8	The Change Strategy Without Political Support: Plastics Division

The story of ICI's interests in plastics dates from the 1930s although ICI Plastics Division was not formed until 1945. The division grew rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s on a host of new products for the construction, motor car, engineering, and packaged food industries and then in the 1970s ran into increasing competition, large rises in raw materials costs, and difficulties with maturing products. Unlike many ICI divisions, Plastics is close to the consumer and much influenced by a 4.3 year cycle of boom and slump. In the 1970s the bad years for the division were 1971 and 1975 and it was expected that the economic recession of 1980 would produce some inauspicious financial results. In fact, from worldwide sales of £748m in 1979 and a profit of £56m Plastics Division made a loss in 1980 of £35m on sales of £738m. Plastics Division, like its upstream chemical neighbour Petrochemicals Division, had also “fallen off a cliff, and produced not just inauspicious financial results but “intolerable losses”. The merger of Petrochemicals and Plastics Divisions which followed on 6 April 1981 was described in Plastics News, the division's newspaper, as “part of the fight for the survival of both businesses”. The fortunes of Plastics Division had changed dramatically from the heady and optimistic days of research-led growth in the 1950s and early 1960s.

The banner used by the new chairman and chief executive of Petrochemicals and Plastics Division to launch the new division was “innovation through integration”. The merger, it was hoped, would bring a single direction on matters of business strategy, raw materials utilisation, and product development by combining ICI's upstream activities in oil and petrochemicals with its downstream activities in polymers. Undoubtedly the merger would also allow significant reductions to be made in management costs as service activities duplicated in the divisions were pruned back and, of course, only one board of directors was necessary and not two. The integration of their petrochemicals and polymers businesses will be a challenge for ICI into the mid-1980s. Looking back into the late 1960s and 1970s it is already clear with the benefit of hindsight that Plastics Division's response to an increasingly threatening business environment was found wanting. Some of the reasons for their difficulties will be unravelled in this chapter – not all of those reasons can be explained by the harsh changes in their environment; there are also legitimate questions to ask about the managerial behaviour and organisation of the division.

Although the OD resources in Plastics Division often asked the appropriate questions about the division's organisation and behaviour, and throughout the 1970s came up with sharp diagnoses, neither the OD resources nor their message were perceived to be credible or legitimate enough to have an impact in the centre of power in the division. Unlike Agricultural Division, where OD had had the tacit support of the board, and at times the active and sustained support of a number of key line managers, and in Petrochemicals Division where OD had been part of the change strategy of the division chairman; in Plastics no such political support was ever afforded OD. The story of OD in Plastics Division is, therefore, not so much a chronicle of missed opportunities, though undoubtedly some opportunities were missed, but rather a story of opportunities that were never made available. However, within the restrictions of their environment and the ways they chose to relate to that environment, the OD resources did attempt to influence the managerial style and culture of the division, though some of their more effective interventions probably had a greater impact outside the boundaries of ICI Plastics Division than they did inside the division.

In seeking an answer to the more limited question why the limited impact of OD in Plastics Division, and to the much broader question of why did the division experience problems of adaptation to its changing environment in the 1970s, one has to examine the culture of the division and how that culture emerged out of the history and business development of ICI's interests in plastics. The purpose of this chapter is to present a narrative account and some basic analysis of the business history and development, and managerial organisation and culture of Plastics Division over the period from its creation in 1945 up until its merger with Petrochemicals Division in 1981. Having established some of the key events and trends in the development of the division's business and managerial culture, this contextual backcloth will then be interwoven into an account of the process of development and impact of OD resources in Plastics Division.

PLASTICS DIVISION: BUSINESS HISTORY, ORGANISATION AND CULTURE, 1945–81

W.J. Reader's (1975) account of the emergence of ICI's interests in plastics during the 1930s is replete with illustrations of the difficulties of championing a new business area in the solidifying structures of interest which had formed in ICI only ten years after its birth. In the late 1920s plastics was seen merely as an adjunct to the more established heavy chemicals businesses; its role was to serve as a market for the products of other business groupings rather than as a promising field for development in its own right. Spasmodic developments in plastics were allowed to emerge in the Dyestuffs, Billingham, General Chemicals, and Explosives business groupings but there was the fundamental weakness that the plastics efforts were “dispersed among the groups with no central authority” (Reader 1975:344).

One potential avenue open to break this pattern was to purchase one of the still small but leading firms in the British plastics industry. In the summer of 1932 Bakelite Ltd., probably the biggest UK plastics firm, turned down ICI's purchase offer, but in January 1933 the number two firm, Croydon Mouldrite Ltd, agreed to sell 51% of their capital to ICI. ICI now had goodwill and an immediate footing in the market. With this belated toe-hold into plastics ICI now started to tentatively grapple with the problems of organisation and co-ordination of their plastics interest. The realities of power at that time were that none of the chairmen of established groups were willing to give up their embryonic plastics interests and no-one at the centre was prepared to insist that they did so. In 1933 ICI responded to these political realities by setting up a co-ordinating body with neither executive authority nor financial resources, which they called Plastics Division.

If one source of inertia in the development of ICI's plastics business was the political interests of its existing businesses, another was what seemed the rather undisciplined way the small businesses in the UK plastics industry behaved towards one another. There was little scope for “harmonious working”, that is, price-fixing, so characteristic of much of the rest of the international chemical business scene at that time. (Reader 1975:347) quotes Hodgkin, one of the senior ICI executives leading their plastics developments in 1935, as saying of the rest of the UK plastics industry “there is no organisation or community of interest whatever . . . competition is keen, and at times unscrupulous . . . Prices are cut as and when individual firms feel inclined to do so”. A key way of handling these instabilities was to invest in research and develop new products which, for a time, could earn monopoly profits. Although by 1935 the ICI Dyestuffs Group had come forward with the major plastics invention “Perspex”, and in December 1935 the Alkali Group had discovered polythene the amount of research money going into Croydon Mouldrite was still very small.

Progress towards central control of plastics in ICI was made in 1936 when ICI purchased the remaining capital in Mouldrite Ltd and was further accelerated by the creation of a Plastics Group in March 1938. But “the vested interests of the established groups were not speedily overridden, and demarcation disputes, conducted with careful courtesy reached considerable heights of refinement and subtlety” (Reader, 1975:349). Having discovered polythene, “the gendemen with a taste for chemistry” at the Alkali Group took a grip on the commercial and technical development of polythene which was not fully relinquished until 1958. In the meantime, however, the Second World Ward led to gready increased demands from the electrical and aircraft industries for “Perspex” and “Welvic” and by 1945 ICI Plastics Division had been recreated, this time as a true commercial division of the company in anticipation of the great growth in the world plastics industry which followed post-Second World War recovery. The headquarters of the new division were located at Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire.

The period of business growth, 1945–67

The creation of Plastics Division in 1945 was associated with a change and expansion of the management group running the division. Grafted on to the staff of Mouldrite Ltd, and the ICI scientists and managers who had come into the Plastics Group during the late 1930s and early 1940s, there now came a strong infusion of talented chemists from the Alkali Group at Winnington. As we shall see, this combination of Mouldrite entrepreneurs and “gentlemen chemists” was to have a profound impact on the development of the managerial culture in the division along lines which inhibited the division's adaptability in the quite different social, economic, and business conditions of the 1970s.

The post-war growth of Plastics Division was based on a number of interrelated factors. One of these was the availability of a more economic way of producing ethylene than the old process which had derived ethyl alcohol from the fermentation of molasses. This upstream problem of large-scale economic raw materials availability was largely solved in the 1950s and 1960s with the production of ethylene from the increasingly large olefine crackers on the Wilton site. The previous chapter on Petrochemicals Division has described how ICI achieved further vertical integration in the 1960s by going directly into the oil business to secure their feedstock supplies. But if Plastics Division's raw materials problems were solved by the development of Wilton their real growth could only lie in their success in the market-place. Crucial to success in the market-place was skill in developing new products and manufacturing processes which could be patented and earn high prices and monopoly profits. All this was dependent on high growth rates in the Western economies stimulating the expansion of consumer goods, electrical, engineering, and construction industries and plastics products maintaining price, utility, or fashion edge over the materials such as glass, wood, and metal for which plastics were substitutes.

Plastics Division built up largish and politically powerful research and technical service and development departments which concerned themselves with the discovery of new products and processes and the modification of existing lines. By 1950 Plastics Division employed around 1600 staff and 2400 workers scattered around 6 works at Billingham and Wilton in the north-east of England, Hillhouse and Darwen in the north-west of England, at Wandsworth in London, and Welwyn Garden City. The division made a wide range of materials for the plastics industry, including moulding and extrusion compositions, resins, sheet, tube and monofilament. Its major products in the early 1950s were “Perspex” sheet, rod and tube, “Diakon” moulding powder, dental and optical products and materials, and vinyl chloride polymers and co-polymers. By this time Plastics had been given responsibility for the technical service and selling of “Alkathene” (the ICI brand of polythene), but polythene was still manufactured by the Alkali Division.

All this was, of course, still pretty small stuff in comparison with the scale of operations in the other groupings of ICI. In 1952 for example Plastics Division's employment of capital in manufacturing activities was only 3% of the total employed, as against 32% in Heavy Chemicals, 24% in Fertilizers, and 17% in Dyestuffs. But plastics was seen as a product for the future, and although the capital employed in plastics in 1952 was still small, they had 84 technical officers engaged in research and development while the much bigger operations in Fertilizers and in Alkali and General Chemicals combined, only had 135 and 138 technical officers respectively. (Reader, 1975:446 and 450).

The substantial growth in Plastics Division occurred in the late 1950s and up to the mid-1960s. By 1965 the new plastics, polypropylene and polyester film, had been added to the product range and the division acquired new products through the acquisition of British Visqueen Ltd and Marrick Manufacturing Company Ltd. Plastics Division, along with Fibres Division, also led in the early 1960s ICI's first move into Western Europe. Plants were built first of all at Rozenburg in the Netherlands and then much later production facilities were developed in France and Belgium. In the meantime newer and much bigger plants were commissioned at Dumfries, Hillhouse, and Wilton and older inefficient plants were closed down. Among the plants to go was the one at Welwyn Garden City and in consequence Plastics Division found itself with a geographically highly dispersed set of production facilities many miles from the Welwyn headquarters.

But questions of unity of purpose and integration of effort were not to the forefront of people's minds in Plastics Division in the early 1960s. In 1963 the largest single field of research in ICI continued to be in organic polymeric materials such as plastics, fibres, and films. Even in 1961, cyclically a bad year for ICI in general, and Plastics Division in particular, half the total value of ICPs exports came from the Fibres, Dyestuffs, and Plastics Divisions. The company Annual Report for 1964 noted that the demand for plastics materials was expanding by 15% per annum in the UK. Figures are not available to assess Plastics Division's levels of profitability in the late 1950s and early 1960s but interview reports indicate that profits were made, though made in an atmosphere where the excitement of new product development and of growth in sales volume were more significant than profitability as such. Two Plastics directors of the late 1960s and 1970s era had this to say about the business orientation of the division in the 1950s and 1960s.

In the 1950s and 1960s we (in the commercial areas) were a bunch of gifted amateurs. We did our own thing, we were very much functionally organised. Conditions were so much in our favour we found at the end of six months we were making quite good profits, but we were not profit oriented. We could have made much bigger profits had we been more professional.

When I joined the division (in the 1960s) there was a very strong emphasis on looking for either entirely new products or new applications for the existing products. The emphasis was on entirely new products or novel methods of fabrication. Now (in 1976) there is rather more emphasis on the geographical diversification of our products, making types of products suitable for particular markets, and a very considerable emphasis on reducing the cost of making our existing range of products, and that is very often synonymous with a greater manpower and capital productivity.

The 1950s and 1960s were halcyon days for Plastics Division. A senior director quoted sales growth figures in 1975 £’s from £14m in 1945, to £45m in 1955 and to £150m in 1965. The division became accustomed to growth rates of 20% per annum in some of its products.

Commercially we had a strong position in practically every product we made. We could sell our products, we had good products to make, we had pioneered some of them, and it was only later on that the pinch began to hurt. I suppose it was starting to hurt by about the mid-1960s, and then it gained momentum.

Throughout the 1950s and for much of the 1960s “it was always assumed the business was doing all right”. Growth and effortless success, but without very large profits, became the pattern of stability. Not many major new products were introduced by Plastics Division after 1965. The last really important product to be introduced was polypropolene over the period 1962–65. Even the process technologies remained substantially the same after the late 1950s and early 1960s breakthroughs. A technical director commented:

I can't think of any of our products now being made by an entirely different process. The processes have been modified to improve efficiencies, to reduce costs and so on and nearly always to produce larger volumes of output per unit of either manpower or capital. I cannot think of a single case where we have gone over to an entirely different process.

The above pattern of business growth with product and technical stability was, as we shall also see, complemented by stability in senior management personalities, organisation structure, and management culture. Before the 1981 merger with Petrochemicals Division practically the only change in organisation Plastics Division had to manage was the 1964 move from a functional to a product structure. Plastics Division was substantially untouched by the periodic adjustments in business area and divisional boundaries that ICI made from 1958 to 1980. Even the swings up and down of the trade cycle were expected every 4.3 years.

The earliest signs that “growth forever, profits forever” might not last came in the rather severer downturns of 1967 and 1971, but it would be way into the 1970s before those early signals and the ones that followed them were interpreted and then acted upon as indications of a basic structural or irreversible change in the fortunes of Plastics Division.

Maturing products and tougher competition, 1967–81

The story of Plastics Division's business fortunes from the late 1960s until its merger with Petrochemicals Division in 1981 is one of sustained environmental pressure and inadequate company response. Plastics Division, for a variety of reasons which will be explored later in this chapter, did not adapt to and manage the speed and complexities of the changes in their business environment as comprehensively as they might have done. But in searching for explanations for Plastics Division's difficulties the analyst has to go beyond the division's capacities and capabilities to manage change and examine some features of the business systems and organisation, and management culture of ICI as a whole enterprise. This will be attempted in Chapter 10 of this book.

However, what can be said descriptively first of all about the evolution of Plastics Division from 1967 to 1981? The ICI Annual Reports have shown the performance of its business classes (Worldwide) only since 1973. Table 23 indicates the pattern of Plastics Division sales and profits from 1973 to 1980. The Table shows that the bumper year for Plastics during the 1970s was the post-oil-crisis 1974. Although many industries were immediately adversely affected by the oil crisis of 1973 the worldwide chemical industry was not; with shortages of petroleum-based raw materials immediately after the oil crisis many firms were willing to pay high prices to build up their stocks of chemicals, but the stockbuilding of 1974 produced for Plastics Division very bad financial results in the downturn in the trading cycle in 1975. Thereafter Plastics Division showed an unexceptionable and volatile profit position until the losses of £35m in 1980. These losses continued during 1981, and were still continuing at substantial levels in 1982, eighteen months after the Petrochemicals-Plastics divisional merger.

TABLE 23  Plastics Group worldwide: sales, trading profit and trading margins (£m)

Year	Sales	Trading profit	Trading margin
1973	265	32	12.1
1974	399	70	17.5
1975	357	2	0.6
1976	538	42	7.8
1977	602	50	8.3
1978	625	39	6.2
1979	748	56	7.5
1980	738	(35)	(4.7)

A number of environmental and business changes have helped to produce the above worsening financial position for Plastics. Chief amongst these have been real reductions in the growth rate for bulk plastics during the 1970s, and an increasing number of new manufacturers in Western Europe leading to overcapacity and depressed margins. Apparendy the problems of overcapacity in bulk plastics has been exacerbated by undisciplined marketing. Vivian, Gray Investment Research (1980) have argued that in 1978 overcapacities in Western Europe in the manufacture of low-density polyethylene (LDPE) meant plant utilisation averaging 75–80%. “Such loadings would not in themselves have been disastrous if the producers had ordered their marketing and refused to chase volume at the expense of price. However, with 23 major European producers this was easier said than done, and the result was an estimated loss of £200m on LDPE by these 23 producers in 1978 alone (nearly £60 for each tonne sold) with ICI itself losing £11m” (Vivian, Gray & Co. 1980:64).

