An intervention.
Interventions are principal learning processes in the “action” stage of organization development (OD)*.
An intervention is what people outside organization development [the majority of professionals are distinctly NOT part of, or aware of, organization development] might call a project, change, or transformation. The reason a professional might call for an organization intervention, or project, can easily be identified as organization sabotage.
Organization sabotage? Why call it sabotage? Well, too many professionals believe all you need to do to run a team, manage a group, or lead an organization is to line people up yell, “ready, steady, go” and they hum along without guidance, motivation, communication, or care.
Unfortunately, many of the same professionals also believe you can happily plug people in and they automatically fall in line and only in a moment of extreme agitation might there be a need to prune dead weight or those who don’t seem to get where the line is going.
I use the word sabotage because too many professionals believe the only motivation people need is their pay. Or that people should feel lucky to just have a job. When these professional see people are not always motivated, they feel their leadership and their management are sabotaged.
What constitutes sabotage?
- Low level of collaboration / difficulty meeting objectives
- Limited buy-in and support
- Lack of employee motivation
- Increasing resistance to transformation and change
- Lack of alignment across key stakeholders and business leaders
- Potential conflicts due to lingering non-addressed issues and differences
- Operational obstacles and delays
- Lack of alignment of business and critical support functions
- Difficulties and misunderstandings in communication due to unclear objectives, varying expectations and competing business priorities
- Eroding trust and loss of good people
- Loss of productivity
- Loss of leadership credibility
- Lack of accountability or empowerment with the teams
- Early results not sustained
- Difficulties on implementing the transformation initiatives
To combat sabotage, enter: the intervention.
And crucial for any intervention: manage expectations.
Managing expectations means when you diagnose, design, and implement any project, there is never a linear path towards project delivery. Any expectation for linear progress is unreasonable. There is no linear projection because people stumble, people get confused, and people need constant communication to move towards a shared goal.
Linear results are as unreasonable in an intervention to combat sabotage as it is for people expect linear results in a dieting, an effort to stop smoking, an effort to communicate to their partner better, or for results at a gym. Some days it is progress, some days it is a struggle. Over the long term and with commitment results are achieved.
A transition from sabotage to development, in reality needs to expect natural dips and changes of direction – it simply can’t expect a straight-line trajectory. As change surrounds you, the team, or the organization, managing new roles, requirements, and skills brings uncertainty. Like sabotage, an intervention is less a linear direction and more like a flight of the butterfly.
Though a butterfly’s flight is a bit raged, the butterfly does arrive. 
And to hang another yoke around our butterfly’s neck it helps to manage expectations to think of interventions more like the butterfly effect in that: small differences in the initial condition, for example: lack of motivation, may produce large variations in the long term behavior.
The phrase refers to the idea that a butterfly’s wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that may ultimately alter the path of a tornado or delay, accelerate or even prevent the occurrence of a tornado in a certain location.
The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large-scale alterations of events (compare: domino effect). Had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory of the system might have been vastly different. While the butterfly does not “cause” the tornado in the sense of providing the energy for the tornado, it does “cause” it in the sense that the flap of its wings is an essential part of the initial conditions resulting in a tornado, and without that flap that particular tornado would not have existed.
Thinking through change with the end-state in mind helps manage expectation, manage resources, and, importantly, manage motivation. The butterfly effect has a both a positive and negative impact, but diagnosing, designing, and continually monitoring your organization’s health throughout all stages of growth and operations, helps limit sabotage and the need for radical interventions – this is a commitment to your organization’s health and that is sustainability.
I’ve never been comfortable with organization development’s use of the term intervention. It sounds drastic, it sounds reactive, and it sounds like its far too late in an organization’s health.
Where do we, in society, use the term intervention most? In drug or alcohol abuse and as a drastic last resort measure. We shouldn’t let our organizations get to a place where drastic measures are needed, as organization sabotage affects profit, revenue, customers, and stakeholders.
Change is constant, so is managing change. As the change curve shows, there are symptoms to treat and manage change along the entire change life cycle.
Sadly, many organizations do wait for drastic measures before addressing human capital risk, but I prefer to think there are leaders and managers, always monitoring and managing talent as their firm’s greatest competitive advantage.
No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas. Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.
*Richard Arvid Johnson (1976). Management, systems, and society: an introduction. Pacific Palisades, Calif.: Goodyear Pub. Co.. pp. 224–226.
Another good read is: Reducing Employee Sabotage, this article from Human Resource Executive Online outlines physical or plant and equipment sabotage. But offers insight into all forms including those above.
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