Future of Work – From Organizational Development(OD) perspectives

By Gautam Mukhopadhyay, Director – Organizational Development at Elkem ASA, OD Expert, Business Coach, NLP Master Practitioner, Author, Speaker

The principle of cosmogenesis is that everything in the universe is constantly evolving into something more complex. If we interpret organisations as living systems, how does this principle of cosmogenesis inform OD practice in the domains of change management and organisation design?

Today’s realities are far off from such a clinical model. Change today is less planned, more disruptive, and happening largely outside the OD organisational lab and spans complex system dynamics arising in the socio-political, environmental, and economic domains. OD is interdisciplinary in nature and operates out of sociology, psychology, and theories of motivation, learning, and personality. Change inside organisations is related to change outside organisations. Successful Organizations today are adaptive, agile, and purpose-driven. The traditional ‘planned change’ approach of OD falls short of range to yield results in the era of Industry 4.0.

What can corporates learn from social movements about responding to disruptive change?

In joining mode, we approach others from the frame of reference of openness rather than caution and defensiveness. We begin with the assumption that we are going to connect, that each of us has something to offer the other, and that by partnering together we will develop better solutions and more creative ideas. The goal is not to evaluate, but to learn. In joining, we let go of the past, extend trust, give others the benefit of the doubt, and invest in the partnership for the long term.

Joining is a win-win model that focuses on creating a ‘WE’— creating a partnership.

Today, OD requires us to be humble in our recognition that we do not control the world or people in our organisations. We take seriously people’s agency for change- we recognise that behavioural science is not the sole domain of knowledge of human change- that, resistance to change might need to be worked with instead of managing out. OD is perhaps less about planned change interventions and more about facilitating spaces for consciousness-raising through respectful dialogue, meaningful diagnostics and equality in co-creation, radical experimentation, inclusive and collective action to a meaningful purpose and a shared vision for the organisation, its people, environment, and society.