Lessons from the wider world of Organizational Development
January 10th, 2008
If Nobel prize-winner Richard Feynman can learn something about a major theory of physics from watching the way plates thrown across a university refectory wobble, why wouldn’t climbing Mount Everest and the problems in the paediatric cardiac surgery program of the Bristol Royal Infirmary potentially give us useful insights into our own organizations?
Three areas of research seem to me to be of particular interest: leadership, governance and organizational development. Existing parts of this site deal with these areas.
The papers dealt with in this post and related page concern organizational development, the way organizations work, what does and what does not effect and affect change and the progress toward outcomes which advance the organization and the people in it. They include some of the more important research papers published in the last 10 years.
In the translation from a previous version of the site to the present one, certain changes occur inevitably and sometimes losses. Unless one is very vigilant, these may go unnoticed. So it is with these important references about organizational change which I have frequently quoted in published papers.
Although the list was completed in 2003, some of the articles are of long-term importance. The articles deal with issues such as lessons learned from climbing Mount Everest – and the accidents that can happen in such a high risk pursuit – and how hospitals work. These are included because of my abiding belief that useful lessons are to be found in all kinds of unusual places. After all, if Nobel prize-winner Richard Feynman can learn something about a major theory of physics from watching the way plates thrown across a university refectory wobble, why wouldn’t climbing Mount Everest and the problems in the paediatric cardiac surgery program of the Bristol Royal Infirmary potentially give us useful insights into our own organizations.
I especially commend the papers by Nitin Nohria, William Joyce & Bruce Roberson on successful change, by Karl E Weick & Kathleen M. Sutcliffe on a major problem at he Bristol Royal Infirmary, by Dan Lovallo & Daniel Kahneman on the effect optimism has on executive judgement, Robert Chapman Wood & Gary Hamel on innovative approaches to grant giving in the World Bank, by Lynda Gratton & Sumantra Ghoshal on the way conversations influence people’s attitudes and behaviours and, of all things, a critique of transaction cost analysis by the wonderful (late) Sumantra Ghoshal and Peter Moran: anything but boring, this paper actually demolishes much of the favoured basis of governance theory and practice.
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