Dialogic Organization Development
The concept
of an organization has evolved from thinking of organizations as organisms that
adapt to their environment, to organizations as conversations between
individuals and groups. As such, Dialogic Organization Development is the
progression of organizational change practice.
Organizational
actions result from self-organizing, socially constructed realities created and
sustained by the prevailing narratives, stories, and conversations through
which people make meaning about their experiences. Organizations are seen as
complex responsive processes where people's thoughts and actions are in a
continuous process of meaning-making and emergence. Change is not something
that happens between periods of stability.
Rather change is always happening at varying rates of speed.
Change in
beliefs and actions takes place by changing the conversations that shape everyday
thinking and behaviour. With change methods like Appreciative Inquiry, Open
Space, World Cafe, Solution Focused Dialogue and Organizational Learning
Conversations, Dialogic OD is not simply about creating good dialogues or
objective exchanges of information. Rather, transformational change depends on
the ability of these conversations to disrupt the current status quo, introduce
new, generative images that allow people to see old situations from new
perspectives, and change the core organizational narratives - the prevailing
beliefs, stories and images that shape how people in the organization make
meaning of any situation.
For
instance, leaders fail to notice the dropping level of engagement in their
workforce, until the annual Pulse survey opens their eyes with alarming data in
the form of hard numbers. And this is the stage which requires drastic
measures. However, if the leaders had focused on the conversations in the
organization, engaged himself in conversations with the employees, and made
sense of those conversations, he would have known the condition before it
turned grave. Thus, allowing taking small adaptive steps, and
not lead to a situation demanding drastic measures. One may look at this as,
daily efforts to keep your health in check as opposed to ignoring your health
for a long time only to later resort to surgical methods which are perilous.
The challenge in the acceptance of Dialogic OD as a practice lies in the fact that
it is still seen as a fuzzy concept as opposed to the straightforward practice
of Diagnostic OD which uses well-defined models to assess any situation in the
organization. It is important to understand that these two practices are not to be
seen as opposing but rather complementary processes, both aiding the
achievement of the same goal.
Food for
thought:
In a world that is constantly changing, having a fixed vision helps by giving a clear direction, or does it get in the way of adaptive changes that need to be
generated from the bottom up in the system.
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