12	The Use, Impact, and Fate of Specialist Change Resources

The purpose of this chapter is to compare and contrast the natural history of development and impact of the various groups of internal and external OD consultants who worked in the corporate headquarters and Agricultural, Petrochemicals, Plastics, and Mond Divisions of ICI. Simply stated there is the requirement to explain why by 1983, through different pathways of development, and after varying life histories and effects, two of these divisional OD groups had ceased to exist while the head office OD activities and the other divisional OD activities continued in 1983, if not in anything like the same size and form as they had emerged in the different business, social, and organisational context of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In asking questions about the fate of these OD consultants, and indeed their contribution if any to creating organisation change in ICI, it is important to place such questioning in the context of the findings reported in Chapter 11 about the pattern, timing, and processes of creating strategic change in ICI over the period 1960–83. The role of internal and external specialists in creating change has to be considered alongside a pattern of evolution in ICI where over a 20–30-year period continuity is a good deal easier to see than change; and where strategic change when it does occur tends to occur in packages linked to major changes in the business and economic environment of the company, and to related changes in the power system and ideology of the top decision-makers in the company. But if there is this evidence of periods of high levels of change activity led by very senior executives when major structural and strategic reorientations occur, the periods in between such reorientations are occasions when the new structures and strategies are implemented and stabilised, and indeed when another generation of leaders begin to champion a new ideology and strategy which they consider more appropriately matches their sense of where the company is in relation to a changing social, economic, and political environment. As we have seen, the process of breaking down the old dominating ideas system in the firm, even when such a process is being led by a small but not yet critical mass of senior executives, is a long, faltering process requiring persistence and patience, and much skill in using and changing features of the inner and outer context of the organisation to justify the new marriage between strategic content and context.

The fact that it is so obviously difficult even for very senior executives to build commitment and energy for radical changes of ideology, structure, and strategy, and that the final planning and acting stages of such change processes often require the enabling and unifying force provided by business crises, indicates something of the context in which specialist OD resources begin their attempt to fashion a role for themselves in processes of creating organisational change. Whatever brand of initial idealism, special techniques and language, or hard-learnt political realism the OD consultant brings with him or her, the starting point for impact must be the context they enter and the needs of the corporate or divisional power systems which ultimately dictate the OD consultant's acceptability, legitimacy, and impact.

Thus in ICI organisation development as an activity began out of a need by senior executives in the company to help justify, and more crucially implement, the centrally driven MUPS/WSA productivity bargain which was being resisted by management and trade unionists in many of the divisions. MUPS/WAS and then the ill-fated SDP were the main initial vehicles for corporate and divisional OD in ICI. In Agricultural Division in the early to mid-1970s the business need for new plant to be commissioned more effectively than the division had managed in the 1960s, and for an industrial relations climate to be created which would allow uninterrupted production from big, new, cost-effective plant, meant that for a time the joint problem-solving techniques of the local third-party OD consultants were an appropriate match and means for some of the local senior works managers’ pressing problems. Similarly in Mond Division, as the IR fires exposed the poor system of organisation and communication between the Mond works managers, and the lack of unified thinking on the Mond board about personnel and other policy matters, so developmental energy was put into creating unity of purpose and perspective amongst the Mond board and the works managers in the division, and ultimately between the board and the senior management group below them. Likewise in Petrochemicals Division (PCD) between 1972 and 1973, pressure by the division chairman created the legitimacy and the space for part of the OD unit to help design a change in the top structure and governance of the division. Without the division chairman the PCD OD unit would not have been created and could not have facilitated the structural change they did. However, as we noted, having relied on such an exclusive source of political sponsorship, once the chairman departed the division, so the OD unit was comprehensively tidied away. Meanwhile in Plastics Division where the then board did not perceive the need for strategic, structural, and cultural change until the business crisis of the late 1970s was practically upon them, the OD resources tried unavailingly both to stimulate organisational change and to create some legitimacy for themselves as interventionists in the organisational life of the division.

Although from a pragmatic point of view the key question to ask of these internal and external OD resources is what impact did they have in their particular context, a related question which the longitudinal character of this research can ask, and try and answer, is why and how did some of these groups of specialist advisors survive over a long enough time period and in a form where they might have increased their chances of impact? Studies of the natural history of development of communes by Kanter (1972), of social movements reported by, for example, Zald and McCarthy (1979) and Freeman (1983) and of innovating groups inside formal organisations by Pettigrew (1973, 1975a), all indicate the precariousness of groups whose purpose is to change some feature of their present or emerging context. As Sarason (1972) has argued, those who seek to create new settings in established contexts are likely by definition to claim to have, or be perceived to have, superior missions and ideas which inevitably compete with pre-existing ideas and values. The challenges posed by self-professed or environmentally attributed change agents, thus attract the politics of disrepute and the withdrawal of bureaucratic support, resources, and legitimacy. The decline and demise which follows is represented amongst the would-be innovators in the replacement of early optimism by pessimism, by polarisation rather than commitment and cohesion, and by a desire to hang on and exist and survive even if that entails accommodation with the local context to a degree where the original pioneering change objectives slip into the background.

A group of OD specialists, like other advisors such as operational researchers, systems analysts, and corporate planners, can represent the anti-routine aspect of organisational functioning and be seen as an insubordinate minority. A group advocating change from a specialist, advisory base is likely to be abnormal rather than normal, illegitimate rather than legitimate, marginal rather than central, and powerless rather than powerful. Its activities and resource base have to be justified, its members have to generate credibility in particular and varying contexts, and success, failure, and survival can be a question of the vagaries of the last project or activity. This is the position from which an OD group concerned with change ordinarily begins its struggle for impact.

Given the interest in this study in the analysis of social process, Sarason's (1972) finding that what he calls the “before the beginnings phase” can be fateful for the survival of a new setting, and Freeman's (1975) data suggesting that birth processes of new groups can be an important determinant of subsequent evolution, this study examines the antecedent conditions which led to the emergence of the various ICI OD groups, and the form and nature of the birth processes of those groups. Why, when, and how did the groups emerge, and what role did contextual and precipitating factors play in their genesis? What were the backgrounds, aspirations, and values of the early group members? Was there any attempt to build commitment and cohesion around a distinctive set of group values, priorities, and techniques? Did these OD groups to different degrees go through an early pioneering phase when they wrapped themselves around their task with unreflective enthusiasm? Did the OD groups take on some of the characteristic values and behaviours of innovative subsystems: high involvement and commitment to the task, and the unit's goals, high energy given to the solution of a novel problem or set of problems, a strong sense of group identity and spirit leading to extensive in-group social contact in and out of the workplace, the development of group rituals often as a way of socialising new members, and unconventional styles of dress and language? Were such processes encouraged or inhibited by the early leaders of such groups? If the leaders concentrated their energies early on in what Gusfield (1957) has described as the mobilisation functions of leadership – the concern with building and reaffirming goals, values, and commitment inside the group, did the tendencies towards exclusiveness which such group building would create, lead to tension and counterpressure from groups in its environment? Was there any evidence for the early flush of enthusiasm characteristic of innovating groups in a pioneering mode, being followed by periodic or sustained phases of collective self-doubt when the change group perhaps begins to overperceive and overreact to threats in its environment, turns in on itself and breaks up into cliques and factions, some of whom challenge the values, objectives, and style of the group leader? Given these features of the internal and external evolution of the OD group, did each group have a strategy and tactics for managing its internal dynamics and external boundaries in such a way that the needs of internal commitment and cohesion did not compromise actions taken to generate and sustain legitimacy in a changing context?

The above questioning naturally draws attention to the what, why, and how an innovating group acquires its resources, generates its sense of group identity and cohesion, chooses its activities, exercises influence, secures its boundary, and builds the network of relationships which help to sustain its information sources and political base. However, these features of internal and external evolution are likely to be influenced not only by antecedent conditions, birth processes, and the continuing sense in which a group's tactics and actions help to create their own consequences and implications, but also by the structural form adopted by the group, and by the initial and changing features of the inner and outer context in which the various OD groups had to make their way in the world.

Research on the different structural forms adopted by social movement organisations (Gerlach and Hine, 1970; Gamson, 1975; Gerlach, 1983) indicates that different structural forms have varying consequences for social movement strategies, fate, and impact. Thus Gamson (1975) argues from his sample of social movements that centralised, hierarchical movements with well-developed divisions of labour may be efficient for achieving short-range change goals in which the survival of the movement is not the dominating concern. Gerlach and Hine (1970) and Gerlach (1983), as a counterpoint to the above centralised and bureaucratic view of structure, identify what they label as segmentary, polycephalous, and reticulate structures in some social movement organisations. By this they mean movements so structured that they are made up of a variety of groups or cells, led not by a central command but by decentralised cell leaders, all linked together into a network or reticulate structure, and bound together by travelling evangelists or spokesmen, overlapping participation, joint activities, and the sharing of common objectives and opposition. Rather than being inefficient Gerlach (1983) uses his case study data to indicate that such decentralised network structures may be highly effective and adaptive in innovating and producing social change and in helping social movements to survive in the face of attempts at opposition and social control. The network structure has the advantages of resistance to suppression, together with increasing possibilities for multipenetration and adaptive variation as each cell or part of the network does its own thing in a way appropriate for reaching its change objectives in the particular context or contexts in which it operates.

The fact of variation in structural form across the different ICI OD groups along a spectrum of a distinct and hierarchically led functional unit on the organisation chart, through a temporary task force, to a group of like-minded individuals forming a voluntary association and then an extended network in their division, to the attempt to create and maintain a wider ICI OD network across most of the UK divisions, offers some scope for suggesting how variability in structural form may have influenced the strategies and pathways of development of each group.

Although the focal level of analysis here is clearly the group, no satisfactory analysis of each OD group's emergence, development, and fate would be complete without reference to the immediate and more distant context within which each OD group had to make its way. In discussing factors which inhibited or facilitated attempts by executives to create strategic change, the point was made that variations at any point in time or through time, either in what was described as features of inner or outer context of company or division, could signally influence the timing and extent of particular changes. Equally well, the argument was made that part of the executive skill in generating energy and commitment for strategic change rested on the executive's ability to understand, come to terms with, and then alter, features of their inner context such as the divisional structure and culture, and to mobilise changes in outer context such as economic trends and business competitive position to help justify and unify action in the change sphere. The same logic applies to attempts by specialist resources to create change, indeed because advisory groups by definition are clearly weaker than executives in structural and strategic terms, then antecedent conditions and auspicious and inauspicious features of present and emerging context may play an even greater role in explaining the fate and impact of specialist attempts to make change happen.

The more immediate context surrounding each OD group is referred to as the inner context. Here variability in context is examined for auspicious and inauspicious antecedent conditions and settings in which each group was born, and for the evolution and selective impact of that context both in the constraining and enabling senses, as each group itself developed through time. Particular features of the inner context of each group examined are company and divisional organisational cultures (Pettigrew, 1979) stability and change in norms, power distributions, and recurring conflicts (Pettigrew, 1973, 1975), the social control and other attitudes and behaviours directed towards each group by key figures and interest groups in their environment, and the relationship between these factors and the organisational impact and survival of the OD groups.

But as we saw in examining the determinants of strategic change, contexts of a receptive or non-receptive kind to change are also influenced by features of the outer-context level of analysis. Outer-context refers to the business performance and competitive position of ICI as a whole, and to each division under study throughout the period 1960–83, and to corporate and divisional policy in the manpower and personnel spheres over the past two decades. Also included here are the broad social, economic, and political trends in UK society throughout the past 25 years, in so far as they affected the business fortunes and general personnel policies of ICI, and as they impacted on the emergence and changing use made of OD consultants, their techniques, knowledge, and skills.

The overriding assumption behind this analysis of the emergence, evolution, fate, and impact of ICI OD groups is that the pattern of each group's development is a result of a complex interplay of contextual factors and factors related to the internal structure, strategies, leadership, and activities of each group. The interplay between these external and internal factors is of course best understood as a continuous process evolving through time. In terms of the balance or weight of explanation of external or internal factors as contributors to the development, survival, and impact of innovating groups, the predisposition is to treat aspects of the inner and outer context together with specific antecedent conditions (the external factors) as the necessary conditions which provide the boundaries of opportunity and constraint within which the sufficient conditions of the strategic capabilities and action of the innovating group can be differentially expressed.

