Organizational Development

Following up on yesterday’s post, here is an article of mine about OD that was published in the OD Networks bi monthly e zine Volume 7, Issue 6, Year 07

OD, the Natural Language of Human Service Nonprofits: Congruence and Opportunity

Organization Development (OD) and the mission-driven organizational imperatives of human service nonprofit organizations (HSNOs) share common values and complementary realities. This congruence represents opportunities for HSNOs and OD practitioners alike.

Nonprofits and HSNOs

O’Neill (2002) defines nonprofits as:

"(1) organizations or institutions to some extent, (2) private or not part of government, (3) non-profit-distributing, (4) self-governing, (5) voluntary or noncompulsory and involving some meaningful degree of voluntary participation, and (6) of public benefit” (p. 2).

Nonprofits serve the public good by providing a public service, and they are humanistic by definition and function. HSNOs are the small to large nonprofit organizations that act as organizational change agents transforming individuals and communities. In the United States, there are 103,171 of them with revenue of $142.3 billion and assets of $209.3 billion (Nonprofit Almanac, 2007, p. 3).

Relevance, OD & HSNOs

While nonprofits are driven by their mission, bringing passion and commitment to their cause, they are often lacking in the internal organizational capacity building tools needed for sustainability. The specific tools they are most deficient in are strategic planning, fund development, board and staff development, and communications and marketing.

OD values include humanism, collaboration, cooperation, participation, knowledge of self and awareness of one’s affect, empowerment of individuals, groups, and organizations, and social responsibility and sustainability. These are also the values of HSNOs, and they can achieve individual and community transformation most effectively when embracing their own values, and those from OD congruent with their organizations, as applied to their own organizational development and functioning.

OD practitioners, working from their humanistic values, can help HSNOs with the technical organizational world needed to positively affect the governance, strategy, and fund development capability of the board and staff, which directly impacts the mission fulfillment—the core reason for their existence—of the nonprofit organization.

Two of the basic techniques of OD that could be most helpful to HSNOs would be the creation of a learning community, and using group work to help clients mentor board and staff members and board and staff members mentor clients. This would help co-create an environment where the inherent self-destructiveness of the HSNO client’s world can be mitigated through the inherent self-responsibility of the board and staff member’s world, leading to an organizational culture of mutual learning and healing in a transformative setting.

The author has worked with several small HSNO’s where this inability to connect the staff and board to the client’s world has dramatically affected the ability of the organization to help its client base, personally in the transformative process, and organizationally in growing to scale and developing effectiveness.

Individuals with humanistic ideals self-select into both non-profit environments and OD careers, actively choosing settings in which they feel comfortably challenged.

This would indicate that nonprofit staff and board may be open to operating according to OD organizational values, but do not yet have the exposure to the knowledge or the tools of change and capacity building. If they did so, they would be modeling and enhancing mission work, and becoming more aligned with the natural language of the nonprofit world.

Opportunity

Individual development, organization development, and development of the social environment cannot be truly separated; they are reciprocal. Many transforming nonprofits fail because they haven't transformed themselves organizationally.

OD has traditionally been marketed to for-profit organizations but HSNOs are generally more able to realize the organizational and values aspirations of OD because of their higher level of congruency with the humanistic values of traditional OD.

The absence of a profit motive for nonprofits creates a deeper ground for the enactment of OD and its values. Block (2002) defining OD, has referred to “organization” as the “construct of an engineer”, concerned with problem-solving, and “development” as the “construct of a healer”, concerned with relationships, feeling, and humanity.

The HSNO embodies both of these constructs as it is a problem-solving entity that heals. They are animated by an intuitive mission of individual and community transformation. To be more effective, they could embrace a technical mission of management—still imbued by values-driven transformation—consistent with the humanistic values and organizational practice of OD.

References

Block, P. (2002). Organization and Development. Practicing OD 2002, 3. Retrieved June 2006 from www.odnetwork.org .

Nonprofit Almanac (2007). The nonprofit sector in brief. Retrieved May 2007 from
http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/311373_nonprofit_sector.pdf

O’Neill, M. (2002). Nonprofit nation: A new look at the third America. San Francisco: Jossey- Bass.