The OD Quest: Part 7 – Integrating the mystical and the analytical!

"I don’t have an opening in my OD team now. But, you can join our recruitment team and do recruitment in the OD way”, I heard the Senior HR Leader telling a candidate who was hell-bent on joining the OD team. This was my fifth ‘encounter’ with this gentleman (See 'Passion for work and anasakti ‘, 'Appropriate metaphors for organizational commitment ‘ ,‘To name or not to name, that is the question’ and ‘A Mathematical approach to HR’ for the outcomes of my previous interactions with him).

I was a bit taken aback by what I just heard. I knew that often these kind of ‘solutions’ will end in tears or worse. However, similar to what had happened during my previous encounters with him, this interaction forced me to think a bit more deeply about the underlying issue - the application of OD(Organization Development) to the various functional areas in HR (Human Resource Management). That, in turn, has prompted me to write this series of posts on 'The OD Quest' where we will look at the possibilities  that arise when OD ventures into other parts of the people management terrain.

In the first post in this series (see The OD Quest: Part 1- Mapping the terrain) we did a cartography of the Human Resources (HR) and Organization Development (OD) domains to map out the current world (the terrain) inhabited by HR and OD and also the evolving worldviews in HR and OD (ways of looking at the terrain). In the second post (see The OD Quest Part 2 : Doing Recruitment in the OD way) we made a visit to the land of Recruitment and explored the value OD can add to Recruitment. In the third post (see The OD Quest: Part 3 – Rendezvous with L&D) we covered the Rendezvous with L&D. In the fourth post we saw how OD can sweeten Rewards and make it ‘Total Rewards’ (see The OD Quest: Part 4 – Totally Rewarding). In the fifth post, we explored a domain (Industrial Relations) that has often been considered as the antithesis of OD (see The OD Quest: Part 5 - Face to face with the antithesis?). In the sixth post, we took our quest to the domain of HR Business Partners and explored the immense possibilities for mutual value addition (See The OD Quest: Part 6 – In the wonderland of HR Business Partners). In this post, let’s take our quest to the most quantitative domain HR – HR Analytics. For the purpose of our discussion let's define HR Analytics as the application of data science and statistics to improve the quality of people-related decisions.

Organization Development (OD) with its emphasis on social construction of organization reality and focus on work at the level of mindsets, values and basic underlying assumptions is as ‘mystical’’ as one can get in HR. HR Analytics with its emphasis on quantification and use of advanced statistics is as analytical as one can get in HR. So the question becomes, is there anything that the analytical and mystical learn from each other? It has been observed that the interaction between apparently unconnected fields often yields rich dividends. So, let us see what treasures can we unearth in this phase of our OD quest!

I have had the good fortune to straddle both these worlds - organization development and analytics. I have made a living out of OD for more than a decade. I have set up the HR analytics function in two of the companies that I have worked in. I am also a lean six sigma black belt (and hence familiar with both the possibilities and limitations of its fundamental approach of converting a physical problem into a mathematical problem, finding a mathematical solution and then converting the mathematical solution into a physical solution). Managing these two fields at the same time (without creating cognitive dissonance) has been a very interesting experience!  

To me, quite a bit of the apparent distance between the two fields came about because of the skill sets of the role-holders and the separation in the organization structure and not just because of ideological differences. In most of the organizations, people with OD skillet don't usually handle HR analytics and vice versa. Also, typically (stereotypically?!) OD professionals are more skilled in qualitative modes of  exploration whereas the HR analytics professionals are more skilled in quantitative modes of exploration. Again, while OD is usually housed within the HR function, the HR Analytics function is often housed in the Business Analytics function. This sometimes lead to a situation where people handling HR Analytics are mainly data scientists without experience in HR and they just take the requirements from HR Mangers, do the analysis and give the results back to the HR Managers (and hence in a way work mainly in the mathematical problem-mathematical solution part of the problem solving approach mentioned above). This compartmentalized approach can lead to significant loss of opportunity in deriving meaning and actionable inferences from the data.

While the most frequently used modes of exploration are different (qualitative versus quantitative) in the two fields, the fact still remains that both the fields are often exploring the same organization reality. This is the fundamental point of convergence between the two fields.