But having divided the world into necessary conditions – factors external to the innovating group, and sufficient conditions – factors internal to the group, it is recognised that at the level of understanding and action, a key part of the process influencing an OD group's fate rests on their perception of features of inner and outer context, together with the skill with which they act on that understanding in the light of changing features of context through time. An advisory group interested in creating change must itself attempt to fashion a social context in which it can survive and prosper. Such attempts to legitimate specialist group actions and objectives by, for example, linking the content and process of specific changes to issues and concerns given special credence by changes in power distributions and/or economic and business trends, conceptually represents the link between the group level of analysis and the inner and outer context levels of analysis. Context is then being treated neither just as descriptive background, nor as a source of opportunity and constraint for change, but as something which must be accessible and understood by the innovating group, and ultimately mobilised to achieve practical effects.

This chapter is divided into four sections. Immediately following this introduction the reader is briefly reminded of the natural history of development and fate of the OD resources in Group Personnel Department in Millbank, and in Agricultural, Petrochemicals, Plastics, and Mond Division. There then follow two sections, the first of which explores variability in the context, antecedent conditions, and birth processes of the various OD groups, and this is followed by a section examining the role of leadership, group-building, and strategies of boundary management and legitimisation in influencing the character of development and fate of the different OD groups. The chapter ends by pinpointing some of the practical implications of the ICI OD experience in using internal and external OD consultants for others seeking to harness specialist skills to help create processes of organisational change.

VARIATION IN THE NATURAL HISTORY OF DEVELOPMENT AND IMPACT OF
ORGANISATION DEVELOPMENT RESOURCES IN ICI

Although in one way or another the creation of all five sets of OD resources reported in this study was linked to the corporate-driven change programmes of the late 1960s and early 1970s given the acronyms MUPS/WSA and SDP, and none of these groups exist now in 1983 in a size or form comparable with how they were in the early 1970s, all five sets of OD resources had quite different processes of development, experienced to degrees a different fate, and had varying impacts on the settings with which they engaged.

The corporate OD resources

As was described in Chapters 4 and 10, ICI's corporate interest first of all in the behavioural sciences and then as it had become to be known by late 1960s as organisation development, was linked to the package of strategic changes formulated in the early 1960s to try and improve the company's competitive position. Part of the company's solution to the competitiveness problem was defined in terms of improvements in manpower productivity, and given the national political and economic context of the day, the most appropriate vehicle for attempts at productivity change was the productivity bargain. OD performed two critical functions in and around ICI's particular form of productivity bargain MUPS/WSA. Initially the concepts and language of the behavioural sciences and OD, helped to provide some of the justificatory language and values to launch the more expansive social and change objectives of MUPS/ WSA. But crucially OD really took off at the corporate level as it became more and more apparent in 1967 and 1968 that in MUPS ICI had a strategy for change without the corporate or divisional capability to implement it. Faced with widespread management and trade union resistance in the divisions to what was perceived as a centrally imposed change, George Bridge and Tom Evans were brought down from Billingham to Millbank to rescue and revitalise the ailing MUPS and transform it, from the trade union point of view, into the more acceptable WSA.

In 1968 George Bridge created the development and applications groups of Tom Evans, Stewart Dudley and two more junior people to create a corporate focus for bringing the behavioural sciences into the company, and to help deal with resistance to MUPS/WSA. With the direct political sponsorship of Bridge, and indirectly the support of those members of the ICI main board advocating MUPS/WSA, the four-man central OD group wrapped themselves around the clear and legitimate task of helping divisional management accommodate to the new management style and problem-solving skills now necessary to engage with shop stewards to effectively implement MUPS/WSA.

In terms of internal development and evolution it is important to note that the central OD group was never more than a shifting, informal group of the senior and more ideologically and professionally committed pair of Evans and Dudley, and a less committed and more junior pair of helpers. Between 1968 and 1971 these four ran a series of behavioural workshops for the 500 or so key production managers in ICI, acted as a link for the many external OD consultants brought into ICI at that time, began the process of training and creating a network of some 50 divisional internal OD constultants, and then helped to devise and implement the company-wide staff development programme which involved more than 40,000 middle managers.

This was the zenith of central OD activity on this sort of broad scale. By the end of 1971 with WSA and SDP substantially implemented, and the ICI line management system exhausted by the efforts in absorbing WSA, cynical towards the purposes of SDP, and now engaged in various divisional manpower reductions exercises, the opponents and doubters of OD came out into the open. OD was not only guilty by association because of its links with WSA and SDP, but it had acquired two other negative aspects to its image. The first was that it was seen as a manipulative tool for the ICI power system, and particularly that part of the power system which needed it and used it most – the personnel function. Secondly OD's close association with psychology, its overclinical image, and threatening messages about shared responsibility and participative management, were difficult for managers to handle, especially when those managers were in no way sure that their own superiors were sharing responsibility for any experimental changes that were made.

With the above changes in context and in attitudes to the vehicle of OD, the perceived management need for and legitimacy of OD declined, and during 1972 the central OD resources were rather suddenly reduced in size and influence. Without the focus provided by the unhappy mother vehicles of WSA and SDP, central OD's sole survivor Stewart Dudley had to work his way around the economic blizzard and short-term expediency management of 1972 to find an independent role for OD. There was no pretence of a central OD group throughout the 1970s. The story of the development of corporate OD after 1972 is the continuing access to the main board of the external OD consultant Ron Mercer, the highly selective sponsoring of Dudley and James by two executive directors, Harvey-Jones and Woodburn, the very non-directive almost laissez-faire management and support of the Company OD network by Dudley and McBride, and the clear change of strategy by Dudley, Mercer, and McBride to play down the behaviourist image of OD of the 1960s, and project OD as a process resource to help selected power figures on questions of strategy, planning, and change at the centre of power. As we described in Chapter 10, Dudley, Mercer, and James did play a continuing role throughout the 1970s in assisting Harvey-Jones and Woodburn influence the climate for strategic change at the corporate level, and eventually aid the processes of accommodation and stabilisation of change, but in no sense could it be said they were part of the direct process of planning and action to create change. Dudley and James survived until their retirement in 1982 and 1983 respectively. Significantly a high-level central OD resource was retained when Nicholas Mann was appointed to succeed Dudley.

Agricultural Division OD resources

Of the ICI divisions studied in this research, apart from Mond Division, Agricultural Division is alone in still using OD resources in 1983, although in Agricultural Division little visibility or publicity is given to the term organisation development in the early 1980s. The Agricultural Division OD story is an important case because at Billingham the OD group had in earlier times a not inconsiderable impact on problems of industrial relations, the processes of designing and commissioning new plant, and the operating management of large chemical plants. The Agricultural Division OD resources also had some success, and certainly much more so than the groups in Petrochemicals and Plastics Divisions, in institutionalising the precepts, techniques, and problem-solving approach of OD amongst selected key managers, and at times, powerful shop stewards until by the mid to late 1970s an increasingly risk-aversive works management culture withdrew from contact with an increasingly tired group of internal consultants whose third-party methods and joint management–union problem-solving approaches seemed increasingly out of touch with the line management concerns and business priorities of the day.

If the corporate OD resources had been propelled into existence by the powerfully sponsored but ultimately singularly dangerous requirement to help implement a centrally imposed change programme, no such specific need faced the OD group constituted in 1969 at Billingham by Noel Ripley, the newly employed young American internal OD consultant. Ripley entered a context which had been opened up by a combination of 10 years of almost continuous technological change, by the dangerously poor levels of business performance of the late 1950s and late 1960s, and of course by the immediate antecedent of George Bridge's era of social innovation at Billingham. Bridge's initiatives towards opening the social system of Agricultural Division to change left behind a legacy of a number of personnel officers and trainers wishing to know more about OD, a seedbed of line managers who became some of the early clients of Ripley and his group, together with confusion and misunderstanding about what the behavioural sciences and OD might offer, and real resentment amongst some line managers about being force-fed behavioural science ideas on Bridge's ever pushing spoon.

Ripley arrived at Billingham into a highly decentralised personnel function. This was critical because it meant that even if Ripley had desired it, there was no question of setting up a central OD unit in the personnel function. Instead Ripley began with a change strategy the opposite to that chosen by Bridge. Change processes had now to be mutual and collaborative and not imposed. There were to be no more change projects or programmes, changes would emerge slowly and organically, step by step from a base provided by where managers felt their problems to be, and where they wanted to start.

The early internal evolution of OD resources in Agricultural Division was dominated by three factors. First of all the clarity of Ripley's leadership in propagating an organic change strategy and a coherent set of values to inform the direction of OD in the division. Secondly Ripley's skill in drawing together a set of personnel officers and trainers into the network or voluntary association of like-minded individuals which was the OD group, and thirdly Ripley's use of the Swallow group meetings to build his network of third-party helpers into a committed and cohesive group with the skills and sense of support to assist them take the risks of offering line managers help through unconventional means.

With the base supplied and created by Bridge's opening up of the Billingham management culture, Ripley's leadership and OD skills, and the informal association of the Swallow group, the OD resources began to establish a network of clients in the middle to upper reaches of the project and engineering, and production parts of the division. A watershed for the OD group was provided by their heavy involvement with the commissioning of the Methanol 2 project. It was critical to the division that this major new plant was successfully commissioned, and the effective use of OD resources in producing a success helped the legitimacy of OD in the division.

Set against these early successes it is important to note that the OD group's network of clients did not extend outside production, nor did the group become much involved with board members. After 2 or 3 years of functioning the OD group began to attract some doubts and hostility from personnel officers who felt themselves excluded from the club-like atmosphere of the Swallow group, and from senior industrial relations and line managers who were suspicious both of the neutral third-party role adopted by the OD group, and what they perceived to be threatening, almost anti-system or revolutionary statements coming from some members of the Swallow group.

Although by 1972 Ripley was still the informal leader of the OD group, for some time a personnel manager, Paul Miles, had been formally asked to manage the division's OD resources. The period when the early intensity of the Swallow group meetings began to wane, was associated both with greater confidence by individual group members in working with clients, and also the diffusion of OD methods and skills into the joint management–union problem-solving work in Ammonia Works, and the open-systems planning work in Engineering Works. Effectively this was a demonstration of Ripley's organic strategy. From the base supplied by the Swallow group and their clients, an extended OD network had now been built out into two of the major works in the division.

However, in 1974 after an unsuccessful attempt to establish OD clients on the division board and in some of the division's headquarters departments, Ripley returned to the United States. In 1976 Miles also left the division. By then the internal OD consultants were becoming tired and disillusioned, as they found the market for their services disappearing, and as their organic strategy looked more and more in need of self-renewal and different leadership. OD survived into the 1980s in Agricultural Division because of three factors. First of all the external OD consultant Larsen continued to be used by the division's senior management and board. Secondly the assistant personnel manager, Moores, who now had responsibility for developmental activities in the personnel function, chose to forget about the neutral third-party role and connect OD help into the division through the legitimate channel of his functional interest in career and manpower matters; and finally because both Larsen and Moores sought to coalesce OD skills around the critical management concern of the early 1980s, structural and cultural change and manpower reductions. OD survived by a refocussing of its content and style to match the management priorities of a new business and organisational context. OD was still just about in business in 1983, and one reason why it was, was that the term OD was never used to describe the work that Larsen, Moores, and their small team did.

The Petrochemicals Division OD unit

The Petrochemicals Division (PCD) OD unit was born in mid-1970 and was disbanded at the end of 1973. In this 3½-year period part of the OD unit worked closely with the chairman of PCD, John Harvey-Jones, in formulating and implementing a major structural change. When their powerful sponsor was promoted out of the division, his successor quickly tidied the OD unit away. It could be argued that the OD unit was effective in the limited role it had as a top management task force, but left little behind to improve the capacity of PCD to manage change on an ongoing basis.

The PCD OD unit's only advantage at birth was its sponsorship by John Harvey-Jones. Although the Wilton manufacturing site had been the recipient of some management and social change as a consequence of WSA and the Coverdale programme, the HOC/PCD board and senior management had been little affected by the “behavioural sixties”, and certainly their preoccupation with the continual growth and technical development of the division in the context of a fairly volatile profitability record, had not been interrupted by any attempt at social architecture of the kind that Bridge had been encouraging in Agricultural Division.

Unlike the Agricultural Division OD group which had evolved slowly from the voluntary association of the Swallow group into an extended network of OD resources that linked into the middle and senior levels of production management, the PCD OD resources made an instant appearance as a high-level three-man task force of Heath, Parker, and James, which then constituted itself as a distinct unit in the structure when it acquired Ward, Brown and the other former members of the OD projects section of the recently disbanded Divisional Management Services Department. From the beginning there were differences of view and confusions about what the OD unit's role should be. John Harvey-Jones, in May 1970 still a deputy chairman of HOC Division saw the OD unit contributing to some of his longer-term organisational aims of relaxing the attitudes and behavioural processes of the division. Concern amongst his senior colleagues that the OD unit might pitch the division too forcefully into culture change, meant that Harvey-Jones had to take the senior and respected Heath and Parker and create a trio which would confine themselves to an investigation and recommendations about the division's structure. This was an inauspicious beginning for a task force trio and a resource group of Ward and his colleagues who had to find coherence and identity in a demonstrably non-receptive context.

