Organization and Education Development

Reflecting and Transforming in a Self-Discovery Journey

Suresh Nanwani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367765767
• eBook ISBN: 9781000451733
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Organization and Education Development combines reflective thinking and practice, action research living theory, and organization development to explore the self-discovery of meaning and purpose. It charts a journey undertaken by the author in pursuit of professional development through self-awareness and self-change as a fully integrated person and a better professor.

This book is about an individual's integrative journey of self-discovery. The author's narrative includes values and organizational development concepts and theories shared with fellow travelers, including supervisors, friends, and students. He shares invaluable insights and examples with the reader, using a model of a six-spoke wheel of final discovery and the MICAI intersection model. These integrative guides provide examples on how to search for what is best in everyday life and what gives us true meaning, encouraging personal reflection and ways of nurturing appreciation for our own lives.

This multidisciplinary book combines western and eastern models and philosophies and draws from organization development, positive psychology, and education development. It will be ideal reading for students, researchers, and academics in the fields of organizational development, organizational psychology, social psychology, and education. It will appeal to any reader interested in learning about self-development.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1 Introduction

Why the journey, the itinerary, and the fellow travelers?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003166986-1

It is never too late to embark on a journey to learn about oneself

Self-discovery at the age of 64 struck me as a bit untimely, but I remember the Fool’s comforting words to his master King Lear: “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise” (Shakespeare, 1606, 1.5.41–42). This line was lovingly encountered in reading the play as a school text in 1973, when I was 17, and nearly 50 years later, it still rings true. Have I really learned from this wisdom 50 years on? Do I really know myself at the age of 64? How do I move ahead in my life?

In the past, I have journeyed with a myriad of experiences at home, school, work, and leisure, with my friends, colleagues, family, and students. I was caught up in my own world – my cocooned sphere working as a development practitioner. When I retired in 2016, I decided to pursue a PhD degree that felt like Greek to me: organization development (OD). In a nutshell, OD is about applying knowledge and finding ways to develop, improve, and transform organizations, companies, individuals, and societies through a process of change. I will explain more about OD later.

During the first year of my PhD degree in Southeast Asia Interdisciplinary Development Institute (SAIDI) Graduate School of Organization Development, I was reassured by the assessment of my two mentors, Drs. Rosalina O. Fuentes and Paul-Marie B. de Luna. They said that while OD may seem daunting to me, I had actually been practicing it throughout my past 30 years, except that I was not thinking, speaking, and articulating OD. Their words did not convince me initially as I was intimidated by the pompous-sounding term (overdose?). I sought refuge in thinking that it is difficult to summarize OD succinctly, given that while academics and practitioners feel that “they intuitively know what the field is about,” they find it difficult to articulate what OD means to others (Cheung-Judge & Holbeche, 2015).

In simple terms, OD is an evolving subject that is multidisciplinary in nature, drawing on sociology, psychology, learning, and personality to plan and manage an effective change in an organization, team, or an individual. In my early years as a PhD student, I took the time to learn the process of OD systems and analysis and accompanying theories, concepts, and models needed to understand the full extent of the discipline.

I became obsessed with finding out how to be more self-aware. I needed to change my life and become a fully integrated person and a better professor. My dissertation was designed to help me accomplish this by first identifying a topic, then applying lessons from OD, and finally embarking on an adventure by using OD theories and applications.

I explain this reasoning to my readers to give them a glimpse of my thoughts. Consequently, the impetus for writing this book draws from the encouragement offered by my Dissertation Committee (2020), suggesting that I consider translating this research into a book. They believed that the insights would be “useful as reference for those who are and will be embarking on a similar journey of self-awareness and self-change” as the experience would “help nourish the souls and the minds in creating a culture of reflective practitioners.” This recommendation stemmed from a need to suit the book to the Philippine context, as well as other countries where fellow readers would hopefully benefit.

