4	Implementing Corporate Change: A Role For Organisation Development 1965–72

The heart of this book is the description and analysis of ICI's attempts to change its structure, technology, management–union relationships, and organisation culture over the period from the early 1960s until the early 1980s. In examining this 20 years of continuity and change in ICI, a central theme will be the exploration of the possibilities and limitations of specialist attempts to facilitate and implement organisational change. The specialists under examination are individuals, and on some occasions groups of internal and external consultants, using behavioural science and organisation development concepts and methods. Crucial to the analysis of the above theme will be a frame of reference for studying change which recognises the opportunities and constraints for organisational change provided by changing social, economic, business, and political contexts, and how the purposeful actions of specialists and executives are bounded by political processes inside the firm.

The presentation of the empirical data in the book is influenced by the divisional character of ICI's structure, and the existence of the company headquarters in Imperial Chemical House, Millbank, London SW1. Throughout most of ICI's history, and during all of the period of this research, the main board of ICI was resident at Millbank. In October 1982 the announcement was made that the main board was to leave Millbank for a location elsewhere in London, but this change had not been implemented by the end of 1983. Millbank has been the centre of corporate power in ICI, and there will be no surprises in the statement that the framework of policy emanating from Millbank has provided the rationale and motive force for macro-level changes in the company. There is, however, some difference between a group of senior executives and senior staff men sensing environmental change and formulating corporate responses to those changes, and then implementing those substantial changes in dispersed divisions. In fact, one of the core reasons for the creation of internal and external OD consultant resources in ICI towards the end of the 1960s was to assist the centre implement the Millbank-spawned MUPS/WSA productivity bargain which was being resisted in some of the divisions.

This chapter describes elements of the political, social, economic, and business context which produced the MUPS change programme in 1965, and MUPS's relaunch in a different form as WSA in 1969. Since detailed accounts of the genesis, pathway of development, and impact of MUPS/WSA have already been supplied by Cotgrove et al. (1971), Roberts and Wedderburn (1973) and Roeber (1975) there is no point in repeating that narrative account here. Instead of focusing on the content and evolution of MUPS/WSA, the focus in this chapter will be to treat MUPS/WSA both as a case of centrally enforced change which ran into problems of implementation at division and works levels, and as the prime vehicle which in turn brought first of all behavioural science, and then organisation development, into Millbank, and then a variety of divisions of the company. Just as no account of chief executive -led change in ICI during the 1960s can ignore MUPS/WSA, so no account of the birth and evolution of OD activities at headquarters or divisional level can ignore the role that MUPS/WSA played as the initial vehicle for OD. Once the OD team had been created in Central Personnel Department (CPD) at Mill-bank, in turn they assisted with trying to rescue a faltering MUPS, to provide a climate for WSA to be implemented, and then helped to devise and implement a further company-wide change programme, this time for monthly staff, called the Staff Development Programme (SDP). During these activities the central team extended their role to training divisional internal consultants, and thereby helped to create a professional company network of OD resources numbering around 50 people.

The focus of this chapter is then on the origins and development of MUPS/WSA and SDP as central change programmes, and the rise of the CPD specialist OD resources who came with those central change programmes. Subsequent chapters will then examine both the impact of MUPS/WSA and SDP at divisional level, and the varying strategies and impact of OD resources in Agricultural, Petrochemicals, Plastics and Mond Divisions, as those OD resources sought to initiate and facilitate change in the post MUPS/WSA and SDP period. Chapter 10 will then return and pick up the story of the continuing role played by central OD resources in the period up until the early 1980s. Finally Chapter 12 will compare and contrast the different pathways of birth, development, demise, survival, and impact of OD in Millbank, and in Agricultural, Petrochemicals, Plastics, and Mond Divisions.

In order to assist the reader is disentangling some of the similarities and differences in the birth, evolution, and impact of OD in Millbank and the divisions, this chapter and those that follow it will have broadly similar structures, and will be written with an eye to keeping some balance between description and analysis. Given the strong emphasis in the first two chapters on contextualism as a mode of analysis, every effort will be made to present the Millbank and divisional accounts of OD in their historical and present-day business, technical, and organisational contexts. The divisional chapters in particular will carefully set the scene for any analyses of organisational change and development by offering broad analyses of the business history and development of each division, and detailed accounts of the management organisation and culture of each division. With the broad context thus established each chapter will then contain an overview account of the natural history of OD in that part of the company, followed by an analysis of the particular antecedent conditions which led to its birth, and the form and character of the development of OD activities. Each chapter will then review the internal and external evolution of the OD group attempting to stimulate organisational change, and account for the fate of each group and the impact of OD activities initiated by internal and external consultants, and line managers.

In presenting these narrative accounts of the business, economic, and organisational contexts in which OD emerged, developed, and influenced or fell away in its context, there is a need to strike a balance between writing a complex business history of the company and each division, and highlighting only those events with particular significance in relation to OD. Further, there is the risk that a narrative such as this overorganises and oversimplifies the complexities of history, makes it tidier than it is, or was. This is especially a problem with recent history where participants in the story have their own implicit framework and funds of detail. The challenge is to provide an account which captures some of the richness of views which are characteristic of any time, which is clear and is substantiated in detail, and yet in a coherent and additive fashion is able to assist the reader to identify factors to do with context, and individual and group action, which contributed to the success or otherwise of OD and organisational change efforts. In what follows the objective will be to capture a sense of the development of events and personalities so crucial in a processual analysis, and to start the process of teasing out the themes and patterns of cause and effects behind these events and personalities. It will be a prime objective of the more explicitly comparative and analytical Chapter 12, to draw out the similarities and differences between the case studies, and thus to seek to generalise what these ICI experiences tell us about the problems of creating and implementing change from internal and external specialist roles.

This chapter is organised into four sections. The starting point is a brief overview of the birth, development, and use made of OD from the headquarters at Millbank over the period 1964–72. OD, as it had become to be known by around 1970, developed out of a need both to justify and to help implement the weekly staff productivity and change initiative MUPS/WSA, and its monthly staff counterpart SDP. The second section thus moves on to identify some of the key antecedents of MUPS and therefore of OD in ICI, and considers what were the business, economic, social, and organisational pressures which led ICI to produce MUPS in 1965. Section three, “Dealing with resistance to change”, chronicles why and how the centrally conceived MUPS was rejected in some of the divisions and works, how it was developed and relaunched in 1969 as WSA, and the role that the Central Personnel Department internal and external OD resources played in shaping, and trying to implement MUPS, WSA, and SDP. The concluding part of the chapter, “The legacy of WSA and SDP” briefly attempts to assess the impact of WSA and SDP on ICI, and considers the fate and future prospects of centrally located OD resources in the aftermath of the widespread relief in ICI that by early 1972 WSA, and SDP had been formally and officially implemented.

THE CENTRAL ORGANISATION DEVELOPMENT RESOURCES 1964–72: AN OVERVIEW

As will become apparent in the chapters which follow this one, on the genesis and development of OD in various divisions of ICI, it is not always easy to be precise where and when an activity such as OD began in a company the size and complexity of ICI. This general problem of identifying points of birth for activities is compounded in this case by the indefinitiveness of the term OD, and by the fact that different people began to use the phrase OD to signify rather different things at different points in time. There is the added problem that by the time the term OD began to have more general use in ICI it had also acquired a variety of negative stereotypes, so that some of its earliest proponents and users had to desist describing their work as OD if indeed they wished to carry on developing the ideas, frames of reference and techniques they would previously have described as OD.

As I pointed out in Chapter 1, the term OD appears to date from work carried out in the United States in the late 1950s. The term organisation development was probably not being used by the specialists who were associated with it in ICI until around 1969 or 1970. But as early as 1963 and 1964 a few personnel people in the company began to hear of ideas about motivation, leadership, and group behaviour at work which were associated with mainly American academics, who variously called themselves, or were labelled, social or behavioural scientists. Some of these American behavioural scientists were already, or went on to become, prominent external OD consultants.

In spite of the fact that not even its proponents would have described their work as OD before 1969, and that behavioural science was the more common term used in ICI throughout the mid and late 1960s, I date the beginnings of OD in the company as 1964 for two main reasons. First of all, in 1964 ICI set up a wages structure panel led by a deputy chairman of Fibres Division, C.I. Rutherford, which in January 1965 produced the Rutherford Report, which started off the chain of events that in 1965 led to the MUPS productivity bargain. MUPS, and then WSA and SDP, provided the main initial vehicle for the behavioural sciences and OD in ICI, and the Central Personnel Department (CPD) in Millbank provided OD with its early home. During the period 1965 to 1971 when first MUPS and then WSA were in negotiation, the always shifting, informal group of people in CPD associated with OD, busied themselves as a subset of the company resources devoted to implementing these productivity bargains. It was, therefore, only after 1971 that central OD had to find an independent role for itself.

The second reason for using 1964 as the starting point for OD in ICI is that 1964 was the year when the first of the well-known American behavioural scientists visited ICI. During 1963 the head of the small research and development section of CPD, accompanied by an assistant works manager from Dyestuffs Division, visited the United States “for the purposes of assessing for the management of ICI the implications of the work of Professor Douglas McGregor and others in schools of industrial management, and the applications of their ideas in some of the larger firms in the United States”. One of several recommendations coming out of this visit to the United States was that “Professor McGregor should be retained by ICI as a consultant on the development of management's basic strategy, and on the application of social science findings generally to management problems”. Before McGregor arrived in England he was visited by George Bridge of Agricultural Division. Bridge, as we shall see, was a critical figure in the development and implementation of ICI personnel policies and practices over the period 1964–74.

Douglas McGregor managed just one 2-week visit to ICI before his death. In September 1964 he visited Paints, Agricultural, Nobel, and Mond Divisions, and had time for discussions with senior managers of CPD, and the chairman and a number of main board directors. In spite of McGregor's brief contact with ICI, he was able to assist those in ICI pushing for changes in working practices and in managerial style to structure and legitimate their arguments for change, and to give added confidence to those preparing the Rutherford Report.

With the Rutherford Report published in January 1965, and its recommendations accepted by the main board in February 1965, there remained the question of negotiations centrally with the ICI signatory unions. Agreement was reached with the national officials of the trade unions in October 1965 and all those centrally involved hoped for an early start in implementing the productivity bargain at the designated trial sites. In fact by December 1968 only 5% of the ICI work force was covered by MUPS and discussions were still proceeding slowly in 12 works. ICI's central change initiative ran into the well-known problem of resistance to change from individuals and groups on the management and union side who had not been involved in its conception and design.

