Table Of ContentRichard Beckhard (1918–1999)
Ronald Fry
Abstract
Richard Beckhard is recognized as one of the founders of the field of organization
development and as a pioneer in the study and teaching of a systemic approach to
planned change in complex organizations. As an educator, Beckhard was an
adjunct professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management where he teamed with
Douglas McGregor, Warren Bennis, and Edgar Schein in the early development
of MIT’s Department of Organization Studies. A practitioner at heart, he applied
behavioral sciences to translate his international consulting experiences into
many useful change management models and tools that still influence practice
of change leadership today including the Formula for Change, Open Systems
Planning, Responsibility Charting, Confrontation Meeting, and Task-Oriented
Team Development. As an institution builder, he helped found the Organization
Development Network, the International Organization Development Association,
and the Family Firm Institute.
Keywords
Confrontation meeting • Decision charting • Formula for change • Open systems
planning • Organization development • Planned change • Resistance to change •
Readiness for change • Task-oriented team building
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Influences and Motivations: From Event Manager to International Change Facilitator . . . . . . . . 2
Key Contributions and Insights: Birthing the Field of Organization Development (OD) . . . . . . 6
A Systems Model for Managing Change in Organizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Managing Resistance: A Formula for Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
R. Fry (*)
Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA
e-mail:
2 R. Fry
Factors That Affect Team Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
The Confrontation Meeting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
New Insights: Ways of Doing and Being That Dick Has Modeled for Us . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Legacies and Unfinished Business: Personal and Professional Development Are Inseparable and
Never-ending . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Introduction
Richard “Dick” Beckhard is widely known as one of the founders of the field of
organization development (OD) and as a pioneer in the study and teaching of a
systemic approach to planned change in complex organizations. He was an interna-
tionally sought out consultant to executives and organizations on topics ranging
from leader succession to team and inter-group dynamics to planned, system-wide
change. As a scholarly practitioner he translated this experience into many useful
change management models and tools still in use today. As an institution builder, he
helped found the Organization Development Network under the auspices of the
National Training Laboratory, the International Organization Development Associ-
ation, and the Family Firm Institute (and subsequently the Family Business Review).
As an educator, Dick developed and taught system-wide organization change
courses to masters and doctoral students, and Sloan Fellows, at MIT’s Sloan School
of Management where he also teamed with Douglas McGregor, Warren Bennis and
Edgar Schein in the early development of MIT’s Department of Organization
Studies.
Influences and Motivations: From Event Manager to International
Change Facilitator
Beckhard was born in New York in 1918. His early professional passions were in the
theatre. At Pomona College he supported himself through college by working as a
stage manager. Eventually his talents took him to Broadway where he stage managed
and radio-acted. Unable to be drafted for physical reasons, he helped found the
Stagedoor Canteen for GIs in New York in 1943 and through an assignment with the
Red Cross in New Guinea he helped direct entertainment shows for GIs in the South
Pacific (Hampton 1997). It was at the Red Cross that a life-long pattern of doing and
learning started as he took on new roles and positions including teaching drama and
music, supervising the building of thatched huts in New Guinea, providing social
work services to GIs, and directing a field operation with a six million dollar budget.
In his own words,
My life pattern has consistently been one of doing something because it was there to be done
and then trying to learn from the doing. For me, the only way of learning is by doing. . ..I
never did anything because I was prepared for it. (Beckhard 1997, xii)
Richard Beckhard (1918–1999) 3
After World War II, Dick applied his extensive stage management and direction
experience to become a “meeting management” consultant. He was approached by
Ford in 1947 to help produce entertainment for a radical new car launch. That
success led to others and his reputation as an expert in staging industrial shows led
to several engagements including the Girl Scouts of America to stage general
sessions at their triennial conference and a railroad “World’s Fair” on the Chicago
waterfront. In 1950, he was approached by Ron Lippitt and Lee Bradford, two of the
founders of the National Training Laboratories (NTL), to apply his theatrical staging
expertise and experience with role-playing to the staging of NTL’s plenary “theory”
sessions to make them more engaging. While doing this he participated in NTL’s
core program, the T-Group. That experience stimulated his seminal thinking on the
relationships between group functioning and problems faced by managers in corpo-
rations (MIT Tech Talk 2000). Again in his words,
Although I didn’t’ completely realize it at the time, I had undergone a profound experience.