The focal context of the OD model is me/myself – the OD benefactor seen through the lenses of self-awareness and self-change as an OD practitioner and as a teacher. As a postgraduate student, I embarked on my journey in my PhD degree at the SAIDI Graduate School of OD, where my mentors opened my eyes to the world of OD and a life journey of discovery.

Two salient events in my life and their effects on me

In 2016, two salient junctures affected my life: The first was the diagnosis and subsequent surgery for my prostate cancer in May 2016. I was diagnosed five months before my retirement, and the cancer and the surgery changed my life, my way of thinking, and myself. The second was my retirement in October 2016, from nearly 30 years of international development work experience in international financial institutions with the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank (ADB), and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), where I worked in the Philippines, the United Kingdom, and many other countries world-wide. The realization of what I was going through with these two milestone events affected my perspectives in life when I took the PhD degree, as I found myself reflecting consciously and making myself think and act positive.

The PhD degree became the springboard to release the positive core in me, which hitherto was caged and untapped. I learned a subject, which at first bewildered me and then fascinated me with its new abounding theories – all of which suddenly made sense to me as I had been somewhat unaware before. I was thinking but not articulating and speaking OD. Having splendid mentors helped me navigate and gain confidence. I avoided getting stuck in the doldrums and asked myself questions, such as “What is life?”, “What do I do?”, “Who am I?”, and so on, and engaged in behaviors to activate, develop, and recreate myself. My journey and discovery still goes on since life is a continuous learning process.

In 2008, eight years before my retirement, I commenced a new chapter of teaching international development at various universities in Australia, China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, and the United Kingdom. I found out that I needed to assess myself on how I could improve as a professor. (I am currently a professor in practice at the School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University, the United Kingdom, and an honorary associate professor at Australian National University, College of Law.) I also ventured into teaching English to students whose English was essentially a second or foreign language at universities in China and Korea. I thought this was an area where I could challenge myself to teach these students along with other students whose primary language was English. I taught international financial institutions and development at postgraduate level at the Chung Cheng University (CCU) in Chiayi. I taught in English at CCU, but most of the courses offered there were in Mandarin, so the students would not be necessarily familiar with English as a teaching language. I also taught at the Instituto de Empresa University (IEU) in Madrid. The CCU students had English as their second language, while most of the IEU students had English as their first language.

OD is a rich subject offering insights to self-improvement and spreading rapidly in its multidisciplinary nature. Still, I had to go through the ropes to find out where I wanted to start with myself as an OD practitioner. I considered several theories of organization through three specific lenses: schools of thought (Charles Handy, Understanding Organizations); theories of organization (classical, neoclassical, and modern organization held by Frederick Taylor, Chris Argyris, Rensis Likert, and Robert Whyte); and organizations as images (Gareth Morgan, Images of Organizations). I was struck by Morgan’s unique approach of viewing the images of organizations, as this provided a new window in attributing an image of organization to help make the transition needed to see present-day challenges. I realized OD had made great strides over the decades since its inception in the 1930s in the United States (e.g., Kurt Lewin was traditionally viewed as the founding father of OD and its laboratory education). Alongside, there were similar developments across the Atlantic in the United Kingdom (e.g., socio-technical system thinking by Lewin’s peer, Eric Trist, the founding father of the British Tavistock Institute for Social Research).

Historically, the United States was the powerhouse for OD research largely due to Lewins’s contributions with his change model of unfreezing, moving, and refreezing. This provided a general framework for understanding organizational change (Lewin, 1951). There were also ripples of OD surfacing in the United Kingdom and in Scandinavian countries, such as Sweden’s Volvo experience with its emphasis on the quality of work life and the reflection of local circumstances and norms. This first stage of OD was the age of socio-technical studies (from the 1930s), which flowed into the second stage from 1940s to 1980s – practitioner OD stage of development – where there was a change from group norms and values to organizational culture norms. The third stage of OD, from late 1980s to 2000s, is the “renaissance of OD” (Burnes & Cooke, 2012), which resulted in a soul-searching debate and dispute about the nature and future of OD and its Lewinian heritage. OD spreads its wings and OD practices were increasingly incorporated into Human Resource Management (HRM), Human Resource Development (HRD), and the establishment of long-standing OD bodies, such as OD Network, the OD Institute, and the International Organization Development Association. The most prominent approach to OD during this period was Appreciative Inquiry (AI) by social constructionists/postmodernists D. Cooperrider and S. Srivastva. In 2009, the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science had a special edition on OD and showed that OD-type activities were increasing worldwide, especially in economies such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China.

