Transforming our Organizations

A peacebuilder by training, as I started my Organizational Development journey I was struck over and over again by the parallels of peacebuilding work and organizational development practices. Readiness assessments, intervening at various levels, polarities/dilemmas, effective feedback loops and listening - the list goes on! And the similarities shouldn’t be surprising - both fields seek to intervene in how humans interact, structure themselves, and engage in culture and identity whether to make them more effective in a workplace setting (organizational development) or to address conflict (peacebuilding). And I’m interested in how these fields intersect and can learn from each other.

Let’s take one example today. The organizational development field draws on several diagnostic models to map an organization - a tool for identifying challenges or entry points for interventions, for example. We can think of McKinsey’s 7-S Framework, Weisbord’s Six Box Model, or Kurt Lewin’s Force Field Analysis. These models can be useful tools, but they primarily come out of a business framework - that the ultimate goal is to get better at the work so as to drive profits.

While these models can be made relevant to nonprofits in order to improve their organizational effectiveness, I also think we can draw on the field of conflict transformation to level up our diagnostic models. Nonprofits intend to create some kind of transformation - whether that is systems change or improvement in an individual’s life. We also need to reflect that same transformative power internally to our organizations if we are going to sustainably do the hard, deep, powerful work of our missions. At both levels - internal and external - conflict is at play and how we engage with it either impedes growth and change or is a catalyst for it.

John Paul Lederach, a pioneer in the field, defines conflict transformation as such:

Conflict transformation is to envision and respond to the ebb and flow of social conflict as life-giving opportunities for creating constructive change processes that reduce violence, increase justice in direct interaction and social structures and respond to real-life problems in human relationships.

Lederach uses this picture (or diagnostic model, if you will) to map a conflict and a related change process:

What if we mapped our organizations to this model of conflict transformation? Would we get an even more comprehensive picture? I use this tool in organizations to help me think expansively and creatively about what’s going on internally. It helps me add complexity in order to get clarity (more on that in a future post!). This model reminds me that the work of organizational development isn’t stagnant or linear. There is an ebb and flow, and we may have to pace our interventions accordingly. I may zoom in on one piece of this model, using other OD models named above to design a change intervention at a specific point, but I’m always trying my best to hold onto the whole picture. Having conflict transformation in mind as my North Star reminds me to focus, ultimately, on justice in the way our organizations run programs, but also in the way they structure themselves, build culture, and manage change processes.

Resources

The Little Book of Conflict Transformation by John Paul Lederach is a great introductory primer on Conflict Transformation.