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Practitioner Forum for Division 14, Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology
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Organizational Change and the Business of Government
Chair: Bruce Brown
John Pickering and Gerald Brokaw – The High Performance Organization (HPO) Model: Introduction, Conceptual Outline and History
Nikki Tinsley, Gerald Brokaw and Emmalou Norland - Impact of HPO at the Office of the Inspector General, EPA: A Retrospective Case Study
Keith Ray and Joan Goppelt – HPO Training and Software Systems Improvement at Navair Systems Engineering, China Lake
Philip Harnden and Bruce Brown – Measurement and Evaluation of the Process: “How Would We Know That We Are HPO?”
Discussant: David Hatch
Practitioner Forum for Division 14, Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology
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Organizational Change and the Business of Government
Abstract
The basic principles of the HPO Change Model are outlined by one of the model’s founders. Retrospective case studies are also presented for HPO-based change programs at the Inspector General’s Office of the EPA, and NAVAIR’s China Lake facility. Methods for evaluating the impact of HPO training are discussed.
Press Paragraph
The Inspector General of the EPA, Nikki Tinsley, will deliver a presentation at the SIOP Spring Conference in Orlando. She will report the impact of HPO training at the EPA over the past several years. The High Performance Organization (HPO) Change Model has had a major impact in a number of government agencies and related industrial settings. Also featured is John Pickering, one of the co-founders of the HPO Diagnostic/Change Model, who will explain the model and its history. Other participants will discuss the implementation of HPO within the NAVAIR organization and discuss methods of evaluating the impact of HPO training.
General Statement:
Organizational Change and the Business of Government
This practitioner forum presents the concepts, applications, brief history, and evaluation of an approach to organizational change that is having a major impact on a number of government agencies—HPO training. HPO is the acronym for the High-Performance Organizations Diagnostic/Change Model. It grew directly out of the work of the Federal Executive Institute in Charlottesville, Virginia, a division of the Office of Personnel Management that has the responsibility for training the senior level executives in government agencies. The impetus for the development of the model began with the question of why executive development programs (alone) don’t work. The following is Pickering and Matson’s account:
“The scenario usually goes something like this: 1) after the program, participants – charged up by their experience and with a new readiness to risk change – reenter powerful organizational environments and cultures that are exactly the same as when they left a few weeks earlier; 2) because no one else from the organization had the same experience with them, they get little reinforcement of their developmental experience and soon have whatever notions of individual and organizational change they picked up in the programs “knocked out” of their heads by the unrelenting press of existing issues and problems (both personal and organizational); and 3) as a result, they often report later that they are more frustrated with their inability to impact their organizations than before they attended the programs. Thus returning “change ready” people to “unready” organizations is like planting improved seeds in infertile soil; the potential is there, but the likelihood of positive results is low.” (Pickering and Matson, 1992, p. 2)
In contrast to this “train the leaders” approach, HPO focuses on inculcating fundamental principles of effective organizational design throughout the organization, teaching HPO values and processes, and building a broad based consensus and “buy in.” HPO is not a cookbook process, but rather a set of lenses through which participants view their own organizations and decide for themselves what processes and changes may be necessary to improve organizational performance. The assumption is that once they come to understand the fundamental principles of organizational design and change, their own internal knowledge and long term commitment to the organization will enable them to create a change program that will have positive impact and staying power. This approach to organizational change is both broad based and also highly cost effective, making it well suited to the needs and the budgets of government organizations.
The first presentation is a summary of the major concepts and a brief history of the HPO movement by John Pickering and Gerry Brokaw, two of the founding fathers of the model. The second is an account by Nikki Tinsley, the Inspector General of the EPA, and Emmalou Norland, an internal consultant for EPA’s change program, of the impact of HPO on the EPA Inspector General’s Office over the past four years. Third, Keith Ray and Joan Goppelt, two of the prime movers of HPO transformation within NAVAIR’s China Lake facility, will report on that organization’s change experience to date.
Finally, Phil Harnden and Bruce Brown will present a number of quantitative and qualitative analyses of the process and deal with the question of how one measures the impact of HPO, that is, how one can determine whether the HPO change effort in a given organization is achieving its purpose. They will also present a plan for a well-designed systematic study over the next year that will more fully and carefully evaluate the impact of HPO.
References
Pickering, J. W. and Matson, R. E. (1992). Why executive development programs (alone) don’t work. Training and Development Journal, May.
Paper 1
The High Performance Organization (HPO) Model:
Introduction, Conceptual Outline and History
The High-Performance Organizations (HPO) Diagnostic/Change Model was developed in the early 1990s at the Federal Executive Institute (U.S. Office of Personnel Management) and the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service (University of Virginia), both located in Charlottesville, Virginia. A team of organizational development consultants at these two centers, led by John Pickering, Robert Matson, Gerry Brokaw, and Phil Harnden, joined together to synthesize a diagnostic/change model out of the management literature and the applied practice in successful organizations, Their intent was not so much to create something new, as to "cast a net" over what was known about improving organizational performance (Likert, 1967; Weisbord, 1976; Peters and Waterman, 1983; etc.) and combine it into a coherent, internally consistent picture. They created a seminar-based training system to capture this wealth of insights and principles and to disseminate it in a practical way.
The seminar and change model are based on several assumptions: (1) seminar participants are "experts" on their own organizations (many having worked there for 10 to 30 years), but (2) they may not have been exposed to an extensive organizational development theory background and so need a framework (a diagnostic/change model and analytical approach) to structure and amplify their knowledge, and (3) they want to be part of a positive change process continually driving their organizations toward becoming higher performing organizations (defined by the model as simultaneously delivering customer-defined product and service quality and excellent execution quality, outstanding customer value, and sound financial performance dependably overtime —“Pick 3+”). The intention is to provide the model as a roadmap to these practitioners so that they, working in their intact work and management teams, can guide the change process within their own organizations.