The chemical industry in the 1970s failed in large measure to appreciate the onset of maturity. In bulk plastics the 15–20% growth rates of the 1950s and 1960s were largely a consequence of high rates of substitution for traditional materials in the construction, engineering, motor car, and packaging industries. By the 1970s economic growth in the markets was beginning to take over from substitution as a growth factor, but increasingly throughout the 1970s the contribution of economic growth as a stimulant to the plastics industry was itself being undermined by the slowing down of the growth rates of major West European economies. With a maturing plastics industry, and certainly in the bulk polymers area, mature products, capital investment being poured into new plant by a combination of established producers updating their technology, and new entrants from cash-rich oil companies, and state-run enterprises more interested in employment than profitability, it only needed the severe world recession of the mid and late 1970s to expose the problems of the plastics industry.

TABLE 24  Plastics sector of ICI: goegraphical split of sales and production, 1978 (percentages)

	Sales	Production
United Kingdom	42	59
Continental Western Europe	23	15
Rest of world	35	27

By 1978 Plastics Division was a major world producer of three major bulk plastics in a maturing industry with great overcapacity. In terms of sales and production Plastics was also largely a UK and Continental Western European operation. Table 24 shows the geographical split of sales and production in the Plastics sector of ICI in 1978. But by 1978 more worrying than the geographical concentration in the United Kingdom and Western Europe was ICI's still heavy commitment to bulk plastics products with their mature technologies, slowing growth, and over-capacity situation. In the late 1970s ICI was a leading world producer of three of the five bulk thermoplastics. The three ICI chose to concentrate in were low-density polyethylene (LDPE), polypropylene (PP), and polyvinyl chloride (PVC). Again focussing on 1978, the above three bulk plastics products made a contribution of 52% to sales, with another 20% coming from plastic films, and a further 28% from specialty plastics. But in terms of contribution to profits the situation was very different. Vivian, Gray Investment Research (1980:62) have suggested that over the period 1975–78 the bulk plastics products of ICI “have at best been at break-even . . . virtually all the profits in the plastics sector, certainly as far as Europe and the Americas are concerned, have been earned in films and specialty plastics”. The conclusions in the Vivian, Gray research paper are corroborated in ICI's Annual Reports of 1977, 1978, 1979, and 1980. Referring to the bulk plastics products in 1977 the Annual Report notes that “selling prices were generally affected by over-capacity and were much below the levels required to justify investment”. The 1979 Annual Report said prices for bulk plastics “were below those needed to earn profits”. While these statements were being made new plants to manufacture PVC were being sanctioned at Wilhelmshaven in West Germany, and Hillhouse, Lancashire, and a new polypropylene film plant was sanctioned for Dumfries in Scotland. These plants had all but been completed when Plastics Division “fell off a cliff” in May 1980. The loss of demand and overcapacity in bulk plastics which had been building up throughout the 1970s was now accompanied by a deep recession, high UK inflation of costs, and a strong pound. ICI's plastics interests have been making losses since May 1980.

The story of ICI's response throughout the 1970s to the declining fortunes of their plastics interests is a complicated and fascinating one which illustrates many of the difficulties large organisations have in seeing and then adjusting to environmental changes when the weight of existing structures, people, and company and divisional cultures and ethoses are propelling them along predetermined lines. The contribution of Millbank to the evolution of Plastics Division in the 1970s, and the ICI main board's decision to merge Petrochemicals and Plastics Divisions will be dealt with more fully in Chapter 10 of this book. For the moment I shall concentrate on outlining the views of some Plastics Division directors and managers on the division's response to the changing business environment of the 1970s. These views on managerial response offer some insight into the management concerns and culture of the division, and therefore provide a prelude to the section which follows on divisional organisation and culture. These views also set a further part of the context in place for disentangling the what, why, and how of organisation development activities in the period 1969 to 1981.

Interviews conducted in 1976 with Plastics Division directors and managers suggest that the earliest signs that the heady days of business growth were being checked came in the increasingly severe impact of the low points in the trading cycle from 1967 to 1971 and then to 1975. A manager commented:

In the 1950s this division was on the crest of a wave with major technological innovations and profitability despite falling prices. I suppose 1967 was the first realization that things might be on the change, with 1971 very much more so.

One consequence of the 1967 trading difficulties was that Plastics Division started the process of consolidating their product range and more carefully scrutinizing new technical and product developments. Further impetus was given to this consolidation process by the even more difficult trading conditions of 1971.

One thing has certainly changed a great deal in the last five years [1971–76] we have begun to drop products. Where products are failing we have stopped making them. That is an incredible turnup for the book. I can't tell you what a revolutionary idea that is. It has forced managers to become more profit conscious. My boss here has bridged this whole period in this product and when he started his remit was virtually consuming as much propylene as you can from Wilton to make “Propathene” out of because that is a good thing. Now his remit is all about our performance.

But 1971 and 1972 produced a much bigger shock for Plastics Division, the trauma of enforced redundancy.

It was a time when the Axeman Cometh. What happened over about two years was a 20% monthly staff cut which was unprecedented and traumatic for a division with growth built in to it since 1945.

The man who had to carry through these redundancies commented:

It was a very considerable reduction in the numbers in the division done with a great deal of compassion for people but nevertheless a great deal of firmness, and we shed very large numbers of people quite quickly. At that time that was my job to be the hatchet man, it happened at a time when the former Chairman was very ill, dying in fact, and just before our present Chairman came in. I and the other Deputy Chairman were left to implement the policy over a period of about a year. It was a very painful year that very much had an effect on the division culture.

A senior director who came into the division in 1973 recalled the mood in the division in 1973 and traced it back to the business difficulties and 1971 redundancies:

This division suffered a terrible shock in 1971–72 because for the first time in their history they were finding business wasn't running their way. They had to accept a tremendous cut in staff and there was a period of major reductions and redundancies, forced redundancy. They had never had that experience, it had been one of all growth. When I came here in 1973 they were smarting under it and really the morale was low right across the patch. Everyone was in their little burrows with the ramparts up defending what they had.

These numbers reductions in Plastics Division were, of course, part of the beginning of a wider concern with manning levels and productivity throughout ICI in the 1970s. Several other divisions lost numbers in the 1971 recession but with the possible exception of Fibres and Organics, the two divisions with the most visible and continuing business difficulties, for the rest of the 1970s there was rather more talk than action about manning levels in ICI, at least until the worsening business situation of 1979 and 1980 forced ICI's hand. Plastics Division certainly stepped back from further redundancies until the very big reductions of 1980 and 1981.

Part of the problem in Plastics Division after 1971 seemed to be the management's definition of what the business problem was. While there was an undoubted recognition that the unbridled days “of growth forever, profits forever” were over, in amongst “a fairly difficult problem of profitability against a trade cycle which hits us quite hard”, there was still a strong belief in the growth ethic as the driving force for the business. A survey by ICI of future plastics prospects described in detail in European Chemical News, 6 September 1974, noted that longer-term growth prospects for LDPE, PP, and PVC are if anything improved as a result of increased oil prices. ICI forecasts of LDPE and PVC annual growth rates in the UK were still of the order of 7%. ICI described its own findings as “confident and reassuring”. The authors of the European Chemical News article noted that “the unqualified optimism of the ICI survey is unlikely to go unchallenged”. European Chemical News, 6 September 1974, page 23.

However, only two months later in the profile interview in Chemical Age, 1 November 1974, and under the banner headline “Plastics Growth will slacken but Future is Still Bright”, the Chairman of Plastics Division offered even more optimistic figures about the growth prospects for the plastics industry and ICI Plastics Division. “We see a large and expanding future for all the plastics”, he said, and while more selective investments would be necessary any over-capacities would be more likely to be periodic than continuous. Tellingly the Chairman concluded by saying “the division won't alter vastly in the next 10 years . . . It’s a vast ship already. New products will broaden the base, but major products will stay a large component of business for a long while”. Chemical Age, 1 November 1974, Page 24.

Further evidence that the above growth possibilities were not to be realised came in the 1975 downturn. A senior director commenting in 1976 on the previous years results said:

Until the last down-turn, the 1975 down-turn, we had always shown growth in every year, even at the bottom of the trade cycle. In 1975 really because it was an ordinary trade cycle with the oil price thing superimposed on top, and oil prices go straight through to our raw materials, there was for the very first time ever an actual drop in the production of plastics in this country as a whole, and in Europe as a whole, and certainly in this division. Our sales in 1975 realised less than sales in 1974.

And yet in spite of the 1975 figures and the realisation that median profitability (allowing for cycles) had been declining since the late 1960s, the director who made the above point went on to say in the same 1976 interview that although “the 20% per annum growth for products like polyethylene and PVC is very much a thing of the past, we are settling down to a 6–8% per annum growth”. Why was there a continuing belief, against a good deal of contrary evidence, in the persistence of optimism about growth prospects for bulk plastics products in Plastics Division throughout much of the 1970s?

One director argued that critical to the persistence of the growth ethic was the sheer momentum of the investment strategies associated with the belief in growth, and then the desperate fight to hold on to market share or increase prices once the new investment came on stream. Speaking in 1981 this director said:

In the late 1960s and early 1970s people became adjusted to a high growth rate and started to plan new production capacity. We landed up therefore with over capacity that caused 70–80% occupacities in plants. This caused producers in Western Europe to go for keeping their volume or market share, or if they had newer plants to invade others’ market share. Eventually by the end of 1980 all the Western European producers were operating at a loss. It has taken a long time for investment strategy to catch up with the realities of the market.

A further problem was that within Plastics Division there was this belief in the trading cycle with its good years and bad years. This belief tended to act to obscure the basic irreversible structural change in the industry and market underlying the movements of the trading cycle. A director admitted:

In retrospect the growth rate stopped in 1975, but started to hit us in 1978–79–80. You are trying to disentangle peaks and troughs that take place from an underlying structural change. The 4½-year cycle is there still but what you don't know is the amplitude; in 1980 it was horrific.

Another director recalled the significance of the trading cycle pattern in division management thinking, the continuing optimism in the division, and the increasing doubts at Millbank after 1975 about Plastic Division's business performance:

In its own terms the division had had a successful year in 1974, and then it came down. And then in 1979 it did a lot better. The division had locked itself into a belief that there was a sort of cyclical pattern of years. What was also true, but perhaps less well perceived below board level, was Millbank's view that Plastics Division had never really delivered anything. It was always “jam tomorrow”, it was always a bow wave of investment, there was always a bow wave of potential sales volume, there was always a bow wave of good profits coming, and therefore there was a disillusionment, growing disillusionment with the division at Millbank.

The growing scepticism at Millbank of Plastics Division's performance may have accentuated what a manager described as the wishful thinking planning processes of the division throughout much of the 1970s.

When you make a plan there's an awful temptation to make up a plan that looks good – optimistic, in the hope that something will turn up and you'll get it right anyway. Psychologically there's still an awful fear of being found out. It puts enormous pressure on people, plans will be sent back if they aren't showing enough profit. There's extraordinary pressure to produce the £35m or whatever is acceptable at Millbank . . . There was this enormous temptation to make things look better than they are.

These problems of perspective and business planning were undoubtedly compounded in Plastics Division by “a lack of divisional institutions” to sew the division together and carry through board decisions into effective action. As I shall demonstrate shortly in detailing critical aspects of the management culture of the division, the Plastics board did not operate as a team, and there were at times rather distant relationships between the board and the group of senior managers immediately below them.

The division was broken down very strongly into product groups which were very separate and the directors on the whole behaved at board level more like spokesmen of their product or function than people controlling the division as an entity. Hence it was extremely difficult to get things done on a divisional basis.

So the optimistic beliefs were located in a division where there were difficulties in stimulating a divisional perspective on problems and of carrying through actions which had divisional as distinct from just product or functional implications. These forces of inertia no doubt inhibited attempts to move out of the slower-growth bulk plastics into the higher added value specialty plastics, and to produce manning levels and a structure in the division which was less geared to the capital expansion era of the late 1960s and early 1970s and more to the mature products, overcapacities, and highly selective developmental opportunities of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Basically, however, in Plastics Division, as in Petrochemicals Division, until the irrefutable reality of the 1980 business crisis, people who had grown up in good times, and had optimistically wished throughout the 1970s for those good times to continue, just did not wish to hear bad news. This is one aspect of the human reality of big business which influenced so many large UK organisations, public and private, in the latter half of the 1970s. One Plastics Division manager put it, in specific terms:

It’s something about not wanting to be a Cassandra, not wanting to be a carrier of bad news. It's easier to manage when you assume growth.

Another manager commented that people did know the growth “wasn’t there but failed to make the connection between what was happening and the effect it would have on our business”. Another manager argued that it takes the unambiguity of crisis to produce real learning, the desire to listen, and the willingness to act:

It seems as if you've got to have a very stark, unambiguous situation about which there can be no argument before the whole family says Christ! . . . It ought to be possible to learn things by intellect, you have knowledge, you can see trends . . . But you've got to be in a position to hear, and secondly to be interested enough to listen, and thirdly to have enough understanding and awareness to actually understand what's being transmitted – and then to act.

A fuller picture of how ICI as a company acted in Plastics Division during and after the past 1980 crisis will be a feature of Chapter 10 of this book.

Managerial organisation and culture, 1945–63

It should be clear from the accounts of the business history and evolution of OD in Agricultural and Petrochemicals Division that crucial to explaining the kinds of business, technical, and organisational actions in those division was the managerial organisation and culture from which those responses emanated. Although, as we shall see, the organisation and management culture of Plastics Division was different in important respects from the two north-east Divisions, the same analytical connections can be made between the birth, evolution, and fate of OD in Plastics Division and the particular culture that evolved in Plastics. Part of the reason for what has been described as the inadequate management response to the escalating business problems of the late 1960s and 1970s, and the relatively shallow impact of OD resources in Plastics Division was the management culture and organisation of that division.

FIGURE 9  Plastics Division: top organisation chart 1962

In describing the development of the management organisation and culture of Plastics Division over the period 1945–82 a useful dividing line to break up this sequence is the year 1964. In 1964 following the recommendations of McKinsey’s, the management consultancy firm, the division's formal structure changed from purely functional to a matrix structure incorporating functions and product groups. Figure 9 shows the top of the division's organisation chart in 1962 before the incorporation of product groups.

Each of the nine functional directors listed in Figure 9 had their own functional department headed by a departmental manager and in many cases several assistant managers. It is noticeable that there was both a research and a development director, and an engineering and a technical director, but no marketing director. The home sales director had beneath him again the tellingly named sales control department. Plastics was a division, structurally at least, with a modest market focus. The two largest and most powerful functions in Plastics Division throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s were the research and technical service and development departments which were headed respectively by the research and development directors. The 1950s was the pioneering decade in plastics as far as scientific discovery and product development was concerned; this led to the pre-eminence given to research “and the feeling that the division was run by Oxford physical chemists”. In fact, the division was not only controlled by its scientists but at a personal level by a very small group of individuals who came into the division in 1945 from the Winnington Laboratory of the Alkali Group. These men, “the gentlemen with a taste for chemistry”, had been closely connected with the discovery of polythene, ICI's major discovery in the plastics field. P. C. Allen had come into the newly created Plastics Division in 1945 as its first managing director, so had J. C. Swallow as research director, and E. G. Williams as a member of the research department. By 1960 P. C. Allen had been promoted out of the division but J. C. Swallow was now chairman, and he was to be succeeded in 1963 by another long-serving member of Plastics Division, J. E. Sisson. This pattern of continuity of leadership was sustained by E. G. Williams's appointment as division chairman in 1965, and only broken by his death in post in 1972. One of the cornerstones of the Plastics Division management culture was this historical preeminence of the research function and the great stability of its top leadership group.

A number of important patterns of attitude and behaviour had established themselves in Plastics Division by 1963. The rapid growth of the division to about 11,000 weekly and monthly employees, the employment of large numbers of scientists, and easy business success in growing markets with new products led to an almost free and easy academic atmosphere in the division.

In the mid 1960s the division was expanding and had been expanding for 20 years at a fairly steady rate. The style of the whole place was that there was money available to spend on any reasonable activity for which some sort of case could be made, that it was not difficult to get extra staff for any projects, and that promotion opportunities for staff with any degree of potential at all were really quite good.

This academic atmosphere was presided over by the triumvirate of the division chairman and his joint managing directors. Although “the culture at board level was very much a club, a kind of old-boy network” the club atmosphere was more obviously seen at Digswell Lodge, the divisions director's guest house, than it was in the board room of the division. One director recalled that it wasn't until the arrival of a new division chairman in 1973 that “a formal monthly board meeting was established”. A manager pointed out how even in the late 1970s Digswell Lodge was still run on “fairly snobbish lines”. If you're not a director you cannot get a drink – you've got to be invited by a director. It shows up some of the worst, non-democratic things.” The absence of formal board meetings in the 1960s encouraged a pattern of control by the chairman and his two managing directors, and created a habit of special pleading and other interest group behaviour by the functional directors. The exclusive use by directors of Digswell Lodge symbolised the status and authority gap between the directors and the rest of the division's management. These managers recalled how ‘hierarchical’ and ‘authoritarian’ the division was for much of the 1960s.

