5

The Heavy Hand of History: Business Development and Social Innovation in Agricultural Division

The purpose of this chapter and the four chapters which follow is to reveal the birth, evolution, and impact of organisation development activities in Agricultural, Petrochemicals, Plastics, and Mond Divisions of ICI. Each of these chapters will present a process description of the use and fate of OD resources set in the context of the historical and present-day business, technical, and organisational evolution of each division. These chapters provide unique processual data on line manager and specialist attempts both to implement corporate changes emanating from Millbank, and to initiate significant changes in the business strategy and structure, technical base, quality of union–management relationships, and organisational culture in each division.

Given the analytical objective of this research, to locate process description and analysis in trends in a changing business, economic, and organisational context, each chapter uses a number of broad conceptual categories and themes to reveal the business history and development of the division. Chief amongst these broad conceptual categories are each division's business conditions, strategy and competitive position, its products, technology, sales and profits, the composition and size of its manpower, the character of industrial relations in the division, and its managerial culture. Focus will also be given to the division's organisation structure, the relative power of various functions, areas, and units, and some of the recurrent problems and conflicts faced by the division. Throughout, the emphasis is on changes evident in each of these areas.

As the title of this chapter on Agricultural Division suggests, a combination of the long history, and stable location of ICI's UK interests in agricultural chemicals and products at Billingham in the north-east of England, together with a history of independent executive tradition in Billingham/Agricultural Division, and, of course, the relative geographical isolation of that division from corporate pressures in London, all contributed to a strong sense of business and divisional loyalty and a particular management and worker culture at Billingham which was eventually challenged by business, technical, and social changes in the 1960s. Given the importance of the traditions laid down at Billingham in the first 30 years or so of its existence in setting the tone for the content and processes of change which developed during the 1960s and the 1970s the first part of this chapter chronicles key elements of the business history, organisation, and management and shop floor culture at Billingham over the period 1920–57. The second section of the chapter then reviews the business history and development of Billingham/Agricultural Division over the period 1958–84. With the business and organisational context thus well established, the middle part of the chapter provides an overview of the use of OD resources in the division in the period from the mid-1960s until 1984. The chapter then concludes with a major section providing a chronological view and some analysis of the major activities and events in the period of social innovation in Agricultural Division during George Bridge's tenure as divisional personnel director from 1962 to 1967. Bridge's era as a social architect at Billingham is an important feature of the division's history in its own right, but that period of social innovation is also of significance as a crucial antecedent for the birth, evolution, and impact of OD in Agricultural Division from the late 1960s onwards. The story of the Agricultural Division OD resources role in organisational change and development from 1969 to 1984 is picked and fully developed in Chapter 6.

BILLINGHAM DIVISION: BUSINESS HISTORY, ORGANISATION AND CULTURE, 1920–57

ICI does not publish financial data about the performance of its divisions in the United Kingdom. It does, however, group its financial results on a worldwide basis by class of business, and publishes statistics for the agriculture group. This agriculture group largely comprises the activities of Agricultural Division and Plant Protection Division, with the bulk of sales and trading profit emanating from Agricultural Division. In 1980, admittedly a bad year for ICI as a worldwide group, the agricultural part of the company turned in profits of £151m on sales of £1071m. This £151m represented 45% of the total profit for the ICI group for the year ended 31 December 1980. Since 1975 the agricultural interests of ICI have been turning in trading profits of between £114m and £182m, with trading margins of between 11% and 20%. Over the period 1974–83 ICI's agricultural interests have consistently provided the highest contribution of all the company's business areas to group profits; although as we shall see energy cost factors and increasingly competitive conditions were by 1980 beginning to significantly pressurise Agricultural Division's commodity businesses.

Agricultural Division in 1980 was one of the largest producers of ammonia and methanol in the world. It controlled 60% of the UK markets in straight nitrogen fertilisers and about 40% in compound fertilisers, and had significant market shares in Canada, Australasia, South Africa, India and Malaysia. Its successful development of the steam reforming and low-pressure ammonia and methanol processes meant that it was a world technology leader in its field, and it had built up a tidy business selling catalysts to licensees of these technologies throughout the world. With a favourable gas contract from the British Gas Corporation ensuring a relatively cheap and plentiful supply of its major feedstock, natural gas, it was in a very strong position as a business, although the continuing upward negotiation of gas prices is changing the competitive position of the division's methanol business.

The agricultural interests of ICI have not always enjoyed this favourable business and technological position. Agricultural Division would probably have been bankrupt in 1969 or 1970 had it not been part of the large ICI group. Ten years before that, when it was known as Billingham Division, it was in equally dire financial straits, and between 1926 and 1930 the first big capital investment in ICI's history – at Billingham Works – collapsed when the world prices for fertiliser dropped and left 50% of the new production capacity at Billingham idle; and sent around 6000 new recruits to Billingham Works back onto the unemployment queues of Teesside, in northern England.

The public announcement of the creation of Agricultural Division was made in two short sentences in the ICI annual report of 1963. Between 1944 and 1963 it had been known as Billingham Division and before that the Fertilizers and Synthetic Products Group.1 However, the history of chemical manufacturing at Billingham on the north bank of the River Tees goes back to 1920, six years before the creation of Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd.

Billingham was born out of some of the pressures created by the German submarine blockade of Britain during the First World War. Finding it increasingly difficult to obtain the supplies of Chilean nitrate needed to manufacture explosives, the government appointed a committee in 1917 to assess the possibility of starting manufacture of ammonia and from it nitric acid and nitrates. Billingham was chosen early in 1918, and the government purchased several hundred acres of flat farmland close to the Newcastle Electric Supply Company's new power station, and with readily available supplies of coal, water, salt, and anhydrite, good communication by rail, road, and water, and a supply of skilled labour with a tradition of shift working.

With the ending of the war, the government's plans were abandoned and in 1920 the site was sold, along with certain contracts, information and patents, the buyer to undertake to make ammonia and nitric acid. The purchaser was Synthetic Ammonia and Nitrates Ltd., which had been established by the chemical manufacturing firm of Brunner, Mond and Co., Ltd, to develop Billingham as a fertiliser factory using the same synthetic nitrogen fixation process as the government had planned to operate. Before the formation of ICI in 1926 a small-scale experimental plant had been built and tested at Runcorn in Cheshire and plants No. 2 and 3 were built and brought into production at Billingham. Research was also started at Teesside on urea and methanol, and on a process for manufacturing oil from coal.

The key event and launching pad for Billingham, however, was the joining together in 1926 of Brunner, Mond and Co Ltd, the United Alkali Co Ltd, Nobel Industries Ltd, and the British Dyestuffs Corporation Ltd, to form ICI. A major argument for the merger was to develop an organisation capable of competing with the German giant – IG Farbenindustrie AG. A feature of this competition was to develop the size and hence the industrial muscle through a range of products, market dominance and share, financial strength and security of future, to be able to negotiate from a position of reasonable power balance with other companies on such matters as prices, and spheres of market influence throughout the world. Sir Alfred Mond, the man instrumental in purchasing the Billingham site in 1920, and the first chairman of ICI, together with Colonel G. P. Pollitt, who had been chairman of the Billingham directors in the period 1920–26 and was now one of the eight first board members of ICI, persuaded Sir Harry McGowan, ICI's first president, that expansion of ammonia fertiliser production to be sold to the farmers of Britain and the British Empire was a key to the development of ICI's market power.

In 1927 the fateful decision was taken by the ICI board to sanction capital expenditure at Billingham works which eventually involved spending £20 million.2 This was a decision driven by Mond's imperial dream and Pollitt's technical leadership – the marketing problems of selling all the new fertiliser capacity were not grasped. By 1929 there was 50% overcapacity at Billingham works and the return on capital employed had dropped below 5%. Reader (1975) has estimated that between 1929 and 1932 the total number of ICI employees in Britain dropped by 20,000, and a high side of a one-third of these were at Billingham. Disaster on such a scale could not be hidden and the ICI ordinary shares fell dramatically. People began to talk about the fertiliser factory being closed altogether, and for good. The total value of property and plant not in production at Billingham in 1931 was £11m. Billingham, far from carrying ICI as had been intended, was a burden for the rest of ICI to carry.

Billingham did not recover from this blow to its business and its pride until 1937 when preparations for the Second World War were dragging British industry out of the Depression. Even in this difficult period between 1929 and 1937 Billingham's scientists and engineers continued to make developments which led to new plant. Methanol was being produced by 1928, Nitro Chalk in granular form by 1931, Concentrated Complete Fertilizer (CCF) by 1930, with government assistant, a plant producing petrol from coal and creosote in 1935, and the plastic “Perspex” in 1936. Meanwhile an anhydrite mine had been opened in 1928, which served the Billingham complex until 1970 and which supplied an essential ingredient for the manufacture of sulphuric acid. By the end of 1931 the factory payroll strength was down to 5,700 and the technical and other grades employed on the staff was 1,200. In 1939 the total factory payroll and staff had risen to 12,500. At its peak around 1960 the Billingham Division employed 17,000 people. The Agricultural Division in 1984 now employs 6,800 people. But I anticipate another thread in the story to be picked up later.

One of the people interviewed in this research described the period 1926–40 as the era of the civil and mechanical engineer at Billingham when new buildings and plant were constructed. He called 1944–55 the era of the chemist when new products were developed, and 1955 and beyond the era of the chemical engineer. Blench (1958) has emphasised the key role that engineers and scientists played in Billingham's development – it has always been much more than just a large production complex. During the Second World War the number of senior men occupied on research increased from 90 to 130 and expenditure on research increased 2½ times over those six years. Billingham technical people played an important part in the design work for the “tube alloys” project, the atomic bomb, and Billingham scientists carried design work to an advanced stage for a process for the large-scale production of heavy water.

