I was presented recently with a typical challenge related to change management: how would you structure a large-scale OD project, a multi-year innovation journey? It was part of a case-study exercise in a consultant selection process (I changed the parameters and some other aspects for confidentiality reasons). You can be an internal OD/HR leader or an external consultant; you may face the same challenge: how to put such a multi-layered, dynamic process into one high-level overview slide?

The Case

I was provided with some basic information and given parameters: the company is a multinational consumer goods producer with 150k employees in 60+ countries. The business stopped growing in the last two years, and competitors surpassed the company in many aspects. Driving the horses running faster didn't help, the company seemed to lost its ability to lead the market. The future didn't look any better: there were no new exciting products in the development pipeline. Efforts to cut costs didn't help much. The CEO realized, the company must become more agile and innovative, and asked the HR department to formulate a change management plan. In the plan, there should be a change team, and there should be some measures to enable and empower 150 Senior Managers and 8000 KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders, here called DOers), people who have the most potential to create innovations and drive change (mid, junior and non-managers).

The task is to create one slide that summarizes the essential aspects of the whole project. Here is my suggested visual representation of the key aspects of the OD process:

Large-scale change intervention overview
I just displayed one cycle in the slide for the sake of sanity, and for emphasizing the need for potential readjustments after one year. Please feel free to use this picture in your work, and I welcome any feedback and input!

Tool for selecting the KOLs: https://orgmapper.com/influence/

Tools for organizational diagnostics, and measuring progress: Organization Effectiveness Survey: OD-Map®

Would you like to learn more about Organization Development and Change? I recommend the following excellent material: Organization Development Lecture

Written by: Gabor Nagy