Throughout 1966 and 1967 MUPS faltered as the craft unions in particular on the big sites such as Billingham and Wilton in the north-east of England refused to co-operate. In late 1967 the first stage of breaking the pattern of MUPS declining fortunes came with the appointment of George Bridge as Manager: Payroll Employees in CPD. Bridge had been sent up to Billingham as Personnel Director in 1962 in order to create social and organisational change there. The period of his social innovations at Agricultural Division is described in the following chapter; but his task at Millbank was to breath life into the faltering MUPS. This he tried to do partly by his zeal, enthusiasm, vision, and political skill in handling his fellow senior managers and the relevant members of the main board, but also by building up in his Labour Department part of CPD, a Development and Applications Group to provide a focus for bringing in behavioural science ideas into the company, to help deal with the MUPS problem of resistance to change.

By 1968 Bridge had brought his right-hand man at Billingham, Tom Evans, into the Development and Applications Group – hereafter the core of what is being called the central OD group. Evans joined a former works manager from Mond Division, Stewart Dudley, who had been doing research and development work in CPD since 1965. Dudley was to become the central and continuing focal point for OD in ICI until his retirement at the end of November 1982. Two more junior managers with management services backgrounds made up the central OD group. These four had informal contact with the several MUPS liaison officers who worked from Millbank out into the divisions, and with the increasing number of American external consultants who ICI employed. Of these consultants one, Ron Mercer, was to stick. Mercer, who had been introduced to George Bridge by Douglas McGregor, had by this time acted as a consultant to the Agricultural Division Board, and was now invited by Bridge to assist the central OD group get off the ground.

Stewart Dudley seems to have been influential at this time in persuading Bridge that the joint problem-solving approach explicit in the process of operating the MUPS productivity bargain would never work even if the local shop stewards’ doubts could be allayed, for as long as the senior management in the works remained reticent and unsupportive in working in the more participative style that was now expected of them. Having clarified the management side of the resistance to change problem in this manner, and after a period of training themselves in the United States in OD techniques and behavioural science concepts, Evans and Dudley threw themselves into helping to design and then run a series of workshops for works managers and assistant managers. Between 1968 and 1970, over the period in fact in which Bridge and others had to abandon MUPS and finally reach agreement with the trade unions on the more acceptable WSA, some 500 managers and assistant managers – “the key climate setters”, attended these workshops. The workshops not only focused on problems associated with MUPS/WSA implementation, but tried to emphasise both the part that workshop members played in creating resistance to change, and through a variety of experiential exercises, exposed the works managers to group dynamics and associated behavioural science ideas. A related strategy of trying to influence divisional directors so as to provide support for the works managers does not seem to have been as successful as the work done with climate-setters at the works level.

In parallel with the workshops for works managers, and the attempt to influence divisional directors, a third strategy was used. This was the attempt to develop internal OD consultants within the divisions. This strategy did not have a lot of impact on the relatively short-run problems of implementing WSA – it was a rather late and low-level intervention for that. However, it had a considerable impact on the evolution of OD in the company. The two Eastbourne Events, as they became known, together with subsequent follow-up by members of the central OD group, helped form the ICI “OD network”, an informal professional association which provided moral if not always too practical support for many a doubting or beleaguered internal OD consultant in the hard times after WSA and SDP had been formally implemented.

The final major intervention carried out by the central OD group was to design and implement the ill-favoured, and some have said ill-conceived, Staff Development Programme (SDP). One effect of MUPS had been to erode the traditional differentials between staff and labour. Renegotiation into WSA in 1968–69 further reinforced this process, as the pay rates to be negotiated with the unions were significantly increased. SDP was ICI's attempt to deal with this situation. The aim was to provide a MUPS/WSA equivalent for clerical, technical, junior and middle managerial staff, a programme in which they could examine their own jobs and more productive ways of organising them, implement changes, and receive significant pay increments.

SDP was a massive intervention. Some 40,000 people were involved in 1969 and 1970. The central OD group designed the basic format and helped to monitor progress and provide assistance in the form of external consultants as well as by their own involvement. The more detailed accounts of the implementation of SDP in the divisional chapters which follow, reveal that the overall evaluation of SDP is very mixed. Some staff were enthusiastic, but rather more were cynical, believing that SDP was just a short-term device to allow staff to be paid more money. Worse perhaps was the fact that in 1970 and 1971 ICI went into one of their cyclical bad business periods, some monthly staff were made redundant, and some associated SDP's arrival with numbers reductions exercises. There is, however, no doubt that SDP provided a great boost for internal and external OD consultants.

These events, plus the Eastbourne training, helped build experience and commitment among quite a large group (perhaps 100 to 200) OD practitioners and exposed many more potential clients and supporters to behavioural science ideas, group relations training methods, and the use to be made of third-party OD consultants. However, this broad exposure also generated its share of opponents and doubters. The worsening business scene in 1971, the sheer exhaustion amongst many senior managers of finally disgorging WSA, and then the perception amongst some that SDP was a cynical ritual, drew the doubters and opponents of OD out into the open. Some of the questioners of OD and behavioural science felt the methods and style of training were too psychological, long-haired, and dangerous. Others accepted them as a temporary expedient, useful while WSA and SDP were around, but doubted that there was any need for continuing activity of this sort.

By the end of 1971 WSA was “in” – the survival of OD now became problematic. The mother-vehicle’s life was over. Could the offspring survive?

In 1972 several things happened. Bridge was promoted to be General Manager of CPD and reorganised the department to get rid of the split between Staff and Labour Sections. MUPS/WSA being over, the MUPS/WSA liaison officers and the two junior members of the Development and Applications Groups were reassigned to other jobs. In addition Tom Evans, a key link in the Bridge, Dudley, Evans development trio left ICI. So within a very short space of time the central OD establishment was reduced from six or seven people to just Dudley. The continuing story of the role of OD in CPD, and indeed at the very centre of power in Millbank, will be the subject of Chapter 10 of this book.

ANTECEDENTS OF MUPS AND WSA

Although from an internal political point of view MUPS appeared to many a surprised manager and trades unionist out in the divisions as an unwelcome white rabbit pulled out of a centrally located top hat, the need for a MUPS, and the particular form in which it appeared and was justified, can be traced back to ICI's long history of progressive personnel policies and practices, and the set of business, political, and social pressures which were closing in on ICI at the beginning of the 1960s. With their newly appointed Chairman Paul Chambers, the first non-wholly ICI career man appointed as chairman, in office in 1960, ICI began a period of for them radical business, technical, organisational, and manpower change, comparable only with the significant changes in organisation and people made around the beginning of the 1980s. It should be clear from the outset that although MUPS and WSA were ahead of their time as pieces of social architecture and organisational change, they and the other innovations coming out of ICI in the early to mid-1960s, appeared because of mounting business and economic pressures. After another period of incremental adjustment in the 1950s, in the face of a broadening set of linked environmental changes, ICI had to innovate in the 1960s in order to survive. As one senior manager crisply put it, in the early 1960s “the real trigger for change in the company was our competitive position”.

But what were MUPS and WSA, and in what sense might they contribute to managing some of the environmental pressures facing ICI in the early 1960s? MUPS and WSA are in the first instance most simply considered as examples of productivity bargains so characteristic of the economic and industrial relations history of Britain in the 1960s. McKersie and Hunter (1973:5) suggest a productivity bargain

involves the parties to the bargaining process in negotiating a package of changes in working method or organisation, agreeing on the precise contents of the package, their worth to the parties and the distribution of the cost savings between the reward to labour and other alternative destinations such as the return to capital and the reduction or stablisation of the product price.

The MUPS bargain required greater flexibility of working practices of both craftsmen and process operators in chemical plants, withdrew restrictions on the supervision of craftsmen by non-craft foremen, aimed to ensure maximum efficiency by getting the right man for the right job and then training him appropriately, and hoped for flexibility of agreement such that working practices would continue to change as other relevant circumstances changed. In return for these organisational benefits, employees would henceforth be known as “weekly paid staff, a new eight-grade payment structure would be introduced for all weekly staff employees based on a management-designed and controlled job assessment scheme, and a weekly paid non-fluctuating, single-element salary calculated on an annual basis replaced the complex miscellaneous part incentive payments which had made up the traditional wage packet. Essentially MUPS hoped to buy out restrictive practices and relax demarcations with a 16% pay rise. In addition improved benefits were stipulated for sickness, supplementary payments for shift and day rotas, overtime and bad working conditions, and trade unions’ existing spheres of influence would be respected.

As has been noted the centrally negotiated MUPS agreement ran into trouble at divisional and works level as much because of the manner or process of its design and implementation as the content of its proposals. But focussing for a moment on local objections to its content it seems these were largely from the craft unions, reflecting the greater extent to which they were adversely affected by the proposals. The three problem areas as seen by the craft unions were first of all concern over the flexibility of working practices and the fear that they were “handing over tools” to the general workers. Secondly the salary levels in the agreement were too low compared with comparable agreements in other firms at that time, and thirdly hostility based on fears of redundancy (Roberts and Wedderburn, 1973).

When, by May 1969, WSA had been agreed the differences reflected some of the above craft union concerns. The flexibility issue was clarified so that any fears of major or complete transferability between craft and non-craft were removed. Higher salaries were offered, in fact a further 7% pay rise on top of the 16% offered under MUPS. The job assessment system was also clarified, and more information made available to the unions on the marks awarded to different job factors so that shop stewards could negotiate more effectively.

It was agreed that no enforced redundancy would take place as a direct result of WSA, and ICI conceded the closed shop. Management also reaffirmed, perhaps with greater explicitness in WSA, that job satisfaction was an objective they were committed to as well as greater effectiveness in reconsidering working practices. Finally management emphasised the process benefits which could accrue from WSA, a closer and more mutual process of problem-solving between local management and shop stewards as they sought to use the broad framework of agreement and intent stated in WSA in order to redesign jobs, working practices, and rewards in the workplace.

It should be clear from the above brief accounts of the content of MUPS and WSA that ICI were using MUPS and WSA both to make productivity gains, and to try and change the ongoing character of day-to-day working relationships between their managers and employee representatives. As we have already hinted, these changes in productivity and managerial culture and style were desired by managers because of a complex mixture of business, economic, political, and social changes then facing ICI.

