Central Luzon State University

Science City of Muñoz 3120

Nueva Ecija, Philippines

Instructional Module for the Course

MNGT 3120: Organizational Development

Module 3

THE OD CYCLE, THE ENTRY AND

CONTACTING PHASE

In this module, we will outline how the OD consultancy cycle is one of

five key building blocks in our practice. This will also guide ODPs through how you
should manage the helping processes – from the moment you are called in to help to
establish the issues, through to intervention, evaluation and exit.

Objectives:
1. Understand the cycle of Organizational Development;
2. Apply Phase one and two

The OD cycle reminds you of the key actions you need to undertake in order to
keep the process as intact as possible. Based on Action Research theory, the OD cycle
is an iterative process in which the cyclical nature of it will mean you revisit the same
phase at various times. In a field where it is not our content expertise but rather the
practice and process of OD that makes a unique contribution to an organization, the
process protocol is an important navigational tool or map. Burke, French and Bell, and
others have written brilliant chapters about the OD cycle. This chapter will, in a simpler
way, point you to the core practice and processes of OD and to give practical tips on
how to implement them in organizations.

A. Overview of the OD consultancy cycle – six key components

The trainers worked overnight to produce the first version of a map of OD

– what to know and what to do (see Figure 3.1). Since then, this map has been
revised many times and the version given here is from Tschudy (2006). The map
is critical to understanding what OD practitioners actually do, so I will go through
each of the six components before discussing the OD cycle in an integrated way.

1. Core theories
 OD practices are heavily sourced from different theories (see Chapter 2) as
well as different disciplines in behavioral science. They all offer ODPs diverse and
rich perspectives on what to look for during the diagnostic phase as well as what
types of interventions you can put together to move the human system towards
the desired change goal.

2. Values and ethics

OD practices are guided by the practitioner’s values. The range of OD’s
values and ethics arose out of a number of powerful movements in the 1940s
and 1950s including human relations, human potential, equality and diversity,
and social participation (clients’ rights, citizens’ rights). These values anchor our
practice, particularly those values that guide our design work as well as the
choice of what approaches we should use to support change. OD values are an
indispensable container to a range of practices (see Chapter 1).

3. The ‘big I’ intervention

This is a central plank of Organization Development. OD practitioners focus
heavily on building relationships of trust, authenticity, transparency and
mutuality with their clients. It is this use of self, from the moment we meet with
the client to the closing of our relationship that holds the consultancy process
together. This requires OD practitioners to look inside themselves and examine
what they bring to the helping relationship: to identify what will enhance the
relationship and what might derail it. The focus on building the relationship is to
‘earn our right to help’ – so that we can be trusted enough not only to be able to
be facilitative, but also evocative, or provocative to the clients when the situation
requires us to be.

4. OD phases
The OD consultancy cycle contains eight phases, which the Gestalt
colleagues called ‘units of work’. They are based on the cornerstone of Action
Research: applying rigorous scientific methods of fact-finding and
experimentation to practical problems and issues within organizations:
 entry/initial contact; contracting;
 data collection;
 data analysis;
 data feedback;
 action planning;
 action taking;
 evaluation;
 termination.

5. Competencies
In order to carry out the different OD phases and sub-tasks, OD practitioners
need to demonstrate a core set of competencies at a high level. They need to
 take OD education and development seriously and the field needs to enforce
more rigorous standards in the training of OD practitioners. You will notice the
list of competencies in Figure 3.1 is a mix of technical and process, hard and soft
skills.

6. The use of self

This is the basis of the ‘big I’ intervention – the use of the OD practitioner’s
key instrument, yourself. During each phase you use your awareness, your
rational, intuitive self, your empathic/evocative/provocative self to help the client
to shift. You will cultivate your non-reactive presence and commitment to the
client in order to create a safe environment that will support the client in
examining his/her situation from different angles and through different lenses. It
is your ability to take risks in intervening and your skill in straight-talking based
on your own values and ethics that will enable you to do the ‘big I’ intervention.
It is the self that provides the reliable engine to drive the OD process.

B. PHASE ONE: ENTRY – INITIAL CONTACT

This is an important phase of our work. Put simply, without contact there
will not be entry, without entry there will not be a commission, without a
commission, there will not be any contract of work. Also, how we manage this
phase will set the tone of the relationship you aim to build with your client and
create a platform for your diagnostic and intervention work.