Of course, there are issues related to stereotypes. Many of the people in OD are skeptical about the seductive power of numbers and their ability to mislead  where as people in HR analytics are often vary about the fluffy and vague nature of OD and the pathological reluctance to define things precisely and in a standardized manner. But, the purpose of both the fields is to facilitate more effective problem solving and decision making in organization, especially on people related aspects. So, there is a logical need  to work together and based on my personal experience, I can confidently say that the possibilities for mutual value addition are immense.

The Achilles' heel of OD is the inability to give confidence to the business leaders that the OD managers understand the hard realities of business and that that they can facilitate tangible improvements through the OD initiatives. Hence, many business leaders look at OD as something that is done to improve esoteric things like culture and that too only when the business leaders have some spare time after they have addressed the important business issues. I have also seen very senior OD professionals becoming uncomfortable and hence losing credibility with the business leaders when the discussion moves to pure numbers - business numbers and people related numbers/analytics. Working together with HR analytics professionals and enhancing the comfort with numbers and quantitative analysis can enable the OD professionals to start the conversation in the language that the business leaders are often more comfortable with and then (after some level of trust has been built) lead them to other modes of exploration. 

Of course, leveraging HR Analytics can facilitate better diagnosis and solution design during the OD intervention apart from helping in evaluating the implications of the possible solutions and in tracking improvements and in demonstrating the results of the intervention.

The action research method lies at the very foundation of the field of OD and it is a data-driven approach (systematic approach to data collection, analysis, feedback and enabling problem solving/decision making) to organizational change. Of course the data can be quantitative or qualitative in nature. May be because of the skillsets of most of the OD practitioners, use of qualitative data and data analysis techniques became more prominent. While these are indeed useful, they miss out on the insights on the relationships between the key variables that can be unearthed using  statistical modelling. Not leveraging quantitative analysis can also increase the risk of ‘dangerous half-truth’ creeping into the OD practice masquerading as conventional wisdom!

 

Similarly, the Achilles' heel of HR analytics is the inability to ensure that the analytics (the measurements and the analysis) accurately capture and is appropriate for the underlying reality that is being analyzed (See A Mathematical Approach to HR?). Another deadly temptation in HR analytics is to take a large database and then look for patterns in the data. This is more of 'data fishing' and not analytics. The problem is not that one cannot find patterns. The problem is that it is difficult to figure out which patterns are relevant or worth exploring for supporting decision making. Even when a significant pattern is detected, it might not be a simple matter to figure out how it should impact the decision-making. For example, if the analysis of employee attrition and its business impact clearly shows that early attrition is very costly to the business and that the early attrition rate among female employees is twice that among male employees what action should it trigger? Don't hire female employees (so that the cost can be avoided) or make extra investment/efforts to retain them? Obviously, this is a matter of what does the organization 'value' and why. OD can help in facilitating this kind of deeper exploration.

OD can also help in terms of facilitating a deeper understanding of the underlying reality and in creating conceptual models so that better hypothesis formulation for testing through analytics can be enabled. This is especially critical now, as the expectation  from HR analytics is shifting from descriptive analytics (that mainly describes the past) to predictive analytics ( that focuses on predicting the future). OD can also be very helpful in creating a compelling narrative based on the results of the analysis that can maximize the chances of the analysis actually informing the decision making process. Also, unless this (leveraging analytics to inform decision making in a consistent manner) is taken up as an integrated change management initiative, there  is very limited possibility that something truly useful would come out of HR analytics.Since OD is essentially about facilitating change, OD can be of immense help here.

So where does this leave us? A triangulation approach of combining an essentially qualitative method ( the traditional domain of OD) and an essentially quantitative method (traditional domain of HR analytics) can almost always lead to much more comprehensive understanding of the organization context/reality and hence facilitate much better decisions.

