26 Feb 2020

Building a career within

organisation development
Paul Taylor-Pitt and Karen Dumain share the steps the NHS community is taking to shape
a career path for OD that is fit for the future

Paul Taylor-Pitt, Assistant Director, Organisational Development, NHS Employers,

and

Karen Dumain, National OD Lead, NHS Leadership Academy

_____

Organisation development (OD) has been around for seven decades and counting, but
can still be shrouded in mystery. The long-standing question exists: is OD a profession or
a practice? There are accepted definitions of what it means to be a profession, including
specific training or qualifications, specialist knowledge, ethical standards and often
registration or regulation. Using those criteria, OD is not a profession in the traditional
sense and, as a result, orienting ourselves in an OD career can be bewildering.

We are working with the NHS OD community to shape an OD career pathway that is fit for
the future. We have pursued the answers to key questions and explored ideas of
professional development, but we have also maintained a space of curiosity around
issues that need further exploration. This process – asking questions, generating ideas
and working with curiosity – underpins OD work.

The open boundaries to OD

OD is a broad and varied field of practice. We pride ourselves on the inclusive and
participative values that underpin our work. The relatively open boundary to entry for
prospective OD practitioners reflects these values. This can have benefits and
drawbacks.

The field of OD is often a mid-career discovery made by people who have a natural

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curiosity about how things work and an ability to work well with people. The openness of
the boundary is seen as a strength when it encourages people from diverse backgrounds
to join and contribute to the practice of OD.

Our work within the NHS OD community has revealed excellent OD practice that is a
testament to this inclusivity and breadth of practice. OD practitioners make a real
difference to the lives of staff and patients using the service. They lead and contribute to
work that improves patient safety, reduces waiting times, improves the experiences of
staff and creates conditions for transformation.

Contrary to some beliefs, it is possible to act professionally, credibly and with fluid
boundaries in a way that other professional groups may not when they are regulated and
adhere to strict professional protocols and competencies.

However, there are areas where the OD community could make our work more
transparent for clients while simultaneously raising our ambition and deepening our
practice. It can often feel confusing to describe, define and demonstrate the power of OD
when there are so many views on what it is and what makes it effective (or not).

Challenges for OD career development

In the absence of formal systems or structures of regulation, it can be tricky for OD

practitioners to find and access a clear route to career development. Few fields have such
an open-ended journey, and so it’s left to us to find our path and navigate the space. OD
practitioners are expected to self-regulate and demonstrate a commitment to our
development and ethical practice. Professional identity is a critical concept that we are
exploring with our NHS OD practitioners, evaluating both the benefits and drawbacks of
the space we currently occupy.

We are consistently asked three questions: What is the path into a career in OD? How do
we find it? Is it easy to navigate?

How do I move into a job in OD? This can relate to those entering the field for the
first time – the OD curious – or people in associated professional groups like HR or
L&D who wish to cross into OD.

What do I need to know? OD practitioners lack agreed competencies or standards to

work towards. It is hard to know what we should know. Sometimes we can suffer
from imposter syndrome, a nagging sense of doubt as to whether we are ‘doing’ OD.

Where can I go to develop my skills? With such a range of options available, from
short courses and masterclasses through to master’s degrees and doctorates, it can
often be confusing to know where and how to start a development journey.

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CEO conversations

In considering our development, it’s vital to remain closely connected to the needs of our
clients and think about how best we can serve their needs. Conversations with NHS chief
executives have highlighted several key points for us to consider and translate into action.
CEOs want OD practitioners to co-create the processes for exploration of deep-rooted
problems, correlating theory and practice as well as holding up a mirror to the
organisation. There are hopes for OD practitioners to help create permissive cultures
based on trust, teamwork and collaboration.

CEOs recognise that stepping into these spaces may not be the natural domain of OD.
Organisations can have preconceived ideas that OD is just HR with bells on, or that we
merely carry out the ‘soft and fluffy stuff’. OD practitioners need to develop closer links to
their senior teams, acting as both trusted advisers and critical friends. We must speak the
language of the executive team and understand what keeps them awake. While our role
may not be to provide and implement solutions to issues, we can create the conditions
and the processes to come to the answers.

Shaping the future of OD

We have done significant work with the NHS OD community to shape our future. We held
a series of conversations via an inquiry into the role of OD in the NHS. The inquiry
revealed five major aspirations for our practice: to be more strategic, agile, impactful,
credible and inclusive. NHS OD practitioners also strive to make a positive change that all
members of the organisation can engage with to make services better for patients.