Commercially life has been fairly comfortable for ICI before the Second World War. ICI has been conceived in 1926 as a cluster of monopolies and nurtured under protection. Western Europe was left to IG Farben, DuPont had the United States, in return for ICI controlling the Commonwealth markets. At home ICI had a virtual monopoly in a number of key products from its old business groupings in dyestuffs, explosives, alkali, and nitrogenous fertilisers. Products were more or less allocated; they were certainly not marketed. During the Second World War and throughout the late 1940s and 1950s ICI tried in a fairly unplanned way to diversify into new fields – in plastics, pharmaceuticals, synthetic fibres, and paints. These newer fields appeared to have faster growth rates than the old business areas, tended to be much closer to the consumer, and with all the pre-war cartels now swept away, had to develop in a much more competitive environment than did the likes of alkali, dyestuffs, and Billingham. If increasingly competitive and international markets was a problem all of ICI's post-war business areas had to face, a particular problem that the newer divisions felt they had was reliance on the older divisions for supplies of their raw materials, and dependence on a conservative main board in Millbank largely stocked with men who had made their name at Winnington, Billingham, or in Dyestuffs Division. The 1950s was the period when the epitaph “Millstone House” was most frequently and forcibly used of the main board and the “mandarins” in Millbank. As one senior manager based in Millbank put it to me with casual understatement “what we just about appreciated at the beginning of the 1960s was that something was wrong!”.

The problems, however, were not just a function of more competitive and international markets, some of ICI's traditional strengths particularly in dyes and explosives were tied to markets (textiles and coal) which were declining at home and hard to expand abroad. ICI were also beginning to become aware that with the UK economy not growing at the rate of, for example, the USA or Germany, an over-reliance on UK sales would not augur well for the future. As it was, the big US chemical companies were already taking advantage of their much bigger domestic markets to produce larger, and more capital-intensive, plants than ICI. By the end of the 1950s ICI began to find themselves with smaller and less productive plants than their major international competitors.

Although the UK economic growth rates were not on a par during the 1950s with the USA or Germany, the “You’ve never had it so good” days were times of full employment and therefore of a seller's market for labour. Full employment, a growing and more confident trades union movement, and changing attitudes and expectations of work and authority in a better-educated and more aware labour force, all began to put pressure on ICI's personnel policies and practices.

For much of the 1950s the above trends were masked by the general excess of demand over supply. It was not until the US-led recession of 1958 that this situation was reversed, particularly in organic chemicals where a considerable number of new entrants had helped to swell capacity. Thus, this traditionally cartel-protected industry was, rather suddenly, faced with a typical boom– slump cycle, and the mask was removed from whatever deficiencies had been developing. For ICI 1960 was a good year, with profits before tax and interest of £91m on assets of £694m, a return on capital of 31.2%. The following year profits before tax and interest slumped to £64m on assets of £738m producing a far from satisfactory return on capital of 8.7%. The returns for 1962 and 1963 were not that much better at 9.1% and 10.4% respectively, before a rise to 12% in 1964, and then the all-time low for the 1960s of 8.1% in 1966, when they were at a peak point in capital spending and ran into an embarrassing cash crisis. Not even the normally formal tones of the ICI Annual Report could paper over these sorts of results. The 1961 Annual Report openly talked of reduced profits, substantial falls in world prices, abnormal surpluses in the USA, a fiercely competitive export trade, and lowered profit margins.

The problem was, of course, that ICI did not look good in the difficult commercial times of the early 1960s when compared with their competitors. In 1961, for example, DuPont's net profit as a percentage of sales was 11.3%, and ICI's was just 6.2%.¹ Apart from these differences in financial performance, the other area that began to preoccupy ICI was the comparative advantage of their US competitors with regard to productivity. The leading main board figure in ICI most knowledgeable and vocal about productivity in the 1960s was P. C. (later Sir) Peter Allen, chairman of the company in the crucial period between 1968 and 1971 when WSA was negotiated. Allen had been a President of Canadian Industries Ltd., ICI's associated company in Canada. When he became a main board director, Allan spent a period as Chairman of the overseas policy group dealing with North America.

Although wages in the US chemical industry were twice the rate to be found in the UK chemical industry in the early 1960s, undoubtedly the US companies had taken advantage of much larger domestic markets to make larger investment in fixed capital per employee than ICI, and the US firms tended to place a higher proportion of contract engineering work and catering, and other services out to contract workers; nevertheless by whatever measure of productivity used, ICI came out looking less productive. For example, profit earned per employee in DuPont in 1961 was £2000, for ICI in 1961 the figure was £700. The corresponding figures for each company in 1965 were respectively £2500 and £1000. Allen himself is quoted in an article on US – UK productivity comparisons in Chemical Age, 23 July 1966, as saying rather sanguinely “as long as the US employ half as many people and pay them twice as much, it is not a dangerous situation, but obviously we can and should be doing very much better”. Later in the same article Allen went on to say efficiency of manpower in the US is about 1½ times better than ICI, allowing for factors like bigger plants, and more contract labour in the US.

Stewart Dudley also mentioned Allen's role in stimulating awareness in ICI of productivity differences with US competitors. Dudley confirmed that the comparative studies tended to find ICI employed 5 people where US firms employed 2. “The areas we were bad at were not process operation, but engineering maintenance, support services, and management. Basically our system demanded very much more work to maintain it than did companies we compared ourselves to. We were very much more bureaucratic. The drive to improve productivity came out of that”.

Before ICI moved to try and improve productivity through changes in manning and working practices they took a more established ICI approach to innovation – technical development backed by heavy capital investment. Considering the period from 1955 to 1970, 1959 was the low point of ICI's capital investment, while 1966 was the high point. In 1964 prices ICI invested £39m in new capital, in 1959 this rose to £56m by 1961 dropped again to £45m in 1963 and peaked to £134m in 1966, only to fall dramatically to £73m in 1967, after ICI was forced twice in 1966 to go to the market to borrow expensive capital. Although this investment brought ICI bigger, more sophisticated single-stream plants using at that time more economic feedstocks, these technical revolutions, as our chapters which follow on the divisions show, brought havoc in terms of commissioning problems. A critical consequence was that ICI's return on capital remained relatively modest for much of the 1960s, and downright bad in 1966 and 1967.

Aside from the above capital investments, Paul Chambers also tried, paradoxically enough, to instill in ICI a greater sense of financial and commercial acumen, to temper what had been assumed to be an over-reliance just on technological perspective and strength in the management culture. McKinsey, the American management consultancy firm, were called in and helped to reaffirm both a need for change in commerical orientation and in structure in ICI, and opened the way for an ICI Board Organisation Committee to stimulate both a move to greater accountabilities between the division chairmen and the main board, and organisationally a strengthening of business areas against the previously all-powerful functions. As we shall see these structural changes had only a patchy impact along the lines intended, and by the early 1980s ICI was still searching for organisational ways to sharpen market focus, top-level decision-making, and business responsibilities and accountabilities.

The other, and for the purposes of this book, the focal, point of intervention that ICI chose to improve its competitive position was to try and change the working practices, manning levels, systems of wage payment, and quality of management–union relationship in their plants. The above analysis of business trends has indicated there were strong competitive pressures for ICI to improve productivity. The two obvious questions to ask of ICI's eventual response in the productivity area was why did they choose the productivity bargain, and why did they design the variant of the productivity bargain described by the acronyms MUPS and WSA?

In choosing a productivity bargain as their vehicle to create changes in working practices and management–union relationships ICI were following a pattern of their day initiated by Esso's Fawley Productivity Agreement of 1960. They were also following both a national and an industry concern that unless UK industry improved levels of productivity compared with American and Continental Western European competitors, UK industry would lose out dramatically and permanently. On the national economic scene there was the beginnings of a concern with inflation amongst politicians. Some politicians could see that in conditions of full employment there was a seller's market for labour, which had a tendency to facilitate wage increases and stimulate cost-push inflation. In a buoyant domestic market for goods and services cost increases due to rising wages and salaries were merely absorbed into price increases. Further wage increases could then be secured on comparability and cost of living changes. These cycles of increasing costs created further problems for UK firms in international markets and adversely affected both the balance of payments and the value of sterling.

When the Labour Government took office in 1964 they looked to incomes policy as a way of curbing the above inflationary cycles. In 1965 the National Board for Prices and Incomes (NBPI) began their work. Now wage rises had to be formally justified through the NBPI. Wage rises could only be justified now by productivity increases, and not just as a result of cost of living changes and comparability. The worsening economic scene in 1966 eventually led to the imposition of a prices and incomes standstill. This more strictly administered prices and incomes policy meant that the productivity bargain became a much-used vehicle to relate increases in pay to improvements in productivity arising from increased effort and more adaptability on the part of the workforce. McKersie and Hunter (1973) note that prior to 1963, the Fawley productivity agreement practically stood on its own as an example of this kind of agreement. Between 1963 and 1966, however, 73 agreements were made, and after the 1966 prices and incomes standstill and up until 1970 there was a veritable explosion of agreements – 4091 in all.

The reason why ICI chose a productivity bargain is then fairly clear to see; they were caught up in a national and an industry concern with productivity, and national economic policies which tied wage rises to productivity improvement. The reason why ICI chose MUPS and then WSA as their particular variant of a productivity bargain is a more complicated story. Critical factors in this story were undoubtedly the competitive pressures ICI were facing at the time, the way that the new process technologies and plants introduced at the beginning of the 1960s were requiring a new level of skill of process workers and putting pressure on an old job assessment system, and a generalised concern amongst the company and the unions that the company's payment structure was over-complex in terms of grades, and over-dependent on work study-based incentive schemes and bonuses.

It would be wrong to suggest, however, that to some people in ICI MUPS “was just” a productivity bargain. The notion that it had aims and a social philosophical base broader than an instrumental need for more productivity was of course captured in the tide of Joe Roeber's book on MUPS/WSA, Social Change at Work. Roeber (1975) has adequately chronicled the progressive employee practices ICI has implemented since the days of Brunner Mond. He has also noted the gap that was beginning to emerge by the end of the 1950s between ICI's paternalism in the personnel field and its manifestation in certain kinds of managerial style, and the better-educated, more demanding, more affluent, and less compliant work force that ICI was dealing with by then.

ICI had always seemed to have progressive thinkers, from a managerial viewpoint, in personnel matters. Mond in the 1920s was certainly way ahead of his generation in terms of his attitudes and behaviour to the people who worked for him. Mond's successor in personnel policy-making was undoubtedly Alexander Fleck, later to become ICI's chairman, and to retire in 1960. Fleck had written the oft-referred-to memorandum of 1942 suggesting that the division used in the UK between the two classes of “workers”, “staff and “workmen” was arbitrary and should and could be eliminated in order “to improve the mental attitude of work people”. Someone who Roeber (1975) makes much less of than Fleck, however, and yet who was critical in terms of maintaining and institutionalising Mond's strain of thinking in ICI was R. Lloyd Roberts.