In spite of the division's concern with growth and innovation, the aloof and rather autocratic behaviour of the top management created an atmosphere of conventionality and low risk-taking. A manager in the 1960s who was later to be a director commented:

In the 1960s it was a non-risk-taking place. The division has always been cautious. If you took too much of a risk and it didn't pay off you'd be more criticised than if you did nothing.

Two internal OD consultants recalled:

There was a conventionality – and there still is. Very few people admit error or ignorance, or ask for help. Mostly, I think, the senior people see that as not virile.

Don’t take risks, don't do things which are likely to rock the boat or cause trouble where you are not sure what the outcome is going to be.

Asked what the concept of a good manager was in the early 1960s there was a consistent theme in the answers of technical ability, rational thinking, high energy, and compliance and conformity.

It’s a very intellectual division so the force of rational argument is a very powerful influence.

Somebody who is a quick, logical thinker, who is energetic and prepared to take decisions having thought things through.

You don't argue in public with your boss. You are seen to be supportive of the line, you know seniority in public.

He had to be deferential, intelligent, neatly dressed . . . shortish hair, and competent technically . . . Conservative, that is, not full of ideas for changing things and loyal . . . And low key, not emotional or excited or dynamic even . . . not too anything. The taboos were don't be emotional, don't feel strongly about anything, and don't just throw up ideas – you argued logically.

The above characterisation of Plastics Division management culture with its themes of scientific and technical dominance, rational and logical thinking, autocracy, hierarchy, social stability in amongst technical development and business growth, and low risk-taking and conventionality is, of course, very much the atmosphere at the division headquarters at Welwyn Garden City. Unlike Agricultural Division and Petrochemical Division whose headquarters were located very close to much of the manufacturing capacity of their divisions, the Plastics Division headquarters was just a centre of white-collar and professional employment. There once had been a small plastics works at Welwyn, but by the early 1960s this had long since closed. The absence of production people at Welwyn Garden City, and of any predominant trade union and works culture of the kind obvious at Billingham and Wilton meant that another potential source of influence to dilute the Welwyn management culture was missing. Plastics Division thus had its manufacturing facilities in the UK spread geographically well away from Welwyn in sites in north-west and north-east England and in Scotland. Not only did this mean that the production function was not culturally influential at the headquarters site, but it also meant that different sub-cultures built up at each of the works sites and contributed a further source of complexity to the management of the division.

Managerial organisation and culture, 1964–80

The above account has highlighted that from its origins the division's management culture was dominated by the research chemists who were essential to the new product developments of the first twenty years. However, by the early 1960s the confluence of a number of factors, some external to the division and others intended responses to those environmental changes, led to the beginnings of a weakening of control of the researchers on Plastics Division. From a business viewpoint the early 1960s brought much suffer international competition for Plastics Division products and with this came a realisation that marketing and financial interests ought to play a larger part than they had previously taken in division thinking and action. A key mechanism used to try and change the power system and values of the division was the McKinsey recommendation to move the structure of the division from a functional to a matrix structure. This decision was implemented in 1964 and the matrix structure with its focus on product groups put more emphasis on commercial and marketing aspects of the business. This structure remained with only minor alterations until Petrochemicals and Plastics Divisions were merged in 1981. Figure 10 shows the top part of the new matrix structure as it was in 1967. The figure indicates that compared with the 1962 structure the top box now included a chairman and three deputy chairmen instead of a chairman and two managing directors. There was now no technical director, and the production and personnel functions were combined under one director. Crucially the market focus was now to be provided by four product group directors, one of whom had deputy chairman status. Each of these product group directors had their marketing and technical planning managers and were expected to pull together relevant functional influences around their product objectives.

FIGURE 10  Plastics Division: top organisation chart 1967

The above structural change, together with the retirement in the late 1960s of some old-established Plastics Division directors, helped along the new commercial and marketing influences built into the matrix structure, and helped change the power balance in the division from function to product group.

The 1964 reorganisation – the legacy of that has been to more or less impose on research and other technical areas a better awareness of their commercial position, or at least their position as against the commercial position, and their interdependence with other parts of the division.

The technical people lost and the commercial people won . . . now [1970s] the people who are looked upon as the elite are the commercial and the commercial support people, that means marketing particularly, but also people like accounts.

There’s no question that if it comes to a dispute between a product and a function – I would expect the product to win.

I think the whole corporate philosophy has changed from being a centre of excellence in producing innovatory raw material to being an organisation that says we must make a consistent profit. So we have changed from being almost a university research organisation into being an organisation with very much a profit orientated attitude.

By 1970 things were much more dictated by the marketing department and the product group directors. Production remained perhaps stronger than McKinsey intended, by virtue of its geographical spread. Remember of course that the top box is also very influential.

But although the 1964 structure change shifted both the power balance and core values of the division from science to the market, and encouraged the up-and-coming young men in the division to see their way up the hierarchy through the product groups, some other core features of the division culture did not change, and this led to continuing difficulties both in making the matrix structure work and in formulating innovative, decisive, and cohesive managerial responses to the gathering business pressures.

Key features of the pre-1964 management culture which persisted for the remainder of the 1960s and way into the 1970s were the authoritarian, distant, and reactive style of management by the chairman and one or two of his senior directors, the apparent lack of cohesive working amongst the board itself, and the at times competitive and distant relationship between the board and the senior manager group below them, and indeed between the product groups, and the product groups and functions. Plastics Division continued to have problems as a human system which intruded on its capacity to act as a purposive and coherent business and technical system.

The chairman's management style in the period 1965–72 was crisply described by a senior director who lived through that period of the division's history:

The culture of an organisation like this depends very much on the chairman. When I joined he had his own style of management. It was a curious mixture of autocracy and laissez-faire. Decisions tended to be made very rapidly by him if he picked it up as something in which he was interested in, or alternatively he would say to one of his deputies you look after that, tell me what you have done. You got what was really a rather curious culture in a sense, this curious mixture of rapid decisions made in a very autocratic and non-participative manner with a good deal of delegation.

It will be recalled that it wasn't until 1973 with the appointment of a new division chairman that the Plastics Division board formally instituted a set of monthly board meetings and executive committees to help formulate policy and make decisions on a regular group basis.

Managers below the board talked of the board being “a difficult culture to penetrate”. “A lot of things are played very close to the chest.” “They’re a bit closed. I personally see it as a weakness because, they haven't resolved their own internal differences.”

A director acknowledged that there were continuing tendencies for the division to fragment:

There was a power game – the division was trying to fragment itself all the time. Product groups would love to be XYZ incorporated, nothing to do with this organisation. They kept saying the board didn't delegate enough . . . it’s particularly the mature products; if he was on his own he wouldn't have to supply money for this bugger over here – he could use it for himself. He kicks against the planning and justifying he has to do.

Another director admitted the division had never made the McKinsey change work:

One of the things which has worried me about our post-McKinsey organisation is that to some extent we operate almost as if we were 4 or 5 separate little divisions. We do not always find it easy to manage a situation when for example product A has to be cut back in sales, we really ought to easily be able to move people working on that product. Our structure is such that it is not too easy to manage that. When it was a wholly functional organisation then it was much easier.

Other directors and managers talked of the division being “role bound”, “there was very little cross-fertilisation”, and of board relations being “a bit water-tight, I've been clipped a number of times for interfering in function A or function B.”

Although the scientific and technical functions in the division had lost power the scientists and engineers were still formidably cohesive groups, and in the case of the research function were adroit at practising defensive styles of leadership.

The research director was absolutely superb at producing barriers of intellect that stopped people encroaching on what research did . . . He and his managers conspired to protect themselves against personnel or board policies . . . There were some world-famous scientists there, but a prima donna sort of culture which because it's strongly differentiated, had the utmost contempt for other cultures.

The engineers at Welwyn also “formed a very clear sentient group – I guess because they were surrounded by Oxford physical chemists . . . They tended to do things differently, for instance they had their own staff assessment scheme for a while. This almost became a bit of a joke, they took it to extremes, it seemed to me.”

But on top of the above signs of differentiation amongst the board, between the product groups, and between the product groups and functions, there were often clear indications of differentiation on hierarchical lines between various levels of management. A middle manager of the late 1960s era remarked:

Around the late 1960s there was a lot of talk about the cultural gap between the younger people, particularly the young graduates and the more senior managers and it certainly was an enormous gulf really. It was very difficult to find a common language at all for the people sandwiched in the middle like myself. Curiously it was the young people who were talking about profit all the time. I think what was being talked about by senior managers at that time was growth, and scale, and full capacity, and research-based industry. What the younger men were talking about was: wouldn't it be better to stop doing this because you might make more profit? Why don't you just drop polythene, you never make any money on it? They were quite willing to say heretical things.

Of course the conclusion should not be drawn from these statements about differentiation in Plastics Division that the culture was rent with continuing and open conflict; the management processes were a good deal more subtle than that. If anything the management culture was characterised by the absence of confrontation. As we have seen decision-making at the top was autocratic and direct where the chairman was interested and intervened, and there was a kind of laissez-faire attitude leading to delegation where the chairman was not interested. But the chairman was taking direct action and delegating into a policy and planning vacuum, and into an organisation structure where “there were few co-ordinating mechanisms”:

We had a chairman who was I suppose pragmatic. He didn't believe in plans because the one thing you knew about plans was that they'd be wrong. He much resented the time accounts department spent on budgets for next year. There were quite a lot of people who took their cue from this, we were reactive.

The absence of mature policy-making and planning processes, and the group and interpersonal skills to make them work had they been encouraged, meant that reaction was the order of the day. Many of the core business issues relating to heightening international competition, what to do with maturing products, and how to create space to develop new products were not faced up to. Some attempts were made in the late 1960s to implement a forward integration business strategy, buying smaller firms who used plastics and were closer to the consumer. But “we had limited expertise in buying and handling these smaller companies, and we swamped them with overheads”. Having failed in this the division “became very introspective and retrenched”. Not even the tremendous shock of the 1971–72 redundancies, and in 1972 the death of their chairman in post, could break the pattern of caution, reactivity, and independent working which by then had been firmly established in Plastics Division management culture.

Mention has already been made of the reasons for the 20% redundancies amongst monthly staff between December 1970 and December 1972, and how those redundancies were handled by a combination of voluntary and enforced means. Here I shall concentrate only on assessing the impact, if any, the redundancies had on the division management culture. Table 25 details the monthly and weekly staff manpower numbers over the period from December 1965 until December 1981. The table shows that the peak year in the division's manpower numbers was 1970. Thereafter the numbers declined and by 1981 were only 60.6% of the 1970 figures. The figures over the period 1970–81 reveal not consistent active erosion year by year but two periods of two years when nearly all that erosion took place. On the monthly staff side numbers decreased by 19.3% from 1970 to 1972 and fell even more sharply, by 20.3% from December 1979 until December 1981. The equivalent percentages at those two time points for weekly staff were 10.8% and 17.6%.

TABLE 25  Plastics Division UK employees, 1965–81

Year	Monthly staff	Weekly staff	Total
1965	5052	6743	11,795
1966	5066	6768	11,834
1967	4946	7250	12,196
1968	5037	7597	12,634
1969	5230	7638	12,868
1970	5497	7637	13,134
1971	5048	7276	12,324
1972	4435	6808	11,243
1973	4248	6671	10,919
1974	4210	6666	10,876
1975	4092	6231	10,323
1976	3969	6192	10,161
1977	3817	6064	9881
1978	3818	6049	9867
1979	3713	6070	9783
1980	3460	5587	9047
1981	2958	5004	7962

Some of the managers and specialists interviewed in 1976 were still talking of the shock and pain of the 1971–72 monthly staff numbers cuts.

That was quite a trauma  . . . there wasn't a manager anywhere who didn't have to face up to saying I'm sorry. And remember, ICI, it was thought, offered security of employment.

Views on the impact of the 1971–72 manpower cuts varied from the optimistic, “that changed a lot of people in their attitudes and brought them up with a jolt and stopped them being fat and happy about the way everything was”, to the hopeful “they felt there were a number of problems that had been buried for too long, and that they ought to be trying to deal with them”. The senior director who led the manpower reduction exercise felt that paternalism disappeared and a new sense of discipline appeared in the division around fixed costs:

This led to rather different relationships between staff, particularly the more junior staff and the management and the board and the main board. Paternalism disappeared rather rapidly and people started viewing their relationship with the company in rather a different light. Had it not been for the 1971 reductions I don't think the trade unions would have been so successful in their recent [1976] recruitment. I think the background was a realisation that if one looked at other companies doing similar things abroad, we were lavish with our manning. This was very much a top dominated feeling, not a feeling people down the line had. It was really quite a time before managers, instead of saying “I need more people”, began to say “I cannot afford these costs. I must see if I can do things more efficiently.” That has been a change in culture if you like which has taken place over the period 1972–77.

But if the 1971–72 manpower cuts helped to focus people's attentions on internal efficiencies these new concerns with reducing fixed costs did not produce regular weighty numbers reductions in the period 1973–78. In that period of 6 years total manpower numbers were only reduced by an average of 1.6% per annum when the target norm was 4% per annum. In Plastics Division the core values of caution, stability, hierarchical control, and continuity persisted throughout much of the 1970s. Of course, the simpler forms of authoritarianism of the 1950s and 1960s were largely gone; “now the style is different, one is consulted up to a point, but people at my sort of level, middle management don't have enough influence”. And undoubtedly the “leaders”, “jolly good chaps”, “enthusiastic amateurs” who had dominated the marketing and commercial areas in the 1950s and 1960s had by the 1970s been replaced by a “much more professional group – more numerate, more articulate – including a higher degree of professionalism in man-management.” But as one manager put it “there have been some cultural changes but the thing that surprises me is the lack of cultural change . . . in this organisation”. For explanations of persistence in the Plastics Division management culture one has to return again to the attitudes and behaviour of the Plastics Division board and the great influence those attitudes and behaviours had in setting the tone of the division as the business problems got deeper and deeper.

Reference was made earlier in this chapter to the leadership style of the Plastics Division chairman who died in post in 1972. One of his senior directors argued that this style was a combination of autocracy and laissez-faire; autocracy where the chairman was interested in an issue, and laissez-faire where he was not. This same director bridged the period 1972 to 1978 when the next chairman held office. He compared the old and the new chairmen's leadership styles in this way:

The present chairman's style is entirely different. He is a great consultor. . . when I came here we never had division board meetings even, whereas the present chairman when he came immediately instituted a formal monthly board meeting and a system of executive committees. The executive committee is a decision making body on which the chairman sits with his deputies. These executive committee meetings are places where the directors and managers are consulted on key decisions. The division board is for policy making. We have this fairly formalised board now and some of the managers may have commented on this. Also I know that many of the managers feel a greater, and perhaps unnecessarily great concern about the level of detail required by the executive committee.

But although the board now met regularly the lack of team working evident in the 1960s continued. One director commented the board was “10 individuals doing their own thing” and another said “they [the board] still can't handle conflict. You speak from your expertise and are only accepted from your expertise. We're not using the talent on the board.” And in more detail a director tellingly said:

It was a very closed group, run by the chairman and his deputies [the top box]. As such the responsibilities were far from clear, the board certainly didn't have a role as a group. Information was fed into the top box and then there would be agonising as to what to do. It was just a series of guys who appeared and occasionally sat around the table, and then went off and did their own thing. That actually was bloody frustrating – there wasn't any collective thing, so the board became reactive and tactical. . . Insufficient time was spent in standing back and considering where we would like to be . . . and trying to push the external environment to that end. Too much time was spent feeding data to the centre [Millbank] and reacting to situations.

Another director put it openly and succincdy:

We are details men – so we'll never be caught out by Millbank.

This continuing problem of lack of strategic perspective and team working on the board also influenced another persistent theme in the management culture, the poor integration between products and functions, and between management levels. In examining the question of management levels as one specialist reminded me, one has to remember that an ICI division board is only just over half way up the management hierarchy:

Decision making is very compartmentalised, nobody is looking at decisions in their broadest sense. Finance is decided up in the stratosphere at Millbank, technology by the division technical planning people, marketing strategy by the product group directors, and marketing tactics by the marketing managers . . . As far as I could see going on in those groups would be a lot of buck-passing. “We could get the marketing sorted out if only we could get the money.”