Before discussing some of the key events in Billingham's post-war expansion, it is important to pick up two further threads from the pre-1939 and 1939–45 period. Fearful of Billingham's exposure on the north-east coast of England to German bombers, the government encouraged the building of external factories to produce ammonia and aviation fuel in such places as Clitheroe, Dowlais and Heysham. Clitheroe and Heysham are still in production today with more modern technology. During the 1960s the external factories under Billingham control which still remained were added to by new production facilities at Severnside near Bristol and Immingham near Hull. These plants used Billingham Division's steam naphtha reforming process for ammonia manufacture – but more of the troubles associated with that new technology later.

The other important theme to pick up from the pre-war and wartime periods is the more general pattern of ICI development taking place not only north of the Tees at Billingham, but also south of the Tees at Wilton. Mention has been made of the factory producing “Perspex” on the Billingham site. When the ICI Plastics group, a forerunner of the Plastics Division, was created in 1936, this plant was placed under their control. Previous to this a caustic soda and chlorine plant had been hived off the General Chemicals Division – now Mond Division. In 1948 Dyestuffs Division – now Organics Division – started a new plant to produce nylon polymer. All three of the above plants relied to some degree or other on Billingham Division-produced services and materials. But in 1943 ICI started to plan for a new kind of factory site – a factory which would provide space and facilities to any ICI division planning large-scale developments for the post-war years, and provide the integration of materials and services so crucial to the effective running of a large chemical site. The final choice of a site south of the Tees at Wilton led directly to two further decisions of great significance to Billingham: first the decision to locate the division's post-war oil operations at Wilton; and second to link this major development by a group of pipelines under the Tees to the existing plant at Billingham. Eventually the oil-based, heavy chemicals on the Wilton site grew to the point where on 1 January 1958, ICI Heavy Organic Chemicals Division was formed. This in time became Petrochemicals Division, the subject of Chapter 7 of this book. Today the Billingham and Wilton sites of ICI constitute one of the largest chemical complexes in the world.

The post-war development of Billingham is a story of almost continuous growth of sales and employment up to around 1960. The relevant markets for fertilisers, ammonia, methanol, sulphuric acid, “Drikold” and cement expanded steadily, providing safe outlets – administered by a tellingly named “sales control” department – for the prowess of the graduate chemists and mechanical and chemical engineers who managed the division. But the ground was beginning to move beneath the feet of the 17,000 employees of Billingham Division by the late 1950s. ICI was not the only large chemical enterprise to expand after the Second World War and increasingly ICI's markets were becoming worldwide and subject to fierce international competition as production capacity increased in North America and Western Europe, and as the comfortable cartels and monopolies of the 1930s and 1940s were dissolved. In this situation a number of the older established divisions of ICI found themselves in an exposed situation with falling world prices and increased world capacity, and with a rising cost base derived from increasingly obsolete technology, and relatively poor manpower productivity. As we shall see, Billingham, of all places, which had prided itself on scientific and technical innovation, woke up in 1958 to find itself behind in the technology of ammonia and methanol production. The responses it made to that discovery were to lead to some startling technical, organisational and manpower changes of the 1960s and early 1970s which produced, among other things, the birth of organisation development activities. But before I sketch out these technical changes and their repercussions, it is important to pick up a crucial theme so far missing in the evolution of Billingham – the social system, and managerial culture and organisation, which had developed at Billingham since Brunner, Mond arrived on the site in 1920.

Manpower, managerial culture and organisation at Billingham, 1920–57

Up until some of the changes in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it is possible to identify a number of key influences which stamped their mark on the broad social system of Billingham. Chief among these include the impact of the Brunner, Mond tradition of employee relationships, which through Mond's influence, carried themselves into ICI personnel policy; the technocratic managerial culture and organisation that built up on the site because of the employment of so many able scientists and engineers; the relative isolation of Billingham from the ICI seat of power at Millbank; the tradition of employment on Teesside and throughout the north-east of England in the declining heavy industries of coal, steel and shipbuilding; and of course, the eventual company town character of Billingham itself, as Billingham Division grew and took up a formidable amount of unemployed men and women who were the involuntary victims of the 1930s Depression.

Mond, like his father and the first Lord Leverhulme, had an outlook on labour relations which was that of the late Victorian paternalist employer. His belief in copartnership did not, of course, extend to matters of policy in running the firm – that would remain with the management. The core of copartnership, for Mond, lay in profit sharing. “The best answer to socialism”, he wrote in 1927, “is to make every man a capitalist.”3 Mond's own family firm, Brunner, Mond, had introduced the eight-hour day, holidays with pay, share ownership schemes, housing, schools and recreation clubs, and in general an enlightened, if paternalist, labour policy based, in Mond's words, on “foreseeing reasonable demands and . . . granting them even before they were asked” (Reader, 1975:60).

Mond quickly imported the Brunner, Mond labour policy into ICI. His chief labour officer, Richard Lloyd Roberts, was appointed to a similar post in ICI and Roberts set up the ICI Central Labour Department. Henceforth all labour and staff, and then personnel policy, was a central activity controlled from the new ICI headquarters at Millbank, from its completion in 1928. Before long works councils were set up along with sick benefit, staff grade, share ownership, and bonus schemes. The trade union movement, losing members and otherwise weakened by the aftermath of the General Strike of 1926, unwillingly acquiesced to these policies which were seen at the time by key union leaders such as Ernest Bevin as divisive of working-class solidarity and union power. Lloyd Roberts and Mond knew what they were doing, to ensure ICI employees made their attachments to the firm and not to their union. By and large the ICI labour policies up to and including the 1939–45 war worked well both across the company and at Billingham. During the war, for example, only about 80,000 man-hours were lost in strikes and nearly 95% of those man-hours were lost in the metals and explosives parts of ICI. I have only been able to find evidence of one major strike at Billingham in the period 1945–57; and this only involved one union, the AUEW.

In spite of the setbacks, of 1929–31 when around 6,000 people were laid off, most individuals I have spoken to on the managerial and union side looked back on “the ICI” of the 1920s to 1940s at Billingham with affection. Managers were “hard but fair” and there is a strong feeling that “the ICI” of those days saved Teesside. After all, in 1922 Billingham was just a village green with about 40 houses, one pub, and one church. By the mid-1950s the population had risen to 30,000 and by the present day it is nearer 75,000. A long-serving member of the management recalled the drift south of Durham coal miners into “the ICI”.

There was a lot of very good labour in the Durham coal fields which flocked down to Teesside . . . They were a very good work force . . . We didn't have any union trouble . . . They were thankful they'd got a job on the surface with fairly reasonable conditions.

In time, of course, they were also glad there were jobs for their sons in the postwar expansion both at Billingham and Wilton. Between the wars ICI built 2,330 houses at Billingham, but since 1945 it has been the company's policy to leave this task to the local authorities. An indication of the concentration of people around the Billingham site in 1955 is given from data provided in Teesside at Mid-Century, by House and Fullerton (1960). At that time 30% of the factory payroll lived in Billingham itself and nearly 100% of the remainder lived in towns and villages such as Stockton, Norton, Middlesbrough, Thornaby and West Hartlepool, which are all within a few miles of the Billingham factories.

TABLE 17  Labour turnover – males (comparative percentage figures)

Year

Billingham site

Wilton site

Chemical industry

All industries

1949

15.3%

—

22.6%

27.4%

1950

17.2

19.3%

24.3

30.3

1951

16.8

23.5

25.2

31.3

1952

13.0

21.0

23.5

27.9

1953

13.9

22.8

21.6

27.0

1954

12.0

15.8

23.2

27.7

1955

10.7

22.1

21.8

29.0

1956

10.7

26.3

22.7

26.6

Some indication of the relative attachment of the Billingham labour force to their jobs, if not always to ICI, is given from Table 17, taken from House and Fullerton (1960:169 and 183). Table 17 illustrates that total turnover at Billingham compares very favourably with figures obtained from the then Ministry of Labour Gazette for the chemical industry and “All industries” in the United Kingdom. Although the Wilton turnover is slightly lower than the average for the UK chemical industry over the majority of the seven years in the table, it is appreciably higher than that of Billingham. A possible explanation of this difference between the Billingham and Wilton sites was that at that time Wilton was expanding rapidly and a large proportion of the payroll was engaged on construction work where the turnover was generally greater than on production. I shall return to some of the similarities and differences between the Billingham and Wilton sites when the Petrochemicals Division case is discussed in Chapter 7. For the time being, the point to note is the apparent relative stability of the male labour force at Billingham.

And then, of course, there was the Billingham Synthonia Recreation Club and the international standard running track nicely juxtaposed so that errant apprentices could run off a few pints of “Camerons” after a visit to the Synthonia, what a Times special correspondent described as “the largest public house in Britain” (The Times, 30 May 1961). Those days are long since over. I was often reminded of this:

In the old days, if you were a blue-collar worker, you lived as near the factory as you could throw a stone because you had no means of transport except a bicycle or a bus. “The bosses” tended to live further away. More recently, a lot of people irrespective of their collar live some miles from the factory . . . This has affected the club [the Synthonia]. Twenty years ago it was thriving with something like 25 sections . . . All the local authorities are now producing their own sports facilities. Because there are things like theatres and night clubs about, people don't want to come back to where they work.

Mind you, ICI's presence was pouring wealth into the local community. The gross amount of wages and salaries in 1959 at Billingham was nearly £15m. Employees there in the same year were allocated over £lm in profit-sharing bonuses. Moreover, in the year ended 31 March 1960, the Billingham factory supplied £400,000, more than half of Billingham urban district council's income from rates. The county council precepts 72% of the rates from Billingham council and they represent a significant element in Durham's revenue (The Times, 30 May 1961). The Miracle of Billingham, a glossy brochure prepared in the early 1960s by the district council, notes the fact that industry occupies twice as much space as housing, is “a distinction which had worked in every way to Billingham's advantage”. But living next door to a Leviathan can be a mixed blessing, especially if the Leviathan becomes sickly and unpredictable, but that was not the case at Billingham until after 1957.