At some level, this is about enhancing your toolkit so that you are not limited by your tools so that there is less chance of all problems looking like a nail (e.g. problem with the culture of the organization) because the only tool you have is a hammer (e.g. culture mapping tool). At a deeper level, it is an acknowledgement of the complex nature of reality (that needs different lenses to see clearly) and the fact that human affairs are often over-determined (there are multiple causes to a situation). As the organization contexts becomes more complex and dynamic, this becomes an absolute must. If the initial sense of 'strangeness' between OD and HR Analytics is overcome by working together and getting to know each other's craft better, an immense amount of mutual value addition (and value addition to the organization that employs both of them) is possible!

Any comments/suggestions before we take our OD Quest to the next domain in the HR land?

Remarkable Encounters – Part 2 : Fear

It is said that we discover some parts of ourselves only in the context of our interaction with others. Some of these interactions are so enriching that they leave us feeling more complete, integrated, alive and human. In this series of posts, we will look at the impressions from some of the remarkable encounters I have had. In the first post, we looked at my impressions from the encounter with a remarkable teacher (See Remarkable Encounters – Part 1 : Teacher). In this post, we will look at a constant companion to many of us – fear. Now, fear is not a (legal) person. But, the amount of time many of us spend with fear and the impact fear has on us would make fear more real than many humans in our lives. Hence, fear gate-crashes into this series!

‘Do you have an independent existence?’, I have often wondered. Because it is always ‘fear of something’ and not fear itself that is commonly mentioned. Yes, it can be a general sense of fearfulness, when we can’t identify a particular cause or when there are multiple causes.

Some people say that you are just a label, or an ‘umbrella term’, that we attach to a physiological reactions to danger triggered by the hormones generated by amygdala in the brain, and, that animals also can feel fear though they don’t bother to attach a label to it or talk about it. They just do the fight or flight response and resolve the fear! In humans, the danger can be psychological or ideological in addition to physical ones, with the first two being much more difficult to run away from! Only the innocent, the ignorant or the psychologically damaged are immune to fear!

In my journey with you over the last four decades, I have got to know you a lot better. It is funny that while you are real, you can be caused by both real and imaginary things. The unknown and the unpredictable usually outweigh the known and predictable as the causes. What is rational fear and what is irrational fear (phobia) is not always crystal clear because when and how much fear should be felt is often socially conditioned. You have many shades ranging from mild uneasiness to terror and horror. Fear can be conscious, sub-conscious or even unconscious with the unconscious ones being more difficult to surface and address. Fear can be developed through direct experience or vicariously. Some fears (e.g. fear of snakes and fear of heights) could even have been hardwired into humans during biological evolution. Fear is also powerful motivator (See The power of carrot and stick). Since fear can be conceptualized as chemical, biological, psychological, sociological or even moral reaction or any combination of them, the prescriptions to deal with fear vary widely!  

While you are inevitable, the response to you is a matter of choice at least in humans. You have a great ability to grow if we think too much about you or even when we try not to think about you. And you diminish if we can find something else to occupy the psychological space you occupy. Love is a great candidate to push you out and so are  enthusiasm and purpose. Yes, enthusiasm means ‘’being possessed/inspired by God’’ and love is also not too different! Religion can both take away some fears and create new fears. But spirituality does a better job of taking away fears than creating fears!

Fear is a clean emotion, a useful warning signal, and essential for survival as individuals and as a society. Quite a bit of the power of the state is derived from its ability invoke fear by the threat of punishment. Also, the fear of a common enemy has held together many states in the absence of a common purpose!. 

It is interesting that while humans are pain avoiding creatures, many of them will pay to experience fear, say by purchasing tickets for horror movies. May be, a minimum dose of fear is required! Yes, too much fear can be dysfunctional. Fear is a much more useful feeling that its cousin anxiety, which occurs as the result of threats that are perceived to be uncontrollable or unavoidable. Fear is one of the basic set of human emotions and  the ability to fear is one of the things that makes us human. It is the layers that we build on fear that causes most of the trouble.

The list of things that can evoke fear is practically endless – from death to public speaking and everything in between including polar opposites like intimacy & loneliness, success &   failure and freedom & restriction. But the most debilitating fear is the fear of fear, because (being a second order fear) it escapes our built-in machinery (which is a first order one) to deal with fear! 

