continuity between the standards of the consultant and those of her clients, a continuity that must be evaluated and negotiated with each client in a continual manner (Argyris & Schön, 1996). Those standards change, sometimes within the course of completing a single contract. This diversity of beliefs associated with our perspectives, purposes, practices, products, and profits represents the heart of our consulting. These heartfelt beliefs form the character and persistence we reflect in our passion, courage, and commitment in working toward common goals. Those who overlook this dimension soon find themselves fighting battles with people in ways that are difficult to explain as if one were fighting with an unseen enemy.
What we offer as consultants is not always well received. We can easily be disheartened when we are not valued. Like anyone else, we have desires to be affiliated with a group of people. Yet often we are on the outside looking in. We want to be respected and appreciated for what we say and do. Yet we often bring bad news and people tend to shoot the messengers in response to the message. It is easy to say that we shouldn’t take this personally, but another matter altogether to avoid those conclusions. It is not an easy profession. Discouragement can and does rear its head quite often. We need the commitment and courage of a patient and persistent heart that comes from well established and securely held assumptions, beliefs, and values.
Image
The image that people within an organization have of their HR department tends to be one of a police force. The HR staff members are viewed as establishing policies and procedures (laws) and patrolling the organization to enforce the use of those laws. Yet Ulrich (1997), Gilley and Maycunich (1998), and others have demonstrated the need for HR professionals to become more strategic in their focus as business partners and change agents. Robinson and Robinson (1995) have noted the same need for training departments to move “beyond training”. They encourage those who have viewed themselves as trainers to develop new practices in order to become performance consultants. What is critical to note is that while HR and training professionals may view themselves in new light as strategic partners and training consultants, the men and women of the organization do not yet have that image of them. It is not enough to announce to people that the training department will now be the performance consulting group or that HR will now be serving as strategic partners in the organization. The image of the HR police force and the workshop facilitators is deeply embedded in the minds of men and women in the organization. If the image in their minds is going to change, it will be imperative for HR and training professionals to give thought to what they say and do that projects the old and new images.
Language needs to change. I have intentionally dropped the language of training from my vocabulary. It is not that I think training is bad. I simply want to convey a more strategic image. So I speak in terms of learning and performance. If I am to be strategic I will need to understand and speak the language of business – finance, operations, sales, marketing, distribution, manufacturing, and the like. And I will need to talk much less about workshops, policies, and compliance. We cannot assume that our clients, internal or external, hear words the same way we hear them as HR and training professionals. So it is very important for us to ask ourselves what kind of image we are projecting. Do we sound like the HR police force or workshop facilitators or strategic partners and performance developers? We should continually ask ourselves a basic question. How do people view who we are and what we do?
Awareness
If we want people to have a different image of us, we will need to make them aware of what work we do, how we do it, and what qualifies us to function as strategic partners and performance consultants. There has to be some level of awareness of credentials, experience, and expertise as well as a basic understanding of how one might be contacted and what kind of process is used to bring valued services to the client. Some kind of promotion has to be done, either through formal advertising, informal word-of-mouth, or intentional interaction. From an external perspective, I use what I call a PRINT model to raise awareness. I publish, research, interact (informal encounters), network (formal professional associations), and teach in order to raise the awareness people have of what I do. I have several clients who are seeking to change the internal perception of them as HR or training professionals. It has taken some time to convince them that the “build it and they will come” mentality does not work. A more proactive approach to building awareness of a new image, or an old one for that matter, is needed. Many people like my colleague above, view HR and training as common sense activities that anyone can do. After all, it isn’t rocket science. This is the basic street level perception of what we do. If the image is going to change, it will take a conscious and strategic effort to raise the awareness of people regarding the complexity, urgency, and value of what we do.
Building the awareness of HR and training professionals as strategic partners and change agents does not come quickly or easily. It is a long-term endeavor. I have been working with one client for the past five years in a constant effort to shift the internal image of their HR and training functions. We knew how we wanted to be viewed five years ago. We are still raising awareness. We have been able to celebrate many successes along the way, but there is still a way to go.