The seminar does not attempt to tell an organization what’s wrong with it or to deliver a cookbook of what to do to improve it. Rather, the seminar introduces a series of “lenses” through which participants can view their own organizations and decide for themselves what changes may be necessary to improve its performance. The seminar begins by asking the question “how did we get like this as an organization?” so that it can decide what to keep from its inherited past and what needs to be changed. Depending on when the organization was formed, it may find that its support systems and work processes date from an earlier era; and while they may have been sufficient in that earlier period, they will not capable of taking the organization into the future. This module focuses on the need for a fundamental mental mind-set or paradigm shift by everyone in the organization -- moving everyone's mental view of organizations from the older, more steeply hierarchical, autocratic, control-oriented "industrial model" to a more inclusive, less-hierarchical, team-based "networked talent model." Finally, the module concludes by examining the skills needed to function in the future and look at how organizations might have to change their support systems to achieve these new skills.
The seminar then turns its focus to asking such outcome-oriented questions as: "What is high-performance for us?" "How would we know if we were high-performance?" "According to whom are we high-performance?" and "Why do we want to be high-performing in the first place?" but also looks inside the organization to ask "What are the change levers available to help us move the organization toward higher-performance?" “Are we doing the right ‘what’ (right products and services delivered with excellent customer value)?” “How good are we at it” and “How do we treat each other and our customers?”
Because the seminar is based on the assumption that intact management and work teams will use the change model over a relatively long period of time to guide their efforts, the seminar itself does not try to cover all parts of the change model in detail. Rather, it begins with a thorough overview of the change model's six interdependent change levers and then focuses primarily on the first lever: the critical nature of organizational leadership. Experience has shown that unless an organization gets leadership right nothing else downstream in the model matters.
The change model defines organizational leadership differently than most management courses. Rather than focusing on “individual leadership,” the HPO Change Model defines leadership as consisting of three parts: (1) a belief set -- a Leadership Philosophy -- about the nature of people and their attitudes toward work, about how people are motivated, about the distribution of knowledge and creativity and how we make decisions, and about how we see the nature of work; (2) a set of Functions -- the "work of leadership" -- that must be performed at all levels of an organization if the organization is to become high-performance; and (3) a new set of "Forms" -- formal and informal ways to share power -- required to get the work of leadership done. The other five change levers -- vision, values, strategy, structure, and systems – are discussed as outgrowths of this first lever, but less thoroughly.
References
Likert, R. (1967). The human organization: Its management and value. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Peters, T. J. and Waterman, R. H. Jr. (1983). In search of excellence. New York: Harper and Row.
Pickering, J. W. and Matson, R. E. (1992). Why executive development programs (alone) don’t work. Training and Development Journal, May.
Weisbord, M. (1976). Organizational diagnosis: Six places to look for trouble with or without a theory. Group and Organizational Studies, 1(4), 430-447.
Paper 2
Impact of HPO at the Office of the Inspector General, EPA:
A Retrospective Case Study
In 1998, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of the Inspector General (EPA OIG), headed by Nikki Tinsley, began an extensive systems-oriented organizational development program based upon the High Performance Organization (HPO) model in combination with the Malcolm Baldridge Award Criteria. At the outset, all OIG staff learned to use the Baldridge criteria to assess OIG and EPA systems. In January 1999, HPO training was introduced to all staff to explain the need for and the principles of system-wide organizational change and improvement.
June of 1999, a Strategic Planning Process was used to develop the EPA-OIG’s first draft Five-Year Strategic Plan, which incorporated greater involvement of customers, stakeholders, and employees, and changed various approaches for implementation planning. This plan was consistent with a process known as “Vision to Performance,” as developed in the HPO approach. In January of 2000, the OIG Steering Committee engaged in a “Vision to Performance” workshop to give shape and structure to its Strategic Plan. The committee also sponsored two new work teams, designated as “Values to Behaviors” and “New Contract,” to address human resource issues. At the same time, all OIG staff received training in Steven Covey’s “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.”
During the “Vision to Performance” process, stakeholder information from Congress indicated additional need for program evaluation of EPA efforts in areas such as water and air programs. Dr. Emmalou Norland was brought into the EPA-OIG to assist in developing the needed skills and approaches. Among other things, Dr. Norland introduced Logic Modeling.
Logic Modeling can be understood as one particular way of implementing the "Vision to Performance" spiral that is central to the HPO model. A Logic Model is a diagrammatic representation of a program, with corresponding descriptive text, which illustrates the theory of how the entire change program is intended to work. It shows the relationships within the program components (inputs, activities, and outputs), and suggests cause-and-effect relationships. A full Logic Model would take seven to ten years to complete its course, because it takes time for individuals to change their behaviors and for the environment to change, which is what EPA-OIG ultimately aims to accomplish.
In September 2000, a new OIG organizational structure was announced. The new structure separated assignment management from human capital issues and managed the process through a matrix organizational design, placing greater emphasis on productivity and customer satisfaction. The EPA OIG completed a new performance management system linking personal accountability to organizational goals, which was implemented for all staff in 2001. The EPA-OIG formally issued its Strategic Plan — Through 2005 during this same time period, including Goals, Objectives, and Measures. The four goals are:
(1) Contribute to improved environmental quality and human health.
(2) Improve EPA’s management, accountability, and program operations.
(3) Produce timely, quality, and cost-effective products and services that meet customer needs.
(4) Enhance diversity, innovation, teamwork, and competencies within the OIG.
Each of these goals includes several targets for the current fiscal year along with measures for determining how well these goals are being met.