Being able to acknowledge the fear and feel the fear without fearing the fear itself has been my greatest learning from my long journey with fear because it enables more constructive and hopeful responses to fear. Interestingly, just being able to name/identify/articulate the fear is highly therapeutic (may be that is why 'getting the ghost to reveal its name' is so important in exorcism rituals!) as it reduces the degree of control/impact the fear has on us. Gradual/controlled exposure to the feared object/situation puts us on the royal road out of the land of fear, which is by working through it. I have also found it insightful to map what my fears are at a particular stage in my life and to examine how they evolve. May be, fear is a useful indicator to facilitate both our external and internal journeys!

The OD Quest: Part 6 – In the wonderland of HR Business Partners!

"I don’t have an opening in my OD team now. But, you can join our recruitment team and do recruitment in the OD way”, I heard the Senior HR Leader telling a candidate who was hell-bent on joining the OD team. This was my fifth ‘encounter’ with this gentleman (See 'Passion for work and anasakti ‘, 'Appropriate metaphors for organizational commitment ‘ ,‘To name or not to name, that is the question’ and ‘A Mathematical approach to HR’ for the outcomes of my previous interactions with him).

I was a bit taken aback by what I just heard. I knew that often these kind of ‘solutions’ will end in tears or worse. However, similar to what had happened during my previous encounters with him, this interaction forced me to think a bit more deeply about the underlying issue - the application of OD(Organization Development) to the various functional areas in HR (Human Resource Management). That, in turn, has prompted me to write this series of posts on 'The OD Quest' where we will look at the possibilities  that arise when OD ventures into other parts of the people management terrain.

In the first post in this series (see The OD Quest: Part 1- Mapping the terrain) we did a cartography of the Human Resources (HR) and Organization Development (OD) domains to map out the current world (the terrain) inhabited by HR and OD and also the evolving worldviews in HR and OD (ways of looking at the terrain). In the second post (see The OD Quest Part 2 : Doing Recruitment in the OD way) we made a visit to the land of Recruitment and explored the value OD can add to Recruitment. In the third post (see The OD Quest: Part 3 – Rendezvous with L&D) we covered the Rendezvous with L&D. In the fourth post we saw how OD can sweeten Rewards and make it ‘Total Rewards’ (see The OD Quest: Part 4 – Totally Rewarding). In the fifth post, we explored a domain (Industrial Relations) that has often been considered as the antithesis of OD (see The OD Quest: Part 5 - Face to face with the antithesis?). In this post let’s take our quest to the wonderland of HR Business Partners(HRBPs) and see what are the possibilities for mutual value addition. 

There are a wide range of HR roles that go by the HR Business Partner (HRBP) title. For the purpose of our discussion, let us focus mainly on ‘pure’ HRBPs – HRBPs whose role is that of being a strategic business partner - to the business they are supporting. This would mean that they are supposed to have very little or no transactional /operational HR responsibilities. So these roles (HR roles that don't do 'usual HR work') are some sort of freaks of evolution*- in the evolution of the HR function. As they don't have too many operational responsibilities, the pure strategic HRBPs tend to gravitate towards the business transformation, strategic workforce planning, employee engagement and culture building kind of work. This brings them closer to OD. 

The other kind of HRBPs, who have more operational roles (who focus on employee life cycle management) would  have another kind of overlap with OD. These HRBPs (HR Operations Managers) are closer to action (they are often embedded in the business they are supporting) and hence they are in a great position to know the pulse of the organization which is very essential for the diagnosis, solution design and implementation of OD initiatives.

The traditional distinction between HRBPs and OD has been that the specialists (including OD specialists) are supposed to do the design part and the generalists (HRBPs) are supposed to do the implementation part. In reality, these boundaries are fuzzy. Design can't happen in a vacuum (e.g. only based on underlying theory/principles and external best practices). Design has to be based on an accurate diagnosis of the organization context. HRBPs are closer to the context as compared to OD managers. Business relationship management is a key part of the HRBP role and this also gives them an opportunity to build close working relationships with the business leaders. So the diagnosis for OD initiatives is best done in partnership with the HRBPs. Also the partnership with HRBPs would make the OD designs more implementable. Similarly implementation can’t be done effectively without a deep understanding of the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of what is being implemented. This means that the HRBPs should work closely with the OD managers for carrying out their job effectively.  

