For many years, organization development (OD) interventions focused mainly on incremental, localized adjustments, tweaks to the functioning of the organization.

The first-shift guys tell you they work together as a team. They are the best shift in every way. And they always clean up and set up for second shift.

What if a company is characteristically cautious and slow to make a decision, and does not reward innovative risk-taking, while the market is moving fast and increasingly rewarding agility? What if the choice is to change or die?

What’s the biggest daily problem in organizations? Communication. What could have prevented many of the recordable incidents that occurred last year at your facility? Better communication. Communication makes the world go ’round.

The answer to the question in the title is “yes.”
When we perceive an event as a challenge or potential threat, a physical and psychological response is triggered by the autonomic nervous system. Whether the stressor is external (an oncoming car swerves into our lane) or internal (an anxiety-arousing thought), its onset abrupt (a sudden emergency) or gradual (a long-term unresolved problem), this automatic reaction is essentially the same.

Going back at least as far as the early 1980s, to the study done by Tom Peters and Bob Waterman in the now classic In Search of Excellence, and continuing today in the work of many management gurus, a small subset of companies have been identified as “best practice” organizations.

Placing the right people on your bus

Jim is a safety professional with 12 years of experience. He’s technically very competent, probably the best in the whole corporation. Jim tends to be low-key, private and introverted, a bit hard to “read.” He doesn’t initiate a lot of contact with the folks in the plant unless he is doing a safety audit, and spends a lot of time in his office alone.

The energizing effect of Appreciative Inquiry

Psychology is going positive — something to consider in your efforts to motivate workers to think and act safely. You see, for much of its history, psychology has focused much attention on the negative. Hmmm… might we say the same about safety programs? But I digress.