Working across whole systems in innovative and proactive ways will help us to be the
catalysts for change that supports transformation. We must step beyond our
organisational boundaries, going into spaces we may not naturally occupy and challenge
our thinking by asking questions of ourselves as well as our clients. Our tried and tested
methods may not work in new and more complex situations, which will require us to be
more improvisational and to take the counter-intuitive approach of slowing down as
things around us speed up. We recognise a need to be more evidence-based in our
practice and more closely aligned to business objectives.

The feedback from our inquiry stopped short of using the word ‘profession’. Perhaps this
comes with the associated fears of being harnessed or constrained. It may also reveal a
nervousness around accountability or expectations. Professionalising our practice could
help increase our visibility and profile in organisations. It may reinforce our legitimacy to
act and demonstrate our practice rigour. In the absence of a professional body or set of
standards, it is up to us to hold ourselves and each other to account and ensure that we

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both ask for help and offer it to others. Our NHS OD community has gone some way to
making the path more transparent and straightforward, but we have more work to do.

Tools for change

To support the shift that our NHS OD community wants to make, we have taken steps
towards creating and shaping a more visible and viable professional development
pathway. While the content of these offerings is important, we have paid equal attention
to how we are creating a professional pathway; working collaboratively with our NHS OD
community and calling on global OD expertise. All our conversations are with, by and for
the OD community. This dialogue leads to better engagement, deeper ownership and a
strong link to operational need.

We have designed a suite of tools to support career development:

In response to questions about learning the basics of OD, we created an online

course for NHS staff new to the field called ‘OD Essentials’.

Emerging and developing practitioners have access to a pool of OD Virtual Mentors

who help them with current and future practice issues.

Our community created a tool to help with continuing professional development

which we translated into a digital resource in our free ‘Do OD’ smartphone app.

An inquiry into the confidence, capacity and ability of our OD practitioners led to the
creation of our Do OD capability model, a tool for reflection and planning.

We are also exploring further spaces, including OD apprenticeships and OD supervision,

attempting to piece together the various bricks into a coherent pathway. The updated
CIPD Profession Map, the ODN Global Practice Framework and emerging work from a
cross-sector group looking at OD standards are helping us to signpost the development
journey more clearly.

Building a future-fit OD career path

We’re very proud of the work that we have done, but there is an ever-increasing demand
to expand knowledge of OD, and to understand the skills and mindsets needed. The time
is right to think about how OD practitioners build a credible development and career path
that is fit for the future. One of the challenges to innovation is the traditional model of a
career ladder. For some, it offers a framework for development and promotion, but for
others, it can constrain and exclude.

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Perhaps by re-framing the notion of a career ladder for OD practitioners, we can
encourage more creative thinking about how we develop ourselves and shape our
futures. Instead of a career ladder, let’s create a different OD career model. What about a
career playground? Could a new model help us to see our development as both
horizontal and vertical, giving equal weight to deepening our practice as well as
professional advancement? This involves a different narrative to the traditional horizontal
career ladder, which requires us to keep climbing up the hierarchy.

To be effective, we need to undertake some self-analysis and exploration. We must ask:

who have I been, who am I now and who do I want to be? Identifying our ambitions can
help us to take those next steps on the development path. For example, we may choose
to take on a new role in a new organisation, using similar skills and practice. Or we could
stay in our current position and narrow the focus of our work, going deeper into issues
than before. Alternatively, we may take on a more significant role, with greater
responsibility or a more diverse portfolio. We may choose a blend of different roles,
weaving them into the changing fabric of our lives to suit our energy, ambitions and skills.

No time to lose

Shaping an OD career path that is future-proof will not be easy, but we believe that the
time is now for OD colleagues in the NHS and beyond. If we wait for someone else to do
this for us, we will be waiting for a long time. To create new paths to our development and
strengthen our practice we must:

professionalise our mindsets

take responsibility for our career playground
confront the feelings that hold us back
make connections and increase our networks across OD and related professions.

We have a mantra about OD in the NHS – to raise our ambition and deepen our practice.
It takes courage, curiosity and creativity to do so, but there are many of us taking these
steps together.

@NHSE_DoOD

The CIPD’s series on the state of play in organisation development can be found here.

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