I have seen 3 common modes of partnership that HRBPs have with OD Managers: 


1. I will do all interfacing with MY businesses leaders!! I will call you if I need OD help!
2. Do your work directly with the business leaders. Just don't create any trouble or additional work for me or my team!!
3. Let's work jointly on this!

Based on the discussion above, it is clear that the mode 3 is the most effective one. This brings us to the important question of why (if this is such an obvious choice for both the parties involved) mode 3 is not always adopted. To me, the most important issues here are related to trust, perceived value addition and sharing of credit.

For any partnership (including HRBP - OD partnership) to work both the parties should derive net value from the partnership (the benefits should be more than the costs/investment). If the HRBPs perceive that the OD Manager brings in a certain deep expertise that would be beneficial in meeting the HRBP deliverables and that the OD Managers won’t create  unwanted issues for the HRBPs, HRBPs would be keen to partner with OD Managers. A track record of consistent value addition creates trust and credibility. Similarly if the OD Managers perceive that the HRBPs can help in contracting with the business leaders, in  diagnosis, solution design & implementation and in sustaining the results, they would be keen to partner with the HRBPs. Yes, this would also mean that OD Managers should invest time in building/enhancing the OD skills of HRBPs by giving conceptual inputs, training on tools and by working together. Once the net value addition,  trust and credibility is established then it is easier to tackle the issue of sharing of credit. Of course, if HRBPs and OD Managers have different reporting lines both of them can claim ‘full credit’!

Where does this leave us?

In OD, scalability and the organization-wide impact and sustaining the new patterns of working post the OD initiative  are the most difficult challenges. Since OD would always be a small team, building OD skills in the HRBPs (in both the strategic and operational HRBPs, may be at different levels of proficiency depending on the nature of their job/involvement in OD initiatives) can help in scalability and organization-wide impact (beyond doing isolated ‘hit and run’ Interventions). Again, working jointly with the HRBPs would help in better diagnosis, solution design, implementation and sustaining the results of OD initiatives. Similarly, effective partnership with OD Managers can help the HRBPs to  build skills, climb the value chain, created differentiated value for the business they are supporting and develop the credibility to be true strategic business partners (See nature abhors vacuum for what could happen when the transactional responsibilities are removed from HR Managers). Of course, this also means that OD Managers should develop a very deep technical expertise in OD coupled with business understanding so that the HRBPs would have a logical reason to get them involved. Again, OD Managers, being relative outsiders, are in a better position to surface certain difficult issues with the business leaders and to have courageous conversations’’ with  business leaders that the HRBPs, being embedded in the business, might find more difficult to pull off (See OD Managers as Court Jesters for a related discussion)!

In a way, the separation between the OD and  HRBP roles are arbitrary with the strategic/pure HRBP roles gravitating towards the business transformation, strategic workforce planning, employee engagement and culture building kind of work that very much overlaps with the traditional OD domains. In one of my previous companies, people like me who were on OD roles were moved to HRBP roles worldwide as it was felt that the HRBP roles require an OD kind of skill set. Also, I  have seen many senior HR generalists do the kind of great process facilitation/ process consulting work with business leadership teams that would make any OD specialist proud. But usually these HR leaders don't call it OD and they don't talk too much about it - may be because they see it as a very natural part of their job and may be also because they don't want to annoy the 'designated OD specialists' in the organization!

Thus, the HRBP-OD partnership can be highly beneficial for both the parties involved. The key requirement is to address the key issues of perceived value addition, trust and sharing of credit as we have seen earlier! 

Any comments/thoughts before we take our OD quest to the next domain in the HR land?!

*Note: Freaks occur in the course of biological evolution also. But they are unlikely to create much of a problem as they usually don't live long enough to reproduce. However since HRBPs can (and do) survive long enough in organizations to create (hire/develop) more HRBPs, it is worthwhile to take a closer look at them and their world - especially in terms of the intersection with the world of Organization Development.