TIME FOR ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT?

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP82-00357R000300060044-8
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 19, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 12, 2001
• Sequence Number: 44
• Publication Date: December 7, 1977
• Content Type: REPORT

Approved For Release 2006/09/28: CIA-RDP82-00357R000300060044-8
Time has an important bearing upon the conduct and durabrlity of
an organization development effort. Unfortunately, this factor
has often been underrated-if not entirely overlooked.
Time for Organization
Deoelopment?
Thomas H. Patten, Jr.
Before embarking on an organization development (OD) effort,
management should ask itself: Do we have time for OD? This is
probably the most serious question that must be explored and
satisfactorily answered before starting an OD program. Yet, curi-
ously, most OD practioners and writers have paid very little
attention to this many-faceted question. Instead, they have con-
cerned themselves with issues such as diagnosing problems,
planning interventions, designing exercises, searching for new
tools, and, occasionally, evaluating the results of OD efforts.
Unfortunately, they have failed to realize that time-not technical
deficiencies or shortages of innovative and stimulative intellectual
thinking on how to do it-is the greatest stumbling block to the
success of an OD effort.
How long should OD take?
OD efforts usually begin with a burst of enthusiasm and an
implicit, if not explicit, hope that they will pay off relatively
soon-and certainly no longer than after a few months. But of
course there is no such thing as instant OD, and various experts
claim that, as a rule-of-thumb, it takes three to five years before an
OD effort fully takes hold and changes a work culture.
Management-by-objectives (MBO) systems, which are com-
monly installed as part of an OD effort, are a prime example of
ardently desired instant OD. Unfortunately, the highly touted
improved results of effective MBO systems often cannot be ob-
tained without months or years of debugging. Obviously, if this
much time is required for correcting errors in an MBO installation,
the time required to solve the problems arising from implementa-
tion of a broader OD effort can only be greater.
Yet top management does not always devote the necessary
amount of time to an OD effort once initial enthusiasm for it has
subsided (as it most certainly will after the new way of life becomes
less novel and managers start to slip or regress to less satisfactory
ways of coping). Many top-management groups follow one wave
of fads after another with alternating degrees of enthusiasm. Thus
OD, like any other new concept or social technology, can be
doomed at an early stage of its life when it is no longer
spearheaded and led by top management-as it should be.
Still another problem is whether time itself and the dynamics of
managerial mobility in large-scale organizations will not be the
undoing of OD. If OD takes three to five years for effective
implementation, it may kill itself by its own glacial time frame.
For example; the number of executives who are likely to quit,
transfer, retire, or be promoted in three to five years in any
department or division of reasonable size within the total organiza-
tion is likely to be so large that the momentum of an OD effort can
be lost. In fact, excessive mobility may make OD impossible
because the entity being changed and persons playing roles in it
are, respectively, excessively unstable and highly career mobile. Of
course, excessive mobility can have the opposite effect and actually
benefit an OD effort if the people brought in have already adopted
a style of management consistent with the desired results. But
barring this happy circumstance, what can be done to ensure that
an OD effort takes hold and accomplishes its objectives instead of
regressing or stagnating because it cannot keep pace with the
underlying velocity of personnel change within a firm or agency?
The only solution to this problem is a shorter time frame than
three to five years from OD initiation to full implementation. This
Approved For Release 2006/09/28: CIA-RDP82-00357R000300060044-8
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