Managerial culture and organisation

As Brunner, Mond had a hand in influencing labour and welfare matters at Billingham, so, too, did that piece of the early ICI jigsaw influence some of the tradition which later evolved into the Billingham managerial culture. Across in the north-west of England, in Cheshire, the Alkali Group, a forerunner of Mond Division, was the reincarnation of Brunner, Mond. And here in the Alkali Group was Winnington Hall Club, a unique amenity in British business for the management first of Brunner, Mond, and then ICI. Reader (1975:71) presents a colourful description of pre-Second World War life at Winnington Hall. Membership was by election. Within the hall, in its bars and on its lawns, the “fellows” moved in an agreeable, masculine atmosphere, very English in tone, of cordial informality . . . The whole setting was reminiscent of an officer's mess or an Oxford College, which was not surprising, since by the time ICI was founded Oxford was the university which many of Alkali Group's technical establishment came from.

Billingham, as a Brunner, Mond colony, inherited something of the Winnington tradition, though considerably modified. In the first place the demands of high-pressure technology made Billingham a better place for engineers. Second, there was rather less devotion to Oxbridge, possibly because both of Billingham's founding fathers had been educated at Manchester University. Nevertheless, Billingham had its management club, Norton Hall, perhaps always with less of a college atmosphere than at Winnington, yet another side of traditional English life – field sports – was cultivated by Pollitt and Slade. Later on the Billingham Rugby Club, and to a lesser extent the Billingham Cricket Club, and of course, the annual review, the Norton Hall Smoker were to become in their differing ways important parts of the Billingham managerial scene.

One of the people interviewed with knowledge of Billingham's pioneering days recalled:

In 1924 we bought Norton Hall and refurbished it. Early in 1926 we put a man called Humphries in there to live – rent free. He was the bossman who was developing the site. He was a civil engineer. He lived there with all his servants around him. The pair-and-trap picked him up and took him into work and back again in the evening. In 1926 the total salary for Billingham staff was £78,000, and Master Humphries got £5,000. Can you imagine – and he lived free. He retired in 1928.

Another manager, talking of Billingham around 1947, drew out some nice comparisons with Alkali Division and Winnington Hall:

There was a very mechanistic style from top to bottom at Billingham. Everyone in his place and knew his place . . . At Alkali Division it was very much a division where there were gentlemen and others. At Billingham things were less stuffy but still authoritarian. In fact, my boss in London at the time had a letter from the director I was going to see at Winnington saying, “is he the sort of person that we would want to accommodate in the Winnington Hall Club?” And the reply went back saying, “Yes, he's the sort of chap who won't slop his soup and what not!” So I stayed at Winnington Hall Club – it is a very splendid place.

By 1957 Billingham Division had settled into a fairly differentiated functional organisation structure run in an authoritative fashion by talented, and in some cases eminent, technocrats. The Research Department housed Billingham's scientists. The first permanent buildings erected on the site in 1922 were laboratories and from the beginning research had played a vital role in Billingham's development. Some of these scientists had been Fellows of the Royal Society, and others were to become so as a result of work completed in the 1960s and early 1970s. One scientist recalled the concern with hierarchy and double-checking in the Research Department:

There was a status pyramid we used to have in Research Department. I remember there was this framed letter we had which, depending on who was about, we might hang on the wall. In those days, if a research chemist wanted to write a letter outside, he got the letter written; he initialled it, and any other technical officer involved, then his group manager, and then the boss man signed it. The one we framed has 14 initials on it! This was the way the place was run. It was all status. You didn't step over your status boundary . . . It was comfortable. The outside world was something out there, which you didn't bother with.

Loosely linked to the Research Department was a Development Department, a Technical Department, the Chief Engineer's Department and the Engineering Works. And then there were the five operating works, known as Gas and Power, Ammonia, Products, Oil, and Casebourne. Each of the works had a works manager responsible to a works general manager, who was responsible for the Engineering and Commerical Works for the whole site, the Olefine Works at Wilton, and the five external factories.

On the commercial side there was a supply department, a distribution department, a sales control department and the commerical works responsible for the reception, storage, and issue of all incoming stores, the storage, packing and dispatch of the factory's products, and the operation of the site internal transport system. In addition to these functional units there were Billingham's personnel departments – labour, staff, medical, education, work study, and office administration. And on top of all this lot a divisional board with a chairman, three deputy chairmen and several directors with mainly functional responsibilities. Truly an organisation structure acting as a monument to the past.

How did this structure work before it started to change in 1958?

When I joined the company at Billingham we had an awful situation in engineering . . . They had the technical department doing the outline design. The chief engineer's department then designed in detail . . . A part of engineering works would look after construction, and then they handed it to the works to run it . . . Four camps, each blaming the other for everything that went wrong.

A manager with experience on the commercial side recalled similar interfunctional problems between the Products Works and the Commercial Works. His illustration also gives a flavour of how changes were handled in the late 1950s.

There was a very tight interface between the Products Works and the Commercial Works, with endless arguments going on about whether the raw material had been there or not and what product movement had occurred . . . The works manager of Products Works, who had a reputation among the men for being “hard but fair” was the architect of the demise of Commercial Works . . . I was startled to hear the Commercial Works manager stand up at a works council meeting and say, “I’m telling you what's going to happen and I've not been consulted.” . . . In fact, he may well have been privy to what was going on, but not for it.

Aside from these interfunctional rivalries between managers, other kinds of recurrent conflicts in the culture were beginning to emerge both because of a new sense of power and confidence from a new generation of shop stewards, but also because of increasing mutual frustration with the we/they culture of management-union relationships that had emerged in the late 1950s. One present-day senior line manager described the christian-name basis relationship between managers and some key shop stewards in the early 1950s, which allowed for “backstairs” deals to minimise conflict. Another close participant in, and observer of, the Billingham scene throughout the last 30 years, who was never on the ICI payroll, said:

Up to the early 1960s this site was dominated by a group of works managers and convenors who'd all been in office for very long periods – all old school, all guys who knew the 1930s. They all went in about a five- or six-year period. And there was a great vacuum left behind.

Ever since the early 1950s ICI had been a pioneer in the use of work study techniques – indeed, their use had allowed ICI to appreciably reduce their manpower around 1952–53. But by the end of the 1950s pressures of a continuous and irritating kind were starting to break out at the shop floor level. One manager recalled:

In those days the shop stewards were getting increasingly aggressive. We had work study in the division and in most areas there were bonus systems working. As you know, it's easier to measure process work than engineering work, and the process workers felt the engineering workers were being paid a bonus on the fiddle and they themselves were being ground into the dust by ruthless work study officers. There were endless, endless disputes. Ninety-five per cent of the disputes I was involved in were about work study values that were being challenged . . . I was so utterly sick of this that I was very happy to see this massive change towards WSA.

This same manager went on to describe an incident illustrating how the we/they attitudes between management and union were sustained by provocation and counter-provocation – and how this influenced the development of his own managerial style:

There was an incident in my third or fourth meeting of the works council involving a shop steward from my department, who had been aggressive with me and Dr Stone. Dr Stone had made a statement and my shop steward hardly allowed him to finish before he was in with, “That’s a lie, a downright lie, and it's not the first lie you've told this council.” I sat back in horror thinking “It’s alright when the cat squeaks, but who's going to get kicked.” But, Dr Stone switched off his hearing aid, a public gesture for everyone to see. The steward went on and on, and when he'd finished, Dr Stone said “let’s calm down and start again” . . . that illustrated to me a way of dealing with the aggressive shop steward. I found it paid off.

Aside from asking about the nature of recurrent conflicts and how they were handled, another way into disentangling the Billingham management culture was to ask – What was the concept of a good manager? This produced some highly consistent answers for the 1950s and early 1960s, and some equally consistent changes by the late 1960s and 1970s. The picture has changed yet again now in the early 1980s, but that's anticipating some later developments in this story.

The following quotes, all from managers at Billingham in the late 1950s and early 1960s, convey the flavour of managerial behaviour at that time:

The division always was, and probably still is, a “technocracy” . . . You weren't credible if you didn't have a technical background . . . particularly in ammonia technology.

image

ICI has always been very kind to its employees, but the individual works managers were very autocratic when I came to Billingham in 1957 . . . No one could stop them except the works manager who lived next door.

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Well in 1958 the chief engineer was the best engineer. He wasn't particularly skilled in man management or in the techniques of organisation – he was the best engineer, which usually meant a mechanical engineer, because 80% of them were.

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In those days if you were bloody good technically that was alright. The labour department, the staff department would look after your problems from the human side of the enterprise. That's no longer so.

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Going back a long way to the mid-1950s when I joined the division you really felt that unless you'd been to Cambridge, got a first-class honours degree, ideally you were a Scot, and a member of the rugby club – then you were severely hampered . . . I don't think it's a bit like that any more.

Finally, two senior shop stewards recall their view of managerial behaviour in the late 1950s and 1960s and its impact on the nature of management–union relationships:

There were a lot of long-service managers and supervisors. The respect afforded management was incredible. If you had to see someone above assistant foreman level, you assumed you were in real bother. You had to get your best togs on to see the plant manager in his office over here. There was a feeling at that time to break this sort of thing down and to give shop stewards and weekly staff more voice and access, to bring a manager down to our level in the mess room.

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Over the years there's been an evolution in ICI, a lot of the managers now aren't the same type – like there are more from working class backgrounds. Previously most were from middle- or upper-class backgrounds, you know, daddy owned the business and all they knew about industrial relations was what they read in a book.

It must be remembered that these views of managers and shop stewards is a retrospective one filtered through some 20 years of societal change, as well as change in ICI. Nonetheless, the above quotes and illustrations capture something of the beliefs and behaviours of a managerial culture which was to come under increasing pressure to change from forces within and without itself.