One example may help illustrate what I mean by image and awareness. Several years ago one of my clients acquired another company. HR was never consulted about the decision to acquire. They were informed after the fact. After all, the only work HR needed to do was arrange the compensation and benefits packages and provide an orientation to newly hired employees. Who had thought through the dynamics of wedding two cultures? The HR professionals had, but they were not consulted. Who had considered the issues of continuity in communication, responding to the fears of reorganization and lay-offs, and the group dynamics that would be involved? HR had, but was only able to work from a reactive perspective. They had very little time to plan and three weeks to implement! Who needs more than that, after all it’s not rocket science. All HR does is take care of compensation and benefits and enforce the policies that assure legal compliance and reduce the threat of litigation. Is this the image people have of us as HR professionals? Is this the image we want them to have? What will we do to make them aware of the complexity, urgency, and value of strategic HR and training?
Relationships
Relationships are central to consulting. The levels of trust and respect clients, colleagues, and co-workers have for one another will be highly correlated to the level of success one has in consulting endeavors. A person who is characterized by strained relationships will struggle to establish and maintain her work as a consultant. It comes as no surprise that women are talented consultants given that they are generally more oriented to maintaining relationships than men. Gender aside, consultants operate within the context of a complex political arena called an organization. The arena is filled with daily negotiations for power, prestige, and position. Skills in communication, collaboration, and leadership are at a premium for the successful practice of consulting. This is especially true when one is seeking to raise the awareness of a new image. The better a consultant understands the dynamics of verbal and non-verbal communication, group interactions, roles, responsibilities, and rewards, proximics, paralinguistics, motivation, congruence, espoused theory and theory-in-use, power games, impact, push and pull, psychosocial development, interpersonal needs for affiliation, achievement, and acknowledgement, and the norms of trust and respect in a given corporate culture, the more effective she will be as a consultant.
The bottom line of raising awareness to change an image is developing relationships with people. We need to have quite a few of what I call doorpost conversations with people in which we ask them about their professional and personal concerns. We need to leave in their minds the idea that if they are thinking of operational changes in which people will need to develop, they would benefit by calling us.
Resources
Image, awareness, and building relationships require the investment of two precious resources – time and money. Those resources must be managed wisely. One has to attend to matters of cash flow, profit and loss, balance sheets, performance productivity ratios, cost benefit analysis, return on investment, return on equity, cost value ratios, and a host of other financial measures (most especially those used by clients). This is one of a variety of places in which one must memorize three letter acronyms – ROI, ROE, PPR, CBA, EPS, SG&A – and catch phrases like “two percent net after” and “capitalized expenses” (it is significant for a consultant if his expense can be capitalized). Then there is the allocation of time to consider. It is not unusual to be working on four or five projects simultaneously, all with deadlines and deliverables. There are interviews to schedule, reports to write, presentations to make, workshops to teach, and conflicts to negotiate. Time management is not a luxury.
When HR and training departments are making shifts to more strategic roles, it is critical to evaluate the resources in the department. The skill sets required for strategic activities are quite different from those of administrative work. Generally, the organization requires a department to maintain current administrative services even while trying to ramp up on more strategic ones. This creates a significant demand on capital and human resources. It is no easy task to develop new roles, maintain efficiencies, and learn new skills simultaneously. The demands can be overwhelming. Substantial changes are not made overnight. Along the way, constant, steady attention needs to be given to enhancing the level of capital and human resources available to be successful.
Service
How well are day-to-day tasks performed? What expectations for service do clients have? What kind of efficiency and effectiveness are required? The way in which we deliver our consulting work is the difference between one small contract and recurring and expanding responsibilities. The reward for good service is another opportunity to serve. The opposite is also true, however. The result of poor service is no further opportunities to serve. Market penetration depends on high levels of service. When all is said and done, services reflect the cumulative effect of how well one understands context, demonstrates heart, projects image, builds awareness, maintains relationships, and uses resources. If clients are not satisfied with service, the problem more often than not lies at the root level of context, heart, image, awareness, relationships, and resources. Deadlines are missed because resources are not managed well. Deliverables are not satisfactory because various cultural and relational factors were not taken into account.
