The Intervention Phase
Once the diagnostic phase is complete and the OD practitioner and Organisational leaders have completed an analysis of the current reality within the organisation it is time to begin work on understanding what steps should be taken to enable to organisation to achieve .
Interventions are not purely projects or programmes associated with fixing organisational problems which have been identified but incorporate a wide range of interventions which cover maintenance work, consolidation, building on strengths and adapting to future changes.
The purpose is to discover what capability the organisation currently have an use that as a springboard to take achieve the best potential future outcome for the organisation.
- There are number of OD tools and techniques which can be employed which are based on the theoretical underpinning of OD practice.
- Critical questions that the Intervention stage seeks to answer are;
- Where in the organisational system, and at what level should the intervention be aimed?
- What specific areas of change are required and in what are?
- Is the focus of the intervention task, process or people?
- How planned or emergent should the intervention be given the culture of the organisation?
- What intervention (tools and techniques) will provide the best fit to the organisation and deliver the outcome required?
- What population within the organisation will be targeted by the intervention, individuals, group, intergroup or the whole organisational system?
A few important considerations are:
- The actions should be specific to the particular organization at this time (one should be suspicious of pre-packaged consulting solutions claiming universal application – remember the old adage about the kid who receives a hammer)
- Both OD Practitioner and client should be involved in planning and carrying out the interventions
- The client gets to make the final decisions – he/she has to live with the actions and their outcomes
- The actions should improve the client’s ability to deal with future problems, rather than create dependency on the consultant