BUSINESS HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT, 1958–83

The reader may recall from the review of the whole ICI group's commercial and economic fortunes in Chapter 3 that the years 1958 and 1961, 1970 and 1971, and 1980 and 1981 were bad years. These years were also precursors to, or directly involved, major organisational and people changes. Thus major changes in divisional labelling, responsibilities, and boundaries, and manpower reductions, took place in 1958, 1962 and 1963, 1971 and 1980.

Billingham Division in the late 1950s and then under its present title of Agricultural Division from 1963, followed the ICI trend for part of that period. As I have already noted, ICI in the late 1950s was experiencing heightened levels of competitive pressure in home, but especially in world, markets, and was facing price reductions in many of its chemicals. This was also happening at a time when the basic technologies in some of its divisions were getting behind international competitors. One has a feeling that ICI suddenly awakened in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and a steady flow of changes emerged in technology, commerical and market orientation, organisation structure, manpower and industrial relations, productivity and social and political awareness, all designed to ensure the company's survival and prosperity, not just in the traditional markets of the United Kingdom and the ever-disappearing Empire, but also worldwide.

Billingham Division found itself in 1958 with an outmoded technology, being priced out of world markets by a combination of the relatively high price of the feedstock for its technology coal-coke, with 17,000 employees organised in a basic functional structure inappropriate for handling market and technological innovations, and with increasing problems in the industrial relations sphere. What it did have was a host of talented scientists and engineers, but how were they to be redirected in order to tackle some of these problems?

What happened was a series of major technological changes in ammonia production to rid the division of its dependence on coal-coke and to move to oil as a feedstock. This happened in the period 1962–65. This was followed by the construction of large new single-stream ammonia plants and a further change in feedstock from oil to natural gas in the period 1966–71. By 1970 a new long-lasting catalyst had been developed at Billingham which enabled a highly efficient, low-pressure methanol plant to go into production. This was followed by a fourth large, single-stream ammonia plant in 1977, new plants manufacturing urea, “Drikold”, “Nitram” and the most recent technological innovation the manufacture of a single cell protein called “Pruteen” from methanol in 1980. The above technological changes, especially in the 1960s, were true innovations, and have placed the Agricultural Division as a world leader in ammonia and methanol production. Those innovations and the outcomes they have produced were achieved through, at times, a highly painful business, technical, and human process. This was most notably so in the period 1966–70 when the division could first of all not get the new single-stream ammonia plants to work and then could not get them to work to predicted levels of efficiency. But more of that in a moment. How did these technological changes start? What associated changes in organisation went along with them and what wider repercussions did they have on the division?

A technical manager at that time recalled:

Yes, we were nearly bankrupt in 1960. If we'd been Agricultural Division Ltd, we'd have gone out of business twice in my opinion, once in 1960, and again in 1969. We were technically arrogant. We didn't think there were any better ways of making fertilizers and gasses. We slept for five or six years – then woke up, almost too late and produced the famous steam-reforming process which saved our necks. We started researching this in 1958, and all the breaks went our way, and by 1962 we had a complete process buttoned up and patented. My God, we were lucky. That saved us then . . . And then, not having learned that lesson, we just went on overstaffing. And our selling people never really sold, they just allocated. So we were lulled into a false sense of security twice inside 10 years. Then we suddenly went full circle on this technological side and developed this new ammonia system (the single-stream plants of the late 1960s) which as far as chemistry was concerned, was years ahead of its time. The engineering hadn't kept up with us, and the very first ammonia plants we built, we had hell's trouble with materials and construction equipment.

The change from coal to oil (naphtha) as the feedstock had a big impact on manning levels. Between 1957 and 1965 the total number of employees in the division declined from 17,000 to 13,800. The great monuments of engineering of the past, coke ovens, hydrogen plants, water-gas plants were pulled down. But the changes weren't just physical or manpower,4 new ways of thinking about and controlling these processes were required:

If for years you've lived with a technology of coke making, and then suddenly you're confronted with a steam-reforming process in which you're shoving naphtha up a tube and attacking it with steam, then you're moving out of a dirty, heavy, solid thing into a rather small-scale, fluid process in which a great deal of rethinking has to take place. You whole process control system changes. If one coke oven unit went out of action, you still went on making 90% of the coke. But if one steam-reform unit goes down, then you stop making 30%-plus of the total product.

The change from multi-stream ammonia plants to single-stream plants and from naphtha to natural gas as a feedstock in the period 1966–72 brought another large reduction in manpower. Uneconomic plants and products were discarded, and the anhydrite mine was closed down. From 13,173 in year end 1969, the total employees of the division had dropped to 10,376 by the end of 1972. More automation meant fewer numbers but also “the demands that it put on people were of a different order”. Single-stream plants, instead of multi-stream units, put on greater pressure to keep the new plants running – this as we shall see put stress not only on the quality of maintenance engineering, but also on the quality of industrial relations on the site.

The financial situation of the division in 1969 was indeed disastrous, more money was “being made out of royalties licensing the new technologies than out of a production”. Another director has commented that the patience of the ICI main board was running out:

At the turn of the decade the business was pretty well flat on its back . . . ICI’s enthusiasm for fertilisers and ammonia was diminishing. In fact, there was a main board minute of that era – so I'm told – saying never again will we invest in ammonia or fertiliser.

Nearly as bad as the financial problems, the closure of plants, and the manpower reductions was the blow to the self-esteem of the technical managers who ran the division. A director closely involved in the technical scene at the time said:

There was a tremendous gash to people's pride because it was a technically proud place and there were these bloody plants which didn't work . . . The division board would go euphoric when all three plants were working and then go deep into depression when they broke.

It was in this situation, in 1969, that formally, at least, OD in the division was born.

Throughout this period of business and technical adversity in the division some changes in organisation structure were made but not of the substantial kind characteristic of Petrochemicals Division. Perhaps the most significant changes were made in the period at the end of the 1950s. On 1 January 1958, ICI (Heavy Organic Chemicals) Ltd was formed and this new division took over the organic chemicals side of the business from Billingham Division and became responsible for the expansion of the petrochemicals business area at Wilton throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Billingham lost about one-third of its staff strength to the new division and the total production of two Works, Oil Works at Billingham and Olefine Works, south of the Tees at Wilton.

Some inroads were also made around 1958 into clearing up the more obvious conflicts between functional units and departments by getting rid of Commercial Works as an entity and the central services unit in the Chief Engineer's Department. The Technical Department was wound up, and the long-term aspects of its work went into a Planning and Co-ordination Department, and the rest into a newly constituted Projects and Engineering Department. The Research and the Development Departments became a single Research and Development Department. The old Chief Engineer's Department was renamed and put under a new Production, Projects and Engineering Director. These organisational changes, just be reducing the number of functional departments, did not really deal with the attitudinal and behavioural problems that were occurring between the units. There was some coming together at the board level but major problems of integration persisted at the head of department and middle management levels, particularly on new project-development activities, and in the commissioning and operation of new plants. These problems surfaced all too clearly in the new plants brought fitfully on stream in the period 1966–69. This pattern was not to be broken, for reasons we shall explore in detail later, until Methanol 2 was commissioned in 1972.

The other structural changes of note to occur were in 1963. At that point the division changed its name from Billingham to Agricultural Division, and took on board responsibility for Plant Protection Ltd. In 1963, ICI's own organisation study and a McKinsey report on company organisation brought forward the necessity to strengthen the marketing activities of the company, and Agricultural Division thus moved from a pure functional organisation to a mixed or matrix structure. Figure 5 illustrates the structure as it was in 1969 with five functional areas and two product groups or business areas, plus Plant Protection Ltd. With relatively minor changes (including latterly the loss of deputy chairman as a distinct level in the structure and a new business area), this structure prevailed from 1965 to 1983, and this represented a source of stability amidst the many other changes in the business of the division during this period.

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FIGURE 5  Agricultural Division: top organisation chart – 1969

If the 1960s were for Agricultural Division a period of economic and technical adversity, then the 1970s can only be characterised, after 1971, as a period of recovery and resurgence. The division had a relatively cheap source of natural gas contracted on extremely favourable terms for the period 1968–84, successfully commissioned very large new methanol, ammonia, and nitram plants with the most up-to-date and efficient technology, and happily poured product into growing markets. Everything was set fair. However, continuing questions about the economic viability and growth in their new “Pruteen” business area, doubts about the division's relative competitive position in ammonia, methanol, and bulk fertilisers because of increasing competitive pressures and rising energy costs, plus a downturn in the prices in their traditional markets, were all creating an atmosphere of concern by the early 1980s, even in amongst profits of £100m a year plus.

Table 18 offers yearly statistics on Agricultural Division manpower from year end 1964 until January 1984. The table shows that the division has reduced its manpower by 49% from 1964 to 1984. Apart from showing the largish drop in numbers between 1969 and 1972 already referred to, it also indicates an appreciable sudden drop in monthly staff numbers from year end 1973 to year end 1974, a consequence of the creation of a separate Plant Protection Division, and then a long period from 1974 to 1979 when the division's monthly and weekly staff numbers were fairly stable. The 22% drop in manpower from year end 1979 until year end 1982 was a product of divisional managerial action to reduce numbers plus a number of corporate changes such as the creation of regional engineering and regional purchasing and supply functions which further denuded the division's monthly staff. The increase in numbers during 1983 was a result of the transfer of Cassel Works on the Billingham site from Mond Division to Agricultural Division's manpower numbers.

Table 19 indicates the sales, trading profit, and trading margins for ICI Agricultural Group world wide over the period 1968 to 1983. As I indicated earlier in this chapter some care has to be taken in interpreting these numbers. ICI group the sales and profit figures for their agricultural and agrochemical business classes. Table 19 thus refers to the worldwide activities of Agricultural Division and Plant Protection Division. Estimates by Vivian, Gray & Co. (1980) of the Plant Protection Division record for the 1970s period would suggest that removing 10% of the above sales and profits for the period 1975–80, and more like 20–25% for 1973–74, would give a truer reflection of the progress of ICl's agricultural business class. Nevertheless what is unambiguously reflected in Table 19 is the dramatic improvement of the business fortunes of Agricultural Division from 1972 onwards, although the heightened competitive pressures of the 1980s are evident in the drop in trading margins since 1980, and £100m-plus profit in 1983 pounds sterling is a drop in real terms from the profit levels of 1977.

