What is Organisational Development?
Organisational Development is an approach to shifting/transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations from a current state to a desired future state. It is an organizational process aimed at helping change stakeholders to accept and embrace changes in their business environment. In some project management contexts, change management refers to a project management process wherein changes to a project are formally introduced and approved.
One of the key writers in this field, John Kotter, defines change management as the utilization of basic structures and tools to control any organizational change effort.
Change management’s goal is to minimize the change impacts on workers and avoid distractions.
Examples of organizational development
The following are examples of the ways in which organisations can change.
- Mission changes,
- Strategic changes,
- Operational changes (including Structural changes),
- Technological changes,
- Changing the attitudes and behaviors of personnel
Kotter’s eight step change model can be summarised as:
- Increase urgency – inspire people to move, make objectives real and relevant.
- Build the guiding team – get the right people in place with the right emotional commitment, and the right mix of skills and levels.
- Get the vision right – get the team to establish a simple vision and strategy, focus on emotional and creative aspects necessary to drive service and efficiency.
- Communicate for buy-in – Involve as many people as possible, communicate the essentials, simply, and to appeal and respond to people’s needs. De-clutter communications – make technology work for you rather than against.
- Empower action – Remove obstacles, enable constructive feedback and lots of support from leaders – reward and recognise progress and achievements.
- Create short-term wins – Set aims that are easy to achieve – in bite-size chunks. Manageable numbers of initiatives. Finish current stages before starting new ones.
- Don’t let up – Foster and encourage determination and persistence – ongoing change – encourage ongoing progress reporting – highlight achieved and future milestones.
- Make change stick – Reinforce the value of successful change via recruitment, promotion, new change leaders. Weave change into culture.
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