Lloyd Roberts had been brought into Millbank from the old Brunner Mond company to head a Central Labour Department, a job he did right up until the early 1950s. Roberts’ ideas on reducing a worker's identification with “class”, and substituting this with first a greater sense of individual self-worth and ambition, and then identification with his firm, are contained in a paper circulated in ICI, ‘A Labour Policy for a Large Undertaking’, 24 May 1949. The essence of this paper is a recommendation that the practice of joint consultation in ICI be more fully developed so that the idea of consultation between and within all levels of management, supervisors, and workers be absorbed into day-to-day practice. The Roberts paper also suggested that the hourly basis of payment of manual workers be gradually discontinued in favour of an annual salary. This meant the application to the manual workers of the principles governing the remuneration and conditions of junior staff. Roberts then went on to justify in more detail the appropriateness of such “a reform” at that time. His own words are important here so I quote him at length:

The adoption of any such plan as this involves an “act of faith” by any Board, but its boldness is its justification. Conceptions of the proper treatment of manual workers have become so stereotyped with the growth of trades unions and employers organisations that only a complete break with tradition as suggested will effectively secure the necessary new alignment of the worker's interests. The worker will learn that his own personal fortunes are linked primarily with those of his own firm and only secondarily with those of other workers elsewhere, and with the full development of joint consultation there will follow naturally a closer association and co-operation with his own management.

The ICI board were not ready to accept this “act of faith” in 1949, and neither did they wish to put all employees progressively on to staff conditions as recommended in the Report on Terms and Conditions of Employment (the Inglis Report, 1955). Some changes were made in the direction of offering staff status for all, including the bureaucratic device of merging in 1964 the old Staff and Labour Departments and calling them the Central Personnel Department; but there were still some ICI managers who kept up pressure in the system for staff status for all ICI employees in spite of the reticence of the main board for radical reform. By 1964, however, the right mixture of people, circumstance, rational justification, bureaucratic mechanism, and political will had assembled themselves, and there now at least seemed the possibility of combining the economic and instrumental need for productivity improvement with the more libertarian desire to create one class of employees in ICI, and a character and quality of satisfaction at work, combined with a more mutual process of problem-solving between management and employee representatives which would bring human relations in ICI into the 1960s, and prepare them for the uncertain future of what the 1970s would bring. The Rutherford Panel of 1964 was the bureaucratic mechanism which brought these various strands together, produced the offspring MUPS, and led to the birth of organisation development beliefs, activities, and techniques in ICI.

Having established the antecedents of MUPS, we now return to discuss in more detail its birth and fate, and thus the genesis of OD in the company.

DEALING WITH RESISTANCE TO CHANGE: THE BIRTH AND EARLY LIFE OF CENTRAL ORGANISATION DEVELOPMENT

The purpose of this section is to provide a chronological view and some limited analysis of the major activities and events in the birth and development of the central OD group. For this purpose conceptual elaboration is kept to a minimum, but a distinction is made between the “internal evolution” of the group and its “external evolution”. The internal aspect refers to the evolution of the group's membership, values, distinctiveness, commitment, conflict, and leadership, and to the intra-group and environmental factors that influenced these. The external aspect refers to the group's strategies of boundary management, its external sponsorship and opposition, the focus and nature of the group's work, and the evolution of the group's legitimacy in its context. The importance of this set of internal and external factors in influencing the impact and survival of internal consultancy groups was suggested in Pettigrew (1975a, b), and has been further confirmed in subsequent research carried out in parallel with this research (Pettigrew and Reason, 1979; Pettigrew et al., 1982). However, even with these concepts the major objective is still to tell the story of the birth and early life of the central OD group.

As has already been explained, the company productivity bargain MUPS/ WSA provided the crucial vehicle for the entry and development of behavioural science and OD in ICI. It could also be said that OD's association with MUPS/WSA also provided the seeds, if not the kernel, of OD's eventual demise in large parts of the company. But in the beginning at least MUPS needed behavioural science, and behavioural science in ICI needed MUPS, and when eventually WSA appeared, WSA certainly needed OD as a contributing source of ideas and techniques to aid its implementation. Behavioural science and OD thereby provided initially two functions in ICI. In the first place McGregor and then Herzberg provided novel ideas on leadership, managerial style, and motivation to help express and thereby legitimate in slightly more formal language the social and organisational objectives of MUPS. Secondly the developing set of ideas and techniques on the management of change in the field of OD helped ICI find and fashion decentralised processes of problem-solving to cope with the continuing problems of resistance to change to the centrally created company productivity bargain and participative styles of management now expected in the divisions and works.

Legitimating MUPS: a role for behavioural science

The previous section of this chapter on antecedents of MUPS clearly made the point that the need for a MUPS, and indeed many of the ideas and principles within it, had been around in ICI for some time before the broad outlines of the productivity bargain were acknowledged as a necessity by the main board in February 1965, and agreed by the trade union national officials in October 1965. The need for a MUPS was a product of competitive pressures, technological change, an outmoded and troublesome payment system, and doubts amongst a small subset of senior managers and directors in ICI that paternalistic personnel policies and practices, and in many cases authoritarian works management, could carry ICI through a period of social and economic change which appeared to be altering workers’ attitudes to authority and expectations of employment.

However, as any student of the development and implementation of strategic change will know, there is a world of difference between the development of a need for change in an organisation, people's differential awareness of such a need, their capacity to pull together an appropriate vehicle or mechanism to satisfy that need, and express it in a way and in forums where it becomes politically acceptable, and then to find the political will, climate of co-operation, systems, structures, and human capabilities to ensure that strategic change is successfully implemented. In the case of MUPS the gestation period that there was a need for change on the grounds of competitive pressures, started with the bad results of 1958, were helped by the appearance of a new chairman Paul Chambers in 1960 determined to give greater emphasis to financial and competitive factors, and consolidated by the bad results of 1961. Meanwhile the productivity thread had been given political visibility in ICI by Peter Allen's presence on the main board after a period of time in North America where he had been persuaded of the differences between US and UK working practices and manning levels. With a MUPS forerunner, the Esso Fawley Agreement, in place, an emerging national economic and political climate indicating that productivity agreements were an answer to contain inflation, the need for change and the outline character of the device to create that productivity change had come together around the period 1963. Politically and practically speaking ICI still had to find a productivity bargain appropriate for their organisation, systems, and people and the right arguments, political sponsorship, and language to get their formulae accepted first by the main board, and then, because of the centralised bargaining, by the national officers of the signatory trade unions, and then by managers and other employees out in the divisions.

The fashioning of the particular response of MUPS came partly from staff work conducted in the small research and development section of CPD, and then principally from the activities of a number of senior manager-composed wage structure committees, culminating in the 1964 wages structure panel called the Rutherford Panel.

The Rutherford Panel in total comprised six personnel and production people from Millbank and the divisions. A critical part of the Rutherford Panel's findings, again in terms of the politics of justifying this kind of change, related to the results of the so-called ideal manning studies. Teams of local managers were given the job of working out theoretical manning patterns for five ICI works of varying sizes, ages, technologies, and geographical locations. They were told to “assume there are no constraints and you are starting from a green field”. As Roeber (1975:58) reports “these studies were influential with the Panel – and later with the main board – and provided the solid base for their recommendations”. Apart from offering a carrot of cost savings at the end of a programme of change, they demonstrated in vivid form the high cost of the current patterns of manning . . . “an early estimate of savings from the new proposals, assuming a 15% saving in manpower, put the money saving for ICI at an immediate £1.75m per year, rising to £7.28m per year in 10 years time.” What this meant in terms of the politics of formulating strategic change was that the emerging consensus that change was needed was solidified by the prospect of manifest and tangible outcomes, if only some concrete change project could be got off the ground.

Backtracking for a moment on the productivity theme, the climate which had allowed the Rutherford Panel to be set up and produce their carrot of manpower savings had really been established as a result of the manpower studies of 1962 and 1963 sponsored by one of the Company's deputy chairmen, Peter Allen. Again as part of the process of creating awareness of a need for change, Allen had encouraged teams of ICI managers to go off to North America and examine working practices and manning levels there. Critical in terms of impact in ICI had been a detailed study of the practices the Union Carbide Corporation of New York.

Independently of these manpower studies, but again in 1963, the manager of the research and development section in CPD had gone to the United States with an assistant works manager as part of his own searching process to develop thinking about personnel policy in the company. This duo met a number of leading American behavioural scientists, including Argyris, Likert, and McGregor, and visited some of their clients such as DuPont, Union Carbide, Sears Roebuck, and Imperial Tobacco Company of Canada. They were followed to the United States in April and May 1964 by George Bridge. These two visits were critical in terms both of helping to clarify the broader management and social philosophy component of the MUPS change, and, of course, thereby to connect the behavioural sciences with MUPS, and bring McGregor and others into ICI.

There were a number of things that made McGregor and his ideas connect with the few people in ICI in 1963 actively trying to create a new management philosophy in the company. Principal amongst his attractions was his personal style and the interpretative and low-key way he presented his ideas. The research manager in CPD commented:

The thing that made me wish to invite him into ICI was the person of Doug McGregor. He was so basically sound and wise that I had no doubts that he would go down with ICI management as a credible person; and that he would be listened to.

But, of course, there was also the attraction of the content of McGregor's approach in The Human Side of Enterprise, his focus on the virtues of individual responsibility and self-motivation, and participative styles of management; at a time when, as one person put it, there “were worries among your university educated, liberal, middle class ICI manager about the inequalities inherent in the officers and the men”. Basically also McGregor provided a language that fitted some of the predispositions of the people in ICI pushing for change. The “McGregor philosophy” provided a framework, a set of principles to point a way forward that people felt was culturally appropriate for ICI in the UK, and yet couldn't express clearly enough on their own.

The ICI documents preparing the ground for MUPS are full of implicit and explicit reference to McGregor. One report described the essential task of management as a “process of involving employees in setting their own goals in their work within managements’ objectives for the business, providing conditions for the exercise of initiative and self control in achieving these goals with a minimum of interference from above, creating opportunities for individuals to take on greater responsibilities and scope, encouraging growth and development of individuals,” and so on.

One person close to ICI at that time commented that when the above kind of ideas came along around 1963, “they provided a kind of seed crystal around which the worries of some liberal ICI managers could coalesce. They also provided people with a rationalisation for proceeding forward to forms of organisation that were very threatening to traditional ways of doing things.”

Certainly George Bridge, who was not a traditionalist in ICI, found it a strain to convince some of his colleagues on the Rutherford Panel, and later he was to have even bigger problems with managers and shop stewards out in the divisions:

That was terrible, that Rutherford Committee, because you didn't have all the facts to argue against, all the logic of ICI over all the years – all you had was a belief that what was going on now couldn't go on forever; and that there had to be change, and that of all the options open this sort of way forward –and it was only a very general, thinking way forward – of co-operation with the unions, problem solving. That was really the key. Somewhere, somehow we had to start talking to the unions.