TABLE 18  Agricultural Division weekly and monthly staff employees 1964–84

Year End

Weekly staff

Monthly staff

Total

28.12.1964

9107

4333

13,440

27.12.1965

8900

4878

13,778

  2. 1.1967

8292

4698

12,990

  1. 1.1968

7900

4346

12,246

30.12.1968

7905

4321

12,226

29.12.1969

7927

5246

13,173

28.12.1970

7610

5399

13,009

  3. 1.1972

6122

4866

10,988

  1. 1.1973

5843

4533

10,376

31.12.1973

5683

3171

10,216

30.12.1974

5757

3177

   8934

29.12.1975

5769

3244

   9013

27.12.1976

5540

3041

   8581

26.12.1977

5407

2959

   8366

  1. 1.1979

5492

2973

   8465

31.12.1979

5460

2977

   8437

29.12.1980

5148

2871

   8019

  4. 1.1982

4610

2885

   7495

  3. 1.1983

4332

2275

   6607

  1. 1.1984

4483

2350

   6833

TABLE 19  Agricultural Group: worldwide sales, trading profit, and trading margins, 1968–83 in £m.

Year

Sales

Trading profit

Trading margins

1968

  147

  15

10.2

1969

  145

    8

  5.5

1970

  157

  10

  6.4

1971

  158

  18

11.4

1972

  166

  26

15.7

1973

  313

  43

13.7

1974

  464

  89

19.2

1975

  554

114

20.1

1976

  645

103

16.0

1977

  848

139

17.2

1978

  873

150

17.2

1979

  995

159

16.0

1980

1071

151

14.1

1981

1245

182

14.6

1982

1369

158

11.5

1983

1507

174

11.5

Having established the business history and development of Billingham over the period 1920–57, the impact of that history on the Billingham manpower, labour relations and managerial culture; and then traced through the dramatic changes in technology and business fortunes in the period 1958–81, a number of questions remain for this chapter. Chief among these are to examine how and why these changes in manpower, organisation, in technology, and in business occurred. To catalogue the impact the changes had on the quality of industrial relations and in managerial attitudes and behaviours on the site, and to discuss the role that the social innovations of the 1960s played in those processes of changing. Therein lies the next challenge.

AGRICULTURAL DIVISION ORGANISATION DEVELOPMENT: AN OVERVIEW

Trying to ascertain when an activity or process begins in a large, complex organisation is never a particularly easy thing to establish – though if the activity turned out in retrospect to be significant, important, or otherwise successful, there are usually no shortage of claimants crying out – “it was from my loins it came”. In the case of organisation development there is the additional difficulty of the very indefiniteness of the term itself. As I pointed out in Chapter 1, the term organisation development appears to date from work carried out in the United States in the late 1950s. There is no doubt that George Bridge, the personnel director who came to Billingham Division in 1962, started off a process of change which could later be labelled as OD. Indeed, just before he left the division in September 1967, he wrote a policy statement for the division board called “A Policy for Organisation Development”, which was meant to establish a link between the change processes he had helped to start, and his hopes for their continuance after his departure. An examination of other archival material shows that the personnel officers in the division were debating their role in “organisation and management development” activities in 1966, and some of the trainers in the division had been involved in management and supervisory development courses, and group work with various individuals and groups from Products Works during 1966 and 1967. There was also the contact with a number of well-known American behavioural science consultants, sensitivity training (T-groups), and the job enrichment work of 1967 and 1968. It was not, however, until February 1969 and the arrival from the United States of Noel Ripley as a full-time internal OD resource that the OD group was constituted and began to sketch out its mission, style, activities and impact.

The informal group that Ripley drew together were primarily from personnel and training. Shortly thereafter some of them became the responsibility of a personnel manager, Paul Miles. It is important to note that most members of the OD group always retained other formal jobs throughout. The OD group at Agricultural Division was always more of an informal association that the OD unit at Petrochemicals Division.

In its early years, the period which may be characterised as birth and pioneering, the OD group informally concerned itself with clarifying its values, activities, sense of distinctiveness, commitment and leadership, and externally sought to establish sponsors, and a network of potential clients. Initially the group continued existing training work, much of which was novel and drew from T-group activities. In addition there was some on-the-job consulting, particularly in projects and engineering, and to a lesser extent in research. A watershed for the group was provided by their heavy involvement with the Methanol 2 project, the first big piece of capital investment sanctioned at Billingham after the struggles with the three new ammonia plants in the late 1960s. It was critical to the division that this major plant construction project was very successful, and OD was seen as having made an important contribution.

Methanol 2 was commissioned in August 1972. The period from late 1972 until summer 1976 can be characterised as the time of diffusion and doubt for OD in Agricultural Division. In fact, as we shall see, it was also a difficult period for OD throughout most of ICI – one of the OD groups, the OD unit in Petrochemicals Division, disappeared altogether in 1973. Within Agricultural Division the OD group continued to build up quite a dense network of clients and supporters among production managers. This network did not extend far outside production, nor did the group become much involved with the division board, or its individual members. The soundest evidence in the period from 1972 to 1976 for the diffusion of OD ideas and technologies into the division was the work done on joint problem-solving among managers, and between managers, supervisors, and shop stewards in Ammonia Works and Engineering Works. This work was important because it was OD being owned and led by senior line managers, but using specialist help, and not always necessarily the informal OD group, where, and as necessary. As a result of this line manager led work, further mini-networks of OD practitioners and sponsors came into being.

The OD group over the period 1972–76 lost some of its cohesiveness and direction. This was happening at the same time as doubts were being raised about the group's impact by managers, and those personnel managers and personnel officers who had never been accepted into its fold. Noel Ripley moved his office and attentions away from the production area to try and work with the division board and senior managers in other functions, and business areas. This proved to be stony ground, and with his important contribution as a thinker and catalyst over, he returned to the United States in March 1974. Meanwhile the OD group was sponsoring into the division three external consultants, two of whom still work regularly with the division in 1983. One of these two consultants, Ken Larsen, was to carry on the group's contribution in the construction and commissioning of new plants manufacturing ammonia and “Pruteen”. The other members of the group worked with varying degrees of involvement in the joint problem-solving work on Ammonia Works and assisted more generally on industrial relations development matters on the Billingham site. In addition, most members of the group were involved in the social policy work that ICI discreetly carried out in the Teesside community. These activities tended to be with schools, social services and local government, and the churches.

Nevertheless, when in March 1976 Paul Miles, the personnel manager who had been formally responsible for the still informal collection of OD resources left the division, the OD group in Agricultural Division was drifting, and the development work led by line managers in Ammonia and Engineering Works had either faded away or was beginning to run out of steam. In 1976 responsibility for OD in the division passed from the personnel manager level to the assistant personnel manager level. Peter Moores, the new assistant personnel manager, who had been a founder member of the OD group, fashioned a role attempting to link career-personnel, organisation development and training matters. This turned out to be a shrewd move. When by 1980, ICI as a whole was encountering severe business and commercial problems, and pressure was being exerted from Millbank for even the relatively successful divisions such as the Agricultural Division to reduce their cost base, Peter Moores had laid the ground for another contribution for OD in the division; though by this time not even the specialist OD resources in the division used the phrase organisation development to describe the process and activities they were hoping to get off the ground. The period from 1976 to 1983 can therefore be characterised as one of opportunism and refocusing for organisation development.

In what follows I will return to describe and account for the antecedents and origins of OD in the Agricultural Division. In Chapter 6 I will then present a thematic narrative which organises and explains the evolution of OD around the three characterisations mentioned above – birth and pioneering; diffusion and doubt; and opportunism and refocusing. Again it is appropriate to acknowledge that processes of the above kind, played out as they were over nearly a 20-year period, are so complex that one despairs of capturing the subtleties and rendering them on paper. It is only possible to do one's best and suggest them.

ANTECEDENTS OF ORGANISATION DEVELOPMENT

One of the natural tensions evident in divisionalised firms is that between headquarters and division. ICI has tended to try and ameliorate these potential conflicts in a number of ways which will become apparent later in this book. Throughout its history, as Reader (1975) has demonstrated, these centre– circumference tensions have often focused around Millbank's central control over the financing of capital investment and personnel policy, and the additional pressures created by the ebb and flow in the business fortunes of the company as a whole, or of individual divisions. Obviously divisions that are not doing well attract additional interest and scrutiny from the centre, and divisions that are doing well become themselves interested in the centre, often for more resources or additional freedom, and in consequence stimulate rivalries with other less well-placed divisions. In the way of things, this is all quite normal behaviour.

As I have already indicated, in the late 1950s Billingham Division was beginning to experience commerical difficulties. In fact, probably the first substantial business difficulties since the much worse traumas of the early and mid-1930s. Interestingly, Millbank responded in not dissimilar ways to both situations. Reader (1975:158–159) has described what happened over the period 1934–36 at Billingham. In 1934 George Pollitt, virtually the creator of Billingham, ceased to be an executive director of ICI (he remained on the board) and took to farming. Also in 1934 the Billingham managing director, R. E. Slade, went temporarily to London to report to McGowan on research, and stayed on as research controller. There were other changes, on the board and below, in 1935 and 1936; and finally, in 1937, the chairman, W. A. Akers, who had been in office since 1931, was succeeded by Alexander Fleck. The top management was remodelled.

