Building the OD professional of the future

In the first cycles of our Action Research, we developed a Blueprint for OD Practice and considered the positive core of OD. This led us to think about what the future might hold for OD practitioners, and how we could ‘build ourselves’ into the professionals that we want to be in support of the NHS of the future.

We took the question quite literally, and used a technique based on the LEGO Serious Play (LSP) Methodology ™ as our tool. We built a model of the OD practitioner of the future. LSP uses narrative storytelling through the medium of LEGO pieces with which to assemble metaphorical representations as answers to questions. LSP is a facilitated process where LEGO is used to build meaning through creative thinking (Hayes, 2016). The LSP method is seen to be an effective way to facilitate knowledge and generation of ideas (Hadida, 2013) particularly through the purposeful co-creation central to the method (Dann, 2018).  LSP helps participants to explore their socially constructed realities and relationships (Wengel, McIntosh & Cockburn-Wootten, 2016).

We used the method to answer the question “How do we build the OD professional of the future”.

The LEGO Serious Play Method

LEGO Serious Play etiquette states:

• The LEGO Model is the answer to your building challenge.
• There are no wrong answers.
• There is no one right answer. Everyone has different views.
• What the model looks like is not the most important thing
• The meaning attached to each model is what makes it valuable
• The LEGO models are tools and means to an end.

(LSP, 2010)

“I was surprised at how much creativity the Lego enabled us to have and how it supported us in articulating our thoughts”– Hayley C

We ran the exercise several times, each time following a four-step process:

• Develop a question
• Build your answer to the question
• Share it
• Capture it

Building the OD professional of the future

To build the OD professional of the future, each of us took one piece of LEGO from one of our individual models and added it to a large blank LEGO base. Each person described why they were adding it to the group build. Group members were able to ask questions, make suggestions and speak to how each piece made them react. For example, Sandi’s contribution of a solid bridge sparked a reaction in Caroline who wanted to see more flexibility, and in turn added pieces that represented movement and motion. This collaborative building process deepened our understanding of the elements that made up our final model.

“I was amazed at the results the LEGO play gave us. For me, building the first model, I just grabbed the bits of LEGO from the pile that felt appealing: some flexible tubes, a couple of ‘eyes’. The tower was asked if it felt comfortable having a blind spot, and whether it was important to move around. Having to answer those questions enabled a deep reflection on the things that are important to me, namely the ability to see across the system and take in the big picture, and being flexible enough to go with the flow as environments and politics change” – Lisa S.

Our model for building the OD professionals of the future is shown below. It consists of 29 individual elements that came together to form a whole.

Figure 1: Building the OD professionals of the future through LEGO Serious Play 

We have since reflected on the model and grouped the elements into themes that describe our model for building the OD professionals of the future; what they are; know; can do; have; and give.

The Bootstrappers guide to being an OD professional of the future

1. OD Professionals of the future are mobile and agile. We respond to and seek out opportunities to develop the system. We are connected to an increasingly diverse community and are visible from a distance. We live with messiness around us, recognising that staying curious and appreciative helps us to navigate through the complexity of our work.
2. OD professionals of the future know the roots and history of OD. We are familiar with classic and contemporary OD theory and understand that there are standards of practice to aspire to. We know which tools to use when, and when to leave the tools behind. We know our value and the value we add. We are future focused and embrace technologies that we know will enable new connections to be made.
3. OD professionals of the future can draw others into OD practice while recognising and maintaining the boundaries that differentiate more experienced practitioners from those outside the field. We can frame and re-frame our clients’ issues by acting as bridges, antennae and mirrors. We step in and out of shadow when we need to. We are able to do endings as well as we do beginnings.
4. OD professionals of the future have a balance of confidence and humility. We know when we need to pull on a sturdy pair of pants when things get tough. We make and grow connections to each other and the wider system. We create spaces of sanctuary with our peers where we can celebrate our work and learn from each other’s different perspectives.
5. OD professionals of the future give their authentic selves. We recognise that our work can have a personal cost, and so we actively look after ourselves and each other. We look for opportunities to explore our vulnerabilities more deeply, recognising it as a strength that helps us and others to grow. We give our clients space to slow down, talk, think and develop which adds capacity into the system.

Our model is both subjective and collective, but we do not yet know how much of it is universal. Some of it may be useful to other OD practitioners but as context is so critical, we acknowledge that one size does not and shouldn’t fit all. In the spirit of curiosity, we offer our model to you as a prompt to think about what it means to you. What is your own story? How can you use your experience to build the OD professional of the future? How will you go about strengthening connections to the wider OD community? Where are your spaces of sanctuary?