As it turned out, and again using Bridge's words, the Rutherford Panel “came out with quite a forward looking proposal . . . and it got through the main board to our absolute astonishment”. What the main board were voting for, however, was a productivity bargain to save fixed costs, not a revolution in the management philosophy and style of ICI.

After the main board agreed to go ahead with negotiating a productivity bargain, Bridge and the other supporters of MUPS still had the industrial relations experts in CPD to deal with, for neither the head of CPD or his chief negotiator had been on the Rutherford Panel. Bridge remarked:

After the Board agreement a central committee was set up to take the Rutherford recommendations further. That was pretty balls-aching too because nobody in Central Personnel wanted it. I remember meeting the head of department and he said “oh, you're not still wasting your time with that MUPS stuff.

These differences in the management view about MUPS, even between those who wanted to proceed with some variant of a productivity bargain, if not a new management philosophy in ICI, surfaced and further complicated the negotiations with the national officers of the trade unions. Bridge's recollections of those negotiations confirmed the caution of the trade unionists, and indicated what won through was the reservoir of goodwill ICI had built up with the national officers:

My memory of the meetings with the unions over MUPS was that they were difficult because the members of the management had different objectives. Some of us were reaching out for the stars, others saw it as a little move forward . . . It was difficult also because you were talking to some pretty old trades union leaders. You couldn't really talk these OD concepts. But they did have a pretty big residue of trust in ICI.

Trust the national officers may have had, but neither the national officers nor the central management negotiating team had the support of shop stewards or managers in the divisions. Crucially perhaps the managers neither expected, were trained in, nor felt confident in behaving in the more co-operative problem-solving mode that was now necessary.

What the company did was to say to the unions “let us sit down together in a problem solving orientation”. This was completely new. Nobody had ever thought of asking the unions to co-operate before. But throughout the whole period between 1965 and 1968 the management didn't really understand co-operation. They were amazed when the shop stewards in the trials works said no.

Having taken so long to gain acceptance of a need for change, having delegated the design of the vehicle for change to a small group, and now having assembled the political will to act in the productivity area, ICI now found themselves with a beached whale, a strategy they could not implement.

Rescuing MUPS: OD finds a clear role

For reasons summarised earlier in this chapter, and chronicled in detail in Roeber (1975), between 1965 and 1967 MUPS seriously faltered. At this stage Millbank was faced with what was tantamount to a rejection of the agreement by the shop floor and, except for a very few, by managers as well. Bewildered by the continuing strength of resistance, the decision was taken to try to stage a revival. The man chosen to lead the revival was George Bridge, who believed in using behavioural scientists, and who himself was a powerful, charismatic, driving figure. One subset of people under him in his role as assistant general manager – payroll employees, was the development and applications section of CPD, henceforth described as the core of the central OD group. Over the period late 1967 until 1972, coincidental to his main task of getting MUPS/WSA in, Bridge provided crucial sponsorship for the central OD group. He created openings (sometimes difficulties as well) for them and he took the bulk of the “political flack” that was generated. Behind Bridge's bow-wave, the OD group of Tom Evans, Stewart Dudley, and the two more junior, ex-management services men, pursued a quieter but continuing task, which had two central elements: first that the primary blockages to change in general and specifically in MUPS/WSA were in the attitudes of managers, and second, that the key to changing these attitudes lay in OD concepts and techniques.

So the period of central OD between 1967 and 1972 had three key elements: the attachment to the MUPS/WSA and then the SDP central change programmes, the attachment to a powerful sponsor, and the growing adoption of behavioural science and OD. As we shall see in this and subsequent chapters, this period was characterised by initial rapid growth of the scope and influence of OD out into the divisions, followed by rather serious reversals and loss of key figures at the centre which almost eclipsed the central OD activity.

The birth and internal evolution of central OD

The central OD group core activities centred around running increasingly behavioural workshops for divisional managers involved with developing local responses to MUPS/WSA, then on the training of internal consultants for the divisions, and the sponsorship and management of an increasing number of mainly American external consultants, and finally implementing and coordinating the monthly staff equivalent of WSA, the SDP. These activities will be described and analysed more fully shortly; first, however, there is the question of the birth and development of the internal character of the central OD group. In exploring the internal evolution of each of the ICI OD groups, enough descriptive material will be presented to clarify the origins and membership of each group, its leadership, core values and other distinctive features, and the extent of cohesion and commitment in each of the groups.

The birth of central OD was straightforward enough, it was part of the company strategy to provide works management in the divisions with a further rationale, together with confidence and skill in participative modes of problem-solving, to aid the rescue of MUPS. In 1966 and 1967 ICI realised they had a strategy without the capability to implement it, and their vehicle for creating the necessary skills and knowledge was the central OD group.

In terms of the internal evolution of central OD, what seems to have happened is that Evans and Dudley established themselves as central OD enthusiasts and gurus, and became a sort of left wing or behavioural wing of those involved from the centre. They identified quite strongly with the values, language, and styles of OD as well as with OD activity. This came from their American OD training and their continuing association with American OD consultants. Somewhat less enthusiastic and committed to OD, to their “right” were their own subordinates, and the MUPS liaison officers, most of whom had also had some exposure to American OD but had not taken to it to the same extent. Further to the “right” still were other members of CPD engaged in more traditional staff and labour personnel activities.

There was then the basis for a certain amount of conflict and schism in the OD group, and this was overlaid with their love-hate relationship, anxieties about, and dependency upon, their powerful visionary leader George Bridge. Bridge was the messianic figure at Millbank driving MUPS/WSA “for his own and the company's ends”, seeking “to revolutionalize the relationships between the workers and the management through MUPS”, and prepared to use OD as a means to that end. But even Bridge with all his pushing for change amongst directors through the medium of “T groups” saw the behavioural activities as sometimes going too far. The OD converts meanwhile saw some of his “political behaviours” as violating basic tenets of their new faith concerned with trust, openness, and non-manipulation.

There are three important points about these intra-group conflicts over values and style. They occurred to greater or lesser degrees in all the ICI OD groups, and have appeared in other specialist groups and organisations concerned with change (Pettigrew, 1975a; Freeman, 1975; Zald and McCarthy, 1979). The other side of the conflict coin is the establishment through testing and modification of a commitment to a set of values which are new to the culture where change is being attempted, and which provide a basis for the distinctive contribution which the group may make in the medium and longer term. Of course, the development of such exclusive values and their public proclamation through idiosyncratic language, behaviours, and activities may also create the kind of dynamics which lead to the stereotyping, isolation, and eventual demise of change-oriented groups.

As we shall see, in the main, the conflicts in the central OD were relatively contained, at least as long as the group were associated with the clear and legitimate task of introducing MUPS/WSA. When that task was over and the group moved over to the always less legitimate activity of implementing SDP, the intra-group and inter-group conflicts surfaced more, and played a part in the partial break-up of the group in 1971–72.

When in 1967 George Bridge left his appointment as personnel director of Agricultural Division to come down to Millbank to try and rescue MUPS, one of the first things he did was to arrange for Tom Evans to join him. Shortly after this Bridge recruited the two ex-management services men for the OD group, and made one or two new appointments as MUPS liaison officers. It was part of Bridge's management strategy to recruit his own men and to demand high measures of commitment and loyalty from his subordinates, so he could feel relaxed that the detail would get accomplished, while he did the necessary projecting of MUPS vertically to the main board, the Millbank general managers, and the various division boards.

Like many energetic and purposeful people who entered Millbank at a fairly senior level Bridge felt the usual sense of being lost, almost being powerless in amongst this highly divisive and power-conscious world:

Actually working in that big office [Millbank] it's a pretty miserable exercise. There's no sense of team. If you are in Billingham you can feel a team, and an objective, and a way. If you are in London, the whole thing is politics and problems – no sense of being part of anything. You feel you are continually up against everybody, that you are continually politicking yourself to try to get enough elbow room to bring your WSA through the Board.

Bridge, however, in choosing his own team could relax a little on that score. Tom Evans had helped to translate some of the elements of Bridges’ imprecise vision into operational reality at Billingham; perhaps he could play the fixer to the moral entrepreneur, now on a company-wide scale. Evans was very conscious that Bridge “saw MUPS as both a vehicle for his own ambition and a vehicle for ICI, and a model of what large-scale organisation ought to try to do”. Evans could also see that, so far at least, Bridges’ rise to fame meant being pulled up with him, and that as I suggest above, their skills were complementary.

He took me up through Personnel at Billingham. He took me down to London. For most of that time we had a very constructive relationship. His vision, he did have a vision, his charisma, and his political skills created space to go forward, and my role was complementary in terms of making things happen.

Bridge and Dudley, however, ran straight into open conflict. To this day Dudley still describes with great feeling his surviving those conflicts as being one of the big successes of his career and life. Part of the reason for the conflict was undoubtedly differences in views about what was necessary to rescue MUPS, part was due to Dudley's requirement to move from being a solo operator to being a member of a loosely constituted team, and part the fact that Bridge and Dudley had at least one developed personality characteristic in common; they were both strong individualists. Bridge had the advantage in the early skirmishes, after all he was the more senior and much better politically connected than Dudley. Dudley was convinced he would be fired within 2 weeks of Bridge's arrival in Millbank. As it happened Bridge merely arranged for Dudley and Evans to go off to the United States to be trained in OD at the National Training Laboratories (NTL) at Bethel, Maine. Interestingly when Bridge was interviewed he unsolicitatedly mentioned Dudley's 2-week deadline for being fired:

Stewart Dudley – his view was that I would sack him within 2 weeks of coming down. The reason I suppose at that time I thought he'd got himself very muddled up between being a works manager and the new stuff (OD). In fact I decided and said “well you can go to the States and go and try to learn what the hell it is you're talking about, and then we'll see where we go from there”. And he went to the States and he came back and he played the part of behavioural science proper.

Dudley meanwhile maintains that whereas Evans and the others were recruited into OD by Bridge, “I chose myself. Not only did he choose himself, it was clear to him from his work during 1965–67 with shop stewards and managers that rather than, as Bridge believed, the problem of rescuing MUPS being a union problem, it was largely in Dudley's view a problem of convincing an unwilling set of works managers. Dudley takes up the story:

For Bridge it was “it’s all the unions – we've got to get them doing it”. In the end I just started working the other way, so there was a split. I was trying to do more things like the job enrichment studies, but do them from a management angle. I slowly won Bridge over to beginning to allow some managerial things to happen in the form, first of all, of getting Mercer (the American consultant) in to work alongside us in central OD.