The internal life of the OD unit was from the beginning characterised by a split between “the right wing” and more respectable trio who had a clear task and a high level sponsor, and “the left wing” or behavioural group who once they had implemented the never popular or acceptable SDP, had to find a task and negotiate sponsorship where they could. Heath, the manager of the OD unit, resisted any attempt at team- or group-building of the variety that Ripley had orchestrated at Billingham for the Swallow group; he and Parker clearly believed they were part of a temporary task force and kept their distance from what certainly Heath regarded as the behavioural excesses and exclusive value position of the “left wing”.

The task force trio's first attempt to recommend an organisational change was overtaken by the structural changes of 1971 which added bits of other divisions to HOC and reconstituted HOC Division as Petrochemicals Division. Parker and Heath left the OD unit in 1971 and early 1972, and with the bulk of SDP work now over the “left wing” of the unit was reduced in size. James's accession as manager of the OD unit coincided with Harvey-Jones’s renewed interest in a structural change for PCD. James worked closely on the second organisation study with PCD directors, and the external OD consultant Ron Mercer, so that this time a firm recommendation went to the board to change the top structure which was politically acceptable.

Meanwhile the “left wing” struggled to find clients and credibility in the headquarters departments. They had some successes in following up interest generated by SDP in the R&D and Engineering departments, but these were the two least powerful functions in the division and the scattered work they did there was neither sustainable in those departments nor exportable into the more prestigious marketing, technical, or production functions.

Before Harvey-Jones was promoted out of the division in April 1973, most of the behavioural wing of the OD unit had either left the OD unit or the company. With the organisation study completed and the structural change implemented, James left for another part of ICI. The task force's task now complete, and with the new chairman's energies firmly focussed on further capital development and growth for PCD, there was no need for an OD resource, and in November 1973 the recommendation was made to wind up what was left of the OD unit.

The Plastics Division OD resources

The Plastics Division OD resources survived for about 10 years in a division which was at times both hostile and indifferent not only to the OD group and their particular view of the requirements for change in the division, but also the concept of, and need to change, the business, organisation, and culture of the division. From this weak base the OD group, perhaps from choice and perhaps from force of circumstance, formed themselves into a fractionated, exclusive group whose specialist role and contribution was easy for others to question and at times denigrate. In this context, whether it was from top management indifference or inattentiveness or not, perhaps the Plastics Division OD resource's greatest success was their own survival for so long.

Paradoxically, of the divisions analysed in this book, Plastics Division had the greatest need for business, organisational, and management culture change, but because it had the greatest need, it had ill-developed capacities and capabilities to see that need, never mind perceive the need and act on it. The fact of birth into such an inauspicious context, combined with the low-key and low-level antecedents and origins of the Plastics Division OD resources was fateful for the continuing development, legitimacy, penetration, and impact of OD in this division.

OD crystallised in Plastics Division around the interest of an assistant personnel manager, Paul Miles, and the divisional education officer, Simon Dow. When in 1969 Miles was promoted up to Agricultural Division, Dow was allowed to recruit a young British social science Ph.D., David Cowan, and an ex-member of the sales/marketing function David Hunt, to form the rump of his OD resources. Dow had the name of his education department changed to Training and Personnel Development Department, T&PD, and he, Hunt, and Cowan quickly were labelled and assumed the role of the OD in-group in a mixed department of apprentice and secretarial trainers, and management and supervisory training officers. The split in T&PD between the pro- and anti-OD factions was a continuing drain on the department's energy and credibility throughout its life, and prevented any real attempt at group-building and coherence in the face of an already unreceptive environment.

Given that as they started Dow, Cowan, and Hunt had neither skill, experience, nor training in OD, and they had no experienced internal consultant like Ripley, or external consultant such as Mercer to lead them or help build a climate to support their work, their early efforts were directed to training themselves and providing fairly conventional training activities for the division's middle managers. Dow sensed early on that he would make little progress until he dented the technocratic, rationalistic, and reactive senior management culture at the Welwyn headquarters departments and on the Plastics board, but his attempts in 1970 and 1971 to influence the top managers in the division by encouraging them to go on T-groups and other behavioural training events, by and large was a failure.

The 1972 redundancies cut Dow's department by over 50%, but he was able to retain all of his in-group, much to the chagrin of the survivors of the out-group. As Dow began to tire of attempts to pull the T&PD department together, he concentrated more and more on relating to his staff through individual counselling relationships and allowed a pattern of working to develop whereby individuals got on with their own thing. The replacement in 1973 of Hunt and Cowan by two other OD resources neither cured the in-group–out-group split in the department or substantially influenced the legitimacy of OD in the division.

Not even the arrival of a new chairman and three or four new directors during the period 1972–74 had much impact on the division's receptivity to change. Some of these new directors were previous users of OD methods and consultants, but open and powerful opposition from at least two senior members of the Plastics board meant that if they were to retain their credibility on the board they had to forgo appeals to cultural change, and certainly abandon the use of OD techniques and language. In spite of the unavailability of these potential senior allies, Dow persisted in his attempts to influence the culture and management processes in the division. Two further attempts were made to bring prominent external consultants into the division but they were eventually rejected by senior figures on the Plastics board.

Eventually Dow left Plastics Division but not before he and two colleagues had developed the highly successful training package Minding Our Own Business (MOOB). In the worsening business conditions of the mid to late 1970s many divisions of ICI and indeed other UK firms bought MOOB as a package to try and educate their employees about what they saw as the financial and business realities of the day. Needless to say Dow and his colleagues got little credit from the Plastics board for developing MOOB. The OD resources in T&PD staggered on into 1980, co-ordinated now by the head of the Management Services Department, but in the sharp dose of redundancies made during 1980 after the very bad financial results of that year, virtually all of the OD resources in the division, and all of the management trainers, were made surplus to requirements.

The Mond Division OD resources

As we saw in Chapter 9, the organisational locus, use, and eventual impact of OD resources in Mond Division was quite different from the three other divisions reported in this study. The unique and significant feature of the Mond OD work was that for a variety of changing motives it was launched and led not by a group of internal or external specialists, but by a small but powerful group on the Mond board. Starting in 1973 with the lead given by the then new division chairman Tony Woodburn, a lead which crucially was sustained by his two successors, and materially assisted by the personnel directors Dylan Jones and Nicholas Mann; and the continuing use of an external consultant and a very small group of internal consultants, the political focus for OD was around a long-term strategy which said “start at the top and work down”. However, even with this continuity of political support at the top of the division's power structure, the process of engaging OD thinking and expertise to the business and organisational problems of the division was faltering, meandering, and haphazard. Nevertheless this long period of learning and preparation eventually bore fruit when in the business crisis of 1979–83 there was a clear, practical, and profound connection of OD thinking and action to the strategic problems of the day.

Before Woodburn began his top-level initiative in 1973 to influence the style and purpose of the Mond board, and increase individual director's awareness of changing features of the division's business, social, and political environment, there had been two lower-level developmental initiatives in Mond. The first connecting point for OD in the division had been the stimulant provided by MUPS/WSA in the production areas. The opportunity MUPS/WSA allowed to bring behavioural packages such as Coverdale into the division, gave early encouragement to more socially and politically aware works managers such as Bay, Jones, and Marshall to try and move an excessively technocratic set of production managers to consider engaging with an increasingly militant work force in a less distant and hierarchical manner. In a situation where in the early 1970s there were no clear personnel policies coming from the Mond board, and where the “cruiser captain” works managers were used to high degrees of autonomy about means if not always about ends, this early developmental work was idiosyncratic and unco-ordinated. It was only the increasingly visible, and from a business point of view, punishing industrial relations fires of the 1972–75 period which forced the hand of the Mond board and the Mond works managers and helped to develop more effective management processes between the works managers, and between the board and their senior production people. The IR fires thus acted as a trigger for Woodburn's attempts to unify the Mond board, and to encourage the then deputy chairman Frank Bay to ask the works manager Sandy Marshall to take up a full-time role as a divisional development resource. This was an important step in its own right at the time, for it meant that OD now had legitimate activists with political standing on the board and at senior management levels, but in the longer term it was even more important, for Marshall and his junior colleague Campbell linking with the external consultant Wilson played a key role in increasing the capability and confidence of senior and middle managers to diagnose and manage processes of change.

Aside from the important seeding of developmental thinking which had gone on in the production areas during and after the implementation of WSA, the other OD initiative taken prior to Woodburn's chairmanship was the failed attempt to train and launch internal change agents into the division. Mond sent a group of fairly junior line managers to the Eastbourne 1 workshop organised by Evans and Dudley to train a cadre of ICI change agents. Given the feedback from this first group of trainees, Mond found it difficult to scratch together a group of personnel and trainers to attend Eastbourne 2. All the interview reports comment how difficult these change agents found it to make any impact on the hierarchical and segmented Mond management culture. The change agents were seen to challenge management values and competences, and their behaviourist ideas and process skills were quickly dubbed “sandals and beads OD”. Although a few of these change agents settled down to contribute in individual works, the majority were “unloved and neglected”. There was never any pretence in the upper reaches of Mond that in the context of that hierarchical management culture, a bottom-up change strategy facilitated by specialist change agents who had neither the right message nor the right positional power, could be effective. Starting at the top and working down was the only politically feasible change process for the Mond context, as indeed it was in Plastics Division, but the difference between Mond and Plastics was there was continuity of leadership in change management in Mond that was never available in Plastics Division.

Another key input into the Mond development activities was provided by the American external OD consultants Bainton and Wilson. They provided many of the early ideas and process mechanisms, together with the support and encouragement for Woodburn to try to break some of patterns and traditions in the division, and create a more unified board with a sharper awareness of the pressures building on the division from a changing environment. As often is the case with consultants, Bainton's position in the division was dependent on his relationship with Woodburn and when Woodburn was promoted onto the main board, Bainton faded away. However, increasingly carefully managed and at times protected by Nicholas Mann, Wilson carried on working with the Mond board acting as an innovative conceptualiser, pragmatic helper, and high-level trainer up to and beyond the 1979–83 strategic changes.

It should not be under-emphasised the extent to which the stream of developmental activities in Mond was held together in the pre-1979 crisis situation by Nicholas Mann, and then released in the crisis situation through Mann's significant role in creating and articulating the Mond Management Model. This model provided an intellectually coherent set of principles and concepts, and indeed a pragmatic content for the structural and manpower changes made during 1979–83. With the window for change provided by the post-1979 crisis, thanks to the developmental stream of by then 6 years duration, Mond was well placed to act in the change sphere. There had been considerable progress in unifying the perspective and actions of the Mond board, the Mond Management Model provided a coherent content and rationale for change, and real strides had been made in helping to raise the capability and confidence of senior and middle managers to effect significant organisational, cultural, and manpower changes. Here was OD put to effective use in the interests of the top management of the division – precisely what the aspiration had been as long ago as 1973.

CONTEXTS, ANTECEDENTS, AND BIRTH PROCESSES OF ORGANISATION
DEVELOPMENT IN ICI

Earlier in this chapter the point was made that primacy of explanation of the growth, decline, and impact of innovating groups such as OD specialists lies in exogenous factors in their environment, rather than the internal developments and strategies of those groups as such. This, of course, is not to argue that the leadership, strategic capabilities and actions of such groups are not connectable to discussions about their fate, but merely that aspects of the inner and outer context surrounding any embryonic group, together with immediate antecedents of the group's birth, and the character of the birth processes themselves, shape the very existence and direction of development possible for any innovating group. Balancing strategic explanations against environmental explanations of the fate of social movement organisations Freeman (1979:167) argues that “what is clear is that whatever strategy a group desires, it must be developed within certain confines. The group can do no more than its resources and its environment permit, and if these are inadequate to meet the dictates of its ideology it is usually doomed to inefficacy”. Freeman's (1979) emphasis on environmental determinism is clearly harder than the more action-oriented theoretical approach adopted by this author, for in her sensible attempt to stipulate the confining characteristics of environment, she underemphasises both the opposite possibility of receptive contexts to innovating groups, and the differential ability of innovators to understand and act on changing features of inner and outer context as part of their strategy for creating a social context in which survival chances and impact may be increased. But put in broader terms the point should not be lost that “the social soil into which an individual attempts to plant and nurture the seeds of change is undoubtedly fateful for what will grow” (Sarason et al., 1977:186).