The OD professional of the future may look similar to the OD professional of today, or you might think it’s quite a stretch to get there. Through our research we have recognised that we are all at different points of our individual journeys, and that having a goal in mind is useful as an opportunity to stretch and grow.

“I once described learning about OD like going to Disneyland and finding all your favourite rides and characters there. Some of the rides are fast or scary or both and take your breath away. Some are slower and give you time to look at everything in more detail, and in between are some quiet spaces where you can take time to reflect. Most of all it should be fun and enjoyable. I’d like to think we are creating an OD Theme Park for the future with all the elements there we need to practice OD – however scary it might get!”– Tracy G

Questions to consider:

1. How would you describe the future in which you will be practising OD?
2. If you were to build the OD professional of the future, which elements would be similar to our model? What would you change? Add? Take away?
3. Does our guide to being an OD practitioner of the future resonate? How near to or far from it are you now?

Consider these questions for yourself, and leave us your thoughts in the comments sections below. We want to expand the conversation on the positive core of OD and our idea of group as instrument of change. Please do share your ideas.

OD Bootstrappers

September 2018

You can download a PDF of this article here.

Appendix: Elements of our LEGO model

Building the OD professionals of the future

1. Community, diversity
2. All seeing eyes, perspective, curiosity. Being present. Actively looking.
3. Generating energy and power. Sustainability. Building capacity.
4. Networking, connections. Going out on a limb.
5. Being visible from a distance
6. Standards. Togetherness. Celebrating different histories and routes into OD. Moving in different directions. Space to grow.
7. Understanding our value and adding value. Talking about our value with confidence
8. Something alien.
9. Building bridges. Enabling. Scaling the divide
10. Knowing what we know. A sturdy pair of pants when things get tough.
11. Futuristic. Technology. Connecting virtually
12. Routes into OD. Pushing boundaries. Reaching out.
13. The right tool at the right time.
14. Pillars of OD. Classical and contemporary.
15. Pulling others in. Connection people together
16. Flexible, agile and adaptable.
17. Navigating through danger. Politics. Shadow self, shadow systems. Doing stuff you don’t like. Risk.
18. Personal cost. Hard hat moments.
19. Transparency. Bumps and imperfections. Values. Vulnerability and trust. Fluidity
20. Confidence. Super hero cape.
21. Self-reflection, and holding up the mirror to others
22. Beginnings and endings. Closing things off. Pandora’s box
23. Appreciating / taking an appreciative stance
24. Space to grow. Growth and nurturing
25. Framing and reframing
26. The whole thing is on wheels. Mobile, agile, outside the box. Not confined
27. Awareness. Tuning in. Intuition and background noise.
28. The sanctuary of an OD space (grey tile)
29. Being amongst messiness (other bricks on the table)

 

 

 

 

 

Strengthening the positive core of our OD practice

“The joy of working in the NHS as an OD practitioner is the mission and the people. Knowing even a small success can help skilled, motivated and value-based staff help patients at their most vulnerable” – Helen B.

NHS OD practitioners deal with complexity every day. The question we posed when the Bootstrappers were forming was “How can we support cross-organisational working with an emphasis on partnerships instead of focusing on individual organisations?”

In our first two cycles of Action Research, through mapping our practice and sharing our stories, we were able to surface themes about the context in which we are practising OD:

• We are working with unprecedented uncertainty
• Our organisations are caught in a polarity of collaboration or competition
• Future forms of organising are tasked with amplifying difference while maintaining consistency
• Politics with capital and small p’s are visible at all levels of the system
• Pace is being used as shorthand for acceleration

From our experiences of OD practice, we noted that

• Leaders sometimes struggle to understand what OD is, and that this can often be due to a lack of ‘marketing’ savvy from us as practitioners. It’s our responsibility to work with leaders to develop a shared understanding of OD.
• There is a disconnect between the rhetoric and reality about the importance of OD. National documents and discourse speak of the critical role OD practitioners have to play in system change but this is against a backdrop of small and reducing investment in OD due to shrinking resources
• OD practitioners are a small workforce with a big workload. We are working on a large number of projects and programmes and don’t often make time to reflect or talk about our practice at a deeper level with our peers.