Eventually Bridge and Dudley's relationship stabilised, and after Evans and Dudley had returned from their American training, Dudley and Evans “made a very strong pairing and worked very well together”. Although Evans was the more senior of the four in the development and applications section he acknowledged that “it wasn't led. We came to the conclusion that we were a pair of senior partners and a pair of junior partners. Apart from training type things we didn't do much work together”.

During late 1968 and well into 1969 Bridge was tied up politically trying to get WSA through the main board, then reach agreement with the unions, and eventually help tackle the hard nut to crack of Wilton resistance. In this period Evans and Dudley had more and more contact with OD ideas and American OD consultants as they all sought to get the workshops for ICI management off the ground. By this time it was becoming clearer which of the development and applications group, and which of the MUPS liaison officers, were prepared to take on board, and proclaim their values as being OD men.

George Bridge continued his socialisation strategy of sending all the central OD group over to the States for 2 months’ training. He commented that there “were huge difference in their reaction to it. For example, Smith came back, he'd learned a tremendous lot but being very clear about the things he thought were absolute balls. Whereas Tom [Evans] tended to go bingo, right over.”

Evans when interviewed was prepared to acknowledge that in ICI in the late 1960s it was a time “when we felt that we had better and different values than others, but I don't think they were . . . I know some people found some of my values difficult. I am basically optimistic and in favour of the individual and I'm basically off organisation. I'm in favour of the underdog not the boss”. Dudley recognised that there was “never a group proclamation of values, but there were lots of individual proclamations” – including his own. Dudley said:

Yes the values were distinctive. Things around the dignity of the human being. We saw organisations and roles as debasing human dignity . . . We would have very, very simplistic and ill-defined visions of the future. We would have values about openness of communication. We had values about job satisfaction particularly at lower levels in the organisation.

On top of these distinctive values Evans and Dudley also admitted using “the same shorthand, we got it from the same NTL Training programme, and reading the same things, this was difficult for others”. They also tried to set norms on their own training programmes at Warren House of “tee shirts and old sweaters . . . we were deliberately different in our behaviour – to try and work participatively in workshops where we knew the managers would expect us to be authoritarian, and we deliberately used that as a learning point”.

George Bridge remembered Evans and Dudley's distinctive language, dress, and behaviour in more graphic terms:

Evans and Dudley turned up at meetings with the most outrageous clothes on . . . Tom himself became a bit difficult to fit in because you'd have a meeting and Tom would suddenly get up and rather ostentatiously lie full length with his hands behind him. Well I suppose in California this was great, but in ICI it was a little beyond what people could accept . . . Also from Evans and Dudley there was a huge input of jargon against which others in the Labour Department (of CPD) rather stood up and formed ranks.

There were then differences of language, values, and even styles of behaviour between in particular Evans and Dudley, and the more traditional members of CPD, but relationships in CPD were already complex because of the “two ends of the corridor thing – between the labour Department and the staff department”, and because of the “fraught” relationship between Bridge and his boss the general manager of Personnel.

In terms of cohesion and commitment the OD group certainly held together well during 1968, 1969, and 1970. “There was a lot of backing each other up between George, Tom, and Stewart. A lot of covering for each other, supporting each other, and explaining each other to other people when they got mad.” But the relationship between Evans and the two more junior members of the OD group was “more like a boss – subordinate relationship”, and between them and Dudley, in the latter's words “it never really worked”. But things ticked over amicably inside the group as long as they all continued to be active on training programmes and other activities associated with WSA and SDP. As soon as the inevitable vacuum appeared with the two central change programmes out of the way, a rather different set of dynamics came into play which caused the central OD group to all but disappear.

The central OD group engages with its environment

In exploring each of the ICI OD groups’ relations with their respective environments a number of broad categories of analysis will inform the presentation of the data. These will include the form and extent of political sponsorship each group was able to generate and maintain, the broad strategy they used for managing their boundaries, the range of activities they concerned themselves with, and who and where their networks of contact were.

To a very large extent the legitimacy of the central OD group was predicated on their association with MUPS/WSA, and their political sponsorship wrapped up in the energy, vision, political skills and contacts of George Bridge. As Tom Evans remarked, “Bridge was the knight on a charger. He was the man with the cause leading.”

Politically Bridge handled the two major interfaces, links with the main board and the divisional chairmen, and with the unions. As Evans commented, Bridge “was heavily connected at the top, first with Peter Allen (chairman 1968–71) and later with Jack Callard (chairman 1971–75), both of whom supported MUPS/WSA. He'd also worked for both Rowland Wright (Personnel Director in late 1960s and Stan Lyon (Main Board Director late 1960s, early 1970s at Billingham.” Being politically well connected was a necessary but not a sufficient condition for influence at Millbank, Bridge still had to drive and push against all the forces of inertia in ICI. Life at Millbank was “all politics and problems”. Bridges’ zeal was a measure of ICI's inertia at first, but in the long term his forcefulness and desire for change created enemies. Bridge takes up the story:

I had a strong feeling inside me, and a sort of stubborness-zeal. Unless you really feel something like this at some point there's got to be one man –not entirely alone, but I think I certainly was the centre. I was able to convince Peter Allen and Rowland Wright. I certainly wasn't able to carry all division chairmen but I was able to carry a lot of them . . . Unless there's somebody there who will drive and drive and drive, it will not happen – someone who cannot and will not take no for an answer . . . It does tend to drag (in ICI). Things are always tending in a large organisation to get into a routine. People like to be comfortable and this is a very, very uncomfortable procedure. There's got to be tension and crises otherwise everything is slipping back again.

Bridge’s energy, risk taking, and intuitive political skills generated respect not just from his old colleague Evans, but also the much more sceptical and wary figure of Dudley. Evans commented that Bridge “saw things in a massive scale and in brilliantly instinctive ways, saw what was necessary to make them happen. It wasn't infallible but it didn't desert him in any of the major crises.” Dudley's admiration for Bridge, for personal reasons, was more grudging and controlled:

In the early MUPS/WSA times Bridge was a great help. Once that is we were through the initial problems of him trying to throw me out . . . But he did lots of very good things. He produced a focus, he produced charismatic speeches and talks; he'd take ridiculous bloody risks, he'd got no sense of potential failure. So yes he was great at times.

With Bridge's lines of support into the main board established if not always secure, his main problems in 1968 were “the resistance of the AUEW, particularly the new leader, Len Edmundson who had not been involved in the building of MUPS, and the resistance of sites, particularly Wilton”. The huge manufacturing site at Wilton was a thorn in ICI's side in the late 1960s not only because Wilton was the focal point of union resistance against MUPS and WSA, but also because the management there were so obviously not managing the site –they were too preoccupied with their own works and division. A fuller story of the Wilton site's problems and how they were tackled will be presented in Chapter 7 of this book. For the moment it is important to note that Bridge was instrumental in persuading first Jack Callard, who in turn persuaded Peter Allen, to set up the review of management activities on the site, known as the Callard Committee, and that Bridge and the then chairman of Heavy Organic Chemicals Division (the “landlord” of the Wilton site) fought hard over the form and character of MUPS. Bridge commented on the Wilton problems in these terms:

Why I'd got so excited was that the chairman of HOC decided that MUPS was not going to work and he produced what he called “mini MUPS”. And just before I went down to London, he'd got this through Central Personnel I fought it tooth and nail. I said “you’re not going to have mini MUPS. You're going to have one personnel policy in ICI and that's it”. So we were absolutely toe to toe over it.

Bridge won that battle with the chairman of HOC, but was on the losing side when they clashed again in 1974.

Bridge by early 1969 was of the opinion that no more life could be breathed into MUPS and if his vision of new working relationships between management and unions in ICI were to be reality he had to find another vehicle. This, of course, was WSA. The differences in content between the MUPS and WSA agreements were described on page 92. Bridge considered “there was no fundamental difference in principle between MUPS and WSA”, the essential difference this time was to be in the process of formulating and reaching agreement on the character of the change. Thus Bridge said:

The major difference were things like it had to come from the bottom up. We couldn't impose it from the top. The words had to be written in a very different way. And the consultation had to come now.

But the other great piece of learning that had come out of the MUPS failure was the lack of management preparedness. One of Dudley's contributions of this period had been to persuade Bridge of this fact. Bridge again comments:

One of the great sadnesses was: The original MUPS agreement had a covering note which was really driving at management, that the whole of management must be concentrating on the philosophy behind it, and how they might move when the time came. And nobody did a bloody thing about it. That was our failure. It seemed to me that the management had a long time and they never prepared themselves. So when WSA came on they had a hell of a lot to catch up.

One of the contributions of the central OD group from mid-1968 onwards was to help facilitate the process of management catching up. Their prime vehicles for doing this were the Warren House workshops for senior works managers. The first of these was in June 1968. By the time WSA was agreed in May 1969, the management were better prepared to handle WSA than they had been MUPS. Again Bridge's sponsorship left Evans and Dudley with a clear run to get up and carry through the influencing of the “key climate setters” as they were called from the works. Evans had this to say in summary about Bridge's broad success in creating the political climate for them to get on with the operational OD activities:

But with having Bridge around, with MUPS and WSA, their visibility, his access to the main board, and their support, you didn't need many other hidden sponsors. You know they said to Bridge – “if you want all the works managers in ICI through the course at Warren House, have’em”. The effort as a whole didn't need more sponsors.

At least the OD effort didn't need any more sponsors for as long as the main board needed Bridge to drive through MUPS/WSA, and SDP. After the implementation of those programmes, the OD groups’ singular reliance on the activities of MUPS/WSA and SDP for legitimacy, and the main board – Bridge connection for political sponsorship proved to be near fatal. But the years 1968, 1969, and 1970 found the OD unit preoccupied with the short-term and compelling activities of the Warren House workshops, the Eastbourne development activities for internal OD consultants, and the afterthought of SDP.

Internal and external OD consultant activities

Although the preceding section has emphasised the extent to which the group I am characterising as the central OD group were dependent on the legitimacy provided by MUPS/WSA, and the political sponsorship of George Bridge, in Dudley's words the “central OD group was never given an organisational position. It has always maintained a roving commission.” By that he meant both that it did not exist formally as a designated unit on the organisation chart with a formal remit, and that its membership of the development and applications section of CPD, some of the MUPS/WSA liaison officers, and the increasing band of American consultants, was to a large extent self-selected. The other thing to be clear about was that Evans, Dudley, and the others’ networks of contact and relationships were largely outside Millbank. As Dudley said “I used to spend 75% of my time out in divisions or on workshops.”