Floating in and around the division and between the division and Millbank were a series of inconsistent objectives. A director said:

On the one hand there was this tremendous drive for expansion, for growth, and there was some tremendous capital programmes going on, and therefore the marketing managers really saw volume as their key. At the other end of the scale the board were struggling to reduce costs and trying to get a grip of the price situation in an over-capacity market. And yet the fundamental equation of if you go for volume you can't actually go for price as well seemed a bit lost. But volume was the key reward. Now, if you're going for volume and high production levels then concentrating your mind on manpower reductions becomes a very difficult task.

A consequence of these inconsistencies was, as we have seen, “we weren't doing anything about numbers reductions [in manpower], we were just vaguely talking about it”. Furthermore, as another director commented, “pushing up prices and hoping the market would follow us eventually led in some products to reduced market share and a price level that was disastrous”.

In 1978 and 1979 four new directors and a new division chairman came into Plastics Division. Attempts were set in train fairly quickly to improve team working on the board. One director commented that:

We acquired a cabinet system whereby opinions were asked for, there are meaningful debates, freedom to say what one thinks, but at the end of the argument the chairman decides, agreement or not.

This approach to board working was, of course, greatly assisted by the worsening business situation and then the business crisis of the second quarter of 1980.

It became a board welded together, and started to tackle for the first time the cost base problem as a result of that savage swing in profitability.

Action initially taken alone by the Plastics board, and then the redundancies following the 1981 merger, led to an 18.6% drop in monthly and weekly staff employees between December 1979 and December 1981.

There was now irrefutable evidence that the wishful thinking of much of the 1970s was going to be no preparation to survive in business in the medium term in the 1980s. The days of 10–15% growth were now officially over. As one manager put it:

Before, when we were in a recession, it was a pause in the growth graph, this one has been a colossal, observable crash.

In describing the management culture in 1981 words like “shocked”, “worried”, “the emergence of business performance as an overriding setter of the climate” were used. The concept of a good manager in 1981 was now someone who could:

Run a tight department, keep control of costs, do tough things with his people and get away with it – be an instrument of torture and a feather bedder. Be a good salesman, put across to his people the division policies so they made sense.

Whether this singular concern with cost-cutting will contribute to business performance is a theme I shall return to when I examine on a more general level the course and impact of the major changes in organisation made in ICI over the period 1980–82.

Having established the business history and development of Plastics Division over the period 1945–81, and key features of the division management organisation and culture over that same period, it should now be apparent that the process of development and impact of OD resources took place in a very particular and clearly unreceptive context. One of the remaining tasks of this chapter will be to chronicle the story of the attempts to use OD resources in Plastics Division to influence organisational change. In exposing the limited impact of those OD resources explanations will be sought both in features of the context and in the actions of those concerned with trying to use OD concepts, values, and technologies. But before getting into the detail of description and analysis I shall follow the pattern of the chapters on Agricultural and Petrochemicals Division and present an overview of the birth and development of OD in Plastics Division.

PLASTICS DIVISION'S USE OF SPECIALIST ORGANISATION DEVELOPMENT RESOURCES: AN OVERVIEW

The point has already been made that the life histories of organisation development activities in Agricultural Division and Petrochemicals Division could not have been more different. The Plastics Division OD story is quite different again from either of the two north-east England divisions. The differences between Plastics Division OD and the other two divisions are at all levels – the antecedents and origins of OD, its location in the organisation structure, the leadership and internal life of the Plastics OD resources, the nature and extent of their sponsorship in their divisional context, and ultimately their impact on the division's business, organisation, and culture. Ironically it could be argued that of the three divisions it was Plastics division that needed the skills of a change resource group the most, and yet of the three divisions Plastics was the one which was least able to use the change resources they had.

The origins of the Plastics Division interest in OD go back, as it did in the other two divisions to the late 1960s. But whereas in other divisions of ICI at that time there was quite high level interest in American behavioural scientists, it was an assistant personnel manager, Paul Miles, and the division education officer, Simon Dow, who took the lead interest in Plastics Division. Because of their location at the Welwyn headquarters neither Miles nor Dow had a great deal of contact with production or weekly staff matters and they had little involvement with WSA and its introduction into Plastics Division. The character and focus of OD in Plastics Division was, therefore, very much set towards monthly staff and the Welwyn headquarters, although notable development activities led by works managers did take place in three of the production units. Dow also later acknowledged that Plastics OD work began “very much in an educational sense – not for consulting and diagnosis”, although there were developments in the consultancy area later.

Just as Miles and Dow were beginning to develop some understanding of what the behavioural sciences and OD were, and what they might offer the division, Paul Miles was promoted out of the division in 1969 and took up an appointment in Agricultural Division. We have already discussed the significant role he played there over the period 1969–76. Before Miles left, however, he did initiate the process of recruiting a “behavioural scientist” – a 25-year-old British-trained Ph.D. social scientist with no industrial experience – David Cowan. With Miles off to Billingham the behavioural mande, such as it was, and the new recruit, Cowan, passed to Simon Dow.

At this point Dow, with two or three graduates and the apprentice and secretarial school staff responding to him, had the name of his department changed from education department to training and personnel development department. Dow had joined ICI Plastics Division in 1951 with a D.Phil. in chemistry, had worked as a research scientist for 7 years, and then spent 3 years in Millbank as personal assistant first to the ICI chairman, Lord Fleck, and then Paul Chambers. He returned to Welwyn in 1960 somewhat broadened by these experiences but worked again in Plastics on technical development work. His move in 1966 into the role of division education officer was a reflection of personal interest in the development of people, and a realisation by others in Plastics Division that Dow was one of the few active thinkers and writers in the division who was looking out of the division and trying to examine how changes in the social and economic environment of the firm would require increasingly novel responses in the human and organisational area. Having his department's name changed to training and personnel development department was one novel response which, while appearing to set his flag in a particular direction, also caused confusion: Dow takes up the story:

This was [the new name] interpreted by me and my boss as OD but people misconstrued this and it caused great confusion and still does with personnel department. I was responsible to the personnel director, and at board level it was he who had OD responsibility. But that came more from Millbank than being formally understood and agreed on the division board. Really he looked to me to take the initiatives.

Interestingly the initial objectives for the Training and Personnel Development department (T&PD) were couched in highly businesslike terms. The 1969 statement of department objectives was as follows:

To provide a service to the division which, through the media of education, training, and consultancy, assist the division board, the product groups, and other departments to obtain in both the short and the long term, more productive effort and positive net cash flow from the division's human and other resources sooner than could be obtained from their own efforts alone.

This businesslike but also rather vague statement of objectives was probably a genuine reflection of the real feelings of lack of clarity about ends and certainly about means that Dow must have experienced at that time. He as yet, of course, had had little formal training in the behavioural sciences or organisation development, and there was no-one of Noel Ripley's calibre or experience to assist him in framing a mission and the ways of realising any particular objectives he had.

Whatever the statement of objectives, T&PD began “very much as a department devoted to apprentice training”. Over the period 1969–72 the department expanded its role, doubled in size, and came to include three people who were primarily involved with OD. In 1970 Tom Hunt temporarily gave up a career in sales and marketing and joined Dow and Cowan to make up the OD trio in T&PD. Hunt and Cowan had the titles training and development adviser. The other professionals in T&PD included an assistant manager, and five training officers each with training responsibilities in a particular functional area. From the beginning there was a conflict between the OD trio in T&PD who were quickly dubbed the “in-group” and the “out-group” of the assistant departmental manager and the training officers. This conflict between the in-group and the out-group survived the exit of the assistant manager in 1972, and changes in the individuals in both groups as well as Dow's change of post in 1975. The conflict weakened the department throughout its history and was still around when T&PD was wound up as a separate department in 1979 and became just the training section of the personnel department.

In terms of activities the key T&PD event of 1969 was a letter from Dow to his personnel director boss heavily criticising Plastics Division's low commitment to training, and particularly behavioural training for senior managers. Dow's letter sent in the context, of course, of both MUPS and the recently launched companywide SDP, led to the creation of a board subcommittee in 1970 and to a series of senior people sampling various management training packages. Faced with “a primarily reactive, non-planning divisional culture”, Dow took the view that “our chief strategy should be to change the culture - it obviously needed change at the top more than anywhere else – so we went for the top with all the methods we could”. Dow later said “it was like driving horses to water that didn't want to drink”. But between 1970 and 1972 senior managers and directors did attend external courses on Action-Centred Leadership, Coverdale, Blake's Grid, Reddin's 3-D, and one or two T-groups. In addition a series of potential senior-level external consultants came into the division, but they were deemed as unsuitable as some of the training packages.

These reversals were accompanied in 1970 and 1971 by some distinct successes which might have translated into more solid gains but for the dampening and anxiety-producing effect of the bad financial results of 1971, and the 20% redundancies amongst monthly staff in late 1971 and 1972. The successes included Dow's participation in the companywide and month-long workshop in organisation development at Eastbourne, his first sustained training and skill development experience in OD. In terms of project work 1970 and 1971 witnessed structural and team-building work in one of the marketing groups, Hunt's opportunity to do similar work in a production environment, and T&PD’s first real impact across the division in the training sphere, their creation of a problem-solving and human relations course for middle managers called the Group Achievement Course.

The successes that T&PD were able to conjure up in 1970 and 1971 have to be set against a background of continuing scepticism of the value of management training, and relatively low legitimacy for the much more explicitly behavioural objectives of T&PD. In 1971 the T&PD department objectives were:

Continuously and systematically to improve individuals’ skills, the effectiveness of individuals’ work in groups and the way in which corporate objectives are achieved by the groups.

But three years into its existence T&PD was faced politically with no active senior sponsor, considerable senior opposition, and in spite of the seeding provided by the group achievement course no broad client base at the middle levels of the division. In addition the development activities or aspirations of the OD in-group part of T&PD were in some conflict with both the personnel and the management services department, and T&PD had no sustained external consultant support to the group itself. The department's standing in the division was not helped either by the public disagreements between the in-group and the out-group, and by Dow's not always successful attempts “to walk the talk” and manage his department along the participative lines his group were advocating on training events.

In this situation of tentative success with a few activities, continuing high-level opposition, and lack of internal cohesion and group commitment T&PD had to face the redundancy threats of 1972. Initially Dow was told to reduce T&PD from 24 staff to 4, but in the negotiations which ensued the actual reduction was held to 12. Dow tried to manage these events by a process that was “open” in the sense of facing his people with the problem of redundancy and the fact that he (and the personnel director) felt it was important to retain the OD component of T&PD. This is an extremely difficult process to manage. Given the stage of limited cohesion and self-confidence in T&PD there was great stress and some tendency for all involved to interpret the experience as showing that “you can't manage openly” or, indeed that “OD doesn't work”.

As it turned out, although Cowan and Hunt, the two full-time OD members of T&PD, were not made redundant in 1972, both of them actually left the department during the following year. All of this left a much-reduced department with reduced OD capability operating in a context which had become, if anything, less receptive.

The period from 1973 to 1975 was a time for limited rebuilding helped briefly by an improvement in the division's profitability, the appearance of a new deputy chairman and a couple of directors who at first seemed to be willing to push for organisational and behavioural change from the top; and perhaps a lessening of the in-group – out-group split in the T&PD department. One internal OD consultant was recruited to replace the two who left in 1973, and he joined the training officer responsible for the engineering function – who had had works OD experience – and that pair became the behavioural or OD focus in T&PD.

In terms of activities T&PD continued their middle management division training work through the group achievement course and a new course on leadership. Works-based OD activities which had got off the ground during MUPS carried on at Stockton, Wilton, and Hillhouse but only Dow of T&PD at Hillhouse Works, was involved with this work. On occasions the OD pair in T&PD were able to carry out project-based OD work with individual clients in headquarters departments, but repeat work was rare, and there was never any sense that OD work was systematically taken up by any of the Welwyn departments.

Perhaps the most important work in the 1973–75 period was Dow's attempt to get back to his original objective of changing the management culture on the Welwyn site. Before the Ph.D. social scientist Cowan left the division he completed two pieces of interview-based diagnostic work and wrote penetrating reports on “Organisation Problems. of Plastics Division” and the “effects of financial control systems on management behaviour”. For reasons we shall explore later this work fell on stony ground, so Dow tried again – this time for the first time successfully opening the door for a well known British Social Science academic to work as a consultant to the Plastics board. Again the available archival material reveals both the accuracy and incisiveness of the consultant's diagnosis and the promise in some of his suggestions for dealing with Plastics Division's top-level problems of management organisation and behaviour, but this consultant and his message, together with another external consultant who followed him, were also deemed inappropriate or otherwise unsuitable. Looking for tangible success from this board level work, the only sign that Dow could point to was the board decision in 1975 to formulate and publish the division's objectives.

In November 1975 Simon Dow left his post as manager of T&PD to take up a role as division staff resources adviser. In the six months or so before Dow took up this new role, he put energy into trying to bring developmental activities in the division closer together by forming a tripartite meeting of a sympathetic personnel manager, and a newly appointed divisional management services manager, and himself. The new management services manager, Michael Reilly was an experienced production man who had been an OD activist and thinker at Wilton. Eventually Reilly was given the dubious responsibility for providing a focus for OD in the division, and he, Dow, and the personnel manager continued to meet to see if they jointly could make an impact on the Plastics Division management culture. Two streams of activity emerged from this trio. One was a highly innovative joint management and weekly staff educational package called “Minding Our Own Business” (MOOB). This package of videotaped material, overhead projector slides, and syndicate work, was designed amongst other things to aid division employees to understand the business information they received, and to further their ability to appreciate “better the disciplines and controls that are necessary to the company's survival and growth”. Before long the package had been sold to four other ICI divisions, was being actively sponsored by leading members of the CBI, and was being taken up and modified by other large UK employers. The trio who created it in Plastics Division, however, had to shield it from board scrutiny whilst it was being put together and then were roundly criticised by more than one division director for “wasting division resources”. MOOB was eventually licensed to a training films organisation for wider marketing.

The other activity of a culture change character which Reilly and Dow got off the ground in 1976 and 1977 returned more explicitly to the theme of the board culture and the relations between the board and the 60 or 70 senior managers just below them. Three conferences were held for the senior managers and chaired by three different directors in order to provide an input for the senior managers into discussions about division objectives, organisation, and productivity. Undoubtedly these were cathartic experiences for a group of senior managers still smarting under a hierarchical, controlled, and detail-conscious board, but although the deputy chairman who originally sponsored the conferences described them as a major breakthrough in terms of board and senior manager understanding, many of the senior managers became disillusioned when “overnight the board didn't suddenly change its style of behaviour”. Worse still for OD resources in the division, some of the board members felt threatened by these assemblies of senior managers below them, and this confirmed their suspicions that the individuals leading OD activities were championing illicit causes through irregular means.

In 1977 Dow was promoted out of the division and the mantle for internal change through OD techniques fell singularly upon Reilly. He tried in a worsening business climate both to bring in external consultants and to encourage group building amongst the set of OD resources still identifiable in T&PD, and his own management services department. But the arrival of a new chairman in 1979, a tough new personnel director who assumed responsibility for driving some organisation change matters, and an increasing climate to hunt overheads meant that OD and training resources in the division became increasingly vulnerable. As we have already noted, between December 1979 and December 1981 monthly staff numbers in Plastics Division were reduced from 3713 to 2958. Included in that group of 755 monthly staff who left ICI were all the individuals who would have described themselves as offering an OD service, together with nearly all the trainers from the old T&PD department who had earlier been relocated as the training section of the personnel department. Plastics Division had now merged with Petrochemicals Division and the numerically Plastics-dominated component of the new division board were tackling the business, organisation, and manpower problems of this new entity with a purpose and vigour appropriate to their troubled business circumstances. Senior line managers were now firmly in the seat driving organisation changes and at Welwyn there was no place for the division's indigenous OD resources in helping along those changes. The indigenous OD resources were clearly seen as part of the division's problems, and more clearly than ever as not part of the process of solving those problems. Having for so long tried to awaken Plastics Division, now that the new giant had stirred, the OD resources were one of its first victims.

