Blame Game

Week 5 – Course Progress Feedback – Dr. Rux

Once again, you continue to impress me with your overall due diligence, creativity, and enthusiasm!   Keep them coming!  As your humble servant reflects on your posts this week, he is pleased with your skills in applying classic OD concepts from our course textbooks to course OD case studies.   You clearly have done your homework; therefore, what follows in no way detracts from your hard work.  However, it is timely to share with you a street-smart insight from an associate, friend of mine.  This friend earned his Ph.D. in Marketing from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and set up his own marketing R&D practice.  It was a great success, and he sold it several years ago to retire.  Before he retired, however, we teamed to do the marketing plan for a $9-million municipal telephone company startup here in Wisconsin!   Our fee for the plan was $30,000, which we split in half.  After we finished the plan he told me something that I shall never forget; I want to share it with you for it speaks to the subject matter of our course, change management.  It is this.  “Craft the plan but never implement it.  It is during implementation, project management,  that ‘all hell breaks loose.’”  You the planner can protect yourself by saying, “Well, clearly, the project manager did not fully grasp and implement the plan as required.”  This means the project manager, not the planner, takes the blame for OD project misfires.  This is why it is wise to budget for outside facilitators to implement OD plans, not you, the planner.  Some of you mention hiring such persons to drive your OD projects; I want to alert you to the “political” value of this move.  It buffers you, the planner, from OD change, project implementation failures.   Do not feel you must “lead the OD charge.”  Plan it; let somebody else take the “doing.” - Happy Easter!   Dr. Rux