The workshops Dudley was referring to were the Warren House workshops; these were the core of the OD group's activities in the period 1968–70. Faced with management and union resistance to MUPS, Dudley and Evans approached some well-known American consultants for their help and assistance. They worked with a small group of people in ICI to help them diagnose what lay behind this resistance to change. After much discussion a new-style training workshop was mounted to help managers diagnose why change was being resisted (including their own part in this resistance) and to supply them with information and help them generate plans for overcoming the resistance. (Eventually between 500 and 600 managers participated in these week-long workshops.) For many of these managers these training events were the first occasions they had been on a workshop as distinct from a course, where instead of being “taught” or “lectured to” they found their own and others’ behaviour and feelings in the workshop and back at work, part of the material for learning. For many of them it was also the first occasion they had been introduced to the OD jargon and message that the social process of doing something was as crucial, if not as crucial, as the content of what was being done. Writ large in front of their very eyes, the frustrations, failures, and to some the irrelevancies of MUPS, was the everyday example of an organisation being preoccupied with the content of outcomes to the exclusion of knowledge and skill in the process of achieving those outcomes.

These workshops were generally viewed as helpful and successful. They brought out into the open managers’ insecurities and anxieties about managing people and organisational change, about their fears of losing control if they got into open-ended problem-solving relationships with the shop floor, and concerns about their own skills in motivating and working co-operatively with their shop stewards and local employees. Thus these workshops not only served the manifest function of helping to introduce WSA, they also served the latent function of exposing a large group of important and respected managers to behavioural science in the service of practical ends –in other words to OD as it was now beginning to be known. In fact Evans and Dudley were rather taken aback by the requests that came from these workshops for consultancy services back in the divisions. The managers already looking for ways of creating change could see there might be a role for third-party helpers or consultants, as they became known, to support them with team-building and inter-group work with subsets of managers and shop stewards in their own factories. Some of this early OD work in the divisions will be described in Chapters 5 and 6.

Here again the central OD group had to learn and react from their experience. One of their responses was to encourage more American consultants to seek clients in the company; a further response was to work with a group of those external consultants to develop a cadre or network of internal OD consultants in the divisions.

The ICI OD network really has its roots in the two workshops run to develop internal consultancy skills for divisional staff. The workshops were run in 1970 at Eastbourne, with about 40 people at each, although the first one also included employees from Procter and Gamble, Europe; Shell; and British Oxygen. Both workshops were modelled on a design used to train internal consultants by NTL, and were staffed largely by Americans. The personal, almost psychiatric emphasis of the first course got a little out of hand at times and participants now tend to remember the workshops with the mixture of pain, awe, and bravado that one associates with initiation rituals.

The idea was to attract to the workshops people from the divisions already predisposed to OD, and perhaps already involved in helping implement WSA and SDP, plus a cross-section of people from personnel, training, management services, and line management roles who might be capable of going back and acting as change agents and third-party helpers in order to keep any change momentum started by WSA and SDP an ongoing and continuous process.

Tension between two groups of consultants with different institutional affiliations didn't help Eastbourne, neither did the great variability in background, skill, and experience of the participants. Interestingly, both workshops produced a split between a heavies’ group of participants who were for rules, order, and structuring of the learning experience, and a “thunderground” group wanting to experiment more and more with unstructured groupy learning exercises. For some participants this just added to the confusion and anxiety of the workshops. Some participants found the programmes an extreme experience, some of these were “paralysed” for quite some time after the event. Others were “turned on”; it changed their attitudes to work and authority, and led to questioning of their life styles, and in some cases tension in their family life, when wives and children felt left out, not possessors of this new elixir of life. There are probably more myths about the Eastbourne events than any other single activity in the ICI OD history. The divisional chapters will reveal more of what some of the participants felt of the experience and the impact it had on their job effectiveness. For the time being Bridges’ evaluation was “I don't think it was terribly successful. I don't think they chose the best resources from the divisions. I think they tried to be too much like NTL.”

Certainly there was no attempt on a company-wide basis to train another cadre of OD resources on anything like the scale or format of the Eastbourne events until the early 1980s, and OD was a very different beast in 1980 than it had been in 1970.

The last major activity that the central OD group concerned themselves with in the period 1968–70 was the development and co-ordination of the junior and middle managerial monthly staff equivalent of WSA, SDP. The reasons for SDP's creation at that time, the broad outlines of what it entailed, together with the very mixed reaction it received as a change process as distinct from a device to allow staff salary differentials to be retained, were dealt with briefly at the beginning of this chapter. The more detailed aspects of its implementation, and the views it generated about OD and central personnel policy will become apparent in the chapters reviewing divisional OD work which follow this one. Two further points about SDP will suffice at this stage. Firstly, although the central OD group was based in Bridge's labour section of CPD, and SDP would normally have been run by the staff section, the central OD group managed to take control of SDP as a natural continuation of all the developments they had made in MUPS/WSA. Secondly the sheer scale of the SDP intervention, involving as it did 40,000 ICI employees, involved still more work for the ICI internal OD network and their American external consultants. The diffusion of OD concepts, techniques, and consultants into ICI took a still more extended form, and with that extension surfaced more people prepared to take an attitude to OD, whether it be of doubt, support, or hostility.

One of the questions often asked about the ICI OD experience of the late 1960s and early 1970s was why they relied almost exclusively on external consultancy help in the behavioural sciences and OD from American academics? Why was a predominantly American approach adopted by a very British company? In broad terms the answer is supplied by the long history of ICI's American connections, by the technological culture of the company which meant there was some history and predisposition to be looking outward to universities and other firms for signs of innovation-led technological and commerical advantage. Not, of course, that OD was seen to offer any particular commerical advantage, at least not in the short term, but it was connectable to the image of ICI as a progressive and forward-thinking company on matters of personnel policy, practice, and organisation.

But why particularly was American help sought? One reason was that much of the early behavioural science literature was North American-based, and certainly attempts to develop and apply that work in industry under the flexible umbrella of OD were almost exclusively in the United States. ICI's pre-war cartel arrangements with DuPont and frequent and continuing interchange of information on manpower and other matters, as well as ICI's own interests in Canada through Canadian Industries Ltd, had all made it quite natural for ICI to visit and talk to academics and businessmen in North America. The visits by the CPD research and development manager to the United States in 1963, and by Bridge and his colleague from Billingham in 1964, had established the link into the major academic centres of behavioural science in North America. McGregor's acceptability had reinforced Bridge's early confidence in using Americans. Before McGregor died he had introduced colleagues from MIT to ICI. Bridge, aided by Evans and Dudley, who could by this time see where the demand for external help could most profitably be used, brought in others. Ron Mercer, the constant American in the ICI OD story himself also sponsored other Americans into the company. Bridge and Evans before they left Billingham also arranged for the company's first full-time internal OD consultant, a young American Noel Ripley, to work in their division. Ripley's activities in Agricultural Division form a central part of Chapters 5 and 6 of this book. Through all these various contacts a number of the ICI internal OD consultants received training in the United States, and eventually a number of ICI directors began to go to T-groups in the United States.

The number of American accents around the company, as we shall see, inevitably led to cries from line managers of “well, all that stuff's American and of no use”. Even some of the consultants became cynical about ICI's apparent willingness to offer work to anyone who was recommended by one of their American colleagues. One American consultant remarked that in the late 1960s ICI became well known in American behavioural science consultancy circles as “a pigeon for American consultants”. Another American consultant commented that:

If you were around at the time of MUPS/WSA and you had something that sounded like expertise and a way of helping people to become more participative, if you couldn't get work with ICI you didn't deserve to be in the business. I don't know anybody who is anybody in the general field of OD who didn't work with ICI at that time . . . SDP also produced a lot of work – but for internal people. As there was increased sophistication, there was less use of outsiders. That was a major change.

ICI tried to use some British academic consultants in the late 1960s but rarely with anything that they would describe as success. According to Mercer and Dudley the problem with British academic consultants was that they were too academic, too theoretical, too concerned with their discipline's problems and not prepared to openly commit themselves to helping to solve ICI's problems. Mercer's view was that:

The English looked to America for help and felt there was no comparable intellectual help, or rather it was over intellectual, classical business school type resource . . . They are seen as theorists, more interested in theories than improving profits. Not really collaborating. No commitment to really help run the organisation better. A kind of professional removal: “I don't want to get in bed with you. I am a consultant and I must maintain my Doctor or Professor role.” That's the perception that's caused the problem.

Dudley said ICI had tried to use a well-known British Social Science Institute, and indeed British university-based academics, but he and Evans “got disillusioned. Every time we tried our own very flimsy credibility was going down the drain too.” The individuals Dudley mentioned were either seen as “thinking too much in national change terms”, “researchers and theorists”, “too confrontatory and outspoken”, “standing 10 steps in front of management rather than 3”, or not having “enough intelligence and personal strength”. The British, it seems, were a complete wash-out.

By 1971, and with WSA and SDP “in”, the central OD group, in the absence of a collective perpetuation strategy, had a survival problem. In so far as the group had had a strategy that was wrapped up in the success of WSA and SDP, which of course had involved influencing the key climate-setting group in ICI of the works management, and spreading OD skills and knowledge through the ICI OD network. With a cast of OD characters, internal and external consultants, and the vicariously placed senior manager or director supporters of OD, in place, an after-the-fact intervention strategy for the company began to emerge out of the partial behaving of that strategy in different parts of the company. Evans described the intervention model thus:

The model we had was we wanted some of the internal consultants with a Noel Ripley, a visiting external like Mercer who did things at the top of the division, and a visiting Evans or Dudley from the central OD group. That was the model and I don't think it exists anywhere . . . because you can't get all the people there.

By the end of 1972 Evans had left the company, Bridge had been promoted to be General Manager Personnel, and Dudley was left as the sole survivor of the central OD group. How Dudley survived, along, of course, with Mercer, to fight another day, is itself an interesting story, and one bound up with the way they both managed their way through the emerging attitudes towards WSA, SDP, and OD which existed in ICI in the early 1970s. Those attitudes and ICTs responses to them are the subject of the final part of this chapter.

THE LEGACY OF WSA AND SDP

The scale, objectives, and visibility of the MUPS/WSA change programme attracted a considerable amount of short-term newspaper comment at the time the negotiations were in process;² since then a number of books and articles have reviewed different aspects of MUPS/WSA. In the main the Roeber (1975) book was neutral to positive in its evaluation of MUPS/WSA, while the TUC-sponsored Roberts and Wedderburn (1973) paper was neutral to negative in its tone. The Paul and Robertson (1971) account of the ICI job enrichments studies was overwhelmingly positive in its analysis of those studies, and the Horner (1974) account of the job enrichment work in ICI was overwhelmingly negative. From my perspective, Cotgrove et al. (1971) presented a very balanced analysis of the implementation of MUPS at ICI's Gloucester Works.

