The Organization Development Institute International, Latinamerica
Presidente: Eric Gaynor Butterfield
www.theodinstitute.org

THE FUTURE OF OD IN RUSSIA

Christa L. Waick, Ph.D.

Michigan Technological University

Houghton, MI USA

ABSTRACT

During perestroika, Russian OD practitioners used organizational diagnosis, training and management games to improve organizational effectiveness. Their philosophy and methods were similar to those used in the West, but adapted for local conditions. Now that organizations must make a transition to a market economy, they prefer “hard” training in marketing and finance to OD interventions. This preference, plus the economic decline of educational institutions, is rapidly depleting the ranks of Russian OD practitioners.

With the Russian economy in ruins, old enterprises struggle to survive by privatizing, forming joint-ventures, and downsizing. New enterprises emerge from the old shadow economy or are created by entrepreneurs seeking opportunities in the economic rubble. Old attitudes are breaking down, and people express a desire for new styles of leadership. It would seem like a fruitful market for specialists in organization development. Yet the small circle of Russian OD practitioners is fragmenting and disappearing from the scene. It is unclear what the fate of indigenous OD will be in Russia.

WHAT IS RUSSIAN OD?

The Soviet Union spawned a loosely-knit group of sociologists, psychologists, economists and designers who took three paths to organizational effectiveness. One path was bu’ games, a second was training, and a third was large-scale organizational diagnosis. Today, these practitioners are starting to call themselves organizational development and management consultants, but in the past, they identified themselves by the specific path they took.

Recently, information about their activities has begun to appear in English: Prigozhin (1992), Walck (1993) and Zhezhko (1992) discuss and describe games; Ekaterinoslavski i (1992) and Tarasov (1992) discuss and describe training; and Rapaport (1992) discusses diagnosis. The following discussion of Russian OD is based on discussions with Russian practitioners in Moscow and St. Petersburg during 1990-1993, as well as sources reterenced here and in Walck (1993).

The three paths to organizational effectiveness all bear a family resemblance to OD as practiced in the West. The business games pioneered by G.P. Shchedrovitskii in Moscow in the 1970s drew on action-research models and the theory and practice of the Tavistock school. The “open’ games which were conducted in the l9&)s were designed to resolve weakly-structured problems and help participants shift from old dysfunctional habitual behaviors to new visions and more effective practices (Zhelezko, 1990; Zhezhko, 1987). One of the popular forms of training, “social-psychological training (SPT)” (Petrovskaia, 1982) has the goal of raising psychological competence in group communication. It borrows from laboratory training, action research, and in particular, the client-centered therapy of Carl Rogers, who was very popular in the USSR. SPT often includes “video-training”, in which managers undergo the difficult process of confronting their video image. Finally, large-scale diagnosis uses a medical model, searching for areas that “hurt” and designing interventions.

Like Western OD practitioners, Russian OD practitioners often start with diagnosis at the organizational level, and then intervene at the group or individual level with a variety of techniques. A typical intervention would begin with diagnostic interviews, a large-scale questionnaire, framing the problem with the client, and negotiations to contract for the intervention, followed by a game or training exercises conducted by a team of practitioners, and concluded with post-intervention analysis.

Even though there are many similarities between Russian OD and Western OD, the Russian context is so different that it would be difficult for a Western practitioner to be effective in Russia. Our ability to intervene successfully depends on our ability to understand the system in which we are intervening, and to read the cultural meaning of behavior. Russian OD is adapted to local conditions and mentalities. The Soviet system was an administrative command system characterized by hierarchy, a machine model of organizations, a dependence on authority, and a Stalinist legacy of fear of incorrect decisions, all of which often produced low levels of individual responsibility and initiative. While many Western organizations retain features of a machine model and control system, the Soviet system was qualitatively different. Individuals were always subordinated to the needs of the system. Managers, indeed all individuals, were considered small cogs in the administrative machinery. This system produced “administrators”, not “managers”, fearful of thinking or acting on their own, who pushed all decision-making up the chain of command, rather than take responsibility for these decisions themselves. As a result, executives were burdened with micro-managing large systems.