So how do you go about making first contact? Whether you are internal or
external, most probably you would like your clients to come to you directly and
ask for your help because they have heard how good you are. Like any normal
human being, you want to be wanted, but reality is not like this. Mainly because
often those who you are supposed to serve:
 are so busy and occupied that you are not even on their radar screen;
 do not know enough about OD that they would come to seek your help;
 have assumptions of what HR as a function can do or can’t do, and if OD
sits under HR, that assumption will be automatically transferred to you.

It is important that if you fail to achieve ‘entry’ to your organization, you

do not turn around and blame the organization for not finding you a sponsor.
What you need to do instead is to figure out what the organization needs and
how you can demonstrate the value you can add. It is important for you to
remember that making contact, gaining entry and a contract is your job. The
following five steps may help you to get going, especially if you are a new entry
to the organization.

First, work out the critical stakeholders surrounding the OD function, and
their view of OD. Some people will fall into two or more of these categories:
 the people who hired you;
 the people to whom you are supposed to provide a service and to support –
generally the senior line leaders who are leading change;
 potential sponsors – those who will speak on behalf of the OD agenda at
board level;
 the people who have the financial resources to fund the OD programme;
 the people who you report to;
 important colleagues and strategic alliances on the same level as you,
especially those who already have direct access to decision makers, eg
strategists, senior HR partners in core functions, etc.

Second, find someone within the organization to mentor you and to take
you through the complex political terrain in which these various stakeholders sit,
what challenges your stakeholders face at work, and the expectations they may
have of you and of OD. This will help you to align your service to their needs.

Third, make half-hour appointments to visit all these key political players.
Why half an hour? Because offering a short appointment increases the likelihood
of them agreeing to meet you. You need to plan each meeting carefully using
the knowledge you have gleaned about the person – their role, work priorities
and working style.

Gather as much data as possible about the division they lead prior to the
meeting, eg the staff survey data, the customers’ satisfaction index, their ranking
in the corporate performance index, whether they have had critical incidents that
impacted on their performance, etc. During this appointment, plan to cover the
following things (not necessarily in this order):
a. Introduce yourself. Plan how you will introduce yourself based on what you
know about the person you will be meeting up with.
b. Find out about their work agenda and priorities as well as the crucial issues
in their part of the organization.
c. Find out about them.
d. Explore how you can add value to their agenda.
e. Inform them briefly about OD and its value to business..

Fourth, write to each person after your visit. Type up the key points from
your conversation and give specific proposals as to how you could support them
in their journey. Consider offering them a ‘taster’ so that they can assess the
type of support you offer. But it is important to stay specific about what you are
proposing. This can open the door for them to call on you later, preferably for a
larger job.

Fifth, once you have visited all the stakeholders, spend a good chunk of
time mapping out all the needs you have gathered from your visits. Using the
 information you have gathered from your pre-visit research and the information
you have gathered during the meeting about the organization (its strategic
priorities, crucial information you have gathered from external regulators,
competitors, etc) you are now ready to formulate your first draft OD plan.

C. PHASE TWO: CONTRACTING

OD practitioners need to have answers to three questions in order to
construct a good contract:
 Who is my client?
 What is this job about? What are the tasks, the deliverables, the scope, the
methods and the metrics that will indicate success (task contract)?
 What type of relationship contract do I want and need to have with my key
client(s) to ensure the success of the project (relationship contract)?

1. Who is my client?
This is a complex question and often there are no obvious answers in the
beginning. Do you have one client, or a constellation of clients? If the latter, how
do you draw up the contract? Practitioners often regard the person who invited
them in as the chief client to whom they are accountable. The reality is who you
are accountable to is often much more complicated than that.

To begin with, there are at least four types of clients with whom you may
need to engage and whom you need to consider when creating a contract:
a. Principal client – the person with whom you have the primary contact and
who explicitly tells you that you are accountable to (vs liaising with)
him/her.
b. Contact and liaison client – this person is there to support the external
consultant by providing various services, eg setting up meetings,
arranging events, getting logistical and technical aspects of the work
done. This does not need to be an administrative person; this can be your
middle or senior client whose administrative team are asked to support
you.
c. Shadow clients – all those people who surround the principal client (either
colleagues of your principal client or senior leaders above your client), to
whom s/he must defer for critical decisions, and who also affect the
principal client’s ‘psychological field’. Shadow clients often have more
influence on the consultation than the principal client.
d. Peripheral clients – any individual or group or sub-group that has an
impact on the project and with whom you need to have contact, or in
certain circumstances need to be invited to get involved.
e. Stakeholder constellations – including people who may be impacted by the
project and who may therefore choose to intervene.
 To create the right contract, it is essential at the very beginning to find
out how the principal client perceives the situation, what problems s/he thinks
need to be sorted out, his/her personal vision of the project, and who s/he thinks
can help the change and the organization. Helping the principal client to
understand the complex client constellation is the first piece of system theory
input that you may need to do. In doing so, hopefully you will also be able to
help the principal client to get in touch with his/her own internal feelings about
the client constellation – eg their sense of psychological safety, their special
personal connection with a specific person or group, the needs s/he has in
getting recognition, etc.