The fact, however that MUPS/WSA has attracted what might be perceived to be partisan writing is not the reason why I draw back at this stage from attempting an evaluation of the economic, political, or social strengths and weaknesses of those programmes. The reader may feel himself or herself better able to evaluate MUPS/WSA after reading the considered views of managers and shop stewards to be reported in the divisional chapters which follow this one.

In so far as this chapter is concluding with a partial review of MUPS/WSA and SDP it is because the attitudes to MUPS/WSA and SDP in 1971 provided a critical part of the operating context in which OD as an activity would or would not survive and flourish in ICI. The fact that by 1971 and 1972 OD, as a means of creating change, was in doubt, indicates that one of the more idealistic notions associated with WSA and SDP, that processes of change could be set in motion and survive on a continuous basis, was itself therefore seriously questionable. The fact also, as Roeber (1975:273) reports, that one of the major pieces of learning to be extracted from the MUPS failure was that management were unprepared with skills in managing organisational change, and yet OD had the questionable reputation it did in the post-WSA/SDP era, suggests how little claim the OD consultants inside ICI had to be considered as credible experts or helpers in organisational change. It is possible, of course, that the aversion that many ICI managers had to organisational change in the post-1972 period was not so much just an aversion to OD and change agents, but also an aversion to centrally pushed change they little understood or cared for. Maybe the ICI system just needed to stabilise itself again after the upheavals of WSA and SDP. Certainly it wasn't for another 10 years, until 1980–81, that the whole ICI system mobilised itself for a scale and intensity of people and organisational change which made the discomforts of MUPS/WSA and SDP look like something rather inconsequential in comparison.

But while I am sure part of the inertia that surfaced in ICI in the post-1972 period was a product both of a desire for a return to stability, now legitimated, of course from 1973 onwards by good financial results, the other reason why this was a bad time for OD was because of negative feelings towards MUPS//WSA, SDP, and OD itself.

Senior personnel people in ICI, while now recognising that “WSA may have been appropriate for die 1970s”, even that “its principles are inherently endearing”, can also admit doubts that “the spirit of WSA, as seen by the management and the unions has ever been fully applied”. Another personnel man remarked “if WSA was about transferring loyalty from the unions to the company then the events of the 1970s showed that didn't happen”. A further senior personnel man, also unconnected with the OD effort, remarked that the premise behind WSA was that if everybody co-operated in a growth situation then more money could be generated which could then be spread out amongst everybody.

Well first of all we stopped growing, so we produced it when it was no longer in keeping with the socioeconomic conditions of the time. And then people couldn't relate an annual salary increase to what they were being asked to do next Monday on the plant, so we failed to crack the motivation thing.

But the above criticisms, all with the benefit of hindsight, came from personnel professionals, the managers out in the divisions had stronger feelings many of which were directed at CPD.

One of the consequences of WSA was management in the divisions said never again, we're not having that centrally imposed sort of thing put on us again, it just produces exhaustion.

The negative views about WSA presented above need to be balanced by the views of those line managers, often from smaller cohesive works who, as one manager put it to me, felt that WSA “had set a tremendous example of what could be achieved by people working together in a fairly open environment . . . I think the company got a lot out of it, and so did the individuals.”

With SDP, however, the data from this research go quite against Roeber's (1975:184) view that “SDP was a success and that the success was achieved at a low level of energy”. Very few people interviewed in this study had anything positive to say about SDP, its impact on ICI as a change programme, and its contribution to the development of OD in the company. SDP was widely described as a cynical exercise to pay monthly staff another 15%, as being reactive, ill-prepared, badly timed, coinciding as it did with monthly staff number reductions in 1971, and as something that was done with the acquiescence of senior monthly staff to middle and junior monthly staff by “head shrinkers”, “trick cyclists”, and various other epitaphs used at that time to describe the internal and external OD consultants. One external consultant compared WSA and SDP in these terms:

WSA was a positive initiative to deal with some problems before they became problems. But SDP was a reaction. It was not part of the original plan. It was not thought through . . . and it was predicted by at least some organisational specialists, including myself, that it would be a disaster.

Bridge commented on the reactive nature of SDP:

In fact it was a bit of a scramble after WSA came in and the rates [of pay] were seen, and the staff got a bit jumpy as they were bound to. So then we rushed around and produced SDP.

Dudley remarked on how significant the union–management agreement side of MUPS/WSA had been to the fact that eventually things did happen in problem-solving terms at local level. Of course there was no equivalent agreement with SDP.

Therefore there was nothing to make it [SDP] go . . . Therefore when you had a manager who was a moral entrepreneur it went well. Other managers just went through the bloody drill to grab the money and get it off their backs. So it was really a pretty desperate sort of thing.

The strong feelings about WSA and SDP naturally enough were easily linked to OD. One external consultant put it in a nutshell:

WSA was the major stimulus for the development of OD in the early years. And the failure of WSA and SDP to produce the expected results was the major reason for the anti – OD backlash.

Strategy and tactics of using OD: some lessons of the MUPS/WSA and SDP period

The centrally driven change programmes provided OD with its first chance in ICI. The will “to make WSA happen was a political will by the main board and put into the hands of this powerful figure George Bridge”. OD then “became part of the means”. But when ICI managers became weary of WSA and SDP they became weary of OD; it was guilt by association. WSA and SDP “provided both OD opportunity and some backlash”. In strategic terms one of the lessons the ICI power system drew from the WSA and SDP was not to force centrally concocted strategic change on the divisions. For 10 years after WSA no major across-the-company strategic changes in the organisation sphere were attempted by ICI. The company went back into one of its periods of incremental adjustment, of evolutionary change. This pattern of adjustment continued until around 1980 when calamitous financial results in several key business areas of the company again shook the slumbering giant, and another, this time even more fundamental period of revolutionary strategic change, was driven from Millbank.

The people involved with OD also drew some lessons from the WSA and SDP period. They naturally reflected on the guilty by association phenomenon, and across-the-board change efforts and packaged training solutions went into sharp decline as a feature of the OD armament. But not all the anti OD backlash came after the implementation of WSA and SDP; there were doubters and opponents during the process of implementation itself. As Dudley remarked, “quite a range of middle managers were doubters in that some of the McGregor theory Y assumptions about people sounded unlikely to them.” There were other senior people, division and main board directors “who were genuinely not in touch and were out and out doubters”. There were also, of course, strong opponents of MUPS/WSA – particularly “the Wilton Lobby” as it became known as. Others opposed “because of the protagonists of WSA and OD – some people found Bridge very hard to deal with. There were some who thought it all an unnecessary distraction”.

A lot of the senior management questioning and opposition to OD was, of course, based on the assumption that WSA and SDP as behavioural change programmes was something that they did to others, that others needed, but not themselves. Elements of this view were present in all the divisions studied in this research, but “OK for them, but not for me” was strongest in Plastics Division. Attempts by internal OD resources to deal with this problem were easily brushed aside, and pressure from Bridge to open up the divisional boards by sending directors on American-based and run T-groups, while having the occasional success, also provided the senior doubters and opponents of OD with a focal point for their opposition. A division chairman at the time of SDP had this to say about the directors for T-groups intervention:

The enthusiasm with which T-groups were espoused was viewed as being weird almost to the point of madness. It was quite usual to be rung up by George Bridge and told: “I think it's about time you sent so and so on a T-group”. “Well amongst the things you don't do is to send people on T-groups (i.e. give them no choice) . . . but even now I can barely believe what went on – great big, beefy American chief executives rolling on the floor and crying . . . I mean really, to an Englishman far too way out for the sort of people we are or were.

But the T-group problem was just one element of learning about how to create change using OD resources and techniques. Strategically it can be argued that OD in the late 1960s and early 1970s was presented as, or was capable of being perceived to be, rather too exclusive in character. It was too exclusively associated with WSA and SDP, too easily associated with George Bridge and the CPD, too easily associated with internal specialist resources and American consultants and not as something to be used by line managers, and of course too over-identified with behavioural and psychological frames of reference and solutions, together with values which appeared to cherish individual growth and development to the detriment of organisational or sectional interests. Elements of these characteristics of exclusiveness were present in all the divisional OD groups and as we shall see in Chapter 12 which compares and contrasts the pathways of development of the various ICI OD groups, the balance between exclusivity and inclusivity represents one of the core dilemmas for the strategic management of specialist activity.

Returning to the fate of the central OD group, we have already noted that by 1972, Dudley was the sole survivor. Evans later described the group's demise in these terms:

We had a survival problem. That group was on a loser from the beginning. We couldn't require anybody to take any combination of us. It had no potential for survival except on this notion of collective credits for good work done by individuals.

Evans had been in a difficult situation to generate credibility without the vehicle of WSA. As he put it “if I worked up in ICI the issue of what I was going to tell Bridge – the power thing – became very important and made things very difficult.” But if he tried to operate as a third-party consultant down into the ICI system his association with the central personnel system and Bridge didn't help either. As he put it “I didn't have many clients which lasted much . . . I did have useful discussions but more between me and another OD person than with clients.” Evans’ long-standing relationship with Bridge became tense and eventually “I saw myself less and less central. From being an adjutant or favourite nephew of George Bridge to being very peripheral, and I didn't like the idea of not having an interesting life . . . so I left ICI”.

Dudley of course had the advantage of being able to project himself as an ex-works manager; this together with his carefully guarded independence from Bridge, meant that he was able to escape the label of being either an exclusively personnel or Bridge man. Undoubtedly the fact of Dudley's skills in maintaining clients out in the divisions, and the implicit recognition by the ICI power system that there had to be a central OD resource helped Dudley's survival in 1972. He explained his own survival in these terms:

I was an ex-works manager that they knew, and that was my base. I think I was able to establish that I was not just doing George Bridge's work . . . I was very much more effective at keeping clients out in the divisions than Tom Evans because he was seen as a personnel man and more as George's man too . . . I also avoided the management role of central OD – kept all that in with Tom, which allowed me freedom to operate and initiate, and maybe look to have that bit more independence in the system.

Dudley survived to be the focal point for central OD for another decade. George Bridge was promoted to General Manager, Personnel, and remained in ICI until 1974. Bridge's successor had these shrewd words to say about the use made of OD resources in ICI over the period 1964–74:

I now accept that the efficiency of ICI's expenditure on OD had to be low . . . because of the learning process that the organisation was and is in has to be slow . . . you are concerned with helping and persuading people to change.

¹ Source: Chemical Age, 2 April 1971, page 19.

² For example, ‘ICI aims to change attitudes’, The Financial Times, 18 March, 1970 and ‘Some spanners in the works’, The Times, 9 September, 1970.