However, as we saw in Chapter 1, one of the problems with the literature on organisation change is that it has rather more to say about processes of change, often in terms of general principles about diagnosis, feedback, and evaluation and so on, than it has about the context of change. This is a major pragmatic difficulty in thinking and acting about change for, as we saw in our discussions of strategic change in Chapter 11, changes often occur when there is some degree of matching between choice of change process and change content, for a particular context. A further problem with developing and implementing change processes is that they take place in unique or nearly unique contexts; and while it may be sensible to argue that it is the context or perceptions of the context which ought to govern the choice of change content and process mechanisms, it is difficult to discuss context in anything other than a very general or in a case-specific way.

One might have assumed that in a large organisation like ICI, with a distinctive company culture and at least in the personnel and manpower areas a long history of clear attempts to formulate and implement consistent policies and practices, that the four divisions in this study would have provided similar contexts for the emergence and development of OD resources. However, the accounts of the business history and development, and management and shop floor cultures of those divisions indicate not only clear differences in context between divisions at any point in time, and within divisions over time, but also differences in response patterns to changes emanating from the ICI corporate centre. At the time in the late 1960s and early 1970s when OD resources were emerging in the various ICI divisions one relevant part of the context was the framework of personnel policy and practice explicit in WSA and SDP. Our historical chapters showed that responses to MUPS/WSA and SDP varied both across divisions, and between different works and departments in divisions. However our historical chapters also demonstrated that in the late 1960s the divisions were in different competitive positions in their product-markets, were experiencing and had experienced different levels of volatility or stability in their profitability, were facing different rates of technological change, varied in the age and stability of the management group who controlled the division, and in Kanter's (1983) terms had more or less segmented or integrative structures and cultures. As a consequence of mixtures of these factors the power systems of each division perceived they had different issues, grievances, and concerns to deal with, to varying degrees had change-minded executive leadership prepared to pick up and grapple with those issues, and to varying degrees the boards and senior management of the divisions offered support, opposition, and indifference to the creation of specialist OD resources. Even without the variability in the birth processes and immediate historical and idiosyncratic antecedents of each OD group, it is evident that some OD groups were born into more repressive and inauspicious contexts than others.

Of the four divisions in this study the Agricultural OD resources seem to have been born into the most receptive context while the Plastics OD resources faced the most repressive environment. Simply put the Agricultural Division context was more receptive to innovation using OD techniques and methods because of the mixture of stability and change going on amongst elements of the Billingham context, because of the antecedents of OD prior to 1969; and as we shall argue in the next section of this chapter, the sound fit between the structure and strategy chosen for OD at its birth. In terms of change potential the important thing about Billingham in the 1960s was that not only was it being challenged by new outside directors and its weakening competitive position into making technological and productivity changes, but that key features of the Billingham structure, culture, and political system remained stable enough in amongst the changes that did occur to absorb those changes and the methods and processes of change associated with OD activities.

A brief comparison of the contextual differences between Agricultural Division and HOC/PCD will reveal both some of the stable features of Billingham management culture which may have helped change, and features of the HOC/PCD context which were not conducive to the use of specialist change resources in general and the OD variant of those in particular. Agricultural Division at Billingham had a much longer history than HOC/PCD, had developed a brand of paternalistic management in much more of a company town atmosphere than was evident at Wilton, and had developed a more stable and integrated management culture than existed in HOC/PCD. The stability of the Agricultural Division structure after the 1963 change from functional to a matrix structure, plus the network system of relations amongst a reasonably stable group of senior and middle managers, and the undisputed and continuing power of the production function in the division created a social system which responded to the competitive and technological pressures of the day, and was able at some level to engage with OD when it came.

HOC/PCD, on the other hand, was a much younger organisation with less tradition in its mode of operations and in relations between various groups of people in the division. It was not subjected to any single major commercial threat during the 1960s and early 1970s, although its profit levels were highly volatile. Its major problem during the 1960s appeared to be how best to coordinate the various growing elements of its activity. There was not the same clarity of power distribution in HOC/PCD as there was in Agricultural Division. In HOC/PCD around 1970 power appeared to be contested between the technical, production, and marketing functions, and there was much more talk of inter-functional conflict in HOC/PCD than was mentioned in relation to Agricultural Division. The HOC/PCD management culture was also described as being more achievement-oriented and aggressive than Agricultural Division, perhaps because of the rapid growth of HOC during the 1960s and the reinforcing effect of continual influxes of bright new technologists who found at that time easy scope for job satisfaction and promotion. If technological arrogance, the desire for technical perfection and the inconceivability of saying “I don't know” were other hallmarks of the HOC/PCD management culture, a manifestation of those features of the culture crucial to the eventual response to the OD unit was that managers were expected to be self-sufficient in solving their own problems. On top of any additional fragmentation that may have resulted from this atomistic view of managerial problem-solving, HOC/PCD was in a state of almost continual flux not just because of the repeated injections of new capital, but because of regular structural change. There was a strong belief in HOC/PCD which was reflected in behaviours, that the best way to make change in the organisation was by re-design, reappointment, and re-grouping. The original minimally acceptable purpose of the HOC/PCD OD unit was, of course, to be concerned with structural change, and more than 50% of the original members were victims of the recent demise of the large divisional Management Services Department.

Thus unlike Agricultural Division, which had been opened up by massive technological innovation and a severe commercial threat, HOC/PCD had experienced no commercial trauma and witnessed the mere addition of capital rather than the total revamping of existing technology. A further difference in context in these two divisions relevant to the question of receptivity to OD approaches to change was that, unlike Billingham, the expanding, rapidly changing HOC/PCD without historically based, stable networks of relations between managers, was relatively poorly placed in integrative terms to absorb the ideas of the OD unit or tolerate the perceived riskiness of its objectives and methods.

Moving away just from differences of receiving context for OD between Agricultural Division and HOC/PCD, another important issue was the different immediate antecedent conditions which created rather varying pre-beginnings for OD in the two divisions. Led by George Bridge and Tom Evans, enabled by MUPS, and supported by some of the stable elements in the Agricultural Division management culture mentioned above, Billingham experimented in a fairly radical way with behavioural science ideas and OD methods in the 6- or 7-year period before Noel Ripley came to give real conceptual, value, and organisation focus to OD activities. Directors went off on T-groups, managers and shop stewards were exposed to unconventional training methods, a series of well-known American behavioural science consultants were trawled through the division, and a more active and developmentally minded concept of personnel was encouraged in a newly decentralised personnel function. Compared with all this activity, the climate setting for OD amongst the HOC/PCD board and senior and middle managers in all the major departments other than production was almost non-existent. The weaknesses in the management processes and organisation on the Wilton site exposed by the effective for a time resistance to MUPS/WSA, gave rise to a major management development activity in which £250,000 was spent on the package OD programme, Coverdale, but the effects of this were not really felt on the HOC/PCD board or the headquarters departments such as Technical, Marketing, R&D, or Engineering. Worse still for the yet-to-be-born HOC/PCD OD resources than the absence of any seeding or climate setting for OD, was the fact that the rump of the left or behavioural wing of the OD unit was acquiring a negative image whilst still in the Management Services Department, because of their association with the unpopular SDP, and their own style of zealously advocating and putting across SDP. Compared with this Bridge's efforts were creating a set of interested individuals who Ripley would recruit into and create the Swallow Group, and a number of awakening managers who would become the first clients and early adopters of OD concepts and methods. In addition after the Bridge bow wave, Ripley's step-by-step, client-centred, organic approach to change was to have its supporters if only because of its contrast with Bridge's powerful and pushing style. Alongside all this the HOC/PCD OD resources had the single political sponsorship and ideas of John Harvey-Jones as the motive force behind their birth, and even at the creation of the task force Harvey-Jones was being persuaded by his more cautious and conservative peers to ensure that the wild behavioural men were supervised and contained by Heath and Parker.

The central OD resources came directly out of the ICI policy context which created MUPS/WSA and SDP; this was their opportunity and their problem. Like the PCD OD unit they were too tied to one or two activities, and were linked at birth too exclusively and threateningly from the viewpoint of some of their potential clients in senior and middle management, to the needs of the top power system. In this sense, although the central OD unit did play an important role in helping to implement MUPS/WSA and SDP, and the HOC/PCD OD unit were instrumental in creating a top-level structural change, neither group was able to recover from the particularities of their antecedents, or their structural location and rationale at birth.

The context and antecedents of OD in Plastics Division were substantially more unreceptive than in any of the other divisions in this study; indeed it is surprising that OD was ever allowed a toe-hold in the division. Paradoxically the toe-hold that was created was a result of the very same cautious, segmented, management culture that created management processes so inimical to the sensing and making of strategic change. Faced in the late 1960s with Millbank pressure to devote resource to management training and development Simon Dow did what was minimally necessary to get at that stage non-threatening things to happen within the Plastics segmented culture and political system. He persuaded his functional boss the personnel director that a rather conventional divisional education department should be turned into a department with at least a sub-set of people with OD skills. OD thus began in Plastics Division in association with a low status activity – education and training, and with no more understanding and legitimacy than was available from Dow and his functional boss. In most situations this would have been a recipe for difficulty, in the confines of the Plastics inner and outer context, as far as OD was concerned, it was a hopeless start and a lost cause.

The reader will recall Plastics Division had most of the elements of a classic segmented management structure and culture. Plastics Division was a compartmentalised and hierarchical world where the chairman and his deputies related to their directors on a one-to-one basis; where in consequence there was little board policy-making and planning, and where the upper reaches of the division were divided by function and business area; and where there was as big a gap between the senior managers and the directors as there was between the directors and “the top box” of the chairman and his deputies. Businesswise the 1950s and 1960s had been an era of scientific-led growth with easy if not large profits. Other core features of the Plastics management culture were the great stability and continuity in the top management of the division right up until 1972, the relative isolation of Plastics from many of the structural and business area changes of ICI, the geographical separation of the Plastics production sites from one another and from the divisional headquarters at Welwyn, and the attitudes and behaviour of the management culture with the emphasis on hierarchy, deference, scientific rationality, and non-risk-taking. In this situation, in spite of the first signs of commercial difficulty evident in the 1967 recession, there was no top management perception of commercial threat, nor any internal pressure for destabilising the divisional social system from a social architect such as Bridge or Harvey-Jones. The context and antecedents of OD in Plastics meant that the social soil in which the OD seed was thrown was particularly inauspicious for germination, for as Kanter (1983:62) argues under segmentalist conditions change is a threat. Where segmentalism has prevailed, security comes in the form of control, and loss of control is the supreme threat. For many of the Plastics board the activities of Dow, Hunt, and Cowan were a topic of indifference or doubt, but for two or three senior members of the Plastics board OD began to signal a fear of loss of control and this meant Dow had the additional problem of dealing with downright opposition as well as death through indifference. The fate of OD in Plastics Division was all but sealed before it had a chance to project itself out into the division.

This section has outlined why and how differences in context, antecedent conditions, and birth processes can provide the boundaries and therefore necessary conditions for the development, survival and impact of innovating groups. Given the boundaries of operation set by these factors, in what follows we examine how the different structures, strategies, and tactics of mobilisation attempted by each group influenced their ability to generate legitimacy for their objectives, methods, values, and activities. How did the groups develop in relation to the inner and outer contexts in which they emerged? To what extent did the immediate pre-history of the divisions propel them forward or block their progress? Here the concept of legitimacy is the nearest we come to a dependent variable in this research. We look on it as a central outcome of the interactions under analysis but do not view it as a dependent variable in the strict sense because the interest in process analysis requires that the implications of legitimacy at one time be traced forward into subsequent periods and events. Legitimacy is important and problematic for innovating groups because they face the dilemma of finding an appropriate middle ground. Towards one extreme, total illegitimacy will lead to rejection or, at best, minimal functioning in any culturally significant areas of the organisation. At the other extreme, total legitimacy means the group has little, if anything to offer in terms of a vision or process to facilitate change.

THE STRUCTURE, INTERNAL DEVELOPMENT, STRATEGY, AND LEGITIMACY OF THE ORGANISATION DEVELOPMENT GROUPS

Although an OD group cannot choose the context and antecedent conditions in which it is born, and may rarely be able to choose the timing, rationale, and location of its birth, it may in principle be able to influence a number of other factors which, interacting with the initial conditions, help to direct the pattern of its development and fate. These other factors include the choice of group members, the way and extent to which the group builds identity and commitment around a set of values, concepts, and activities, how it resolves conflict, exercises leadership, and structurally organises itself. In terms of the group's external evolution what is obviously critical is the locus and nature of the group's work, how it connects to existing organisational networks or builds its own, how it generates sponsorship and defends its boundaries, how it exercises influence and broadly nurtures and maintains its legitimacy in its particular context.