“One of the most frustrating things about working in this context is the way in which engagement and progress at a local or even regional level can be constrained, sideswiped or simply slowed down by initiatives, policies, targets or processes that come from elsewhere in the national system. The need to horizon-scan and adapt is constant, as is the operational demand pressure, and as OD practitioners we are often helping individuals, teams and organisations to build the capability to navigate their way through.”– Lisa S.

Practising OD in a dynamic space

Our further research identified a potential new space in OD theory and practice that we called Dynamic OD (OD Bootstrappers, 2018) which we think represents an emergent way of being when working on complex issues across multiple organisations. We produced a Blueprint for OD Practice: a tool for reflection, sense making and action taking when planning and assessing the utility of OD interventions in a range of contexts. This led us to hypothesise that we as OD professionals might need to work differently in the spaces between organisations. We realised our practice would have to be more improvisational than we had previously experienced. Our research drew us to inquire into what the OD professional of the future could look like and how we could build ourselves and each other to be confident in ‘the dynamic now’.

“I’d been involved in change programmes for some time but had no reference point for navigating the complexity of multi-organisational agendas whether openly shared or hidden.  I came to the group at a time of low confidence in my own practice and questioning the value of my role.”– Andrea S

Looking through the Appreciative Inquiry lens

In one of our cycles of action research we used Appreciative Inquiry (AI) as a methodology to explore beneath the surface of our identities as OD practitioners.  AI was chosen as it stimulates the “…affect required for building social solidarity and a renewed capacity to collectively imagine a new and better future” (Barrett &Coopperrider, 1990). In answer to our question “What would it take to become phenomenal OD practitioners in the dynamic now?” we each described how we had come into OD, where we had done our learning and what our strengths were as practitioners. The AI concept of the positive core supports the heliotropic hypothesis, which posits that social systems evolve towards to most positive image they hold of themselves (Bushe, 2001) and is the “most potent renewable source of energy for change, free and accessible to all organisational members” (Ludema, 2012).

Through the AI process, we revealed what – for us – is the ‘positive core’ of our OD work: strength. This strength can be built when we work from a foundation of creativity and authenticity, making connections to others. This enables us to be brave in our work, bringing our love of OD to the surface and transforming our imposter syndrome into confidence. That may involve varying degrees of struggle for some. On this foundation, we build greater strength by basing our OD approach and role firmly on the needs and intentions of our clients. When we add this to the sum of our skills and experience, multiplied by the depth and breadth of our thinking we have a formula for success. This formula is given extra power by difference and thought diversity.

 

How do you measure OD strength?

We played with the idea of building an equation to measure the strength of our OD practice using those elements just described. We offer it to you here as a way of testing your own strength and identifying which aspects of your OD work and internal identity may need to be developed further.

Figure 2: An equation for measuring OD strength

From me to we

Individual strength is important, but we also recognised strength comes from togetherness. Rainey Tolbert and Hanafin (2006) describe OD practitioners’ use of self with intent, constantly being aware of self and others in order to have impact. OD practitioners are described as having their own ‘practitioner DNA’ with a set of qualities that combine to provide the foundation of their unique presence. Rainey Tolbert and Hanafin identify that presence can be cultivated or honed through a lifelong commitment to personal development within six dimensions. These are:

1. Continuing to work on unresolved issues within yourself such as use of power or intimacy
2. Create space for active reflection
3. Living life fully to bring a rich source of life experience
4. Investing in a broad view of the world and its cultures and events
5. Actively seeking feedback in order to enhance understanding and impact of self
6. Experimenting with new ways of being and opening oneself up unveiling new parts of self.

Within the group, we attended to both our own use of self and cultivating our presence, whilst at the same time facilitating further insights and means to cultivate strength within each other. This was very much linked to the development of our group identity and collective working. We experienced ‘group as instrument’ as vital to strengthening our individual and collective practice.

We have adapted the model proffered by Rainey Tolbert and Hanafin (2006) to illustrate the six elements associated with doing own ‘own self’ work to build a proposition of the extended elements to going beyond cultivating self to ‘cultivating presence in self and group’. This is provided in figure 3.

Figure 3: Cultivation the Use of Self and Presence within Group, and Group Presence

“I felt a real sense of collective learning and appreciation of difference within the group. I was able to contribute my thinking and reflective preferences and found myself diving into the more creative interventions offered by other group members. I am more confident in showing my vulnerabilities which have helped to create new revelations in self and group” – Tracey W.