Those three weeks changed my life. The most profound effect of my first experience with
NTL laboratory training was a dramatic increase in self-awareness. . .. (Beckhard 1997, 19)
Later in his writings, a key assumption underlying Beckhard’s thinking on
organization change was that organizations functioned as systems of groups and
understanding group dynamics was the key to facilitating improvement or change.
As I thought about the presentations on theories about the effective group functioning
[at NTL] and about the ways meetings were actually conducted, I realized there was little
connection between the two. The knowledge and understandings that were being discovered
were not being translated or applied to managers or leaders in organizations. A light flashed.
Perhaps what was needed was “bridge” between the two worlds. . .
(Beckhard 1997, 22)
This early experience at NTL also spawned a 35 year relationship wherein Dick
became a staff member and served on the board.
In the late 1950s, Dick began collaborating with MIT Professor Douglas
McGregor who founded the Organization Studies Department at MIT’s Sloan
School of Management. Here they initiated a project at General Mills designed to
facilitate a system-wide process that included top team goal setting, leadership
training for all management levels, performance improvement meetings between
supervisors and workers, and work team identification and team building. In writing
up the project as a case study, Doug and Dick needed a program title. Instead of
Human Relations Training, Leadership Training, Management Development, or
Organization Improvement, they chose “Organizational Development” to describe
the scope and focus of their work. (Beckhard 1997) The experiences and ideas
emerging from this work lead to one of the first training programs on “planned
change” at NTL; “Program for Specialists in Organization Development (PSOD).”
Participants would meet initially for a weeklong seminar with the instructors to learn
the tools for planned or managed change. Each would then set off to apply their
learnings on a change project. The cohort would reconvene quarterly to share
4 R. Fry
experience, frame their lessons learned and plan for next steps. The components of
this design, experiential learning along with peer feedback and meaning making,
have become and remain staples of effective executive training today (Hampton
1997). The PSOD experience stimulated Dick to urge the founding of the Organi-
zation Development Network (ODN) in 1967 with its national publication, The OD
Practitioner. By 2000, the ODN had grown to over 3,500 members and multiple
international branches. The early success of PSOD also influenced some of the
teaching staff to pioneer the first masters degree programs in organization develop-
ment in 1975 at Case Western Reserve University and at Pepperdine University. By
2000 there would be over 45 graduate degree programs in OD throughout the world.
Douglas McGregor invited Beckhard to become one of the early faculty members
of the new department of organizational studies at the Sloan School where he served
as Senior Lecturer and then Adjunct Professor of Organization Behavior and Man-
agement from 1963 to 1984. In 1969 Dick, along with Edgar Schein and Warren
Bennis, edited and launched the Addison-Wesley OD series. In their effort to
understand the state of the practice of “organization development” at the time,
Beckhard, Bennis and Schein chose to explore the definition of OD by having
leading practitioners describe what they were doing. The original six books by
Dick Beckhard, Edgar Schein, Warren Bennis, Robert Blake and Jane Mouton,
Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch, and Richard Walton became and remain the foun-
dational literature of the field of Organization Development (OD).
Dick’s definition of OD, constructed from his observations of his and others’
current practice, was provocative. He defined OD as, “an effort (1) planned, (2) orga-
nization-wide, and (3) managed from the top to (4) increase organizational effec-
tiveness and health through (5) planned interventions in the organization’s
“processes” using behavioural science knowledge.” (Beckhard 1969, 9) He distin-
guished OD from human relations training and management development efforts
where the outcome were increased skills rather than organization change. He saw
OD as interventions in the form of change programs whose goals were to create a
new culture, new ways of working, changed management style, a reward system
congruent with cultural values, and new allocation of tasks and roles to produce
optimum use of human resources (Beckhard 1997).
From the 1960s through the 1980s Dick taught and developed OD Practitioners,
change agents, institution builders, and future practical scholars (doctoral students)
at MIT, Columbia Teachers College, Pepperdine University, Case Western Reserve
University and the London Graduate School of Business. At the same time, he
developed a global consulting practice with clients including Ansul Chemical
Company, Hotel Corporation of America, Raymond Company, Donut Corporation
of America, J. Lyons, Ltd., Imperial Chemical Industries, and Proctor & Gamble.