In focussing in on these different elements of a group's internal and external evolution it may also be possible to discern certain patterns or phases of group development when particular problems of leadership, cohesion or conflict, and boundary management and legitimacy occur. Thus Pettigrew (1975a) has developed a phase model of the evolution of innovating groups and departments which describes and analyses conception, pioneering, and self-doubt phases, and suggests how the choice of adaptive and maladaptive responses to managing the uncertainties of collective self-doubt can crucially influence the demise, absorption, consolidation and renewal of a specialist unit. Furthermore, although there is little evidence in these studies of OD groups, of those groups putting together elaborate and intendedly rational strategies to shape their fate, there is some evidence of groups drifting towards elements of what may be described as exclusive and inclusive stances in relation to their environment. The suggestion developed in this section is that the choice between different elements of these exclusive and inclusive stances constitute general pragmatic dilemmas faced by many innovating groups seeking to change their world while they try to live within it.

In looking at the content and consequences of strategic choices for innovating groups, it should not be forgotten that any such choices have to be made within the context and confines of some of the prior conditions already mentioned. Equally well, of course, we are talking about a continuous process where the factors influencing development and demise are cumulative. Finally it is analytically important to appreciate that the ground moves as the figure evolves and develops. Innovating groups are influenced not just by prior conditions and their strategic choices, but by changing fashions of concern and discontent, by what Downs (1972) describes as the attention cycles of issues, resulting from changes in this case of business, political, and organisational context.

Of the five accounts of the natural history of development of OD in this book, the Mond division experience is strikingly different from the others in so far as the harnessing and use of OD there was so much more clearly a senior executive and external consultant-led activity than it was an internal specialist activity. In looking at the other four groups the Plastics Division experience obviously stands out because of the unreceptiveness of its environment and the continuing inability of the group to generate enough acceptability to make any impact on its context. The central OD group was of course allowed and encouraged to fade away with the end of WSA and SDP, and the story of strategic choice for central OD after 1972 is really a story of a set of individuals grappling with questions of sponsorship, image, credibility, choice of activity, and impact. In terms of general questions about the evolution and impact of specialist innovating groups, the points of similarity and especially difference between the Agricultural division and HOC/PCD division experiences are probably the most instructive, for here we see evidence of impact in change terms by both groups arising from quite different choices in terms of structure, strategy, leadership, and internal team-building and commitment.

We have already noted that although Agricultural and HOC/PCD Divisions are two divisions of the same company located in the same part of the same country, in 1970 they were of similar size, and part of the same broad industrial grouping, the context and antecedent conditions for OD in those two divisions was quite different. It is also important before dwelling on some of the important differences between the two OD groups in those divisions to note some of their similarities. The groups were created within a year of each other, and geographically worked within a mile of one another. They were always small units of six to ten members. The term “OD” was used in reference to them and they were influenced more or less directly by American writing and practice in this area, and both groups were involved, to some extent, in team-building activities with clients. Both groups saw themselves and were perceived to be somewhat distinctive in relation to their own contexts, and thus acquired some of the opprobrium of distinctiveness. Further, there was a similar sort of conflict within each group on a behavioural versus business dimension, and the formal leader of each group to differing extents was seen as representing the business – structural – task end of that dimension.

However, given the straightforward facts that these were small OD groups in large business organisations, the differences between them are quite striking. In terms of conception and structure the HOC/PCD group made an instant appearance under Harvey-Jones’s sponsorship, and was organised initially as a high-level three-man task force and then when it incorporated Ward's behavioural sub-section from the moribund Management Services Department, it formed into a distinct and visible structured unit on the organisation chart, with, from the business point of view, the credible leadership of Heath as its manager. Both wings of the HOC/PCD unit had clear, and from a wider divisional point of view, imposed tasks to complete. The task force trio were asked with varying degrees of commitment by the HOC/PCD board to examine the division's structure and recommend changes, and Ward's behavioural wing had the externally imposed change programme of SDP to implement. The combination of the OD unit's distinct structural visibility and their evidently clear task remit led them from a consulting point of view into an expert or directive stance, where from the behavioural wing rather more so than the task force trio they were not responding to an internally created demand for change, and certainly in the main were not working with volunteer clients. As one of the HOC/PCD board members put it, in 1970 although there was little clarity and agreement on the board as to what OD was and what it might do, it was recognised by some board members that the OD unit was to be used as a rather crude instrument of high-level change – “to hit the donkey [of HOC/PCD division] in between the eyes with a brick”.

It seems because of their greater business experience and credibility and closer contact with directors that the task force trio were clearer from the beginning that the OD unit was just to be a temporary arm of top management. Heath and James in particular knew of HOC/PCD’s predisposition to make changes through redesign, structural change, and reappointment, and they understood they were liable to have the rug pulled out from under them at a moment's notice. This, of course, had just happened to James with the breakup of his Management Services Department. Sure enough with the ICI business area changes which affected PCD in 1971 Parker was reassigned to other duties, and then early in 1972 Heath was asked to head a new central resource department offering specialist help in the business-relevant area of strategic planning. Thus although Heath and Parker were committed to the initial task remit supplied by the division chairman, they were not committed either to the OD unit as a continuing vehicle for divisional change, or indeed to OD as a specialist body of technique, concepts, and values. Politically this was undoubtedly an appropriate position given the PCD context and history.

Meanwhile Ward, Brown and their behavioural wing were searching for a different understanding both of change processes in the division, and for a continuing role of specialist OD help in those change processes. But the more junior status of the behavioural wing, with their backgrounds in the relatively politically weak R&D and Engineering departments, the way their zealous pursuit of MBO and SDP, together with their proclaimed OD values, challenged some of the established norms of the culture, all contributed to their isolation and the confinement of their work after SDP to sporadic team-building interventions in R&D and Engineering. Long before the behavioural wing's legitimacy became really precarious in late 1972 they tried to persuade Heath, Parker, and James to put energy into planning and developing the OD unit's external strategy and internal commitment and cohesion; but Heath in particular was explicitly against too much discussion of interpersonal issues, values, and team-building. The result was that the OD unit's meetings largely concentrated on business matters about tasks and roles, and in consequence the OD unit never had a sufficient sense of internal identity and commitment, or more crucially a pragmatic rationale for the continuance of OD which they could take out to meet an ever more unreceptive context. In consequence the behavioural wing's preparation for their demise while James was actively and this time successfully working on the structural redesign of the division, was a period of internal reflection and collective self-doubt. This, of course, hastened the by then inevitabilities of their fate, and James's reassignment with the successful completion of his task.

The above analysis of the PCD OD unit has demonstrated how and why the organisation, and initial membership and sponsorship of an innovating unit, can be critical in moulding that unit's strategy for dealing with aspects of its internal and external environment. The PCD example also illustrates how, in the case of the task force trio, a penetrating understanding of the rules of the game in making changes in the division was helpful both in thinking and acting on their present task and the future development of the OD unit, and in a sense avoiding the label of OD specialist being put on them; and at the same time controlling the activities of the behavioural specialists in the unit. The PCD OD unit's experience also illustrates Freeman's (1979:185) general point about the political circumstances of aspiring change groups. “Finding leverage points within the political system generally requires some intimate knowledge of its workings and so is an alternative available only to those not totally alienated from it.” This problem of the lack of political perceptivity and access of the behavioural wing of the OD unit was of course a problem shared by the Plastics OD specialist resources, and a feature of the development of innovating groups we shall return to when discussing the dilemmas of exclusivity and inclusivity.

It should be clear, from the above analysis of the PCD OD unit, that the choice of the high-level but essentially task force form of organisation, together with the relatively safe content area of structural change, fitted well the traditions and culture of that division. The price of that approach to change in that context was some change in divisional structure but no change in divisional culture towards Harvey-Jones’s long-term aim of “loosening the attitudes and behavioural processes of the division”. Such a cultural change would clearly have required a top-down, long-term change process of the kind that went on in Mond division, and PCD did not have either the continuity in senior executive change leadership or continuity of high-level external consultant support that was available in Mond. The other price of the PCD OD unit structure and strategy, although few of the managers in the division at that time would regard this is a price of much note, was that there was no institutionalisation of OD knowledge and skills in the division. It was probably not until the business traumas of 1980 and the merger in 1981 with, from a change process point of view, the equally ill-prepared Plastics Division, that line management capabilities in change management really acquired strong legitimacy in either of the two merged divisions.

Different as the organisation and strategy of using OD resources in Agricultural Division was to the experience in HOC/PCD, it can also be argued that the choice of structure and approach in Agricultural division was initially at least as it had been in PCD well suited to the structure and culture of Billingham. However, a crucial difference between the two divisions was that the leadership, organisation, and rationale for OD in Agricultural Division was such as to connect OD there more penetratingly to the key business concerns of the day (industrial relations and plant commissioning), and in the medium term to diffuse and institutionalise OD concepts and approaches more widely into Billingham than occurred in PCD division.

In Agricultural Division Ripley's leadership, and the decentralised nature of the personnel department where he was located, meant there was no attempt to create a formally structured OD unit visible on the organisation chart, nor any attempt, unlike those made in the Bridge era or in PCD, to launch particular change projects or programmes on the division. As we have described elsewhere in this book, Ripley's view about organisation was to slowly build up a network of OD resources, to encourage those resources to practise the role of third-party neutral facilitators or process consultants, and to engage OD to the division through an organic strategy of building out additively from the problems line managers were sensing as worthy of attention.

Since Ripley's views about the organisation and strategy of OD resources were so important in determing what happened at Billingham in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it is important to know something about his background, experience, and style as inputs into understanding how he stimulated the internal and external evolution of OD in the division. Although recruited by the personnel director as a full-time internal consultant rather than a part-time external consultant, Ripley as a 30-year-old American with a Ph.D. in OD and 3 or 4 years’ experience in the United States as an internal consultant, was very much an outsider to the Billingham culture. In fact for a time Ripley's true outsider status enabled him to sharply see both important aspects of the workings of the Billingham culture and attitudes to the Bridge strategy for introducing OD. This sharp understanding helped Ripley to legitimate his own concept of OD, whilst personally challenging aspects of the Billingham culture in face-to-face contact with managers through his neutral role as a third party. Ripley more so than any of the other divisional OD practitioners at this time, perhaps because of his greater education and experience, seems to have been able to combine a penetrating understanding of the culture where he worked with an intellectually coherent and articulate set of concepts about creating change from a specialist base. This coherence of style and conceptual substance was very similar to the leadership of a network of change resources in a community context described in Sarason et al. (1977). In both cases leadership in the realm of ideas and values was critical both to the process of binding the change resources into a network, and to the process of providing a legitimate rationale to connect the service offered to the needs of whatever clients could be found.

Given that (unlike the PCD OD unit) Ripley had neither a ready-made department nor a ready-made set of tasks and a predetermined group of clients, Ripley had to work to create all three. The process of working at developing a network and some clients created some of the cumulative events and conditions which helped to at least partially institutionalise OD into the division. But what was Ripley's network and how did he build it? The starting point both for Ripley's network of OD resources and his earliest clients was the set of people who had been intrigued, even enthused by the Bridge era of social innovation. Ripley's task was to find these people and allow them to find him and to develop them into a voluntary association. Building on the existing work and interest of the personnel officers in R&D and Projects and Engineering department, and the trainers who had been invigorated by the early management–union workshops in Products Works, Ripley before long gathered together a group of 6–10 like minds – people who were personally interested in OD approaches and in Ripley's ideas.

Crucial to the creation of this network were the group building processes of the Swallow meetings. The procedures of these meetings were very influenced by T-groups. Task issues were discussed but much time was given over to conversation and exercises which surfaced personal issues, values, and assumptions about what they were or might do. The offsite location of these meetings in a local hotel, the allocation of up to 2 days at a time and the personal orientation all contributed to the development of a shared identity that was recognisably different from the organisation as a whole. Partly because of the Swallow Group meetings, commitment was said to be “massive”, “very high”, “very strong”, “real” in the early days. But it was a commitment to each other and to certain values, it was not collective in the sense of commitment “to walking out the door with an agreed agenda”. The kinds of values and beliefs which the group engendered were strong and distinctive. They seemed to centre around “concern for people, with a strict resistance to organisational values”. Another Swallow Group member went even further: “it was almost anarchistic – certainly different values from the divisional norm”. The notion that the group was distinctive is reinforced by the fact that myths, for example, about nudity in Ripley's early T-groups and memories of other unusual activities were alive in the division some 6 or 7 years after those early pioneering days.