ANTECEDENTS

In what follows I will return to describe and account for the antecedents and origins of OD in Plastics Division. Following the pattern of presentation of the chapters on Agricultural and Petrochemicals Division conceptual elaboration will be kept to a minimum, although focus is provided on the antecedents of OD and a distinction is made between the “internal evolution” of the Plastics OD resource group and that group's “external evolution”. The internal aspect refers to the evolution of the group's membership, values, distinctiveness, commitment, conflict, and leadership, and to the intragroup and environmental factors that influenced these. The external evolution of the group 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 divisional context. These broad analytical categories will be located in a largely chronological presentation which focusses first on antecedents, and then is organised around the three characterisations of creation and early life of Training and Personnel Development Department 1969–71, redundancy and the false dawn 1972–77, and demise 1977–81.

Of the three ICI divisions examined in this book undoubtedly Plastics Division was the most unreceptive, some would say hostile, to the goals and methods of OD. Crucial in explaining the unreceptive context in Plastics Division must be some of the factors highlighted in our earlier discussion of the management organisation and culture of Plastics Division. The reader may recall that some of the core features of the Plastics Division management culture were business growth and ease of profitability throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, great stability and continuity in the top management of the division right up until 1972, die relative isolation of Plastics from many of the structural and business area changes of ICI, the geographical separation of the Plastics headquarters from their production sites, and the attitudes and behaviour characteristic of the management culture with its emphasis on hierarchy, deference, scientific rationality, and non-risk-taking. Added together the above features make up a context which was unreceptive to organisational and behavioural change, whether the pressure was from an OD resource group, or as we shall see in the 1970s from individual directors or groups of senior managers below the board level.

Aside from the heavy hand of constraint provided by a stable context, a further antecedent condition which made the early life of OD in Plastics Division difficult was the absence of a period of social innovation at Welwyn, or indeed of powerful social architects of the calibre of George Bridge or John Harvey-Jones. Compared with the two north-east England divisions the late 1960s antecedents of OD at Plastics Division were low-level and low-key. Behavioural science ideas were being picked up by an Assistant Personnel Manager, Paul Miles, and with the assistance of the Division Education Officer, Simon Dow, being communicated as best they could throughout the division. Dow takes up the story:

During the period 1967–68 Paul Miles carried the OD flag [but unofficially] with me as an outside admirer and provider of forums for him to preach from on courses. We had a very good relationship. I listened and got an interest in behavioural science . . . But much of this was presented in the educational sense – not for consulting or diagnosis – and it was quite often rejected, but Paul pressed on . . . He had a list of allies which he passed on to me – people who were beginning to be out of their cradles on this, but it was not nearly as much as Paul or I would have liked.

There were, of course, towards the end of the 1960s, other attempts to introduce changes in attitude and behaviour in Plastics Division but these were located in production environments. Hillhouse Works in Lancashire had been one of the trial sites for WSA, and Darwen Works also in north-west England had been one of the earliest sites to try and introduce management by objectives (MBO).

MBO in the division went the way of MBO almost everywhere else. It was a complete failure, so people thought, in terms of people adopting it. But it wasn't a failure in all senses. I personally think it was a success in seeding the idea of objectives into a primarily reactive, non-planning divisional culture.

But sitting as they were down at Welwyn, and without production experience themselves, both Miles and Dow were not part of these early experiments in the works. Dow later said of WSA:

At the time, I simply didn't understand the significance of it. It was something that happened up at the works. I was a headquarters man.

So when in 1969 Paul Miles was promoted to a personnel manager position in Agricultural Division all that had been possible to achieve in the way of preparation for OD at Plastics Division was to attract and gain Dow's enthusiasm, to set in motion the recruitment of the young British Ph.D. social scientist David Cowan, and to use educational experiences and internal documents such as Management, People and Change: Notes on Behavioural Science, to begin the process of drawing to people's attention the potential role of the behavioural sciences to create organisational change. OD, as it was starting to be called by the few in the know, now passed to a forward-looking training manager Dow, leading a training and education department with no history as a force for innovation or change, and including a new recruit Cowan with no previous industrial experience. Neither Dow nor Cowan had at this stage any formal training or professional experience in using OD concepts and techniques, and because of his headquarters location Dow had missed the opportunity of establishing himself through the WSA change programme. There had been no George Bridge or John Harvey-Jones to push a bow wave of pressure for change through Welwyn, and Millbank was more preoccupied with the problems of the massive investments at Wilton than the still less obvious organisational and business problems at Welwyn. In these inauspicious circumstances Simon Dow launched OD on to the prickly and inhospitable rocks of the Welwyn management culture.

CREATION AND EARLY LIFE OF TRAINING AND PERSONNEL DEVELOPMENT DEPARTMENT (T&PD)

Explicit in the above discussion of antecedents of OD in Plastics Division was the lack of preparation and climate setting for the OD resource that began to emerge in the division in 1969. Looking back to the division in the late 1960s it would not be an unreasonable question to ask that given such an unreceptive context why and how was it possible that an OD resource group ever got off the ground there at all? The answer to that question probably lies in two areas. Firsdy the pressure coming out of Central Personnel Department at Millbank to build up divisional change resources to ensure the implementation of the centrally created change programmes of WSA and SDP, and secondly the circumstantial availability of individuals such as Miles and Dow who were interested enough to see the possibilities of developing their own role and function by using new ideas from the behavioural sciences and OD, and aware enough of local problems of organisation and behaviour to recognise that such new ideas may have been of some assistance in tackling those problems. Given a certain amount of Millbank pressure on the Plastics personnel director, and the willingness of Dow to follow Miles’ lead, politically what was required in the hierarchical and differentiated culture at Welwyn was for Dow to recruit the support of his functional director boss and begin the process of getting OD on its feet. The personnel director and Dow thus agreed that the old division education department was to be renamed,¹ and that this new department was to be the home for any internal specialist OD resources in the division. As we have already noted this arrangement between Dow and his boss “was not formally understood and agreed on by the division board”. Using the legitimate and possibly only channel of his functional boss, Dow therefore set up T&PD with the barest kind of divisional understanding and legitimacy. T&PD were never fully to recover from this probably necessarily illegitimate birth; indeed some of their actions over the next two years were to endanger their fragile legitimacy even more.

No doubt using the pressure and support for more management training coming out of Millbank, and the more favourable environment for trainers created by pressure on management from the new industrial training boards, Dow was able to expand a department which in the past had been largely devoted to apprentice training. By the end of 1970 T&PD came to include three people primarily involved with OD (Dow, Cowan, and Hunt) and an assistant manager Walsh, who assumed responsibility for a group of mainly graduate training officers each of whom took up responsibilities for training in various of the key functions of the business. The relic from the past, the apprentice training part of T&PD, seemed an odd bedfellow with the above OD resources (called in fact training advisers), and the training officers. Hunt recalled:

I don't think the apprentice trainers ever began to understand what my job was because it never impinged on them, or anyone they knew, and they really had no conception of what I did, although I sat and had endless cups of tea with them. They ran their section at that time – the apprentices as part of their daily routine used to wash out the toilets – they ran it as if it was a ship, they were all ex-naval, and that was how it was run.

But if the link between the apprentice trainers and the rest of T&PD was at times a source of bewilderment the link bettween the OD trio and the training officers was a good deal more troublesome, and throughout the period 1969–72, and beyond, a further drain on T&PD’s attempts to acquire some legitimacy in a largely indifferent or even hostile environment.

External evolution of T&PD, 1969–72

One indicator of how tentative OD was in Plastics Division in 1969 can be gauged from Cowan's account of how he was recruited:

Curious, they advertised for a behavioural scientist. They clearly had little idea what they wanted beyond sombody who could inform our discussions with research evidence. I got put into training rather than personnel purely because Paul Miles initiated it and Simon [Dow] was the only other person who understood what it was about. . . I don't think I was recruited initially to do OD. It gradually changed, partly because I got interested by going on lots of courses, more in OD than research.

Dow and Hunt also acquired their training whilst they were seeking to define their activities, identify their potential clients, and formulate a strategy to influence their environment. Hunt also emphasised the boot-strap character of their beginnings:

Oh yes, Simon took a very wide view of his role . . . he certainly saw OD as a terribly logical extension of the training activity. I don't think either of us really understood how it was going to be done . . . neither of us had terribly clear ideas of which way to run and so we just took a number of actions like going on a few training courses, meeting a few other people who were doing that sort of job and actually pitching in and trying to do a few things with anybody who was willing to listen.

Both Dow and Cowan acknowledged that in its earliest days the OD resource group in T&PD had no strategy, although there were attempts to develop one. Cowan remarked:

There certainly wasn't a strategy of OD that I was recruited into [in 1969]. There wasn't by the time I left [in 1973]; mainly we responded to any opportunities that came up. We also publicised what we could do with a brochure . . . a training booklet, and by going round to senior managers to talk about the training for their staff. . . The idea of this talking was that if organisational – non training – things came up then Tom, Simon or I would get drawn into that. It didn't happen much.

Dow agreed with this:

I remember many meetings when we were saying what the hell is the strategy? This was a response to the fact that there was not a nice, neat defined strategy. It was a much more opportunistic approach which also reflected the culture of the division. As professional OD people we always felt guilty about this. That's not to say we haven't tried . . . but the plans didn't always work . . . the degree of acceptance we've had has always been low.

What Dow was clear about, however, even in 1969, was that “there was a need for an OD thrust serving the total system, and for training officers suited to the particular sub-cultures” (functional departments). He was also clear “that the major objective of OD was changing the division culture”. But how were he and the others to attempt that? The route that Dow initially chose was behavioural training for the board and for senior managers immediately below; “we tried to get board members doing what Mond and Agricultural Divisions had done – to experience the kind of thing that would enable them to see what SDP and OD were all about”.

Frustrated already by the lack of senior management interest in training, Dow sat down during the Easter holiday period 1969 and wrote to his boss what in the context of the Welwyn culture must have been a blistering and highly risky letter. Dow talked already of being “despondent”, of the “cynical and complacent” reception given by Plastics Division managers to the recendy launched SDP, of the training initiatives being taken by other divisions showing Plastics in an unfavourable light, and crucially “the fact that this division appears to be spending only about half as much per capita on management training as is ICI as a whole”.

Before going on to make specific recommendations Dow indicated “it is also clear that I must proceed beyond the point at which the present management culture in the division would suggest I ought to stop, otherwise we shall only be tinkering with the problem”. His recommendations included:

1.  A clear initiative from the division board in implementing SDP.

2.  Training at board level by an external consultant to facilitate attitude change.

3.  Reorganisation at board level to permit co-ordination of management effectiveness improvement.

4.  Personal involvement by general managers and functional directors in training their work groups.

5.  A decision by the board on which type of management training is to be implemented across the division.

Stung by these accusations of board indifference and reticence in matters of organisational effectiveness and human resource training, the personnel director “felt it was a serious situation and he persuaded the chairman to set up a committee in 1970 consisting of two deputy chairmen, the personnel director and myself to consider what management training was required at senior levels”. Having forced the issue, however, Dow realised that “none of the other board members believed that anything needed to be done – so we began with a very low commitment”. The result was that over the period 1970–72 “the board found all sorts of excuses – only about half the board experienced some form of training for change”, and the reactions of those who agreed to go varied from “saying his time had been wasted, to coming back quite enthralled, and I felt it was necessary to restrain him because he was evangelising, to damning it with faint praise saying it might be useful to section managers”. Crucially perhaps an already sick chairman “himself went on a T-group, not long after, had a serious illness, a stroke, and died. There were those who attributed this to the experience of the T-group.”

One of the deputy chairmen around the period of the early 1970s who successfully resisted any encouragement to sample these management training experiences focussed his doubts on T-groups.

A number of our directors and possibly some senior managers went on T-groups and this is where I am declaring prejudice. It isn't prejudice, I have very strong views about T-groups, I think they are wholly wrong and almost evil actually. Somebody who had been on a T-group, a man who went onto the main board of the company, summed it up by saying T-groups turn a strong man into a real bastard, they don't touch a normal man, and they destroy a weak man, and that is entirely the wrong direction, any course should do the reverse. Anything that leads to people bursting into tears, weeping, and in the case of one man I know, I definitely attribute his need for early retirement to the fact that he went on a T-group. I would not dream of going on one myself. . . Of the other courses people have been on Blake, Reddin etc, the effect has not been particularly strong but anything I have observed has been favourable. Whether it in fact matches the cost, I have no way of judging.

The downright opposition or reticence of board members eventually culminated in February 1972 with a board minute that “although it would be advantageous if all its members attended a Reddin seminar, the time was not ripe to make the board the focal point for extension of the training”. Instead the board recommended that a controlled experiment be conducted in one of the product groups, further information collected and a “go/no go” decision made on whether Reddin training would be applied across the division. As one of the managers in this product group put it, “one day a board member came in and said we're going to do this – just like that. There was a combination of interest from previous exposure to Reddin, and resentment.” Dow himself commented that it wasn't entirely successful because the director left, so the ownership was unclear. The new director allowed it to continue but without commitment and the most senior manager had never agreed with it in the first place, so he was lukewarm. Eventually, of course, the “go/no go” decision was not taken and the assault on the Plastics Division management culture through the mechanism of director and senior management behavioural and attitudinal training drained into the sand.

While Dow was making his first attempt to change the division culture through management training events, there were three other events going on in the division all with actual or potential organisation development significance and which barely involved T&PD. Two of these events could probably be regarded as successes – indeed were so by many managers involved with them – but paradoxically because they were successes, and they took place in works environments (Hillhouse Works SDP and Plastics Works at Wilton, Coverdale training) their successes did not spread to Welwyn, and may even have weakened T&PD’s attempts to do similar things at the headquarters. A senior manager in the plastics factory at Wilton commented on the gap that developed between his works and his headquarters after Coverdale training:

Plastics Division didn't accept Coverdale. So we as members of Plastics at Wilton, were very conscious of being different. I mean flip charts were unknown at Welwyn, indeed positively frowned upon. They were regarded as a Wilton gimmick.

A senior director from Welwyn echoed the above manager's perceptions of the exclusive character of Coverdale's impact up at Wilton, noted the success up there and his own resentment at not being part of the Plastics works subculture, but of course did not encourage Coverdale as a culture change vehicle to spread down to Welwyn:

Coverdale was a very different matter from Blake, Reddin, and the other training courses because it was taken up by parts of this division with enormous enthusiasm, particularly our Wilton works. There was a time when it was divisive that people who had been on Coverdale courses were able to talk to each other very well but they could not talk to the rest of us because they built up a new language. Five years ago [in 1971], when I used to hold meetings with Wilton people, I couldn't tell what they were talking about because they used English words with entirely different meanings, and I used to get irritated by this but they were so convinced in their local environment. The works manager was absolutely convinced that he was getting much better results from his staff because they had all been on Coverdale – the overall effect of Coverdale on those bits of the division which picked it up was very favourable but I just felt slightly jealous at not being allowed into the club, as it were.

Dow also noted the success of Coverdale at Hillhouse Works – it had “a big effect on the culture, you got a tremendously positive and supportive climate there”. But there was no diffusion of the learning from Coverdale from Hillhouse Works either. Dow commented:

However, they did nothing to spread their leadership position in change to Welwyn . . . that was one of the things I tried to get them to do.

Presumably the Hillhouse management saw the bad feeling that emerged at Welwyn as a result of the Coverdale subculture that developed at Plastics Works, Wilton; maybe they also realised that it would have been politically suicidal to push for change from a subordinate position and a production base in a division which was so hierarchy and status conscious, and so influenced by the research and marketing people at Welwyn.

With the lack of success of Dow's attempts to change the Welwyn culture, and little scope for diffusing ideas and methods successfully implanted at Hillhouse and the Wilton Plastics Works, there was only the centrally driven SDP change mechanism left to try and influence the Plastics Division culture. The SDP was not only a rank failure at Welwyn, but because by 1971 T&PD had publicly changed their departmental objectives to closely correspond with SDP's objectives of “improving individual skills in groups, and the way corporate objectives are achieved by groups”, T&PD’s reputation was sullied through association with SDP. This was all the more tragic because none of the T&PD staff were formally responsible for co-ordinating the implementation of SDP in Plastics Division.