2. What are the practical ways to create a contract in a complex client system?
First, work with the principal client on the issues that s/he is charged with
sorting out – eg outcome, targeted group, type of methodology s/he is
considering, evaluation metrics – and the political terrain in which the different
stakeholders sit. Then ask the client how the other stakeholders would see what
you and they have discussed. At that point the principal client often becomes
aware that s/he alone does not have sufficient data to draw up a substantive
contract and hopefully will suggest that circling back to other stakeholders will be
necessary in order to check out the content of the contract.

Second, if time is an issue, I would handle this situation by ‘chunking’ the

contract, contracting one step at a time with the full intention of bringing in the
client constellation for the second stage of contracting, eg undertaking diagnosis.
It is important not to make the principal client feel that you are devaluing their
perception, but to help him/her understand that your role is to expand their
perception about who needs to get involved in order for them not only to be able
to obtain a wider perspective before agreeing on the final aims of the project,
but also to ensure they would not be accused later on of forgetting some key
individuals/groups’ perspective.

If the above is not doable because of timescale and access to those

individuals, then it may be better for your initial contract to cover only the first
phase of diagnostic work with a clear specification that a review of the contract
will take place once you have analysed the diagnostic data together. This
ensures that you enter into the main contract with a surer footing. Some of you
may feel this is a risk as you have not signed the full contract. But the risk of
entering into a full contract without the full picture will also be high. There is not
a right or wrong way of handling this. It just requires a degree of discernment
when you do the contracting stage of the work.

3. What is a task-based contract?

 This is the formal agreement between client and practitioner that outlines
what the job is about: the core tasks, deliverables, scope, methods, timelines
and the metrics that will demonstrate that the project has been carried out
successfully.

The task-based contract can have two sections: the first is a commercial
document outlining all the legal, regulatory and liability issues, and including the
total cost of the OD project and the payment schedule; the second is a working
document that the procurement department will see as supplementary but that
will in fact be the main document to which you will refer throughout the life of
the project.
The working document is likely to contain the following elements:
a. the nature of the consultancy task;
b. the deliverables and the desired outcomes;
c. the options for methods you will use to collect data (the diagnostic
process);
d. the options for methods you will use to help to achieve the desired
outcomes;
e. the resources the organization is committed to putting into the project;
f. your role, the role of the internal change team, etc, and how each party
will contribute towards getting the work done;
g. how evaluation and monitoring work will be done; specifically how
evaluation will be conducted, by whom, when and based on what metrics;
h. the cost of the contract and the invoice/payment schedule.

4. What is a relationship contract?

A relationship contract is about how you will manage your relationship with
your client system while doing the work. In OD it is just as important to be
absolutely clear about the relationship aspects of the work as it is on how the
tasks are to be done. The relationship contract covers the collaborative aspects
of the work: how you and the client will work together to discover, learn and act
to bring about the desired changes, and when ‘trouble’ emerges, what needs to
happen in order for you and the clients to do joined-up troubleshooting. Finally,
how you will handle the feedback system to ensure valid data will get fed back to
the right parties. Weisbord (1973: 108) summarizes the importance of having
two types of contracts – the ‘task-based’ contract and the ‘relationship’ contract
– to ensure a successful project.

What do I mean by contract? I mean an explicit exchange of expectations,

part dialogue, part written document, which clarifies for consultant and client
three critical areas:
a. what each expects to get from the relationship;
b. how much time each will invest, when, and at what cost;
c. the ground rules under which the parties will operate.
 One approach is to use ground rules that spell out the relationship you expect
and the important aspects to which both parties need to pay attention to make
the relationship work effectively. Examples of what each party expects of the
other may include:
 how to keep each other informed of what goes on during the journey;
 how to give feedback to each other;
 how to evaluate interventions;
 what you will do if you get conflicting instructions from shadow clients;
 how to work together with the change team – to ensure there are clear
boundaries between different governing parties;
 how much time each party expects to put into the project in what roles;
 how frequently you should meet or talk on the phone to ensure that you
jointly
 give the project enough support;
 what type of coaching and capability upskilling the client would
appreciate from you during the change project;
 in a high-risk project, what conditions would lead either side to end the
contract.