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The case studies included in this book are intended to help you learn the role and thought process of an OD consultant or change agent through realistic examples. By reading and analyzing case studies, you will actively participate in applying the theory and concepts of OD to complex, real-life situations that consultants find themselves in every day. These cases are all based in practitioners’ real experiences—names and some details have been changed to protect the client’s and practitioner’s anonymity. By stepping into a practitioner’s shoes, you will be challenged to make the tradeoffs and choices that managers and consultants are asked to make. The cases will help you develop the problem-solving and critical-thinking skills that are central to the value that a practitioner brings to a client. Ideally you can discuss these cases with others who have analyzed them as well, and together you can identify the central issues in the cases and debate the most appropriate response. In this way, you will be assimilating knowledge that you have about organizations, change, human dynamics, and the concepts and theories of OD. You will learn the logic behind the choices that managers and practitioners make, and you will gain practice in making your thought processes explicit. The cases in the book will build on one another in complexity, so you will need to integrate what you have learned from previous chapters as you analyze each case.

The case studies in this book are written as mini-plays or scenes to provide a richly detailed scenario in which you can imagine yourself playing a part, in contrast to many commonly published case studies in which a few short paragraphs provide all of the detail available for analysis. Since a good deal of OD and change management involves noticing and responding to the human and relational dynamics of a situation in addition to the task and content issues, the scenes in this book provide both in order to give you practice in becoming an observer of people during the process of organizational change. The cases in this book also are situated in a number of diverse types of organizations in which OD is practiced, including educational environments, health care and nonprofit organizations, and for-profit businesses. Each of these types of organizations brings with it unique challenges and opportunities for the OD practitioner.

Each case provides a slice of organizational life, constructed as a brief scene in which you can imagine yourself playing a part, but which will require your conscious thinking and reflection. Cases present situations with many options. As Ellet (2007) writes, “A case is a text that refuses to explain itself” (p. 19). It requires you to take an active role to interpret it and discover its meaning. Fortunately, unlike the passage of time in real life, in written cases time is momentarily paused to give you the chance to consider a response. While you do not have the opportunity to gather additional data or ask questions of participants, you do have the ability to flip back a few pages, read the situation again, and contemplate. You can carefully consider alternate courses of action, weigh the pros and cons of each, and clarify why you would choose one option over another.

As a result of having to make these choices, you will hone your ability to communicate your rationale for your decisions. Classmates will make different choices, each with his or her own well-reasoned rationales. Through discussion you will sharpen your ability to solve problems, understanding the principles behind the decisions that you and your classmates have made. You will learn about how your own experiences shape your assumptions and approaches to problems. You will be challenged to develop your skills to provide evidence for your reasoning, defend your analyses, and explain your thinking in clear and concise ways for fellow practitioners and clients alike. You may find that these discussions prompt you to change your mind about the approach you would take, becoming convinced by a classmate’s well-reasoned proposal, or you may find that your reasoning persuades others that your approach has the greater advantages.

Regardless, you will learn that there is no single right answer at the back of the book or to be shared by your instructor after you have struggled. For some of the cases in this book, your instructor may share with you what happened after the case concluded. This information may provide support for the approach you would have taken, or it may make you think that your approach was incorrect. Instead of seeking the right or wrong answer, however, asking yourself whether your proposal was well reasoned given the circumstances is more important than knowing the exact outcome of the case. While you have the opportunity to do so, use the occasion of the case study and the discussion to play with various alternatives. Here, the process may be more important than the outcome.

The following tips will help you get started with case study analysis:

1 Read the entire case first, and resist the temptation to come to any conclusions the first time you read it. Allow yourself to first gather all of the relevant data about the situation before you propose any solutions or make any judgments about what is happening or what the client needs to do.

2 Use the tools and methods outlined in each chapter to help you think through the issues presented by the case. You will find worksheets, models, principles, and outlines that can assist you in identifying and categorizing problems, selecting and prioritizing interventions, and organizing ideas to respond to the client. Use charts and diagrams to map out organizational structures and underline key phrases and issues. Write questions that come to mind in the margins. Read the case multiple times to ensure that you have not missed a key detail that would indicate to a client that you had not been paying close attention.

3 Realize that like real life, case studies contain many extra details and describe multiple issues. Organizational life is messy and complex, and not all of these details are helpful or necessary to the consultant or change agent. A consultant helping a team redefine roles and responsibilities may be doing so in an environment in which the company has acquired a competitor or quarterly results were disappointing. Part of the practitioner’s role is to sort the useful primary information from the unnecessary secondary information (or information that is unnecessary for the immediate problem). This is part of the value of these case exercises and a logic and intuition that you will develop as your skills and experience grow. Ask yourself what the client is trying to achieve, what he or she has asked of you, and what the core issues and central facts are.

4 Similarly, in any response to a client or reaction to a case, resist the temptation to comment on everything. An OD practitioner can help to prioritize the most pressing issues and help the client sort through the complexities of organizational life. It could be that part of the reason the client has asked for help is that the number of possibilities for action are too overwhelming to decide what to do next.

5 When you are prepared to write a response or an analysis, ask yourself whether you have addressed the central questions asked by the case and whether you have clearly stated the issues to the client. Once your response is written, could you send that, in its present form, to the client described in the case? In that regard, is the analysis professionally written and well organized to communicate unambiguously to the client? Will the client understand how and why you reached these conclusions?

6 As you write your analysis, ask yourself how you know any particular fact or interpretation to be true and whether you have sufficiently justified your interpretation with actual data. Instead of boldly stating that “managers are not trained for their roles,” you could write, “Only 2 of 10 managers had attended a management training course in the past 5 years, leading me to conclude that management training has not been given a high priority.” The latter uses data and makes the interpretation explicit; the former is likely to invite criticism or defensiveness from a client. This does not mean that directness is not appropriate, only that it must follow from the evidence. We will describe the considerations of the feedback process in depth in this book.

7 When you have finished your own thinking and writing about the case, and after you have had the opportunity to discuss the case and options for action with classmates, take the time to write down your reflections from the experience (Ellet, 2007). What did you learn? What principles might apply for the next time you are confronted with these choices?

Summary

Today’s organizations are experiencing an incredible amount of change. Organization development is a field of academic study and professional practice that uses social and behavioral science knowledge to develop interventions that help organizations and individuals change successfully. It is a field practiced in almost all kinds of organizations that you can imagine, from education to health care, from government to small and large businesses. Changes that OD practitioners address are diverse as well, including organizational structures and strategies, team effectiveness, leadership coaching, and much more. OD is not management consulting or training and development, and it is neither short term nor the mere application of a standard procedure or toolkit. OD practitioners can include many kinds of people for whom organizational change is a priority, such as managers and executives, project managers, and organizational members in a variety of roles.