Dow in the letter to his personnel director boss of April 1969 had already pointed out that even at the launch of SDP in Plastics there was evidence of managerial “cynicism and complacency” about SDP. When, however, SDP began to be introduced in a “terribly mechanistic” fashion into the division, and with the wrong aspects emphasised – “how can we reduce the numbers”, the person co-ordinating ‘its implementation’ didn't like the job and was soon moved”. Dow then found that he became, “not officially, but people and the division newspaper referred to me as: ‘Keeper of the division's conscience on SDP.’ That meant I was the butt of complaints from staff that the division was not keeping faith on this.” Dow thus became guilty by association. On top of this, however, the redundancies of 1971 became associated in managers’ minds with SDP, and this sealed SDP's fate as a change vehicle, and further weakened the use of OD based attempts to change Plastics Division. The following comments reveal characteristic attitudes to SDP and some of its consequences:

Divisions differ and I think SDP was regarded as a bit of a charade here. (Senior Manager)

I think SDP really fell on its face because it was brought in immediately after WSA but without anything like the consultation . . . the difficulty I found was that a lot of the managers were not behind it. In general the staff were, but it does not take them very long to find out that the managers are cynical about it. (Training Officer)

You see it came at a very unfortunate time because we immediately started running into financial troubles in 1970/71. There was a most extraordinary reaction from the majority of managers. They did not see it as anything new at all, what they did was to turn round and say – look we do this already, all good managers do this, now let's forget it and get on with our work. (Training Officer)

SDP has hindered quite a number of times when I have suggested some OD to the managers. People said “oh you mean another SDP?” and the implication was that would be a bloody waste of time. SDP was not a real exercise. I think it was basically sold to the management as being: look, we've given away on pay to the unions with WSA, we have got to do something for the staff as well, and here is something we have dreamt up, it will not be too much trouble, it will keep them quiet. (Training Adviser)

Neither Dow's own initiatives to change the division culture through management training nor indeed the Millbank-driven SDP had any great impact at Welwyn. The question was, would any other opportunities present themselves to create culture change through other mechanisms? A chance meeting in mid-1971 at the Welwyn staff club bar between David Cowan and the division chairman provided Cowan with an assignment to do a study of the division's problems. In the worsening business situation of 1971 and in the context of still greater competition developing at the prospect of Britain entering the EEC the division chairman had written in the Plastics News, 24 September 1971, that:

We shall have to find ways and means of achieving the expansion of our business by means of greatly increased productivity without expansion in our overall personnel numbers. This is bound to involve a readiness to accept change at all levels and innovation in our organisational methods can be just as important as technical innovation . . .

Was the chairman's statement of the importance of organisational innovation and the opening provided for Cowan likely to provide the catalyst for cultural change? Cowan interviewed 15 managers with experience in all the major functions in the division and in seniority terms covering the range from junior manager to division chairman. He then fed back the patterns in the interviews to the 15 managers, received confirmation and additional interpretation of the data, and then in December 1971 prepared a report titled “The Organisation Problems of Plastics Division”. Regrettably perhaps in terms of its political impact the report contained only an incisive diagnosis – no solutions were offered for the problems identified. Cowan picked up five key problem areas in his 1971 report which were to reappear time and time again from other diagnostic work throughout the 1970s. The problems were stated in these terms:

1.  There are too many management levels for the amount of management the division's business requires.

2.  As a division we do not do enough strategic planning, nor do we have sufficiendy clear objectives.

3.  Too much decision-making power is concentrated at the top of the division.

4.  Individuals and departments work too often in isolation, and collaborative work is impeded by both the formal and informal reward structure.

5.  The division's culture is too cautious and deferential – people seek to avoid mistakes rather than to grasp opportunities.

Dow takes up the story of the burying of Cowan's report:

He produced an excellent report which lots of people said hit the nail on the head. It surfaced in December 1971; by this time the chairman had been on his T-group. He wasn't well himself. He'd forgotten the report and he got it only within a fortnight of having his stroke. It was passed onto the deputy chairmen who knew nothing about it and had more worrying business problems. They were horrified by what they read – some of it ought never to have been written, they said. So the whole thing got buried until the new chairman came along in 1972. The personnel director gave the new chairman a copy but I've no idea how he reacted.

Against this picture of apparent failure T&PD did have their successes. Two of the successes involved OD project work in a Welwyn marketing group and in one of the distant production units. In both cases the stimulus for the work had been heads of department with real problems of creating change in people and organisation who had been sensitised to OD methods, and had enough confidence to use novel methods of tackling their problems without a great deal of public support from their line manager peers. The works manager who successfully used Hunt as an OD consultant in his works on objective setting, team building, and training assignments later said:

I think we made great steps. We shut down a quarter of the plant with no IR problems because everybody knew that was the objective, and replaced it with other plant. But we had to keep it [the OD activities] very quiet from headquarters because the product director had said we will not spend any money on training. . . I really had to put a veil around it.

T&PD’s most significant success at this time, however, was in getting a division-wide management training event off the ground which subsequently provided them with one of their few continuous activities throughout the 1970s. This training course, known as the Group Achievement Course, got division support partly because it was a joint venture with interested people from the Management Services Department, and partly because the behavioural elements on the course were played down and the problem-solving component of the course emphasised. T&PD were now beginning to recognise that political processes could be used to create as well as inhibit changes. Hunt takes up the story:

Walsh and I started to develop the Group Achievement Course and we very quickly realised that we could not progress without the full co-operation of the Management Services Department. Luckily for us Howard Dudley was enthusiastic and joined in. They had a number of training courses that taught problem-solving. We saw that if we based the whole thing on the concept of problem solving that was very suitable to the culture, that would go down well . . . the personal element was worked in insidiously.

Dow also recalled that the course “was strongly OD oriented but the people who went through it wouldn't necessarily experience that because it was almost de-jargonised”. But undoubtedly another reason for the group achievement courses’ continuing viability was that its target audience was the middle reaches of management. As Dow said, “it’s really become the prestige course of the division. It's supported by the chairman and it hasn't got many detractors . . . but again it didn't come up above the middle management group.”

Internal evolution of T&PD, 1969–72

As we have already seen, soon after its creation in 1969 T&PD was made up of the apprentice and secretarial training schools components, Cowan and Hunt as the OD specialists, Walsh the assistant manager, and five training officers, each with responsibility for a particular functional area. Dow as the manager certainly concentrated on the OD and behavioural side of the department's work, while Walsh, formally second-in-command of the department, was largely kept on the conventional training side. In terms of group building and socialisation the group began in 1969 with almost no significant personal experience of behavioural work. So learning their own business was something of a boot-strap operation. Dow, Cowan, and Hunt sampled a variety of OD and human relations training packages. The training officers were exposed to similar training opportunities but to nowhere near the same extent. At the beginning there was nothing that would be recognised as team building in the OD sense, and certainly no group activities of the intensity, of Ripley's Swallow Group at Billingham. By 1970, however, a number of attempts were made to engage in team building activities using off-site events, and on some occasions external consultants. But given the group's inexperience, plus the sceptical predispositions of some individuals in the department, these attempts at group building were difficult, halting, and groping sessions.

Even before these 1970 attempts at team building were attempted T&PD had already firmly split itself into the in-group of OD specialists Dow, Cowan, and Hunt, and the out-group of Walsh and the training officers. This in-group – out-group split in T&PD persisted throughout the department's history and was a continuing source of further weakness as T&PD sought to increase its legitimacy in an always resisting and sceptical environment. Dow described the source of the split in his department in these terms:

The groups were formed as much as anything by the structure of the department . . . certain people were designated as doing OD . . . OD had a glamour at the time – it seemed to be a key to the corridors of power; this meant the outs resented those who were in . . . The differentiation made my life difficult because I felt there was a need for an OD thrust serving the total system and for training officers suited to the particular sub-cultures . . . I still don't really know [in 1976] how to solve it.

The strength of feeling of the outs to the ins can be gauged from these comments from out group members.

Whether they feel superiority they certainly acted as though they were. There was definitely them and us, and I found that most uncomfortable. The culture of the in-group was: oh well until you have worked a long time in this area we dare not let you loose on the world at large, you just keep to the training thing and do not get too involved in these behavioural science things. You really need a hell of a lot more development before you can do them. To join the in-group one had to gain credibility in the world at large but it was difficult to know how to start. It certainly produced all sorts of nasty tensions in the department; and it was obvious to the outside world. I would have thought it got near to being disastrous for the department as a whole because the credibility of the department was going down because they were looked upon as being too long-haired anyway, being too theoretical, too behaviourally oriented.

There were a lot of personal contests and largely people went their own way. I don't think they were ever resolved. Individuals who did not like the behavioural sciences thought it was a load of crap and thought they would go on with more structured training.

There was a terrific gap. There were Dow, Cowan, and Hunt in that group and the rest of them in this group, and this group would very much stick to themselves in the office together and go to lunch together. There were two distinct groups altogether.

As some of the above comments reveal the consequences of the in-group–out-group split were real enough in terms of its pattern of internal working and external image. Internally there was interpersonal conflict and at times resentment, the in-group screened their “glamour OD work” from the out-group, and the out-group jealously held on to whatever contacts, work, and credibility they acquired in their functional parish. The lack of cohesion in T&PD, and the resulting discrepant messages which this communicated to their potential clients at Welwyn, provided further data for the sceptics who were looking for ammunition to say no to many of the OD and behavioural science initiatives attempted by the department. Only in the running of the group achievement course did T&PD pull together as a department and work well as a team in an activity widely supported in the division.

A factor related to the internal evolution of T&PD between 1969 and 1972 was the evolution of Dow's own managerial style. Dow himself recognises that his own development from a conventional, highly conceptual physical scientist to behavioural scientist/manager was not particularly smooth either for himself or for his department. Dow recalled “at the time OD came in there was a clear value for participation and I deliberately moved in that direction . . . in the early days, 1969–71, we went through a tremendously open and high risk-taking period when I really broke taboos and gave (to particularly the OD in-group) a tremendous amount of information”. However Dow's strong value for participation, which he genuinely tried to implement, allied as it was with a desire to release sensitive information just to the in-group, sometimes created confusion and indecisiveness amongst a group which was already lacking in cohesion. Three members of T&PD commented on Dow's leadership style and its consequences in these terms:

Well it was kind of authoritarian/participative. Dow wanted desperately to be participative. Our meetings would oscillate wildly from our being told, to Simon [Dow] sitting back and taking no lead at all and our wandering around in small circles, enlivened occasionally by rather personal and obviously very deeply felt rows and altercations between Simon and Peter Walsh.

Simon called meetings fairly often, he shared out a lot of information which many managers would not have shared out, he went to great lengths to pass on information. But even so I still found him rather selective about it.

Simon would think it was participative, I would call it laissez-faire where you did your own thing in your own way. It slowly changed though. Simon became more aware of what the division wanted and I think he also became more aware of the politics of the division and then he would direct us rather gently into fields where we should be working.

In summary what emerged from this pattern of internal development during 1969, 1970, and 1971, was a rather uneasy agreement for people to work their own patches. Individuals were committed to what they were doing but not to any common set of priorities or purposes, and certainly not through agreed means. But ground had been broken, beginnings made in a hostile context, and with very little external aid. What happened next might easily have flattened a lesser enterprise, and it did in fact cause no small amount of pain.

The 1972 trauma of the first enforced redundancies in Plastics Division affected T&PD more than most Welwyn departments. Initially Dow had been told to cut T&PD from 24 to 4, but he managed to hold his department to a 50% cut when the average across the division was around 20%. Dow's own account of how the process of handling the redundancies in T&PD were managed was the real learning experience which moved him away from his attempt to lead through openness and participation.

From 24 we in T&PD came down to 12 with pressure to come further. The one bit of success was that my director said you retain the OD people because we'll need them when we're through this. So it was a question of getting rid of the apprentice and secretarial trainers . . . My strategy with the department had been an open and participative one and I saw this as putting that to the test. . . so I was pretty open and said this was what was required. In retrospect I think it was a mistake. People couldn't take it and got worried. My assistant manager was affected more than anyone else and he left. It exacerbated the in-group–out-group conflict . . . It should really have been handled by more traditional methods. I was too open . . . I still maintained a fair degree of openness but I retracted a bit after that.

Image of T&PD by 1972

A useful means of providing a summary of the positioning of T&PD in its context in 1972 is to examine data on the image T&PD had acquired after three years of its existence. In addition to interview data collected explicitly for this research and archival material reporting on particular activities, one other significant source of data on T&PD’s effectiveness and image is a report prepared by a Plastics Division manager dated July 1971. Dow had suggested to the manager that as a training project before taking up a new post the manager might complete a data-based study on the effectiveness or otherwise of T&PD and make any appropriate recommendations for improvement.

On the positive side the report describes favourable attitudes to the traditional training activities of T&PD and acknowledges that since Dow took over the education and training function there had been an “immeasurable improvement”. This view was also echoed in the research interviews. The deepest questioning of T&PD’s activities was in their behavioural science related work as it was described in 1971. No mention was made in the manager's report of the term OD; thus a proportion of the respondents in the managers sample – perhaps 40–50% – held the view of the whole of T&PD, and of Dow, as being more interested in behavioural science than in training. T&PD were seen “predominantly as odd, off-beat people with no hair, long hair, funny waistcoats or unusual approaches, although there were one or two ‘sane’, normal characters about”. But while the data in the report revealed this scepticism and antagonism towards T&PD as a group – and certainly to their behavioural science work – there were also attitudes of interest, sympathy, and curiosity shown by some managers towards the behavioural sciences. A feeling that “behavioural sciences had a contribution to make, but they were not sure where”.

Dow in his own comments on the manager's report thought that his own department had been “stereotyped”. It is interesting, he wrote, “that individually people showed sympathy towards behavioural sciences; collectively they seem to be more antagonistic”. Probing beneath these statements about the reasons for T&PD being ladled with these negative stereotypes, it is likely that T&PD’s own responses to the unreceptive context where they worked helped the development of the negative views. Faced with a management culture that emphasised hierarchy, deference, autonomous action from individuals with strong positional power, and strong values of technical rationality and control, perhaps some members of T&PD pushed too hard with their own rather exclusive values and language system. Certainly when the OD in-group were interviewed in 1976 they all agreed that their approach in the period 1969–72 had been too exclusive, too particular and not pragmatic or political enough for the harsh environment they were working in. Dow commented that in 1969 “we tried, or were seen to try to peddle values, humanistic psychology and the like. This wasn't altogether successful.” Hunt remarked that around 1970 and 1971 “Theory Y, and being honest and open were regarded generally like motherhood as being a good thing; there was a kind of do-gooders syndrome of saying yes, participation, co-operation and delegation and all these things were absolutely marvellous.” Hunt went on to say that “by the time I had done enough jobs I began to see how successfully some parts of even our operation here work on the basis that most people would describe as Theory X. I think maybe it is much more a matter of doing what is necessary in a situation.” Cowan was even more sure, as he put it, that they had only got hold of one piece of the jigsaw:

There was a mini-culture in T&PD that there were lots of things wrong with the way the division worked and the way ICI worked, and we knew what should be going on and if only people would listen to us things would change dramatically for the better. In retrospect that wasn't true. It was because we'd got hold of one bit of the jigsaw that actually very few other people were bothered about. Had we ever been able to put that bit [OD] together with everything else we might have had some effect. We were swamped by much more powerful considerations like major wage bargains, like the technology, and the competitive pressures.

For a time some of the training officers in the out-group sought to protect T&PD’s overall standing by playing down behavioural science language and values. One member of the out-group put it this way:

I was very anxious to get outside managers on my side and on the side of the department. I felt we could do a tremendous amount for other departments and groups if only they would come along with us and I felt I was prepared to sacrifice principles of OD and behavioural science for the sake of getting alongside people.

But in the period when the in-group were acquiring their own OD professional language and technologies of analysis this kind of out-group pragmatism was not acceptable and by the time members of the in-group had adjusted their own influence strategies most of the out-group had distanced themselves emotionally and personally from the in-group’s “glamour” work and were “doing their own thing in their own way in their own patches”. This was their recipe for influence and survival during the high period of anxiety of the 1972 redundancies.

In fact Dow managed to protect the rump of the OD in-group, and the out-group of management and supervisory trainers during 1972, although in 1973 Cowan left ICI and Hunt left T&PD for a line management position in another part of Welwyn.

The period 1969 to 1972 had been a very difficult one for all members of T&PD and although there had been some successes these must have seemed minor compared with the problems of trying to gain acceptance to tackle problems of people and organisation through methods which were still alien to most managers at Welwyn. As one member of the in-group put it, “generally there were relatively few people who were interested, the ones who did show an interest certainly got anything they wanted, but it was a matter of responding to any request we got. I remember thinking at the time that the thing must have been extraordinarily lonely for Simon [Dow] trying to get the thing off the ground. Our department had the lowest influence of all.”