Although some of the reforms initiated by Gorbachev during perestroika aimed at large-scale system change, Russian OD efforts in the 1980s emphasized changing the hearts and minds of individual administrators. Borrowing freely from the humanistic psychology of Maslow and Rogers, Russian OD practitioners attempted to create free, fully-actualized individuals who would take responsibility for their actions. They used individual and group therapies in the form of training and games to heighten administrators’ awareness of the present moment, the “here and now” of their actions, and to confront them with the need to choose their actions and be responsible for this choice.

OD practitioners also tried to correct another deficiency of the command system: the inability of administrators to communicate well with others and be sensitive to their needs. Administrators were placed in small groups to experiment with roles and learn to act cooperatively and interdependently. The OD practitioner played a critical role here, modelling communication skills, responsibility, and authenticity of self.

Russian OD practitioners learned their craft by doing, apprenticing to experienced practitioners conducting games and training. As in other areas of Russian life, loosely-knit circles developed. While some practitioners were based at universities and institutes, others practiced OD part-time, as an adjunct to widely-varying occupations. When a practitioner got a contract for a game or training session, he or she would assemble a temporary team from their circle, based upon the needs of that contract and their desire to give apprentices experience.

THE CURRENT STATE OF PRACTICE

When I visited Moscow in 1990 to attend an open game at the Moscow Meat Plant (Waick, 1993), many games and training activities were underway. It was a lucrative profession. Large enterprises paid large sums for interventions that involved significant numbers of managers. Enterprises were groping in the dark, unsure how to create change and equally unsure where change would take them.

Resistance to change was high. At the opening session of the game for the Moscow Meat Plant, several managers loudly questioned the competence of the OD team leader, Vladimir Zinenko, a practitioner trained as an economist and affiliated with the Institute of Sociology’s Laboratory for Management Innovation: “You are not an expert, you do not know our business!” they shouted. When an economist explained features of a market economy during evening sessions, managers expressed fear of market conditions, and had difficulty linking these features--private banks making loans, private individuals buying shares in companies, managers laying off workers when orders were down--with the content of the game they were playing. Attendance of managers at the game declined rapidly.

Today, few games are played. As I conducted ethnographic research on Russian businesses in 1992-3, I discovered that management training and development efforts have shifted from “soft” training to “hard” training, from OD interventions to training in marketing, finance, accounting, and strategic planning. This is what we need now, I was told. We need to know how to function in a market economy. Moscow and St. Petersburg are hotbeds of market-oriented training, and schools of management and business have sprung up everywhere to meet this demand. These schools are sometimes staffed by Russians, sometimes by Westerners funded by Western governments; some are state-supported while others are private, for-profit.

The OD practitioners that I met in 1990 have scattered. The Laboratory for Management Innovation at the Institute of Sociology has closed. Its former head is now developing American-Russian exchanges for children. Two of its practitioners have emigrated, to the U.S. and Israel; another is getting a Ph.D. in political science in America. Several have become successful entrepreneurs, and one is already a Russian millionaire. Vladimir Zinenko, the leader of the games for the Moscow Meat Plant, now runs his own medical products company. “The time for games is over,” he told me, “Now, anyone who can manage a company does so. What can managers learn from [ practitioners]? Nothing. If they knew anything, they would be making money.” Games apparently continue, but their relevance is questioned: a business school in the Samara on the Volga invited an American practitioner to observe their games in 1992, but the Russian managers all quit and went home (private communication from Donald Cole).

Some OD practitioners have become management consultants. A few remain attached to institutions with money and clout, like the Russian Academy of the National Economy or the Plekhanov Institute, but as Communist Party and state-funded academic institutions decline for lack of funds, many practitioners have joined the new class of impoverished intelligentsia. Moreover, those who do remain are so competitive that they are often afraid to cooperate. It is hard to get managers to see the need for games or training now, they say, and anyway, there is no money. Yet there is money for trips abroad, for “hard” training in the tools of market economies.