In the meantime in 1935 a main board director, J. G. Nicholson, accompanied by A. R. Young of the treasurer's department, carried out a visitation. One outcome of this was the decision by ICI to write off huge chunks of the idle capital at Billingham, but not before the newly emerging management had asserted their independence. While the old chairman Akers was still there in 1935, and as his board was changing around him, Young complained “where we expected spontaneous interest, co-operation and active assistance, we were faced with an apparent self-sufficiency which completely frustrated any attempts to enter into any agreed line of investigation.”5 As Reader (1975:159) crisply puts it, “to dispose in this way, as Akers succeeded in doing, of the formidable Nicholson was a notable victory, for the circumference over the centre”.

Some of these events were to repeat themselves at Billingham in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A succession of new directors and senior managers arrived in the division to replace key managers and shop stewards, many of whom were retiring after service on Teesside, going back to the 1930s, and before. Simultaneously, Billingham was trying to put its own house in order – at least in the area where its core identity lay – technological innovation. The famous ICI steam-naphtha process was born of economic necessity at Billingham between 1958 and 1962. But Billingham's difficulties were more than just technological and it took one of these new directors, George Bridge, to grasp the nettle and begin the process of social innovation which he and other farsighted men in ICI at that time could see, was an essential complement to technological change and business success.

SOCIAL INNOVATION IN AGRICULTURAL DIVISION, 1962–69

The changes in the division during this period paralleled and, to some extent, led changes in the company as a whole. The MUPS/WSA productivity bargain was in process between 1965 and 1972, and, of course, towards the end of the 1960s and early 1970s, ICI introduced their staff development programme (SDP). The division led the company in the sense that it became involved very early on in focusing attention on the need to change managerial attitudes and behaviours as much, or more than, those of the work force.

As in later initiatives in Heavy Organic Chemicals Division (later named Petrochemicals Division), there was a central figure at Agricultural Division. This was George Bridge, who was the division's personnel director from 1962 to 1967. His was a pivotal role in MUPS/WSA both in the division, and in the company's central personnel department, to which he moved in September 1967. Bridge created a bow wave on Teesside which dented the rather tight and insular managerial culture on the site. His impact illustrates the role that powerful, charismatic individuals can play in social and organisational change, even in a company the size of ICI.

George Bridge's observations as a newcomer of the Billingham managerial culture, and of its impact on union–management relations, and business effectivenesss, closely mirror the statements collected together earlier in this chapter. I chronicle them here because of their powerful evocative character, and as a reaffirmation and summary of the point of departure for social innovation at Agricultural Division.

Entry – I was told I was to go to Billingham as personnel director, which was pretty traumatic because Billingham was then really the toughest place in the country. Nobody could imagine why I'd been sent . . . except as the most revolutionary, impossible person, who was always suggesting dreadful things to central personnel.

Isolation and Identity – Billingham . . . they seemed to be completely out of touch with what was going on in the world . . . There was this vast site, 17,000 people, the whole place was so solid in its cultural norms . . . there was Norton Hall, and the grouse moor where the staff lived, and the other place where all the others lived . . . I found I was responsible for 4,000 houses and a vast estates department administering them.

The Board: Concern for Production – Most of the board, their background was Oxford and Cambridge and the south (of England). Science, innovation and research had been the great Billingham thing, that was where your reputation was made . . . I do not believe that a board ought to be sitting on top of a business. I can remember you'd be sitting around the lunch table and you'd hear a bang and the whole board left the table and swept to the window. Their whole mind was on the Works.

The Managers: Concern for Technology – So many of the managers got tremendous pleasure out of the technology, out of keeping those huge plants running. They would say to me, “Look if that plant breaks down, the amount of money that I will lose in a week will pay for 50 chaps for a whole year – so don't talk to me about numbers (reductions). Numbers are irrelevant. The real thing is that the plant's got to keep running.” And my answer was “That plant's got to keep running and there have to be 50 less people” . . . but their life was science and technology.

Where the Power was and How it was Used – They [works managers] were the king pin in their works. They were technically very good. They were paternalistically very good – good managers in the old sense. I'm not knocking that in its own way. I merely thought it was getting a bit out of date . . . It wasn't a business, it was a vast, vast technical works with brilliant people running it . . . The sales boys had to get rid of the stuff– the “bloody commercials” they were known as.

Dealing with the Unions – The managers were still able to manage the unions – that meant keeping them in their place, but keeping them chatted up. They drove the plant. They made technical innovations. They encouraged the young graduates.

Bringing in the New Graduates – So they would come from university into the research department until they were 30 or 35 . . and then they were sent down the yard [the production area]. They'd never met a shop steward in their lives, they were terrified of them.

The Role of Personnel– You had a labour department in the middle that was meant “to get on with the chaps”. You had to have a pint in the [Synthonia Workers] Club twice a week. It was incredibly we-and-they to the nth degree. And the personnel function behaving in that way just did not close that gap. It's a management–man gap . . . the management didn't really feel what the men were feeling.

Bridge’s Imprecise Vision – I didn't go there with any clear ideas . . . I had changed very clearly in my view of unions and had been preaching for a number of years that management had to come to terms with a new kind of unionism . . . Co-operation with the unions and consultation were my aims at that time . . . I thought there must be a way of problem solving before negotiation.

Bridge’s Entry Point for Change – 1 thought if you could get the culture to change, then we might come through . . . You go in and feel something and feel a way forward and either get absorbed by them or start to change them and its damned hard with 17,000 like that, to retain your beliefs . . . I did carry around early on six points, in a cigarette case for all the time I was there – broad objectives for change . . . I had to hang onto my beliefs to stop myself from being absorbed into their very comfortable and happy system.

The content of what Bridge actually did, and the how and why he did it, is clearly stamped on the minds of the people who helped, opposed, and doubted him; it is also well-documented in a mass of archival material. Looking back at this attempt at managerial-led change, a striking and important thing about it was how poorly it conformed to the planned theories of change which were beginning to emerge from the writings of behavioural scientists of that time, Bennis, Benne and Chin (1961). Here was a process which was far from the planned, rational, diagnostic intervention. Rather one sees a complex, untidy, at times faltering, and political process being driven hard by a powerful man who knew only imprecisely where he was going and how to get there, tried several things along the way, learned from some of his mistakes, was not easily diverted once momentum had been created, and took others along with him behind his bow wave. Here was a social architect, and organisational changing in practice.

What Bridge did was to look carefully around him for the appropriate point to begin the change; try and build up his personal credibility with his fellow directors by doing conventional personnel activities well; wait until powerful opponents left, or could be neutralised by counter pressures, and used whatever support or mechanisms inside and outside the organisation he could find to galvanise others into action. Thus before long he and some of his fellow board members went off on T-groups in the United States, new kinds of training began for managers, supervisors, and shop stewards; the personnel and training activities in the division were decentralised, and the personnel officers were encouraged to spearhead development activities; and a stream of well-known American behavioural scientists came into the division – one to work with the division board and to examine human problems between manufacturing and engineering, another to spread group process knowledge and skills in the division, and a third to begin job enrichment projects in research and engineering areas. Some people were enthused by these people and ideas, and went on to learn more and try and apply the ideas themselves, others couldn't understand what was going on and took no part, and a few individuals among the management groups and shop stewards were overwhelmed by the pressures in some of these novel happenings and the implications they created for them back on the job.

George Bridge takes up the story:

You have to do two things. You have to do your day-to-day job. If you have to go to the board with something very mundane like graduate selection, it has to be absolutely first class. In order to be able to achieve that which you want to achieve, your department and your ordinary routine business have got to be absolutely first class.

But Bridge had to wait, first of all for the outgoing chairman to go, and also for the respected and likeable senior manager in the labour department to retire before he could act.

The chairman was against me, very much. That was the most difficult thing of all.

Politically, however, the die had been cast by Millbank. Billingham had to change.

That was the first time that outside directors had come in to Billingham. That was done as a quite clear policy by ICI to break up the hierarchy at Billingham.

At least four other new board members arrived, including a new chairman. They began pushing in the production and engineering areas.

So don't let me give you the impression that I was the saviour of Billingham

Although Bridge felt from a very early stage his task ought to be try and change the Billingham management culture, he was not easily able to find the appropriate words, or the appropriate vehicle to do so. The trigger was supplied by the late Douglas McGregor. In April and May 1964, and following contacts and advice supplied by the head of the small personnel research group at Millbank, Bridge and a young Billingham labour officer, Tom Lawson, departed for the United States to look for themselves at the behavioural sciences. Lawson later recalled:

I’d barely even heard of the term behavioural science, and certainly didn't know what it meant . . . The purpose of the visit was to go to the academic establishments and to test that out with the firms who'd experimented with this stuff . . . The impact that Douglas McGregor made was enormous. He really stood out head and shoulders over anyone else we saw. He came across as not only being a highly talented academic, but also with an immense feeling for people, and perhaps above all, the quality of wisdom. He was at great pains to emphasise the tentativeness of what they were doing. That visit really catalysed in George [Bridge] some views about what the division should be doing about organisation change.

Bridge confirms the above statements:

McGregor, it was with him that one started to see a light to change the culture. He gave me a method of dealing with the culture – instead of it just being personnel, or “this is the way that you manage”, which was easily rejected . . . So partly it was a great help to me in trying to get my own thoughts straight, and partly it was a great help in getting other people enthused and coming on board.

Bridge didn't waste any time in inviting McGregor to England.

He turned down the offer to be a central consultant [at Millbank]. But he spent a week at Billingham and accepted the offer here. Then, of course, he died. He was an extraordinary person. His theories were just good common sense . . . In the week at Billingham, he met group after group. At the end, I took him to see the chairman and he shook John absolutely rigid. That had a big effect that week . . . As a result, we started to look at getting at our business objectives through the internal organisation.

Bridge’s next move also turned out to be fateful for the long-term development and character of OD in ICI. Bridge takes up the story:

When I lost McGregor I spent a great deal of time trying to find somebody else that would fit ICI. I met Mercer and he came up to Billingham . . . Ron is a funny, tough little operator. He's very acceptable to people. He's very down to earth. He's not much good if people want a shoulder to cry on. But he works.

