Management Development: Organisation Development

Abstract

The relationship which my colleagues and I have with client organisations is one of partnership. Managers have as their primary brief to take decisions and actions which help to make their organisations become and remain successful. They stay firmly at the ‘coalface’ of their organisations. Most try to learn from their own and their immediate colleagues’ experience, and to use that learning to carry on the constant fight against organisational entropy. But increasingly rapid change and complexity make it hard for individual managers, or even groups of managers, to gather even a small proportion of the facts and ideas which comprise the sum of all managerial learning. Most managers can gather only a limited view of the world. The immediacy of direct involvement in their own challenges, and the narrowness of perspective which any single organisational situation provides, make it impossible for them to gather for themselves the broader, more objective view which many feel they need for effective decision-making.