At the end of the 70s and beginning of the 80s, discussions began in science and partially in practice that led to the approaches we now summarize under organizational development and personnel development.
Its institutional expression was found in the research program “Humanization of Working Life.” With the upheaval during the time of the social-liberal government under Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, the perspective on working life changed. It was no longer about employment and payment, which was a matter for the collective bargaining partners, but about quality of life as part of working life.
A large part of this funding program dealt with ergonomics, i.e., studies on physical work burdens and the development of tools for relief. However, social-psychological research was already concerned with the experience of the working world, with issues of work design involving the affected parties. While initially, the industrial worker was discovered as an interesting research object, who could be offered a better life through group work, the approach increasingly developed to work directly with people. The perspective shifted from the object viewed from above, for whom something was done, to the subject with whom one worked intersubjectively on the next developmental stage of the working world.
This already contained the principle of equality that is still valid today. It accentuated the emancipatory side of the approach. It put the appropriation of design power in the foreground. Applied social research became action research. Scientists entered the inner circle and made their special competence available. They became part of the team, which, for example, worked on the new structure of group work in engine production. A team primarily composed of those working there, whose know-how from everyday work was equal to that of the scientists.
So much for the theory. They were experiments that were started. They received attention. At the time, rather authoritarian management philosophies would have needed very enlightened, forward-thinking managers to assert themselves.
Nevertheless, workshops as a form of design and negotiation were in the world, and moderation as process-oriented conversation management became important. It was necessary to prepare people to work in this way and for the future of work. Lifelong learning was discovered, and key competencies became important. Communicating, listening openly, analyzing, forming opinions, making decisions, participating confidently in the process, and dealing resiliently, as we would say today, with other opinions and circumstances became important. This was initially conveyed in some specialized institutions, later also in the seminar catalogs of personnel departments.
In summary, one can say that in the 80s, organizational development and personnel development constituted themselves as components of management theory and increasingly also as management practice. Entrepreneurially speaking, a new business field emerged.
From the mid-80s, we discovered humanistic psychology. Themes-centered interaction TZI, transactional analysis TA, group dynamics, neuro-linguistic programming NLP – these approaches opened perspectives on human action in and with organizations. Management and organizational sciences worked with implicit human models. However, these were often simple and had a functional character in the sense of “Action A leads to Reaction B.” In reality, humans were treated as a kind of black box in the system.
With the models of humanistic psychology, we discovered more complex and coherent explanatory patterns for human behavior. More importantly, what fascinated us was the goal of these approaches. People should be enabled to understand themselves. It was not about a therapist-client relationship with an implicit and explicit hierarchy.
We had the missing piece of the puzzle in hand. We knew how structures could be designed, we could make economic calculations, we had an ethical attitude, but we did not yet understand people. And no less important: we did not sufficiently understand our own role.
There was something to learn, and it was necessary to deal systematically and permanently with one’s own person, with one’s own personality.
We did that too.
JK on the beginnings