Mercer “worked” all right. His part in the evolution of organisational change and development in ICI was a crucial one. From around the mid-1960s right up into the 1980s he has worked at various times with different parts of ICI – usually with the most senior managers, but also notably with the main board, and with individual main board directors. He has also assisted with the development of ICI's internal OD resources in ways which will become apparent in later chapters. But as we shall continuously see, the fortunes of individual consultants, and the momentum of change processes, is intimately tied in with the idiosyncrasies of personality and the chemistry of relationships, and when Agricultural Division acquired a new chairman in 1968, Mercer's work in the division was wound down.

Mercer’s view of George Bridge's style and methods in the Agricultural Division are instructive. Mercer, working as he usually did with the top layers of management, could see the importance of working the power system and assembling a critical mass for a change process:

You need a critical mass. Bridge was an aggressive guy and a very smart political person, who knew how to work the power system. He was very abrasive and always a troublesome person in the company. But he was the social architect, really . . . Bridge was strongly influenced by McGregor and felt there was a need for some other relationship between management and worker which involved trust – somebody taking the first step to set up a contract for improved productivity. He was also a missionary and was trying to introduce a different kind of climate into the division of which he was director . . . He wanted to create a theory “Y” climate . . . but he started with the environment of the work force and the things in his own division . . .

As can be seen from Bridge's shrewd use of external consultants, he knew that although changes require a champion and that a champion needs powerful acquiescence, if not always open support; for new ideas to penetrate a system and start to influence behaviour, there has to be activity and involvement in as many levels and functions in the organisation as possible. Bridge recruited an able lieutenant, Tom Evans, with a similar philosophy and managerial style, and the pair of them introduced the behavioural sciences into the division on a “seeding basis”. “It was broadly educative rather than technique of package orientated.”

There was the much recalled visit by Herzberg:

Bridge just summoned a whole raft of managers and marched them off to the rugby pavilion which had a meeting room and Fred did his song and dance act . . . it was a very inspiring thing.

A senior production present said:

There were about 50 managers who hadn't heard what a social scientist was and I think they were quite amazed . . . We sat there with open mouths . . . I was quite impressed.

This visit led on to the job-enrichment studies in engineering and research later published in Paul and Robertson (1971). These job-enrichment experiments at Billingham (and elsewhere in ICI) were part of the productivity objectives of the MUPS/WSA personnel strategy. The way the studies were carried out is still a controversial subject, and certainly no studies of this type using experimental groups and control groups have been repeated in the company. Two of the Billingham people involved in this work have subsequently argued that the impact of the job-enrichment studies in research was not entirely negative.

But I still say that the people who took part in that project not only enjoyed it, but they got a lot of extra responsibility they'd never had before. By and large we eliminated an area of management.
We got people to maximize their talents, to pursue projects, to think out innovations instead of just carrying out technical officer's experiments. The changes seem so small and yet I think they brought in a new culture . . . It directly led on to the SDP programme . . . Research SDP groups tended to be a lot more natural than in other areas because they'd done this work.

This phenomenon of the additive effect of one change on another, though I doubt planned, was an important piece of learning from this era. People began to see that where things went well they provided other kinds of opportunities for innovation. The linking that went on between the management and supervisory training that started in 1965; the Sandsend Teesside community group events involving managers and shop stewards from various north-east organisations, and people from the Teesside Industrial Mission; and the shop steward training – much of it within Billingham – flamed again by preparation for MUPS, led to the opening up of new possibilities for the emerging development resources in the division. A trainer at that time recalls:

I was drafted in to set up a management training programme . . . It was a kind of crash reorientation programme to oil the wheels for the productivity deal [MUPS] . . . One of the consequences was that we began to get involved in the sort of problems which managers try to deal with in their normal workplace. With hindsight, it was on a sort of consultancy basis, although we didn't describe it in those terms . . .   . . . It also grew out of having to talk with managers and trade unionists in rather unfamiliar – collaborative ways.

In the period around 1967, of course, the MUPS programme had become thoroughly stalled across the whole of the ICI Teesside complex. The trade unions would have nothing to do with it (Roeber, 1975). Management was beginning to look to the behavioural sciences not just to help with the redesign of work and improving productivity, but also with how to deal with the problems of resistance to change. Here the work on organisation change and group process became relevant. Another American consultant appeared in the division and began to run workshops on group process skills.

The Mills workshop was really the start of it for me. I can't explain adequately the shock I got being invited to something that didn't have a programme – just gaps between meals. The only equipment you needed was a real problem you were working on . . . It sent me back determined to adopt some of that to the work I was doing.

Some of the management and shop stewards became more daring, and especially in different corners of Products Works where a combination of a supportive line manager, a couple of trainers, and a MUPS co-ordinator managed to get off the ground a series of “barrier meetings” exploring links between process and maintenance, and then the first management–union workshop, in 1968.

This Products Works one-week workshop, where the average working day was 18 hours, was a modified T-group attended by 36 people from fitters to the deputy works manager. Some of the shop stewards who agreed to come on it had been to shop steward training events and the Sandsend community group events, so had the Products Works trainer who spent a year with a management–union working party trying to get the workshop off the ground. Again MUPS provided part of the enabling mechanism to allow this extremely novel kind of activity to take place. But there was still the local politics. The trainer recalls:

The works manager said he was backing us and recognized that it was a risk, he had an awful lot to lose but he gave the sanction . . . There were some trade unionists who thought it was terrible and tried to stop it . . . but failed . . . They were the most stressful training experiences I've ever been involved in, and the most exhilarating . . . The vast majority of managers and unionists who attended always came back saying it was worthwhile . . . not that some didn't say, “never again” . . . From that we grew another two workshops on Products Works and then it began to branch out to other works.

It is difficult perhaps at this distance from the late 1960s to appreciate the extent to which this kind of unstructured group process event, involving various levels of management, supervision, weekly staff, and shop stewards cut across the normal pattern of workplace relationships at the time. It was totally counter-cultural both within ICI and British industry generally. Again this breakthrough, small as it was, and quickly overshadowed as it was by the technological and business traumas Agricultural Division was just about to face, provided some experience and climate setting for the joint problem-solving work between management and unionists which was spawned in Ammonia Works and Engineering Works in the mid-1970s.

Before this Products Works management–union workshop got off the ground, and indeed right up until 1970, some directors and senior managers of Agricultural Division amended T-groups. Often these took place in the United States and there is a fair bit of correspondence in the files from returnees reporting on their experiences. The following extracts reveal something of the colour of these events as seen by a manager of the day:

The group work was certainly not like an English group. The people who attended were, in the American term, “switched on” before they go through the gate. As soon as the group starts they are rearing to go. For example, a man who felt slightly inferior to his bosses and covered it by a “cool image” was held down by a few strong men while one or two others reviled him to break his coolness. A man who had a devil in him had it exorcised by describing its physical appearance – and then talking to it until it came out and sat in a chair opposite where he argued with it. During this session the man in question went berserk and rushed round the room seizing the women in the group and throwing them out of the door. The T-group trainer eventually collared him and two or three people sat on him till he cooled down. As the man stood about 6’3” and was heavily built, this was a quite alarming experience.

The author of the above report concludes with the superb understatement that the culture of the above event was so different from England that it would not be understood. No recommendations were made for others in ICI to attend this particular T-group.

Much later George Bridge was to say:

I think I get my fingers burned more over T-groups than anything else. I went on one myself and found it an amazing experience. We got most of the [Agricultural Division] board to go on them and that was a great opener. But there was the appalling business where somebody saw this as the second coming . . . I think the average Englishman regards this sort of thing as the nearest thing to seances . . . I think the most acceptable thing was running good courses. You keep on working at it and eventually it takes. They swore they'd close down Norton Hardwick [the training centre] as soon as Bridge left, and its still going.6

The one major structural change that Bridge engineered as an enabling mechanism to bring about the attitudinal and behavioural changes he was looking for was to break up the old central labour, staff, and education department at Billingham and to decentralise personnel and training activities into the works and other departments. Tied to this structural change was a change in how personnel policy was to be formulated, and a change in role for the personnel officers. This happened in 1965, and predates many of the activities described above. Bridge recalls:

I put in a line manager as production personnel manager and under him I put younger men in who were totally responsible to a works, and the works manager. What I wanted to do was to break down the isolation of personnel department which worked in its own way and bring the management into personnel and make them responsible for decisions. I weakened the function and strengthened the line.

Now the personnel officers were to be responsible for everything on a particular patch from straight negotiations to behavioural change. The interchanges in the records between the personnel officers and the personnel managers, and then Bridge, indicate the kinds of pressures this change had created in 1966, one year after implementation. A personnel manager characterised the change thus; in a note to G. Bridge in June 1966:

The principal difference between the new and old concept of the personnel function in the management team is the increased emphasis on positive means of getting people working more effectively and enthusiastically, rather than the more negative but by no means easy task of avoiding disruption of effort by disaffection.

The personnel manager then went on to query the personnel officer's ability to act towards managers either as experts on human behaviour, as an organisation expert, or a developer of managers. He complained the personnel officers were in danger of riding one fashionable hobby-horse after another and that they remained the manipulators of the (personnel) machinery and as such “had little effect on the basic thinking of managers in the works”. The above note was quickly circulated to all the personnel officers and a lively correspondence ensued. Most of the personnel officers felt extremely uncomfortable with their new development responsibilities, complained that they were not professionally trained in the behavioural sciences, or organisation matters, and suggested their new-found change activities be delegated to an expert, or experts. A more perceptive member of the group could see that they were not necessarily being asked to become instant behavioural science experts, but rather were being encouraged to ask managers about the balance appropriate between technical and man-management aspects of their jobs. The personnel officer was also there to “encourage managers to experiment with new ideas in man-management and when appropriate to assist in the development of the ideas”. Having said that was the way forward he doubted whether much progress had been made in the first 12 months, and called for a review of the training of front-line personnel officers.