The fourth and present stage of OD is at a crossroads in its evolution (Worley & Feyerherm, 2003). From their interview of 21 thought leaders and pioneers, they gathered that “OD practitioners in the future will need to be globally competent, understand a broad range of issues in the workforce and the world, and develop new models of change and organization” (p. 114, emphasis added). In my view, this comment on OD is nothing new or startling – OD must evolve to assure relevancy and resilience. While it was an “aha! moment” for AI to change the landscape in 1987, so, too, OD is (and will be) ready for new developments, such as positive organizational scholarship (POS) and positive organization development (POD) by Kim Cameron, J. Dutton, and R. Quinn; quantum OD (Charlotte Shelton); flow and creativity (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi); and other developments as they occur (Yuval Harari on algorithms and “know yourself”). The current Covid-19 pandemic has also witnessed revisits of OD thinking, which I will explain in my last chapter.

Given all these trends and directions, I found out that I needed to self-assess, take stock, and ask myself a series of questions I probably should have asked ages ago but never got around to seriously consider. And if I had asked these questions early in life, I would have dismissed them as ephemeral and unanswerable. I seemed to be chugging along on a train of thought that did not ask deeper core questions. Probably my retirement was a catalyst that transformed my life from a work routine of over three decades. I now had free time to dwell on and focus on myself in relation to the world, especially with my cancer – serving as a wake-up call – in remission, after my surgery a few months earlier. These junctures collectively provided the opportunity for a reality check to ask myself questions I should have asked and answered long ago.

Once the PhD degree got underway, the opportunity arose to take a couple of deep breaths and reflect on questions of life in order to situate myself in the world I live in. By reflecting on these basic questions of life, I did not wish to go down the road of definitions, including “morality” and “destiny,” such as “Why am I here?” and “Where am I going?” Ravi Zacharias, the author of more than 30 books on Christianity, including the award-winning book titled Can Man Live Without God?, represented this road to self-improvement. Rather, through the world of OD, I chose to examine my interconnection with the everyday world I live in as a way to find wisdom and enlightenment.

Options in mapping out my journey

I had several options in mind when mapping out my journey. First, I could have done a brutal self-analysis of a purely reflective nature and solicited views from others through surveys and interviews about myself. Second, I could have focused on any aspect of OD, such as appreciative living, which might provide me with insights on how often I wear rose-colored glasses and think that everything in life is optimistic to avoid negativity bias. Just how often should I pull back the curtain in front of me to see a more complete view of life (negative and positive) and then train myself to see the positive side of things through an appreciative mindset¹? A thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the author
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: why the journey, the itinerary, and the fellow travelers?
• 2 Essential items packed for the journey: OD theories and concepts with accompanying studies and literature
• 3 All aboard: my journey travelers who helped me in navigating my route
• 4 The journey: what I learned from my initial fellow travelers and myself in relation to the values of integrity, professionalism, and spirituality
• 5 The journey continues: what I learned from my additional fellow travelers and myself on my top three discoveries and on my final model
• 6 Completing the journey: the final OD model, the lessons learned, the MICAI intersection model, summaries of reflective practices, and does the journey really end?
• 7 Postscript from my journey: Covid-19, the new normal, and ways of rediscovering oneself
• Appendix 1: selected journal entries as samples showing self-reflection
• Appendix 2: selections from the data collection table reporting interviews with the respondents
• Glossary
• Index