tailieunhanh - Practicing Organization Development (A guide for Consultants) - Part 60

Practicing Organization Development (A guide for Consultants) - Part 60. Organization development (OD) is about planned change. As change has turned into the only constant, many managers and other people are pursuing change strategies with vigor. OD is a major strategy for leading and managing change at the individual, group, intergroup, organizational, interorganizational, and large systems levels. This book is about what it takes to be an effective change manager, change leader, and OD consultant | TECHNOLOGY AND ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT 561 The online interactions opened the door and he was willing to walk right through it It was amazing to see that happen so quickly. The experience of this organization is somewhat unique because everyone in the organization including the executive director himself was already committed to the ideal of cooperation and collaboration and the director was mature enough despite his strong personality to quickly recognize the benefits of listening and collaborating. All he needed was an environment that would allow that to happen and the collaborative online workspace provided the space to positively shift both individual behavior and group effectiveness. Another example from a much larger organization is a global technology company in which mid-level managers from the United States Germany and Japan would meet periodically to strategize deployment of new products in their respective geographic markets. While these meetings were always amiable and filled with cooperative intent the Japanese managers rarely contributed to the brainstorming sessions other than expressing agreement to ideas articulated by their German and American counterparts. To support ongoing communication between this geographically dispersed group a collaborative platform with online discussion areas was chosen to keep some of the creative brainstorming alive between face-to-face gatherings. The Japanese managers quickly became active and full participants in these online forums. While we did not determine whether their willingness to participate more fully was due to their greater comfort with written English than with spoken English or whether it was due to cultural differences in communication styles that made the asynchronous mode of posting to a discussion board easier for them it was unmistakable that the availability of online technology to support group dialogue fostered a level of participation among some of the managers that had emerged in .