Writers on the natural history of social movements and communes such as Scott and Lyman (1970), Kanter (1972), and Wilson (1973) have discussed the importance of ritualistic meetings such as the Swallow meetings for creating and reaffirming the common creed. Scott and Lyman (1970:133), in their analysis of student revolutionary groups of the late 1960s also discuss the functional importance of solidarity for change-minded groups in so far as they avert the sense of isolation, impotence, meaninglessness, and sense of self-estrangement easily felt by individuals going against the grain.

If a crucial difference between the internal evolution of the PCD and Agricultural Division OD groups was that the former was a structured unit of specialists, and the latter a highly committed voluntary association or network with contacts in a variety of works and departments, how did the Agricultural Division OD network engage with its environment? This after all, as Sarason et al. (1977) remind us, is the critical question determining the legitimacy and impact of a set of people purporting to be interested in change. “Agreement on values and goals [in a network] is not always easy to obtain, but that is far less difficult than to sustain agreement in the course of action, which has a way of tearing apart the fabric of agreement and exposing the fragility of that fabric to the climate of action” (Sarason et al., 1977:26).

Ripley’s strategy of building his OD network amongst people who had dual affiliations, to the Swallow Group and the particular department or works where they formally had the position as personnel officer, personnel manager, or trainer, meant that from the beginning OD had natural links into potential client groups through individuals with varying levels of credibility in those contexts. But critical to the early success of OD in Agricultural Division was the fact that Ripley's organic change strategy was both a contrast to Bridge's bow wave of directive change and a contrast that was acceptable for that context. Organic change processes of additively building out from a base are most likely to work in contexts where stable, identifiable networks of potential clients already exist (Aiken and Alford, 1970; Curtis and Zurcher, 1973). We have already indicated that the middle and senior management levels at Billingham were featured by a relatively homogeneous and stable management group. However, although this management group was relatively homogeneous in its identity of interest around production, engineering, and science and technology, there was another tradition at Billingham, of works developing their own identity and culture. Ripley's strategy of encouraging change to develop around issues managers felt important, and at a pace and in a form they desired, fitted the established pattern on the Billingham site for management teams in individual works to find their own means of reaching whatever division objectives were important. Furthermore Ripley's strategy of seeking out, and focussing on managers’ problems meant there was some chance of identifying content areas of change where managers might be persuaded to make a start, even with the as yet for many managers culturally unacceptable methods and processes of OD. There was thus some association and identity between Ripley's change strategy and the context and content of changes that began to emerge.

Before long the OD group found its early adopter clients mainly from individuals “opened up” by the Bridge era, and began to work around the culturally central issues of industrial relations and then plant commissioning within the dominant production function, and mostly at the level of works manager and below. It is important to note that there was only one attempt to work directly at the board level, by Ripley in 1973 and 1974, and that was unsuccessful. But the by then extended OD group did have a series of “friends in court” in the form of successive personnel directors, who were prepared to hold up some kind of political umbrella. There were, in addition, some doubters on the board, who group members felt were hostile or at least questioning. However, unlike the situation with the PCD OD unit, doubters and opponents of OD in the Agricultural Division were always at one remove from the OD work itself, which had to be evaluated largely from the viewpoint of production managers.

The Agricultural Division OD group's posture with respect to evaluation was a logical extension of their client-centred organic approach to change. They argued that they should not be evaluated in terms of some vague criteria about the group as a whole, but rather in terms of specific clients’ views of their contributions to particular works or projects. In addition since the managers and union leaders who were their clients tended to stay in the organisation, satisfied clients provided repeat business.

What was attempted in Agricultural Division was the marriage of essentially new and non-legitimate methods with existing business problems. That these problems were defined by clients, not the consultants nor by board remit, is very important. Over the period 1969–75 some legitimacy was achieved for OD methods at least within the production function. This conclusion is based on the continuing requests for OD help, the diffusion of OD methods into a variety of works, and the initiatives taken by line managers in particular in the Ammonia and Engineering Works and in the commissioning of Methanol 2 and Ammonia 4. But this conclusion must not be overstated. It does not mean that the whole organisation accepted OD, nor indeed that the divisional board did. In what follows we shall examine how even with some elements of both an exclusive and inclusive stance, the social control tactics of the Agricultural Division OD group's detractors, the problem of sustaining and renewing the network, and perhaps critically changes in the divisional context, all cumulatively contributed to weakening the OD group's base of legitimacy, and creating the condition of collective self-doubt amongst the OD resources still practising their trade by 1975 and 1976.

THE DILEMMA OF EXCLUSIVITY AND INCLUSIVITY FOR INNOVATING GROUPS

To change the World one must live with it (Wilson, 1973:167)

In his discussion of how new bureaus come into being within the existing framework of government bureaucracy, Downs (1967:5) argues that “a bureau starts as the result of aggressive agitation and action by a small group of zealots who have a specific idea they want to put into practice on a large scale”. However, no matter how much the psychological climate of a new group of innovators focusses energy and activity on the realisation of the new idea in some future state, the requirements for group survival and task achievement necessitate that the group understands and intervenes effectively in the context of the heavy hand of the past, and the dynamics of the present. The innovating group thus has the difficulty of looking three ways at the same time, to its past, present, and the future, and in so doing of facing up to a dilemma faced by all change groups of applying new values and ideas whilst living with the world as it is rather than the world that might yet be. Stated in its most passive mode a feature of this dilemma of how to change the world whilst living with it, is the requirement of groups to adapt to their context whilst maintaining the cutting edge of their own distinctiveness and membership commitment, and in so doing avoiding the impotence which may result from co-optation.

A significant factor in the survival and flourishing of any system, whether it be a total organisation, or a subunit of specialists within a firm, is how that system relates to its immediate and more distant environment. Boundary management refers to the system of exchanges a function, activity, or a role has with its environment. These exchanges include how the activity:

– acquires its inputs (resources) and disposes of its outputs (services);

– exercises influence;

– builds relationships and activates its image;

– protects its integrity, territory, and technological core from environmental pressure and threat;

– co-ordinates activities with other units, roles or organisations.

While boundary management is an important consideration for any system it is particularly crucial for advisory/service activities within organisations because advisory units by definition do not command line authority, neither can they assume their advice will be listened to, or their services needed. In this situation the legitimacy of the activity, and the credibility of individual practitioners, has to be developed and maintained over time if the activity is to flourish. The development of the resources which form the power base for carrying out the advisory activity, together with the strategy and particular unit adopts about how legitimate or illegitimate it chooses to appear to different parts of its environment represent two of several areas of choice and action involved in this key activity of boundary management.

However, research by Pettigrew (1975a) on groups of operational research, organisation development, and general management consultants, and further research on trainers reported in Pettigrew et al. (1982), indicates the task-oriented and politically limited perspective evident amongst groups of internal specialists means that often such groups do not develop explicit strategies for managing their internal and external environment, at least in the conception and pioneering phases of the groups’ evolution. Only when the certainty of the original pioneering task nears completion, and uncertainties about future tasks and political sponsorship for the group become starkly evident, do groups of innovators sit down, often by then in an atmosphere of collective self-doubt, and begin to try and put together a home and foreign policy. But although groups of innovators do not necessarily always have coherent intended strategies, they clearly do display attitudes and values and act on their environment in such a way that an implicit stance is taken, or is perceived by their supports, doubters, or opponents to be taken.

This section examines various aspects of boundary management by innovating groups by developing the idea that change-minded groups may relate to their environment through patterns of attitude and behaviour labelled as exclusive or inclusive. In recent social science thinking the polar types exclusive and inclusive have been used by authors such as Olson (1965), Zald and Ash (1966), and Curtis and Zurcher (1974) to analyse the internal characteristics and dynamics, and patterns of external relationship adopted by interest groups and social movements seeking survival and impact in their various context. Although she does not use the dichotomy of exclusive and inclusive, Kanter (1972) in her discussion of the survival of nineteenth and twentieth-century communes, focusses in on what she describes as the twin pulls in the social life of communes, of expressing values and implementing practical concerns, and mentions some further associated dilemmas which derive from living with those twin pulls. Drawing on and developing the above authors’ work it is possible to break down the exclusive and inclusive polar types into the dimensions shown in Figure 14, which can be related with profit to features of the natural history of innovating groups in organisation.

FIGURE 14  Dimensions of exclusive and inclusive stances

Broadly the innovating group behaving the exclusive stance, either as a product of deliberate intent or cumulative circumstance, or both, is offering a distinctively sharp and culturally deviant presentation of self to its environment. Its message for change has been nourished in a group possibly with high levels of commitment and cohesion around fairly specific values and goals, and these goals are wrapped up in fairly singular and unilateral attempts to push their values and where possible particular changes on their environment. Groups of innovators behaving the exclusive stance are likely therefore to contain at least a proportion of Downs's (1967) zealots, with their sacred policies, implacable energy, their refusal to be impartial, and their willingness to criticise openly the status quo. While zealots may be functional for organisations operating in rapidly changing environments, because they help to generate and focus the enormous amounts of energy necessary to overcome bureaucratic inertia, zealots operating from an advisory position may have to sacrifice their own impact and survival, for the short-term comfort and certainty of expressing their own values. As we shall see, the OD zealots in ICI tended to attract the attention of powerful critics, and were controlled by stigmatising and labelling in the terms of Cohen's (1980) “folk devils”.

The inclusive stance, on the other hand, is the behavioural representation of the aphorism that to change the world one must live with it. Here is the attempt literally to change the world by inclusion in it, to understand and where appropriate identify with local cultures, and to use such cultural identification to cultivate the access and information which will reveal the pragmatic starting point or points for change. Although innovators adopting such a stance may have their own values, goals, and technologies, these are proclaimed less visibly, and are made available much more flexibly and opportunistically than is suggested with those innovators adopting an exclusive stance.

These two ideal typical stances can be broken down into the six dimensions listed in Figure 14. Thus an innovating group adopting an exclusive stance is likely to have a relatively impermeable boundary, while the inclusive stance implies a much more open boundary and thereby greater opportunities to give and receive information, gather resources, evaluate and alter services, and possibly recruit different kinds of personnel. The second dimension refers to the structural and cultural similarity between an innovating group and its environment, and in the case of an exclusive group suggests significant differences in language, rituals, problem-solving style, and mode of organisation between that exclusive group and its host environment. Specificity and diffuseness of values captures the extent to which the change group has a highly developed sense of commitment to specific values informing decisions and actions, or in the case of the inclusive stance the adoption of value indeterminism with all that offers in flexibility of action to meet changing inner and outer contexts. Groups pushing out from a base of cultural distinctiveness and value determinism in the language of consultant-client relationships are likely to be behaving in a directive or consultant-rather than client-centred manner. There is therefore a heavy element of unilaterism in the relationship between the innovator and those who he seeks to influence. The final two dimensions refer in turn to the extent to which the innovators build up multiple linkages and networks of relationship in their environment, and the extent to which the change groups cross the boundary with single or multiple tasks and services.

The major proposition implied by the exclusive and inclusive ideal types is the expected high degree of association, or in the statistical sense intercorrelation between the six dimensions at either end of the polar types. But in addition the adoption of exclusive and inclusive stances points to certain critical dilemmas in organising and acting to create change. The major of these dilemmas is that actions taken to build commitment, coherence, and identity in an innovating group by having an impermeable boundary, adopting specific values, and being culturally dissimilar, tend to have the consequential effect of cutting such a group off from its environment; while on the other hand features of the inclusive stance may tend to displace a change group's values and goals, and dissipate the group's sense of distinctiveness in relation to its environment, and homogeneity in relationship to itself. Any move through time by a change group from the exclusive to a more inclusive stance may in effect be a move from the sacred to the profane, from high principle to pragmatism, or from change agentry to absorption and co-optation.

An examination of the natural history of development and stance of the PCD OD unit – and particularly the behavioural wing of that unit; the OD “in-group” in the Plastics Division Training and Personnel Development Department; and the Millbank-based corporate OD unit over the period 1969–72, reveals a clear pattern of exclusivity in all three groups. This pattern of exclusivity arose and developed in all three cases as a result partly of the confines around each group resulting from the antecedent conditions and receiving culture they were born into, but also from the value positions and actions taken by the group members as they struggled for legitimacy in their contexts, and as they attempted to face up to the control strategies adopted by their doubters and opponents.