REDUNDANCY AND THE FALSE DAWN, 1972–76

With Cowan and Hunt now gone Dow had to wait until 1974 before he could persuade his director to allow him to recruit another training adviser who would have specialist responsibilities for behavioural science and OD matters. The new recruit, Watkins, came from another part of ICI, and he and Smyth – the training officer responsible for the engineering function in Plastics Division, a man with works OD experience – with Dow jointly took on the mantle for OD in T&PD. But if anything the impact of the 1972 redundancies in Plastics and the worsening business situation was to make organisational change even more difficult to obtain at Welwyn. Even with a new chairman, and at least three new directors who were predisposed to use OD techniques, and certainly were sensitive to the need for significant changes in management culture and practices, the division appeared, as one manager put it, to “freeze”:

By 1971 the effect of perhaps being slightly slow to recognise various kinds of changes external to ICI were beginning to have an impact, we went into a major cutback – redundancies. The ability to change in some ways became harder although fairly major change was wanted. Once we ran into a contracting situation with people, one would always run up against blocks of how you cope with the people concerned with change. I have an overall impression the division tends to rather freeze on things because it is too difficult to set it up in different ways.

After the shock and the reduced activity which resulted from the 1972 redundancies T&PD attempted a period of rebuilding but more based on individual initiatives than any collectively agreed upon and externally sponsored plan. The successful training and OD work begun around the period of WSA continued at three of Plastics Division's works but T&PD staff were little involved in this work. T&PD’s conventional training activities for middle managers continued also to receive support, and a new division leadership course got off the ground and with the Group Achievement Course was one of the few activities that T&PD members shared. One of the T&PD staff training officers who was a shrewd observer and actor in the Welwyn informal social and political scene managed for the first time in 1973 to get a group of managers, supervisors, and shop stewards together in a workshop training event. As Dow said, “this would have been unthinkable 2 or 3 years before”.

Watkins and Smyth, the focus for OD activities, continued to face problems of lack of acceptance inside and outside T&PD. Both of them were not well received when they first arrived in the T&PD office to start work. Watkins talked of “a lot of testing going on, people were trying to prove they were more subtle than I was”. Smyth said, when he arrived in T&PD, “I felt a bit deserted. I did not have a telephone to start with and there did not seem to be an office arranged for me. I felt unwanted.” Part of the problem Smyth and Watkins faced would be explained by the history of in-group – out-group split in the department, and, of course, the public knowledge that Dow and his personnel director had decided that if anyone were to survive the 1972 redundancies in T&PD it was to be the OD component of the department. But Smyth and Watkins did have this body of expertise – and perhaps also a set of proclaimed values which the training officers in T&PD felt were quite inappropriate for the Welwyn culture.

Watkins described his values in 1976 in these terms:

I would see a society which is more caring and which is less based on greed and fear, more based on love. I accept the reality of power and the necessity for it but I think there is a great need for a change of emphasis. I believe that people can have a great deal more creativity within themselves than organisations give them the scope to use; to the individual's and the organisation's detriment. Given those sort of values then I would want to encourage more questioning of assumptions, ways of doing things: more considerations of alternatives, more fun, more excitement.

Smyth answered a question on his values, also in a 1976 interview, by revealing how he thought the training officers in T&PD saw him:

Apparently I do a lot of talking. I go away and do funny things like meditation. I have learned all about psychoromatics and they say “what is that? It is a way-out thing Norman does.” I go to encounter groups. I do re-evaluation counselling and I talk a lot about things which are concerned with the behaviour change individuals can bring about in themselves. It is seen as being rather hairy and unrelated to real life, and I have found that I have had to play that down.

Certainly the training officers did react – perhaps over-react – to what they saw of Smyth's and Watkin's values. One said:

One of the things that gets in the way is what he calls his value system. I tend to get the feeling if my value system differs from his then mine is either automatically wrong or inferior, and if other people pick up that same message then I reckon he is going to come across pretty badly. I see his value system where everything concerning people is all important to him, and must take priority over every other consideration, as unrealistic, totally impractical in business.

Given the Welwyn management culture and their own predispositions, neither Watkins nor Smyth found it easy to generate work which they found professionally appealing. Smyth remarked that “I felt tension every time I thought about approaching a client. I did not know what the reactions were likely to be. I felt unsafe really. I felt much safer with just getting on with running courses so that was largely what I concentrated on doing for a year or so.” Watkins, as the only member of T&PD who didn't have a functional training “parish” to retreat into, had, of course, to be more active in seeking out clients for OD-related work and this eventually encouraged Smyth to be more initiative-taking, but neither of them found it easy. Watkins stated the obvious painful truth:

There are taboos which are specific for the OD function. One is: don't be ambitious in an OD sense. It is a low-key, low-status function. I don't think the division is really interested in a really professional approach to OD which is to do a real system diagnosis of the total system, identify what are the significant blockages and really blast through with the power behind you to sort them out. There is a pretty strong status taboo about, for instance, going to the managers meeting which is held from time to time. How one is supposed to do organisation development work when you are denied access to where all the important issues get discussed, I don't know.

In spite of this obviously non-receptive climate for their work Smyth and Watkins persevered and occasionally they did generate project-based OD work with middle management clients in Welwyn departments, but there was little sense of momentum or direction behind this work and even where their clients did report on the OD work as being successful, repeat work or follow-up work was uncommon.

Asked about the contribution of T&PD over the period 1969-76 most managers concentrated their positive remarks on the educational and conventional training side of T&PD work. This meant that to most managers T&PD’s impact had been in the area of personal development rather than organisation development. Great scepticism was expressed as to the value of employing specialist OD resources on organisation problems unless they were external consultants from one of the big business consultancy firms. And as for behavioural science, a commonly expressed view by Plastics Division managers in 1976 was that “it was unfortunate that a lot of this stemmed from America. It sounded like the latest American gimmick, and people tend to think that's alright for the Yanks but won't work over here. Again, universities have got a bit of an image to live down. So academics from America are doubly dubious.”

Dow’s strategy by this time for dealing with T&PD’s continuing legitimacy problems was on the one hand to try and de-emphasise what he called “the soft end of the business”, i.e. interpersonal related interventions, to coach and counsel and feed information to Smyth and Watkins where he felt this might provide them with an entry, and to try and get as close as he could to some of the new members of the divisional board who appeared initially to be looking to create organisational changes. From about 1972 onwards Dow appears not to have put a great deal of energy into team-building in T&PD, no doubt partly because the in-group–out-group split was well established, but also because most members of the department had by now come to some accommodation with their differences, and largely went their own way with whatever work and sponsors they generated. Dow's tendency to manage by or through individual coaching drew some criticism from T&PD members who argued they at times needed more direction but acknowledged that they might have resisted it had it been offered. The other part of Dow's leadership style of shielding his board-level contacts from group members, and releasing information selectively to individuals, while done for the best of intentions, had the effect of raising group suspicions about his motives, and his actual capacity to help them.

Most of Dow's time was now spent trying both to encourage and facilitate directors and senior managers who wished to create change in culture or organisation, and to quietly plot with a small number of allies and help them develop their own change initiatives. Perhaps the three most important pieces of work Dow was involved with in the period 1973–76 were to finally succeed in getting a consultant working for the Plastics Board, to help set up a divisional mechanism for senior managers to influence the direction of the division, and to help create the educational package Minding Our Own Business (MOOB). All three of these activities were a return to his long term, and by this time seemingly unattainable goal of attempting to create some degree of culture change in Plastics Division.

The Plastics Division board and organisation development

The Plastics Division board in 1974 was composed of a chairman, three deputy chairmen, and nine directors. Of the nine directors, four were functional directors, four were directors and general managers of business areas, and one was Plastics Director ICI Europe. The lack of team working on this board was described earlier in this chapter. The reader will recall that power was heavily concentrated in the Chairman and his three deputies, and that the individual directors largely played representational roles for their function or business area, rather than members of a collegiate board assessing the overall problems of the division and making decisions as appropriate. The historical trend for concentration of power with the chairman and his three deputies (“the top box”), and for detailed reviewing and assessment of directors’ and senior managers’ activities, was given a further twist by the worsening business situation of the mid-1970s. One senior manager in the division summarised the workings of the board in the mid-1970s in these terms:

Well the board is undoubtedly very much deferred to in terms of power, and relatively minor things have to go to at least the executive sub-committee of the board for approval. Tightness in the business in the last couple of years has meant that more stuff has been retained by the board for approval than it was even a few years ago – even something as trivial as the number of apprentices we might take on next year. And it is not just the board as a whole, there is a fairly tight group on the board which retains the power to itself, that is the chairman and his three deputies.

As we have seen, Dow's first attempt to influence the attitudes and behaviours of individual board members in 1969 and 1970 through the use of behavioural training experiences had met with a mixture of scepticism, opposition, and deflection. Dow, Hunt, and Cowan had all talked of the pre-1972 board as being “very reactionary”, of there being one or two supporters of OD but these one or two being “overwhelmed by one or two people who were right down on OD”. With the death in 1972 of the last of the chairmen who had come into the division on its creation in 1945, Millbank saw this as an opportunity to bring in not only a new chairman from another division but also younger men from inside and outside Plastics who might help to dilute the old culture. But unfortunately two of the old directors most resistant to cultural change stayed on into the mid-1970s and continued to be “a drag on innovation” – and certainly innovation spearheaded by OD methods and behavioural science ideas.

One of the two deputy chairmen most resistant to behavioural science ideas emphasised that it was T&PD’s attempts to push participative management styles which created board resistance, and once Dow and his group had been “branded as theoretical” or “impractical” almost anything that came from them was likely to be rejected:

I think they have been thought by some of the managers to be going rather too rapidly towards changes in management style, changes from the rather more oldfashioned, not necessarily authoritarian but classical, traditional management style, towards a fully participative style . . . T&PD’s association with behavioural science has inhibited the acceptance of some of their views among some of the older and more traditional managers. There is perhaps a feeling that because of a rather theoretical treatment of relationships, some managers have rejected the probably very sensible practicable, very obvious message which they are also putting across at the same time. Certainly one of our division directors was so opposed to the behavioural science aspects which Simon Dow was putting forward that he almost rejected everything which came from that department, and there might just be a little bit of that in some of the rest of the board, possibly a little bit of that in me.

This was the kind of context that the new chairman and the new directors who followed him came into between 1973 and 1975. Two of these new directors had been early adopters of OD methods in the late 1960s, and both had successfully used internal and external OD consultants to assist with team building, culture change, and organisation design problems. Both were surprised, even dismayed, by what they found on the Plastics board:

I was brought into this division, and I came with this OD background, its values, and it came rather as a shock to me. I had assumed the rest of the company was moving at this pace and it took me many months to discover that people were not even on the same wavelength. OD was not accepted, and in a number of areas was being positively rejected. I began to see that I was in an entirely different culture . . . There was a complete blockage any time you mentioned something like OD, behavioural science; we need to do something about the culture. The hackles went up, the resistance was there, and it was very widespread. Simon Dow let me know about this very early on. I could hardly believe it, I had to learn the hard way that he was absolutely right. It was looked on as some new-fangled thing -behavioural science – that knocked the stuffing out of people, it removed control from authority, it weakened structural authority, all sorts of things you dare not let in.

The other director was equally emphatic about the reactions of the Plastics board to OD and behavioural science, and he realised that if he was to survive he had to disassociate himself from OD methods and behavioural science language:

OD was not understood: I don't think many of the other board members had been through the experience Pd been through . . . When I first came down here, all full of behavioural science, I was taken aside and told if I wanted to last, to be listened to, I better drop that. I don't use the jargon now, well not collectively, maybe with one or two people.

Undismayed by what he knew of the history, and with what he saw as some potential supporters coming onto the board, in mid-1974 Dow saw an opportunity to introduce a distinguished British social scientist, Sam Roberts, into Plastics Division. The opportunity arose because the central OD man, Stewart Dudley, invited Sam Roberts to spend a week in London and different divisions had time with him. Dow takes up the story – “It was quite difficult to get this division to respond . . . we have learned a bit and a certain amount of deviousness was used by my boss and myself to get people. We couldn't get any directors. It was up to head of department level – there were about eight or nine of us.”

This group of eight or nine met in London for a day with Roberts, each arriving with a flip chart describing the problems of Plastics Division. Dow remarked “the incredible thing was the similarity of the independently arrived at conclusions . . . it really got people turned on, you could see they felt very deeply about it.” Encouraged by this cathartic experience, Dow took his notes from the day to his personnel director “who approached the chairman and said this was something pretty serious . . . and we then employed Roberts as a consultant to the chairman”.

Before going on to describe what Roberts did alongside the Plastics board it may be useful to summarise a few of the key points made by the nine managers at the London workshop, and Roberts's initial reactions to the managers’ diagnosis. There is a remarkable similarity between these managers’ accounts of the division's problems and the message rejected in Cowan's 1972 report on the Organisation Problems of Plastics Division. The problems were classified in four areas: company philosophy, motivation and morale, manpower problems, and organisational difficulties. The division was said to be not aware of, and responding to, changes in its social environment, not to be recognising that a growing proportion of its monthly staff were becoming increasingly alienated from the company, and that the recent 20% drop in monthly staff was having a significant effect on the division's age distribution and promotion prospects. Crowning these issues, however, was “the busyness of seniors”, “everyone wanted to be consulted”; matrix “was leading to interference, to confused messages, to dissonance, and to unclarity as to who is managing. Management levels were failing to cohere and communicate: individual middle managers thought they were correctly diagnosing the situation, but the top managers had no time to listen, so did not hear.” Apparendy “organisational pressures were preventing top management from stopping to listen to the warning signals that are likely to undermine their strategies for the business. Somehow a ‘uniting for change’ mechanism must be developed.”

Roberts’ view was that it was the duty of senior management to represent these views upwards, however unpalatable, and they might have to persevere over a long period of time until the validity of their message became undeniable. In the meantime what was required at Welwyn was a process of “de-bureau-cratisation”, a loosening of control from the top in order to transform Plastics Division into a “learning system”, and the management group below the board required to form an assembly or assemblies in order to “help create their own future”.

One of the senior directors favourably disposed to OD takes up the story of Roberts's activities after the London managers’ workshop:

I don't think the chairman knew very much about that first meeting [in London] but the outcome of that meeting was certainly fed to him, and Roberts was introduced to the chairman, and the chairman was, I think, quite interested in what Roberts might be able to do and listened to him . . . my own view of the managers’ meeting was that it was very valuable because it began to loosen things up a bit, but at that stage I was still a bit naive about the resistance. Roberts gave a number of cautions that there was anger around and frustrations and that we had a problem in this division because something or other wasn't getting unleashed. Then we did have some quite useful sessions where each member of the board had a session with Roberts, and then Roberts had a feedback with us all, and with the chairman. We had one very good session which looked as if it was going to make some progress. Then there was another session where I do not know what went wrong but he just did not come across well at all and there was a rejection, a very powerful rejection from one or two of the then deputy chairmen.

Dow explained that in the preliminaries to the final meeting with the board, Roberts and the chairman had requested each of the directors to prepare individual papers on “culture and organisation – more emotional things rather than the mechanistic things”. In order to prepare the papers the directors had meetings with their senior managers, some of these “were extraordinary – one was scheduled to go from 2 to 4 and went on until 10 p.m without a break”. These papers were to have been discussed at a board meeting for a whole afternoon with Roberts present. Again Dow supplies the detail:

The meeting was absolutely disastrous. The morning business spread into the afternoon and in the end there was 20 minutes for Roberts to give feedback which he'd prepared for an hour or two. He didn't acquit himself well and 2 of the deputy chairmen became antagonistic and became a focus of strong opposition. They persuaded the chairman we shouldn't go on. Roberts came back once, but really he's been quietly dropped.

Even though Roberts built up his data about the division first from a senior management group representing many of the interest groups in the division, and then from individual board members many of whom concurred with the levels below them about what some of the problems of the division were, he eventually ran into a brick wall created as much as anything else by two of the deputy chairmen, and with the acquiescence of the chairman. One of these deputy chairmen had this to say about Roberts's intervention:

To be only fair I had a remarkable lack of sympathy with Roberts actually. In the one interview I had with him I am afraid we were at loggerheads the whole time. I didn't know what he was about and he didn't know what I was about. I thought his perception of what was going on was utterly wrong, particularly his perception of the relationship between the board and management. . . It seemed to me he was listening to all of the criticisms and documenting them very carefully and without paying any attention to the occasions when people thought this bit of structure or this bit of organisation was all right. I think he did have a meeting with the board. It didn't seem to me that we got a great deal out of that. You maybe are getting a rather extreme view from me – but the other deputy chairman was just as critical – even more so than myself. This was not only, I hasten to say, because Roberts was fairly critical of the way the deputy chairmen behaved. He was critical but I don't think his criticisms were too well based on that specific occasion.