Much more could be said at this point regarding the practice of good consulting. Analysis of standards of excellence, assessment of status of performance, design of systemic, strategic, and structural change initiatives, implementation of the change process, assimilation and acculturation of changes into organizational routines, measurement of progress and success, and communication and celebration of results are all essential aspects of consulting service. Volumes have been written to articulate the complex and dynamic nuances of these activities. The bottom line of service is the use of excellent practices, the achievement of desired and beneficial outcomes, and the ability to discover and resolve mismatches between practices and outcomes.
Measures
The values and outcomes of consulting are evaluated through measures. People look for results, plain and simple. A great deal of valuable material has been written over the years regarding the levels of evaluation for training and human resource development initiatives (Kirkpatrick, 1998; Phillips, 1997; Preskill & Torres, 1999). Initial satisfaction, learning, behavioral changes, business outcomes, and return on investment have been and will continue to be important standards for the measurement of consulting results. I would offer one additional suggestion in order to expand the depth of evaluation at every level. Similar to a balanced scorecard approach (Kaplan & Norton, 1996; Becker, Huselid, & Ulrich, 2001) in which strategies are evaluated on the basis of benefits provided to customers, shareholders, employees, and the operations of an organization, I suggest a consideration of six types of outcomes that I call EFORCE analysis. Measures of ethical, financial, operational, relational, cultural, and educational results expand the ways in which we view the success of a consulting initiative. Financial, operational, and educational measures are well documented in much of the literature. What I would suggest further is that we expand the breadth of measures by giving more thought to ethical, relational, and cultural measures.
The two primary measures of business results – financial and operational efficiency – do not adequately measure the depth of developmental benefits received through the investment of human and capital resources. While financial and operational measures are imperative, more thought needs to be given to ethical, relational, and cultural gauges. These are the heart and soul of many of the results we seek. The conversation around these dimensions invariably revolves around the fact that they are “intangible” and, therefore, difficult to measure. That point is now a redundant given. The conversations then tend to lead to the conclusion that since these are intangible factors, we cannot measure them. That is an understandable inference, but not a necessary one. Ethical, relational, and cultural goods are so critical to what we do in development that it is imperative for us to continue the dialogue regarding ways in which we might measure the gains achieved.
If we are to measure such factors, we will first need to discuss the standards of each. What do we mean when we speak of ethical character or conduct? How do we define excellence in relational terms? What kind of cultural norms do we believe to be appropriate? What are the links between ethical, relational, and cultural advances and operational and financial efficiencies? These are not easy questions to answer. We do not have common definitions either within the field of HR or in the culture at large (MacIntyre, 1988). Yet they are critical to the overall success of organizations. As a result, they are critical conversations to have when considering ways in which we measure the successful ventures of human resource development and training.
Conclusions
These eight dimensions of context, heart, image, awareness, relationships, resources, service, and measures provide a framework (not the framework) for evaluating internal or external consulting practices. The dimensions are complex (there are many factors), dynamic (the factors interact in constantly changing fashion), and, quite often, mysterious (unpredictable and beyond our immediate control). Organization and human resource development consulting practices are indeed not rocket science. They are far more complex than that. People, unlike the nuts and bolts of rockets, object to changes, grow fearful when aspects of restructuring are considered, and become perplexed by modified operational strategies. Their improved functioning is not easily achieved or measured.
Such a state of affairs calls us as human resource, organization development, and training professionals to become ever more diligent in our pursuit of studying, researching, and understanding the philosophical, psychological, sociological, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of life as they impact our consulting practices and the people with whom we interact. It will be essential for us to be oriented toward lifelong learning because it will take us at least one lifetime to adequately understand many of the complexities and dynamics of consulting. Whatever we do, let us not be deceived into thinking that our work is simple or easy. If we believe that, we may take our research, study, and consulting far too lightly. Perhaps we would do well to remember that the explosion and destruction of the rocket ship we know as the Challenger Shuttle was far more the result of faulty human dynamics than “rocket science.”
Dr. Philip Graham is the President of Perspectives, Inc., an organization development consulting firm based in Richmond, Virginia dedicated to discovering and understanding ways to succeed as professionals and organizations. Dr. Graham also serves as an adjunct faculty member in the School of Education at Virginia Commonwealth University. He can be reached at phil@consult-perspectives.com
References
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