Next steps

The next cycle of our research builds on the notions of OD strength and group as instrument. We used various methods including cognitive sculpting to help us explore the OD professional of the future. It helped us to enhance awareness of self and our own strength and then moving collectively to a co-created model which we hope offers something new to the OD community.

In the meantime, consider these questions for yourself, and leave us your thoughts in the comments sections below. We want to expand the conversation on the positive core of OD and our idea of group as instrument of change. Please do share your ideas.

Three questions to consider:

• Reflecting on times when your OD practice was at its most vibrant, when you felt you were in the flow of your work, how would you describe what was at the most positive core of you?
• Our equation to measure OD strength highlights some areas that you could work on. Which, if any, resonate with you? How might you go about enhancing the elements that need action?
• Where are your group spaces to share your experiences on a deeper level? Do you need to create new connections in order to build yourself and others?

 

OD Bootstrappers

September 2018

You can download a PDF version of this article here.

OD practitioners enable people to transform systems

Lisa Sharples is a member of the OD Bootstrappers Action Research Group. In this blog, Lisa reflects on working across a complex system and her experiences of being a Bootstrapper.

Lisa Sharples

The Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland (LLR) STP is built on the foundations of an existing ‘Better Care Together’ programme.  I joined the portfolio office team in April 2015, to lead on Organisational Development across the partnership of three local authorities, three clinical commissioning groups and three NHS trusts.  The team were hosted by the system, but we were all new to LLR, and thus didn’t have any existing alliances to any one partner.  This gave us an interesting perspective as somewhat detached and independent of the system, able to observe dynamics that perhaps others were unable to see.

I was attracted to the role because of the partnership/ cross organisational nature of it.  I’d worked as a Head of OD in a large organisation before, and I wanted to challenge myself in an environment that I knew would likely be more political, and in which I’d have to trade heavily on my ability to build relationships and influence.  I wanted to see what the difference was between working in a single organisation and working across a partnership where the organisational drivers, strategies and cultures would be different.  How would that compare to working across departments in a single organisation?  How would it change when the nature of the ‘problem’ (increasing demand and complexity of health and care needs, with little new resource ) was likely more complex, and when the diagnose-and-fix approach was struggling to impact?

One of the first things that struck me was that no one could explain quite what they wanted me to achieve.  My remit was around ‘creating a system culture’ to enable transformation, but leaders were clear that whatever ‘system culture’ meant, it shouldn’t interfere with the culture of their own organisation.  There was something there about identity – perhaps like identifying as European whilst having strong British values… identifying as part of the LLR health and care system whilst having a sense of identity at an organisation or team or professional level.  In a lot of ways, this was similar to working with identity between departments or teams in an organisation – if there is a clear view of shared purpose and role, you’re on your way.  The challenge in this case was in agreeing an articulation of shared purpose that took into account the language used in different settings – it was complicated, involved a lot of engagement, a lot of governance, and took longer than it would have in a single organisation, but wasn’t complex , and we got there in the end.

I was also struck by the level of connectedness (or not) of parts of the system. The chief executives met regularly and in some cases there were connections at Director level, but often there was no connection at all.  Front line staff of all types told me that they’d lost connections that used to exist years ago in parts of the system that used to work more closely.  Often some of our large scale engagement events and world café interventions would bring together people doing similar or connected roles who had never met.  It was relatively straightforward to bring together cross system project teams to map existing services and think about system improvement.  There were issues around accountability and risk to work through, and the ‘getting to know you’ and team development work to support.  Sometimes simple and sometimes more complicated, but not often truly complex.  I was able to bring the OD leads from each organisation together – we sought to understand our collective practices, to support cross-system engagement, and ultimately to create and deliver a System OD strategy and plan based on what workers in the system told us they’d need to support new models of care (systems leadership, purpose and story, space and time to think, cross boundary working methods and tools)

So not all ‘system level’ working is complex.  In fact, a lot of it is straightforward and pulls on exactly the same skills and tools you might use in a large organisation. Yes, it often takes longer, and yes it can be more political, and involve misunderstandings around language, and the like. The saboteurs come from all angles with a whole range of agendas, but so do the innovators and the change agents.