In 1992 I was invited to attend a four-day management workshop conducted by the faculty of a Russian management school for 30 managers of a large Moscow industrial enterprise. The goal of the workshop was to develop a mission and strategic plan. This enterprise had gone through a cycle of games in 1990. I arrived in the middle of the workshop, after strategic planning had been introduced, and tried to give a short lecture on organization culture and conduct an evening decision-making exercise. It failed miserably. I aske the group to write down, an important decision they would need to make ir the near future, with the intent 01 exploring how their organization values affected their decision-making. However, my question created great consternation: must it be a decision we make by ourselves, they asked, or can it be one we make in the group? We don’t really make decisions, this exercise doesn’t apply to us, they said. The group grew increasingly loud and hostile, and whenever someone would try to explore an idea, another would quickly cut him or her off. With a strong sense of deja-vu I felt transported back to the 1990 game I had attended. Although I was informed by the management faculty that this was an unusually strong enterprise, little seemed to have changed in managerial attitudes or behaviors from what I had observed in 1990.

After my exercise, the management faculty met to conduct a post-mortem. The faculty included several adjunct psychologists, who tried to provide insight into the managers’ behaviors and determine how to move the managers forward the next day. When I asked to attend one of the morning training sessions, I was told by a psychologist that my presence would disturb the managers, who would be afraid to do their work. I wondered how my presence would impede their ability to learn marketing or finance. From what I observed, it seemed that the management faculty, while introducing some “hard” economic concepts, was really engaged in trying to manage an unplanned OD intervention.

A FUTURE FOR OD IN RUSSIA?

There is certainly a strong need for OD in Russia today, and this need will grow. Large enterprises continue to struggle with restructuring. Managers everywhere talk about the need for new attitudes and new mentalities. The old command structure remains surprisingly intact in large enterprises, and “cowboy capitalists” often rule new enterprises with strong fists.

Despite the clear need, Russian OD will have to struggle to survive. Russian practitioners hold on to the slippery slope of dying academic institutions and a weakly developed management consulting industry. Existing OD knowledge is being dissipated, and there is little money available for developing new knowledge. Compared to the pressing need to understand and develop markets and make money, managers often perceive OD as frivolous, nice but not necessary. Until economic and political conditions stabilize, it will be hard to convince executives to invest time and money in OD interventions. So much change is being forced on enterprises, that it is hard to think in terms of inviting change.

What can non-Russian OD practitioners do? Give Russian OD practitioners our understanding, our patience, and our moral and if possible financial support. Share knowledge, ideas, teaching and consulting opportunities. Learn from them and their experience. Build bridges, and keep the spirit of OD alive.

REFERENCES

Ekaterinoslavskii, 1.1. (1992). Diagnosis, destruction and creation: A new conception of training managers for the market economy. In S.M. Puffer (Ed.), The Russian management revolution: Preparing managers for the market economy, Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe.

Petrovskaia, L.A. (1982.) Teoreticheskie i metodicheskie problemy sotsial ‘no-psikhologicheskogo treninga (Theoretical and methodological problems of social psychological training). Moskva: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo Universiteta (Moscow: Moscow University Press.

Prigozhin, A.I. (1992.) Game methods of collective decision-making in management consulting. In S.M. Puffer (Ed.), The Russian management revolution: Preparing managers for the market economy, Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe.

Rapaport, V. S. (1992.) Managerial diagnosis: Practical experience and recommendations. In S.M. Puffer (Ed), The Russian management revolution: Preparing managers for the market economy, Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe.

Tarasov, V.K. (1992). Personnel-technology: The selection and training of managers. In S.M. Puffer (Ed.), The Russian management revolution: Preparing managers for the market economy, Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe.

Waick, C.L. (1993.) Organization Development in the USSR: An Overview and a Case Example. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 8(2), 10-17.

Zhelezko, S.N. (Ed.). (1990.) Upraviencheskie novovvedeniia i igropraktika (Managerial Innovations And Gaming). Moskva: Institut Sotsiologii (Moscow: Institute of Sociology).

Zhezhko, I.V. (1992). Open games as a method of personal transformation and motivation. In S.M. Puffer, (Ed.), The Russian management revolution: Preparing managers for the market economy, Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe.

Zhezhko, I.V. (Ed.). (1987). Sotsial’noe proektirovanie v sfere kul’tury: Igrovye metody (Social planning in the cultureal sphere: Game methods). Moskva: Nauchno-issledovatel’ skii institute kul’tury (Moscow: Scientific Research Institute Of Culture).