Later in 1966 the above personnel officer wrote to George Bridge stating there was a gap between his high-level formulation of personnel policy and the practical application of that policy at the lower levels. The gap he felt would only be narrowed by allowing each personnel officer in a “piecemeal approach”, to gauge the different situations they were in and their “different interests and backgrounds”, and act in consort with local management. The piecemeal approach for creating change recommended by the personnel officer was acknowledged as sensible by Bridge in his reply – but he was still pushing for the broad objective, and the grand design. Bridge concluded his letter to the personnel officer in this way:

You say start from the other end and obviously from the way you lay out your objectives – i.e. involvement with managers and getting a toehold in the process – you are right on target. While this seems a sound practical approach . . . unless we start grappling together with the concept of what is management et alia . . . to have a standard in our mind to put performance against, we are no better equipped than managers to answer daily problems or to form objectives. In short, I accept your approach but I believe mine has got to be achieved – but my methods must be improved!

The above interchange and correspondence which preceded it on the tensions implicit in the new personnel officer role, between the personnel systems and the developmental aspect of the job, illustrate some general issues about creating change which will recur time and again in this book. Can organisational changes be led from people in specialist roles, and if so how? Is it possible for individuals with an administrative and political component to their role, such as personnel officers, to act as developers of people and organisations? Can change be created by the broad sweep of a social architect such as Bridge, or must we rely on the more circumscribed and piecemeal approach recommended by the personnel officer? Indeed can both of those approaches be combined in the same organisation at the same time, or are the dynamics they create basically opposed to one another?

Social innovation in Agricultural Division, 1962–69: a review

Drawing together some of the threads from the period of social innovation in Agricultural Division in the 1960s and making an assessment of its impact on attitudes and behaviour in the Billingham manpower scene and management culture is a difficult task. The comments I have been able to extract from the voluminous archival material available indicate naturally enough that for those in the middle of those changes it was a time of confusion, stress, exhilaration, pain, and learning. For some people, and especially the individuals who later went on to become specialist OD resources in the 1970s, or the managers excited by the 1960s work who led some of the important development work in the next decade at Billingham, the social innovations of the 1960s were a founding experience. It affected the concept of themselves as human beings, the way they treated their peers, superiors, and subordinates, how they behaved at home, and how they attempted to make future changes at work.

I have no hesitation in arguing for the case that George Bridge, and Tom Evans, the general manager of personnel who worked closely with and for him, opened up Billingham in the 1960s. But their impact and the contribution made by the people they enthused and left behind, has to be set beside the repercussions on the site made by the business and technological traumas at Billingham of the early and late 1960s. Equally well, one has to take into account the impact on managerial attitudes and behaviour of the conduct of industrial relations, and changes in the educational system and in social values going on contemporaneously with life at Billingham. One cannot talk comfortably here about linear causal relationships, in a world more realistically characterised as a complicated mosaic of cause and effect.

In what follows I leave it largely to the views of those specialists, managers, and shop stewards involved in the social processes of innovation to make their own assessment. I think it proper to wait and draw together my own reflections later in this book. The reader will see that running through the views of those who were at Billingham in the 1960s is the stamp of change, a feeling of continuty and opportunity into the 1970s and a clear notion of an aversion or backlash against some of the methods and processes used to create change. The 1960s was a period of experiment and of learning at Billingham – and regrettably perhaps, it is in extreme situations that individuals and organisations acquire their most fundamental learning.

In an earlier section of this chapter George Bridge expressed his later reservations about using T-groups within the British culture. Here I draw only on his comments on what he felt he left behind at Billingham, and his reflections on his personal style, and its impact on others:

By the time I left there was a fairly strong converted lot within the management and certainly in personnel . . . I felt there was enough critical mass that it wouldn't go back . . .
I have never seen myself as a power person but when you are pushing things through, you're bound to get some opposition. And the chap who comes after you does inevitably have a difficult time . . . The chap who came in, on my advice entirely, was Ray Williams . . . He got up against the board. At that level it was desperately difficult. On the other hand, he really built up the behavioural side, encouraged Noel Ripley, and Williams drove through WSA . . .
Don’t forget that technically they were having one hell of a time with all the plants. A lot of the management saw themselves, very fairly, as having to put up with two revolutions, a technical revolution and a social revolution. And they said that's too bloody much.

It is instructive to follow through the comments of the four personnel directors who followed George Bridge. All of them point to the successes of the Bridge era, the opportunities it created for future development work but also, in some cases, the deeply held resentments. None of these personnel directors supported and pushed development activities in the open, driving manner Bridge had done, but all of them, to varying degrees, provided a loose political umbrella for OD work, as it then became known as, to continue.

I knew Bridge and Evans very well, both were very forceful people. Bridge had been experimenting like mad at Billingham. I don't think it would have happened without him . . . What he left behind at Billingham was a seedbed, ultimately worked out as very good. But at the time there was a lot of confusion and misunderstanding as to what all this OD was all about.
While Bridge was there people who found it illegitimate kept a low profile, so it was afterwards, when I got there that there was considerable deeply held objections . . . They’d have talked about pieces of behaviour – apparent free thinking behaviour where somebody they'd seen before as a clear, firm, controlling, big machismo guy was turning into some sort of obscure, arcane, unforecastable person. It didn't happen too often but where it did, it was influential.

image

The concepts had penetrated very widely down the organisation, partly as a result of the Teesside Industrial Mission and the Sandsend events. That did lead to the beginnings of a very different attitude to relationships at work . . .

There was quite a network at the lower levels and no consciousness in the board at all . . . Bridge and Williams had really overdone it and turned the board off.

image

I quickly got all sorts of powerful impressions that the behavioural science initiatives of the 1960s had been very definitely a mixed blessing. The business went through very dramatic adverse circumstances after that work and left the feeling “if we'd not been messing about with all that stuff we might have seen problems sooner and more clearly – a resentful feeling . . .”. This convinced me one clear way not to succeed was to launch a divisionwide campaign of some kind. It's not that kind of culture.

Naturally enough, those individuals who, from personnel, training, or line management roles, were able to use the new ideas and people brought in by Bridge and Evans to create meaningful changes, and to develop their own knowledge and skills, regarded Bridge's arrival as a breath of fresh air.

Bridge was a tremendous pioneer, trying to do things that were very different from the things around him. For me he really opened up new possibilities. They did create opportunities because it was the first time that somebody at board level was saying perhaps we should be moving along these paths.

image

Bridge and Evans were very much the engine and motor behind all this in the 1960s. One important early decision was not to go for a total, across the board change programme such as a “Managerial Grid”. Bridge and Evans opted for an eclectic . . . Home grown – developmental was the word used – programme. That threw up opportunities left, right, and centre. Any problem you came across was fair game.

image

Working on the management and supervisory development programme led various managers to come and ask for more tailored work along these lines – this created a network of activity at lower levels, and a group of sponsors for us in the 1970s.

Shop stewards were cautious of getting involved in development activities spawned by Agricultural Division in the 1960s; this is understandable enough given the organised resistance to the company-led MUPS/WSA programme on Teesside. Nevertheless, shop steward training started in the mid-1960s, first of all on the neutral ground of a local technical college and then inside the Billingham site. As I have already noted, the first management–union workshop was held in 1968.

There is a risk for shop stewards in involvement in development work. When the OD started there was a word that came out – behavioural science. An emotive word, you can put all sorts of interpretations on it – you can think of Chinese brainwashing!

Job enrichment – most people tend to be highly suspicious of that sort of things, wary of it. The company was trying to get as much as it possibly could get for a given amount of money.

image

Many union people in ICI are very suspicious of OD. People think of it as a lot of undercover, underhand stuff. Training is a more acceptable term. I got involved in the first Sandsend course in the 1960s where two or three shop stewards were among 50 managers, clergy, etc. I had some trepidation because I thought the managers were all very clever people, but I found I could hold my own and in many cases help other people. That sort of stuck with me.

The caution, suspicion, and learning described above did not stop a much larger number of shop stewards, including the ones quoted above, from attending a wider range of management–union joint problem–solving activities in the 1970s. The reasons why will become apparent later.

The final quotation I would like to use catches very clearly the resentment that a number of managers at Billingham felt about the way behavioural science ideas were introduced into the division, about the feeling of personal threat those ideas and experiences created, and the positive impact it did have on management thinking and behaviour there.

I disliked it intensely and dislike it even more now. Not as a science or an input but I have no patience for a philosophy which says, here is the answer. Everyone will go through it, and end up a better manager . . . I saw behavioural science coming in a very simple form . . . a number of people began to look at themselves and say “hell, I'm in this category and I'm not very good – they don't like me, that's not acceptable today”. I didn't want the information and I didn't know what to do with it when I'd got it. There was some success, it introduced a new vocabulary, it introduced a way of looking at management style that was rather less haphazard. The whole movement, the whole idea did get a lot of people looking at management style, putting much more emphasis on problem-solving and analysis, more ordered in where they were going and in reviewing whether they had got there. Before it was by intuition and seat of the pants.

Agricultural Division had been opened up, at least partially as a social, technical, and managerial system – but who was to capitalize on this development, and how? The next chapter on the OD work in Agricultural Division over the next 15 years has that as one of its starting points.

1 This was from 1931.

2 Much of the detail in this historical review is based on Imperial Chemical Industries: A History Vol II 1927–1952 by W.J. Reader (1975)

3 I am grateful for this and other detail in this section on Mond to the research and writing of Reader (1975)

4 Some of these manpower reductions were also due to the hiving off of part of the division in 1958.

5 Quoted in Reader (1975:159).

6 Norton Hardwick was eventually closed down in 1983, 16 years after Bridge left the division.

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