Come Gather Round

I have let go of my Organization Development practice. I consulted to more than fifty organizations in a dozen countries, took a significant role in four turn-arounds or mergers with major corporations, and worked with some truly admirable and wonderful people. I am particularly proud of the fact that about eighty percent of my business was repeat business and almost all of it came to me unsolicited through recommendations from a current client to a client in need.

It was a great ride. Now it is time to move on to other things. I may still answer the OD call if it shows up and excites me with its potential, but I am no longer seeking it.

As I depart this particular roller-coaster, I have two confessions to make. First, I never, not even once, got up in the morning caring about my clients’ ROI, stock price, market share, profit margin, or any other of the measures that mattered to them. I never read the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, or Forbes. I saw that as their job. I cared only about helping them and the people around them become the kind of people who could achieve the lofty goals they set for themselves, and helping them enact first-rate and productive processes for change. That was my job.

Second, I held an agenda that was rarely made explicit. I worked from my own practice theory, a pair of assumptions that guided how I guided my clients. The first assumption is that an organization is healthy to the degree that there is synergy among its purpose, culture, and people. Those three elements must support one another, and I worked to make that happen.

The second assumption is that the ability of an organization to sustain itself and achieve its aims depends upon centering among the physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual energies in the workplace. Centering means bringing all of those four energies to whatever task is at hand. I attempted to describe how a centered organization would look in my book Artful Work:

1. All forms of human energy are welcomed
2. Joy is intrinsic to work processes
3. People are involved in work congruent with the requirements of their own spirits and souls
4. Commitment is the norm
5. People manage their own work processes and have the necessary resources to do so
6. Consistent and conscious use of the self pervades all work
7. Decisions are made as much on the basis of feeling, spirit, and soul as on intellect and logic
8. Technique is always in the service of commitment to purpose
9. Communication flows from self to self
10. People strive to be perceptive, receptive, and expressive
11. People are engaged with and committed to both the organization’s processes and its products
12. Connections are drawn between the mundane aspects of work and the world of meaning

My clients and I called our work together by names such as team building, large-scale change, coaching, training, culture change, and strategy implementation. Regardless of what we called it, and of whatever organizational goals we pursued together, my underlying aim was always to nudge my clients’ organization in the direction of centeredness. This often required that I help them shift their energy among the four forms.

Oops! I take it back. Re-reading this I realize that these aren’t confessions at all. A confession ought to be accompanied by remorse and by a plea for forgiveness. I have no remorse about my disinterest in the measures to which my clients attended, and none about my own unspoken agendas. And I want no forgiveness.

In fact, I’m rather pleased.