Thus the behavioural wing of the PCD OD unit initially had the centrally imposed task of SDP to work on as their sole transaction. If they had any political sponsorship it was all wrapped up in the person of Harvey-Jones. Their post-SDP tasks were largely confined to helping James with his second organisation study and doing team-building and role clarification work in the politically weak R&D and Engineering functions. Furthermore, the limits imposed by their uncertain legitimacy and the way this represented itself in their limited tasks and network, were exacerbated by the group's presentation of self as having distinct and superior values, and through their proclamation of these values in a distinctive language and problem-solving style for thinking about learning and change which emphasised their cultural dissimilarity from the predominant management culture of PCD at that time. Worse still was the fact that as part of the price for setting up the PCD OD unit, Harvey-Jones had had to accept Heath and Parker as early senior members of the OD unit, and probably sensibly from their point of view, Heath and Parker as representatives of the division establishment distanced themselves from the behavioural science ideas and methods being pushed with zeal by Ward and his colleagues. The result was that the change group at PCD was always weakened by being divided within itself, and OD methods never gained complete legitimacy within the OD unit, never mind outside it.

A similar pattern of external and internal causes created the exclusivity evident in the Plastics Division and central OD units. The central OD resources of the late 1960s and early 1970s were from a task point of view almost exclusively concerned with WSA and SDP, were overdependent on George Bridge for political sponsorship and legitimacy, were too easily associated with the policy objectives and power needs of the central personnel department, and of course over-identified with behavioural and psychological frames of reference and solutions, and values which appeared to cherish individual growth and development to the detriment of business needs and purposes.

These brief illustrative points will have made it clear that exclusivity is partially a product of the control strategies of groups questioning or hostile to change groups. If a change group can be confined in terms of the permeability of its boundary, the extent of its political linkages, and required to specialise in narrow tasks with finite time limits for implementation, then to all intents and purposes the group can be allowed in the absence of support, new tasks, or replacement personnel, merely to wither away on the vine. In PCD, Plastics, and in the central OD unit this process of withering on the vine was facilitated by the additional sense and reality of entrapment which followed from the visible way those groups proclaimed their cultural differences, and the additional control behaviour that visibility and perceived deviancy attracted.

In HOC/PCD Division, Ward's OD section in the management services department was already being perceived and treated as a deviant group before the creation of the OD unit. Ward and Brown described their group as being “enthused” and “highly committed” to the behavioural sciences, and of considering themselves as heavy users of jargon “because we thought we were the bee's knees”. Ward's group’s values about “openness”, “data not opinion”, “boundaries not being sacrosanct” and their emphasis on “people values and growth potential” at work clashed with the hierarchical, technically arrogant tone of the HOC/PCD culture and quickly attracted them the labels “head-shrinkers and trick cyclists”, and a feeling “we weren't very identified with the business”. The Plastics division OD group of the early 1970s also got themselves trapped “peddling values, humanistic psychology and the like”, and pushing some of the fashionable phrases and solutions of the day such as “theory Y”, “participation”, “co-operation and delegation”. Worse still, even in the 1975–77 period when the ICI management system was identifying more and more with pragmatic, economic values, two of the internal OD consultants were still proclaiming values emphasising laudable notions such as “caring”, “creativity”, individual growth and freedom, and “fun and excitement” within organisational life. One of the trainer critics of OD in the mid-1970s remarked that “one of the things that gets in the way [of OD having an impact] is what he calls his value system . . . I see his value system where everything concerning people is all important to him, and must take priority over every other consideration, as unrealistic, totally impractical in business.”

In the literature on the sociology of deviance (Downes and Rock, 1979; Cohen, 1980; Downes and Rock, 1982) there are ample theoretical frameworks available to analyse processes of social control by groups threatened or otherwise disturbed by deviant sub-groups. For the present purposes of examining some of the consequences for innovating groups of adopting an exclusive stance in their environment, Cohen's (1980) interesting book Folk Devils and Moral Panics is particularly apposite. Using a detailed case study of the Mods and Rockers phenomenon in Britain over the 1960s Cohen (1980) analyses the general processes which generate folk devils and the moral panics which sustain them. Moral panics are defined as episodes when a person or a group emerges to become recognised as a threat to societal values and interests, and is presented in stylised and stereotypical fashion by the mass media. Such stereotyped groups thus acquire the role of folk devils – “visible reminders of what we should not be” (Cohen, 1980:9).

Although it would be to exaggerate to argue that the phenomenon of OD in ICI created any sustained moral panic, without doubt the occasions when OD people visibly confronted or were perceived to confront some of the core values of their host culture in a situation where of course they were structurally and strategically weak, they did attract the exaggerated stereotypes which escalated local feeling and allowed opponents of OD to decry OD methods as deviant, and OD people as folk devils. Thus in PCD, when it looked at one stage as if Ward and Brown's emphasis on self-direction and autonomy for managers might actually tap real energy and support from those dissatisfied with “a very mechanistic bureaucratic organisation”, the director responsible for OD began to fear loss of control from a bottom-up change process. He was saying “I don't like what's happening. I feel we're losing control.” Similarly in Plastics Division some members of the board in the mid-1970s considered “behavioural science – that knocked the stuffing out of people, it removed control from authority, it weakened structural authority”. According to a deputy chairman of Plastics Division in the mid-1970s, it was the perception of key people on the board that OD was or could undermine authority – weaken authority at the top, that meant Simon Dow “had to be stopped in his tracks”. One of the board members opposed to OD in Plastics Division admitted that concern about OD's attempts to move the division from an “old-fashioned, not necessarily authoritarian but classical, traditional management style, towards a fully participative style . . . meant that he and a senior colleague were so opposed to the behavioural science aspects that Simon Dow was putting forward that almost everything put forward by Dow's department was rejected”. Similar attempts by the Mond division change agents of the early 1970s to question and challenge managerial values and practices around authority, of course led to the characterisations of OD “as being too soft” and “sandals and beads OD”, which prepared the ground for those change agents to be ignored and allowed to wither away.

The PCD, Plastics, and central OD group cases well illustrate some of the factors external and internal to innovating groups which create the pattern of exclusivity which can made a change group so vulnerable. The Agricultural Division OD case is an interesting contrast to these three cases in so far as there was a clear mix of exclusive and inclusive elements in the early stance of that group, and an explicit attempt to move the group's strategic positioning more unequivocally over to the inclusive stance after a period of contextual change had invalidated many of the precepts guiding the group at an earlier phase in its existence. In combining an appropriate, for that context, mix of exclusive and inclusive at an early phase in its development, it may be argued that the Agricultural Division OD resources were able to offer from a content point of view a distinctively different message about change whilst retaining the linkages necessary to provide the access, the information, and the leverage to reach the people and the problems in the division where an impact could be made.

The ideas and values about change brought to Billingham by Ripley and then nourished and activated by the intensity of the Swallow group meetings, ensured that the Agricultural OD group had specific and distinctive values which were culturally dissimilar from the Billingham management culture. Indeed there was a greater coherence and commitment to values and change approach in the Swallow group than in any of the other ICI OD groups, and yet those elements of exclusivity were combined with an organic and mutual style of relating to their environment which allowed and encouraged a relatively permeable group boundary, well-developed linkages in the key production area around a variety of transactions relevant to the two key management problems of the day.

The Agricultural Division OD group did attract hostility from some division directors because some members of the group were perceived to be “anti-system”, even “revolutionary”, but this labelling was contained to some extent by a number of features. Firstly the directors were one stage removed from the actual OD work, and the OD group's middle and senior manager clients protected and supported them from folk devil epitaphs. Secondly, the fact that the OD group all had dual affiliations, to the Swallow group and their more conventional divisional roles as a trainer or a personnel man allowed them to balance out their identities and associations. Crucially, the fact that the OD group had two leaders: one Ripley acting as a creator, interpreter, and protector of their values, and Miles acting as a political umbrella and link with the management and personnel system, meant the group didn't become too exclusive and detached from other viewpoints, values, and concerns in the division.

However, after the success of the Methanol work, and with both senior line managers and senior industrial relations managers in the division seeking to launch their own initiatives to improve IR on the Billingham site, the Swallow group came increasingly under pressure. The Swallow group's interest in the individual before the organisation became increasingly portrayed as “anti-system and revolutionary”, their desire to keep all doors open with as many groups as possible by casting themselves in a neutral third-party role – and the unorthodox links with shop stewards this led to, plus a feeling amongst some personnel people that they were excluded from their inner sanctum of the Swallow group – all produced a desire to contain the group. Miles responded to these control strategies by refocussing the Swallow group away from their own internal workings and values to trying to develop a more explicit political strategy for the group under these new conditions, and of course this helped to stimulate the extended OD group with its cells in Ammonia and Engineering Works. But a combination of the loss of Ripley, the difficulties of renewing the old network and organic approach to change, the tiredness of the old Swallow group members after several years in very stressful roles, and crucially the more risk-aversive and cash-rich era of the mid-1970s all exposed the lack of ideas and purpose in the OD group. It wasn't until the era of real productivity change in the late 1970s that Moores was able to use the legitimacy of his personnel role, and the external consultant Larsen's acceptability with the divisional board and senior management, to mobilise the changes of business context around a series of developmental activities in the manpower, training, and careers areas, that OD emerged again, but of course, by then the work Moores and Larsen did was not, could not, be described as OD. The content, style, and language of OD had to move on to survive in the new context.

In summary this section on features of the internal development and boundary management of innovating groups has emphasised some of the tensions and dilemmas of managing the survival and impact of such groups through time. The most general dilemma for an innovating group is how to change the world whilst living with it; how to be exclusive or different enough to retain a vision or process to facilitate change but not so different that the group creates a moral panic, acquires the stereotype of folk devils and is controlled by overt attempts to limit contacts, tasks, and resources, or more subtly is ignored and allowed to slowly disappear. Part of the dilemma of how to live with a community whilst changing it is caught up in the stylistic problem of how visible or invisible the group is, and whether it is able to manage the timing and extent of its visibility. Groups propelled out into the open by working exclusively for the top management, and/or being associated just with formal top-down change programmes, or being seduced by their own inner momentum into proclaiming their superior values, can find themselves trapped and vulnerable when their political sponsor moves on, the change programme is implemented or otherwise recedes from public attention, and when a changing context makes their self-consciously proclaimed values manifestly irrelevant for the changed times.

This requirement to maintain flexibility of values and activities in order to live in a changing context conflicts with some of the virtues of specialisation. Sarason (1972:121) has commented that “in the short run specialization appears to have productive consequences in terms of new knowledge and practice, but in the long run it seems to render the individual, or field, or agency increasingly unable to assimilate and adapt to changes in surrounding social events and processes”. There is always the danger that professionalism and specialisation transform unfamiliar problems into familiar ones at the price of relevance, and for this reason few if any innovating groups can justify an indefinite future.

THE ICI USE OF ORGANISATION DEVELOPMENT: SOME LESSONS

One of the major lessons of the ICI experience in using the knowledge and skills of internal and external OD specialists to help create change, must be the pessimistic one of “don’t expect too much”; and certainly in the context of strategic change without a business crisis, “don’t expect too much too soon”. If the evidence of this book has substantiated how difficult it is for chief executives and senior and middle line managers to justify and implement strategic and operational changes, then what chance have specialists with their fragile political position and often illegitimate message and methods to create change? And yet with every decade new groups of specialists appear with a new set of techniques, new values, still greater promises and in some cases the latest brand of polished presentation. Some come and some go. With the arrival of computers came the programmers and systems analysts, the logic of organisational form and process would now be moulded by the changing possibilities offered by computer technology, and earlier bands of organisational settlers, such as work study officers and organisation and methods officers retreated to their camp fires to consider their fate. We have seen in this book how the arrival of OD specialists provoked much camp fire chat not only amongst executives, but also in personnel and training departments, once the sole guardians of human resource management. But we have also chronicled the fading away of a generation of OD specialists in ICI who arrived on the scene in the context of the optimistic social and economic values of the 1960s, and for the most part did not survive the harsher and more pragmatic economic and political context of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Of course much of the early misguided optimism for OD came not from the expectations of ICI executives but from the almost social movement quality of writing and thinking about OD values and techniques in the 1960s, and early 1970s. These early texts and articles (Bennis, 1969; Beckhard, 1969; Solomon, 1971) with their grand statements about the possibilities of planned organisation-wide change, informed by humanistic values emphasising individual dignity, participative and open processes of decision-making and change, and honest and authentic relationships between people at all levels in organisational life, for a time seemed to gel with the optimistic and questioning times of the 1960s. Certainly the above kinds of assumptions about the possibilities and values of OD had been well internalised by the American consultants who trained most of the ICI internal OD specialists. The result was that the ICI specialists were socialised at events like the Eastbourne 1 and 2 training programmes in techniques and values which in the context of the economic difficulties ICI was facing in 1970 and 1971 already seemed to jar with their working contexts. One of the American external consultants who worked closely with the ICI internal specialists commented in this way about how they were socialised:

Essentially Eastbourne and other such training events for OD consultants were much too oriented around the humanistic ethos which tended to make people think that almost any problem could be solved by developing co-operation. In that I think they confused ends and means. Because if your end is to develop cooperation and participation, your means may often be to be initiating, and structuring, and confronting, and plan-full and a lot of stuff that people didn't learn in this consultant training.