For me, the complex bit came when the system simply didn’t have an answer managing the rising level of demand within it.  Demand projections far outstripped the available financial resources using current models of care.  Changing the model in one part of the system, might shift demand elsewhere, and often there were no existing ways to predict what the impact of making a change might be.  There was a requirement to create a ‘Plan’ to both manage demand and return to financial balance and systems would be measured against that ‘plan’.    The problems and challenges with this have been widely covered in literature by the likes of the Kings Fund, but for me in my system OD role, they could be summarised into the following:

• Each organisation was regulated and measured on its own performance. Moving demand and financial risk around the system meant that there were winners and losers at an organisational level.  Ultimately the chief executives and chairs around the partnership table could lose their jobs if they didn’t act in the best interest of their organisation.  Whist relationships and trust developed to a point where there was open conversation about this issue, the partnership struggled to resolve it at a system level and it was clear that national changes would be required to enable progress.  My OD role here, although never explicit, was to enable these dynamics to be surfaced and spoken about safely and provide space for the partnership leaders to work and learn together, continuing to build and maintain trust, and to manage the levels of frustration and blame which could arise.
• Power and influence in the system would shift with the external political environment and with the relative resources of the organisations within the partnership. This for me was the truly ‘dynamic’ element of understanding the shifts and finding ways to work with them rather than against them. My OD practice here was very instinctive, often in 1-1 conversation and informal coaching. I had to regularly stop and ask myself ‘what am I observing about the dynamics of the system? What questions can I ask that will help others observe too?
• A new approach to care, focussing on prevention of ill health and on managing long term conditions in completely new ways for which there is no clear blueprint. Managing the transition to those new ways without losing the ability to manage demand during the transition. My OD role here, was to create interventions that enabled learning together – building the connections at all levels of the system (eg an intervention to bring together the GPs, district nurses, social care team and relevant specialist services in a locality to build connections and think of themselves as a test bed for experimental new approaches, looking for patterns in A&E admissions data as a result of their trials)

Working in this space meant a lot more ‘going with the flow’ and a lot less ‘building and implementing a plan’.  There was a lot more ‘can you just come and be in the room while we talk about …’ and an expectation that I would help to make connections, join dots, ask challenging questions, make objective observations and help people step back and reflect.

Being part of the OD Bootstrappers work has helped me to reflect on my practice and my strengths.  I think it’s natural when working across multiple organisations to assume everything is complex, and I’ve probably spent the majority of my time using my existing toolkit to apply simple principles at a ‘developing systems’ level.  In the complex parts of my work, I’ve found myself drawing on ALL of my past experience, my tacit knowledge and my gut instincts to look for power and patterns and to build connections and enable learning. I dusted off my copy of the Fifth Discipline and reconnected with some learning organisation principles that I haven’t studied explicitly in years. I rediscovered the Cynefin framework, which for me has helped make sense of my OD role in different scales and spaces. I also enjoyed some of the Kings Fund work on system leadership which talks about working at different levels.

I’ve also made some truly wonderful connections to some fantastic OD practitioners who have challenged me throughout.  They’ve provided inspiration in my darkest hours and illuminated new ways forward for my practice.

I’ve loved it

Case Study: Testing the blueprint

Sarah Morgan

Director of Organisational Development

Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust

Sarah is a member of the Bootstrappers Action Research Group. As part of the creation and testing of our OD Blueprint, Sarah mapped her own OD activity. This helped us understand the model better before we shared it more widely. Here, Sarah describes her process and findings.

Foundations for change

Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust have been working in partnership together over the past two years to determine if you can get the benefits of a merger or acquistion through collaboration rather than the distracting and often destructive process of an organisational structure change.

The New Care Models Vanguard Programme has enabled this work to be accelerated and is called the Foundation Healthcare Group.  The work has been under the auspice of the Acute Care Collaboration Vanguard Programme for the past 18 months and has been undertaken at two levels.  Firstly at the Board level, with the two Executive Team forming a Committee in Common which governs the programme overall but also ensures that there is an equal partnership, despite the asymmetry that exists between the two organisations (GSTT £1.4bn turnover and 15,000 staff; DGT £250m turnover and 3,000 staff).  Secondly at the clinical level with three clinical specialities looking at different models of care across the boundaries of not only the two organisations but also two STPs and two counties: South East London and Kent.

This work has take a significant amount of time and effort from individuals and teams from both organisations and there has been a real commitment to seeing how far collaboration can take us within the NHS.

In order to examine the OD interventions that have taken place and the impact that they have, the framework has been used to plot the context and the impact that that had.

The mapping below on the framework attempts to demonstrate which level the intervention was working at; the level of complexity and where the impact was felt.

This has given an insight into which interventions had the most impact in the development of the Group and had surprising results in terms of the coaching being a relatively simple intervention that worked at many levels and had a significant impact.

Sarah Morgan

March 2018