With hindsight this was probably Welwyn's last chance to change its internal structure and management culture to meet the exactitudes of its rapidly changing business environment. In Roberts’ terms, to create a self-learning and self-adaptive system to provide a clearer set of policies and management processes to help meet and better manage the environment that was fast encroaching on them and closing down their business options. As we have already noted, Plastics Division did not actually seriously contemplate radical changing business environment. In Roberts's terms, to create a self-learning and self-adaptive system to provide a clearer set of policies and management and Petrochemicals Divisions fell off the cliff in April 1980.

Dow, seemingly never dispirited, tried to introduce another well-known British academic into the division in 1975 but this was equally disastrous. A meeting was arranged over dinner at Digswell Lodge between one of the two deputy chairmen who had seen Roberts off, and this new British academic. Dow takes up the story:

It was a hot day and Frank [the academic] turned up not wearing any socks. Oh dear! So a stereotype built up about external people. I'm not quite sure why the deputy chairman took such a dislike to Frank but he clearly did. He was extremely rude to him. I suspect it was partly because it was a recommendation from my boss and myself – rather than from a trusted person.

Dow’s final two interventions in Plastics Division

In spite of the promise and then the failure of the Roberts's intervention, Dow in a 1976 interview described the period 1975–76 as “OD in the bloodstream”. By this he meant “this was the first year in which I thought things were happening of their own accord – with management taking their own initiatives. They didn't talk about OD, but they acted.” The source of the action in, for example, the engineering function was the movement out of traditional managers and a new divisional engineering director, and a new engineering manager. More generally the pressure for change was coming from Millbank, faced with poor financial results in 1975 and a renewed desire to improve ICI's productivity levels in comparison with their European and North American competitors. So if there was change in the air in 1975 and 1976 it was not because of a belated recognition of the value of OD objectives and methods, it was because of line management pressure. The question was, would Dow and T&PD be used any more than they had been in the past?

In fact what happened was that a new deputy chairman tried to use the 1975 productivity drive to start more general processes of change in the division, facilitated, if not spearheaded, by Dow in a new role as staff resources adviser. Initially this seemed to be on, and Dow moved out of his role as manager of T&PD to become division staff resources adviser. Unfortunately board level opposition meant the deputy chairman had to back off his intended use of Dow and other internal and external OD resources and, as Dow put it, “I’m not sure that I'm in as strong a position now as I was before. I fear I may not be.” Not long after this – in fact in 1977 – Dow was promoted out of Plastics Division to another part of ICI. But while Dow was changing roles in the division over the period 1975–76 he managed to encourage a trio of informal supporters; himself, a personnel manager, and Reilly, the new management services department manager, to engineer two significant interventions in the division. One of these, involving off-site conferences for the division's managers, was partially successful, at least for a time, and the other, the MOOB educational package, was an undoubted success inside and outside of ICI.

But the deputy chairman's words take us back to the 1975 productivity initiative and his hopes to use OD help:

I was made deputy chairman in 1975 when we were down into another trough and I was given as one of my prime areas to cover productivity. I thought: well at least I can ensure we handle this in the right way to keep the team motivated. The other deputy chairmen were utterly opposed to this and they came out really. It was the first time I really realised where the power source of the opposition determined to stop Simon in his tracks was. I probed a bit further. It was this thing he was doing which was seen as undermining authority – it was going to weaken authority at the top. So fears were around, it wasn't put into words but I could see what was going on . . . I wanted Simon to work with me as redeployment manager. Simon was quite excited about the opportunity because I could level with him what I wanted to do. At this point I tabled with my colleagues and got the shock of my life. I wanted new consultants in OD and teams working and then the battle broke out between myself and the other deputy chairmen. I had to back right up because I could not get the chairman to overrule the others. I really retreated and said O.K. we will define the job in a much more acceptable way to my colleagues.

After that the deputy chairman had to conclude that “an OD man at the senior level for this division is not quite justified – but I do want managers who are sympathetic to its use and realise its value.” Not long after Dow left Plastics this deputy chairman was also promoted out of Plastics to a very senior-level appointment elsewhere in ICI. The Plastics Division management culture was to perpetuate itself come what may.

One of the resisting deputy chairmen had this to say as a final epitaph on T&PD in the Dow era:

I regard OD and organisation change as very much a major part of the terms of reference of the board. I think initiatives ought to come both from the board and the deputy chairmen, it also ought to come from the sharp end of the business, the works, the selling organisation, and R&D. It will be nice if it also came from the management services department but that's a service department – a ways and means department rather than a department which initiates thoughts . . . If we are coming up to any organisational change in the division I personally would not have thought of Simon's department as the prime mover. I don't think T&PD was or should have been particularly concerned with OD. I am interested that you have obviously got a fixture in your mind that if you were looking for an OD unit in this division, it is that department that matches it, I don't see it that way at all . . . Simon has had a very good influence on the education, training, further development of middle management in this division. Where I differ from him has been when he does in fact seem to broaden out beyond the individual into questions of structure and change.

Line management, and in particular very senior line management, were to initiate discussions of structure and change, and implement those changes through their own methods and processes. Dow's role was to concern himself with questions of personal development and training of middle managers – anything else was just a non-starter.

With any possibility of Dow or other members of T&PD working with the Plastics board now virtually ruled out, Dow set his store with another long-term ambition, to try and link T&PD, Personnel Department, and Management Services Department to help facilitate what he still felt was a bottled-up management desire for change in the division. There had of course, been difficult relations between T&PD and the Plastics personnel function ever since T&PD was formed in 1969. The use of “personnel” in the title training and personnel development department had, of course, caused “great confusion” with the personnel function, and management services were running training courses for the division and doing organisation studies before T&PD was born. Going back to 1970 there had been “a running problem with Personnel Department, sort of: we don't understand what you're doing (i.e. T&PD are doing) and it doesn't seem to have any real value and, frankly, the important things are the things we're doing . . . so you carry on but it's not of any great interest to us.” Never accepting these prickly relations, and recognising the obvious overlaps between T&PD, personnel, and management services, Dow had in 1971 tried to conduct joint workshops with the other two departments to assist the process of identifying complementary activities and common needs for professional leadership, but these had failed to produce the kind of integration at the departmental level he had looked for. Personnel Department continued to insist management development was “in their area”, that the T&PD training officers had “too much spare time” and how were we to know what results were to come from a department “so generously staffed?” Management services, although careful not to be seen to be “tarred with T&PD’s long-haired and unworldly image” did co-operate with T&PD successfully with the Group Achievement Course.

While relations at a departmental level between the three overlapping departments were often distant and indifferent, Dow always had a good personal relationship with the personnel manager responsible for manpower planning, and when in 1974 those two were joined at Welwyn by Reilly the three began to meet informally and share information, problems, and hopes for change. These informal meetings coincided in 1975 with the deputy chairman's productivity change initiative and the deputy chairman sponsored a series of three conferences, each chaired by a different director, and with the process organised by Dow and his two compatriots. Dow and his two colleagues “felt well rewarded by our efforts in designing the conferences and the preparation of papers for it . . . and in a culture often quick to criticise, there was hardly any criticism” from the senior managers who attended. Again there was a cathartic experience for a management group who felt over-inspected, and over-controlled by the levels above them, and were desperately looking for ways out of the gathering problems of the business environment. But again while there was great consensus and commitment about what the problems of the division were – no action followed. The deputy chairman recalled that “we got a very positive constructive feedback with messages loud and clear to the board. Problems followed because the management were almost expecting overnight the board to suddenly change its style of behaviour.” Dow and his colleagues acknowledged that while the conferences “had proved a valuable means of establishing a better understanding of division business strategy . . . they also called for a change in management style leading to trust between board and managers, and an elimination of detailed monitoring.” These changes were too much for the board to take on in the short term, especially from an assembly of their subordinates. Dow put the fate of the conferences into stark perspective: “the greatest failure was in the planning of how to get the conference [ideas] into the rest of the power system”.

Dow’s final intervention at Plastics, and probably the one he would regard as his most successful, also came out of informal meetings between himself, Reilly, and the personnel manager. In the context of the 25% inflation in Britain in 1975 “we felt that there really was a dangerous lack of understanding of basic economics amongst trade unionists and even some managers; for example, a MORI survey recendy showed that 54% of people in the sample thought that profits went to directors”. The trio felt there was a contribution they could make not just in Plastics division but in ICI more generally, and perhaps in industry beyond, to develop a learning package which would help both shop floor and managers better understand the language of business and accountancy and connect it to their own factory or office situation.

Realising from past experience the Plastics board were unlikely to finance a training package on business realities training, the trio persuaded an ex-works manager who, although shordy to retire, was still influential, to join them in helping to develop the package which became known as Minding Our Own Business, or MOOB. After 3 months the ex-works manager proposed the package in its embryonic form to the works managers’ committee. One of the works managers then agreed to help pilot the package in his works. There a shrewd training officer helped prepare the handouts, overheads and video films to make them acceptable to shop stewards. With the pilot deemed acceptable the production director acknowledged “this is just what we want” and the other works managers took their cue from this. With interest in MOOB solid in the production areas, other divisions interested, and a main board director regularly publicly calling for business realities training, and even a quote from a senior shop steward to be used – “the more we understand the business the more we'll understand one another” – the Plastics board eventually were shown MOOB and nearly all approved. Eventually most other divisions of ICI bought MOOB, and they and other organisations developed and modified Plastics’ 11 video films, handouts, and slides. The package was eventually licensed to Training Films International for marketing.

As Dow said, eventually 25–30% of Plastics Division employees experienced MOOB, “still the biggest education intervention we had”. But MOOB only got off the ground because it was steered around the Plastics board until it was a demonstrable success. No chances were taken this time. One of the design trio later remarked that “we were later accused by a director of spending £x thousands without any consultation with the board; meanwhile the outside world was saying this is marvellous.”

But the time was now 1977, Dow had had his success in Plastics Division and was looking forward to a promotion elsewhere in the company. He must have felt some relief to be leaving Welwyn after so many years’ toil in such an unreceptive context. Mike Reilly, the management services manager, was given responsibility for OD and it was left to him to watch both the rate of change increase at Welwyn and the T&PD variant of OD finally slip out of sight and out of mind.

THE DEMISE OF ORGANISATION DEVELOPMENT IN PLASTICS DIVISION

Given the history of lack of legitimacy of OD in Plastics Division, and the continuing problems of credibility its individual practitioners had, the reader may by now be wondering why and how it managed to survive so long. But survive it did and for 4 more years after Dow left Plastics Division in 1977.

Initially when Dow moved over in November 1975, to become Staff Resources Adviser, T&PD continued as a separate training function with its own manager – a man with a long period of experience in personnel work. His early mission had been to give more direction to the conventional training side of the department and generally to give the function a more businesslike appearance. He was plainly uncertain, however, how to assist Smyth and Watkins with their OD work:

There is some concern about what everybody always describes as the behavioural end of the business and how effective it is. . . . Smyth and Watkins have great difficulty in making any significant entries into the division – they are not naturally called upon for interventions. If the division wants some fairly straight training activity to be done they would think of us, but they would not think of us if they wanted something done in support of OD. Whereas they might pop into management services, initially perhaps in a routine way if they wanted a study done . . . I do believe we are in a situation of seeking work in the OD field; this is a nonsense to me, either there is a natural demand for it or we don't do it.

Both Smyth and Watkins later acknowledged the veracity of their new manager's statement of the obvious. Smyth in particular freely admitted the “low acceptability” of his attempts to operate as a change agent – “OD was not accepted or understood by managers in this division; one could pick out the managers on the fingers of one hand who understood”. Watkins, whose deeply held values about caring were well represented in his work, felt there was some acceptance “for work I was doing, and for myself in a role people couldn't define – it was more me being personally helpful in meetings, and as a person to talk to.” But there must have been an element of wishful thinking in this and Watkins was deeply hurt by redundancy in 1981.

Dow’s successor as a manager of T&PD did not have to wrestle with his problem for too long, for when in 1979 the division acquired a new chairman and a robust new personnel director, one of the first actions he took was to disband T&PD as a separate department and place it as a section within the personnel department.

Mike Reilly, the manager of management services, meanwhile had taken over in 1977 as “OD focus for the division”. He defined his role in terms of OD as “acting on behalf of the company and division as a focus for the group of individuals – irrespective of departmental location – whose activities are mainly concerned with aiding the processes of change within the division.” Encouraged first of all by Watkins, Reilly tried to pull together the OD resources in the division initially into what was called a “sensing group”, and then what became known as the “OD core group”. These groups of eight or nine individuals from management services, training, and personnel met periodically, sometimes with external consultant help, sometimes in consort with specialist OD groups from other firms, and every 3 or 4 months inside the division to discuss strategy, objectives and tactics – and to offer one another mutual support. But in the context of the history of attitudes to OD in the division, and the new sense of urgency and action by senior line managers “to get the fixed costs down” and “sort out the business” – the OD core group was left largely to talk to itself. As Smyth said “when the individuals left the group, they came up against the same barriers – the lack of power, the many people in high places who didn't value time being spent on development work”.

For a time Reilly was optimistic there might be a role for OD methods and some of his core group. This was especially after three members of the board, and then on a separate occasion, three members of the OD core group, attended the company management of change seminars. The idea of these seminars was that with both senior managers and middle-level managers or specialists now using the same language to think about change processes they might form into “critical masses” to facilitate change. But the critical mass for change in Plastics, and indeed by this time in much of ICI, was the line management system, and the OD core group was not part of attempts to create change.

Reilly later commented that “I didn't spend enough time doing a selling job [for OD] with the board in general. That was a mistake.” But Reilly was in a dilemma, he knew that the board were hunting fixed costs and all service functions were vulnerable – “I was a bit scared of making the OD function too visible – I was reluctant to make too many overt moves.” Ultimately the board must have felt that “OD planning for change would slow things down and actually cause less people to go than ruthless management would. There were two strands in that, first a genuine belief in autocracy and secondly a more subtle thing. People were doing things they didn't like doing and felt they didn't want to be reminded. They didn't want a group reminding them of this. I don't think that was a valid perception of what we actually could have done. We could have more positively harnessed energy and purpose.”

Reilly did have his successes in using external consultants, particularly in the strategy planning area, but he “could never persuade my boss (a director) to spread this. He felt if it was put up to the board it would be turned down, therefore better to leave it.” The problem, Reilly insisted, was that it was “very counter-cultural to be seen to be using management techniques. There's something in Plastics about being a successful businessman which makes you not want to reveal that this is just a mechanism, and not just a brilliant piece of entrepreneurial thinking”.

A problem for the Plastics board in 1979 and 1980 was, of course, that they were not producing the financial results expected of successful businessmen. One result of this was the merger of Petrochemicals and Plastics Division in 1981 and the large-scale redundancies in both divisions during 1980, 1981, and 1982. The joint division was still making a loss of around £70m after only two quarters of the financial year ending December 1982. But by mid-1981 the training function, and nearly all of the individuals who would have considered themselves as internal OD resources, had now left ICI employment. As one senior director put it “We were unable to use those resources. It isn't the culture or behaviour of this division to understand or comprehend organisation. Welwyn is divorced from the production plants and the sites where organisation and people are very important. Here they are all pragmatists – what prices can you get in the market, and individualists – not managers in the true sense of the word. People at Welwyn don't manage large groups of people, they work things out on an individual-to-individual basis. Therefore there is a feeling that “well what are those guys going to do for me? How much more profit am I going to get out of this guy?”

Ironically perhaps OD resources were thrust upon Welwyn in 1981 as a result of main board intervention. A well-known American external consultant, Tom Bainton, and Tom James the former head of Petrochemicals Division OD unit, were drafted into Welwyn to assist with the process of merging Petrochemicals and Plastics Divisions. Their activities will be described in Chapter 10 of this book when we examine Millbank's attempts to bring major structural change to ICI over the period 1977–83.

But before moving on to consider the ICI corporate changes of the late 1970s and early 1980s, there is the Mond Division experience of OD to examine. Mond Division started the 1970s with a management organisation and culture as divided as that to be found in Plastics Division of the same period, but the consistent top-level support for developmental activities in Mond from 1973 onwards meant that eventually, in Mond, OD methods and concepts were linked to some of the critical business, management, and organisational problems of the late 1970s. How and why this happened is the subject–matter of the following chapter.

¹ Dow later acknowledged that “it was fortuitous that T&PD was the chosen name – my boss was sick at that time and the division secretary dreamed it up”.