But if lessons could be drawn about the kinds of ethos in which the ICI OD people were trained, a more telling lesson from those early days was the kind of people who were recruited or volunteered to be internal ICI OD specialists. As one participant in the ICI OD work put it:

They usually took staff who could be spared. So they took people who, in terms of the norms of the organisation, were kind of weak, personally goal-less, not very courageous, not very successful. Then when you take that material and teach people to be more receptive, better listeners, more democratic, you are strengthening what was already a disadvantage . . . So I'm personally convinced that one of the biggest lessons from the ICI experience is that if you want an OD effort to be successful you start with high energy, rather successful line managers and try to teach them behavioural skills.

From a selection point of view it is clear that many of the ICI internal OD consultants were hampered by the fact that they were perceived to be middle managers that could be spared, or were junior managers or specialists “who couldn't require anybody to take any combination of us”. The internal consultants that survived for any length of time to have an impact were people like Dudley, James, and Marshall who were fairly senior line managers before they became internal OD resources, and had the advantage of being scarce and therefore for a time pivotal exemplars of OD in their chosen working environment. Other survivors included people such as Moores in Agricultural Division who used the legitimacy of his personnel role to generate the information, the political access, and the credibility to carry on using OD methods, and was shrewd enough to change his methods and areas of work to fit the changing business and political context where he had to work. The most solid evidence for ICI's doubts about the value of using internal specialists as “change agents”, was the clear statement of policy that had emerged by the last few years of the 1970s that in the foreseeable future line managers were to be the vanguard of attempts to create the significant changes in organisation that eventually came with the recession of the early 1980s. By then most of the internal specialist OD resources in ICI were either disappearing or had disappeared, and an important role played by the few credible specialists that remained was to help train and develop senior line managers for the managers’ task of initiating or implementing the manpower, structural, and then strategy changes of the period 1979–83. This, of course, is suggestive of a pattern of retaining a very small number of internal OD specialists who act as professional centres of excellence, drawing new ideas and techniques, and in some cases external consultants into the organisation around problems being flagged by the line management system; and where relevant help to develop the line management system, without the zealous attempts to create the ambitious, planned, and across-the-board changes which were a feature of OD in ICI in the days of WSA and SDP.

A view has been expressed to me about the ICI OD experience, without too much of a self-justificatory tone that OD is like any other developmental activity, you spend a lot in the hope that there will be pragmatic returns but there must be a high wastage rate of resource. A corollary of this position is that ICI had to go through their early strategy and experience of training a lot of internal specialists and sending them out to “do OD”, in order to reach the level of appreciation they were at by the late 1970s that if OD was to be harnessed at all as a means to change, it could only be in response to a perceived need by the owners of a problem, and then the leader of the change had to be the relevant member of the line management system. There is clearly some sense in that pragmatic view of the reality of how organisations learn, but nevertheless one wonders if there are other lessons to be appreciated about how the way some of the OD groups were set up and managed contributed to their effectiveness and ineffectiveness.

We have seen in this study that the broad receiving context, immediate antecedent conditions, and birth processes of an OD group can crucially set the bounds or provide opportunities for that group's subsequent activities and fate. Groups which were born with minimal consultation into settings where there was little perceived need amongst the key power figures for organisational change, never mind understanding, of the potential utility of OD resources, and as in Plastics where these difficulties were compounded by the inexperience and lack of training of the early specialists, hardly had the chance to begin to create an impact. In other divisions such as Agricultural Division where there had been an opening up of the social system prior to Ripley's arrival, where climate-building for organisational and cultural change had seeded the division with at least a smattering of potential line manager clients and minimally experienced potential OD specialists, and where the early leader of the group had a coherent conceptual rationale for OD which was appropriate for that context, then there was some scope for connecting specialist OD resources to management-defined local problems. Creating a new group of internal specialists, whether they be OD consultants, corporate planners, or operational researchers, is a change like any other change and as such requires not only forethought about the appropriateness of those skills for that context, but also climate-building and support-generation to link the new resources into the existing system. By and large the rush to set up the ICI OD resources as means to rescue the centrally imposed MUPS/WSA, and fashion and implement the equally centrally imposed SDP, meant that not only were those groups trapped by the unpopularity of their initial task of serving the ICI personnel system, but little constructive thought was given to other key issues which can be crucial to the impact of new groups of specialists.

Setting up an internal specialist or consultancy group is a form of innovative planning and as such requires at least some moderate amount of diagnostic activity at the point of conception and birth. But in ICI fundamental questions about identifying client needs, predicting a mix or range of potential clients, the distinctive competence of the OD unit and its relationship to the choice of how the OD resources would be structured and located, the type of leadership appropriate, and issues of work style and selection of the right mix of staff tended to receive only passing attention in the haste to set up the new resources and get on with or find the first series of tasks.

Equally well, once the OD resources had been set up, it wasn't until their initial tasks were near completion and/or their initial political sponsorship had disappeared or had otherwise changed their attention, that some of the groups began to think positively about a continuing strategy to maintain sufficient legitimacy for them to operate effectively as change resources in their particular context. As our discussion of exclusivity emphasised, innovating groups must actively manage their various boundaries and support base to have an impact in their context. In broad terms this requires continuous sensitivity to the past, present, and future context of the group's work; to continuously raising the capacity of the group through training and development and personnel changes; to repeated attempts to alter the nature and possibly range of tasks and services the group provides; and through developing the range and quality of networks of linkage and support which will translate group objectives into reality.

In terms of alternative ways of structuring and organising specialist resources, the ICI data have revealed some of the strengths and weaknesses of the network approach versus the formally structured unit approach. The PCD OD unit, with its identifiable structured status, credible business leader, close links with at least part of the PCD power system, and clear task, did in fact eventually achieve the task for which it was set up, but at the price of the group's demise. In addition there was practically no institutionalisation of OD skills and knowledge in that division. The more organic modus operandi and network approach to organisation adopted by the Agricultural OD group did achieve a measure of both task impact and institutionalisation of OD knowledge and skills into the Billingham culture. The success, for a time, of the Agricultural Division OD resources did seem to be the result of a variety of factors: the fact that the Billingham management culture was based on a relatively stable network of managers who had already been introduced to OD methods; the coherent and strong value and conceptual leadership given by Ripley, both in providing a rationale for OD in the division, and in building a resounding team spirit amongst the early network members. However, there are dangers and difficulties with the continuing and non-reflective use of the network approach to organising specialist resources. Networks require regeneration with new leadership and new personnel. Networks can also become cosy retreats where groups of specialists who have lost their sense of purpose just sit around and talk to each other about former triumphs and the latest concepts and techniques. In this sense, and especially in hard times, a specialist network can become a deliberately low-visibility way of concealing a service rather than projecting a service. Although by no means impossible, it is very much more difficult to conceal a unit or a function which is likely to have a manager required to publicly state objectives and accountabilities. Dudley was eventually criticised in ICI for adopting a too laissez-faire attitude to running the ICI companywide OD network. In effect Dudley was blamed for co-ordinating the network rather than managing it; for adopting an “expediency” or “opportunistic” approach rather than actively using and developing the network to build an OD strategy which actively linked the network to key business problems through the main board and the divisional boards.

But if one of the lessons of the ICI organisation change and development experience is the unreality, the persistent difficulties of grand attempts to plan change, then there must be caution against overemphasising too elaborate attempts by specialist groups to plan and strategise about their linkages and impact on their environment. After all in each of the divisions and locations where this study looked at the use and impact of internal OD resources, only a comparatively small number of individuals both survived in and had an impact on their surroundings from an internal specialist role, and that impact was often dependent on the continuing active support and sponsorship of a relatively small number of clients. As one of the few really senior ICI OD supporters put it, “using OD is in the first case an act of faith . . . believing in it and wanting to use it is an individual thing”. If support is that idiosyncratic and individual, then perhaps the only viable form of strategising to develop OD has to be from whatever islands of support continue to project themselves out of the sea.

Turning to examine the lessons that may be drawn from ICI's use of external OD consultants, here again one finds the importance of individual differences, of certain consultants seeming to fit certain contexts, and in effect specialising as helpers for particular clients. Thus Larsen, the American external OD consultant, has been working almost continuously first with senior production people, then more generally with the senior management group outside and inside production, and latterly with the Agricultural Division board over the period from the early 1970s until the present day. Wilson, another American OD consultant, has linked with a selected group of senior managers and the board of Mond division, also for a period of 10 years or more. It is noteworthy that neither of these two consultants has particularly sought to, been encouraged to, or in fact has ended up providing consultancy services to any other part of ICI, even though those two consultants must be considered at some level or other to have been effective in those two divisions, and other divisions of ICI to varying degrees, and at differing times have been users of external OD assistance.

There seem to be a variety of reasons both why certain external consultants appear to fit and survive in certain contexts, and why their impact becomes localised. Early consultant acceptability seems to be as much to do with the personal chemistry of relationships between the consultant and a powerful client, as it has to do with the appropriateness of the consultant's service for that business at that time. The continuing survival and impact of the consultant may be due to the protection afforded by the initial client, the skill with which the external consultant infiltrates the organisation's cultural and political systems, and thereby generates the information and support necessary to alter his product to meet any changing top management views of the problems that require attention. Although as McLean et al. (1982) document one of the advantages an external consultant may have over an internal one, is that the external can act as an outside conceptual stimulant, a provider of alternative views; by not being part of the local career and political systems may be able to act as a sounding board and counsellor; in order for externals to survive they also sometimes have to “go native” and demonstrate identification and loyalty and commitment to local problems, and even local people. This identification with key local people and problems often means they can end up as personal gurus or medicine men for power figures, and or are associated with particular conceptual models and techniques for solving certain problems. Given the inevitable competitiveness which has existed between ICI divisions, and one of its consequences the “best if invented here syndrome”, it can mean that it is difficult both to export external consultants’ ideas and include them personally into other business locations. Finding a way of managing the impact and use of external consultants so they can modify and export ideas throughout the company is a continuing problem for ICI.

Mercer’s position as a continuing high-level external OD consultant to the ICI top power system was discussed and reviewed at the end of Chapter 10. Unlike the other external consultants ICI have used Mercer did work with several ICI divisions, and of course has worked for the ICI main board over the period of four Company Chairmen. This is, I suspect, a very unusual occurrence with high-level consultancy where it is common for a consultant's star to wane with the change of top leadership. Mercer stayed in the ICI system because of the positive support in particular of two executive directors, Harvey-Jones and Woodburn, who were championing a number of change ideas; because of Dudley's shrewd management of Mercer's access to individual directors and general managers, and because Mercer's low-key, “doing good by stealth” style of consultancy fitted the highly personal and political environment around the main board.

Dudley’s management of Mercer, and indeed Nicholas Mann's management in Mond Division of the external consultant Wilson, indicate a number of lessons for effectively using external help. One lesson is to use externals so they enhance, not compete with, the credibility of internal development resources. Externals also literally require management, not just in the narrow contractual sense, but in directing them to people and problems where their expertise is most likely to be used; by shielding and protecting them from short-term critics; by in the early stages introducing them to key aspects of the local political and cultural systems; and where possible to use their contacts and credibility to legitimise whatever more circumscribed interventions internal OD resources may be considering.

One further and critical aspect of the management of external consultants seems to be the simple to espouse but not always easy to achieve objective of ensuring the external does not usurp management. Examples have been quoted in the case study chapters of line management withdrawing emotional and practical support from change projects and processes once it was felt that the leadership of the change process had moved from the hands of the management to the hands of the consultant. But this is another reflection of one of the themes about creating change mentioned in this and previous chapters of this book. In the absence of crisis/survival circumstances, visible change projects or programmes made all the more visible by upfront consultant presence tend to incur resistance. Lower visibility processes of changing, using consultants to provide complementary processes and ideas to additively build on natural movements in the system, are more likely to combine the appropriate balance between continuity and change to move the organisation slowly in a different direction.