A common denominator in all of these contracts was having a [multi-year] relationship with
the CEO. This allowed me to have input and influence at the [organization] center when
needed. From my very first consulting assignment with Robert Hood at Ansul, I found
myself working with both the leadership and with the organization as a whole. I learned on
the job. Every client that hired me was concerned with changing something: the top team, the
Richard Beckhard (1918–1999) 5
ways of work, external relations, communication patterns. My task was to help clients with
their issues. In doing that, I quickly learned to use my learnings about process to “guide” the
interaction.
(Beckhard 1997, 64–65)
In his work in the field, Dick realized that his expertise went well beyond
meetings improvement or staging large group events. He was being retained to
work with, support, advise, challenge, provide theory, and to link to other experi-
ences. It was his understanding of the management of process through relating
interpersonally that was of value. He was primarily facilitating planned change in
management style, relationships to the outside environment, operating policies and
mechanisms, and the organization’s culture (how people were treated, how teams
functioned, how meetings were run, how decisions were made, what values should
be driving the work, etc.). Consistent with his doing-learning modality, his reflec-
tions on his role and actions as a change agent and linking to behavioural science
theory and concepts led to the creation of numerous models for interventions to
facilitate planned, system-wide change which will be discussed in the next section.
Dick’s first major client was Robert Hood at Ansul Chemical Company. Robert,
like several to follow (e.g. George Raymond at Raymond Company and Roger
Sonnabend, president of HCA) were second-generation heads of family businesses.
As his interest in and experience with family dynamics and their impact on the
business grew he also discovered that very little family business literature existed.
He developed an innovative plan to partner with family business clients who, in return
for his time, would provide their organizations as research sites. This led to the creation
of the Family Firm Institute (with Elaine Hollander) in 1984, a nationwide organiza-
tion to promote learning among practitioners from a variety of disciplines who work
for and serve family companies. The Institute’s activities include annual conferences
and issuing of the Family Business Review (FBR), the only peer-reviewed journal that
is focused entirely on family business theory and practice. (Hampton 1997). Dick
served on the Institute’s board and the FBR editorial board until his passing.
Dick retired from MIT and most of his formal teaching roles in 1984. He was
honored with an unprecedented “MIT Richard Beckhard Day,” built around a
symposium with invited speakers who represented academic colleagues, clients
and students. That evening at a dinner hosted by the Sloan School, Dean Abraham
Siegel announced the formation of the Richard Beckhard Annual Prize for the best
article in the OD or change management field to be published in the Sloan Manage-
ment Review.
The final phase of Dick’s career saw him based in his New York City apartment
and spending full summers at his beloved family cabin on Lake Kesar in Maine. He
continued editing the FBR and served on the advisory board of the Peter Drucker
Foundation for Non-Profit Management where he co-edited its Future Series on
Leadership. He found a new calling in coaching to change agents and consultants,
and conducted annual master classes in OD for senior health managers in the UK’s
National Health Service under the auspices of the Public Management Foundation.
He published his memoirs in 1997 under the title, “Agent of Change; My Life, My
6 R. Fry
Practice.” It was his ninth book to accompany 10 book chapters, and 26 periodical
articles. Richard Beckhard passed away in December, 1999 at the age of 81.
Key Contributions and Insights: Birthing the Field of Organization
Development (OD)
Beckhard’s pioneering work in 1969, Organization Development: Strategies and
Models, helped to define and bound a nascent field of inquiry and practice. Based on
his own stories of helping organizations to bring about planned change he developed
role descriptions and skill sets for would be OD practitioners, a collection of issues
or challenges that OD could address, and an initial typology of the skills and
knowledge necessary for the development of OD practitioners. For the next
20 years, Dick collaborated with colleagues to author four more books and numerous
articles and papers to convey the models and tools he derived from his work in
helping large, complex systems to bring about effective change. The following
represent some of the most used and cited of those contributions.
A Systems Model for Managing Change in Organizations
His next volume for the newly established Addison-Wesley OD Series he co-edited
was Organizational Transitions: Managing Complex Change with Rueben T Harris
in 1977. In this work he laid out a new concept for understanding organization
change; the transition state. He envisioned any large system change as moving from
a current state through a transition state toward a desired state. It was this attention
to the state-of-changing, or transition, that began to shape what we know today as the
discipline of change management, leading change, or OD. Thus changing in a large,
complex system involves:
Setting goals and defining the future state, or organization conditions desired after the
change.
Diagnosing the present condition in relation to those goals
Defining the transition state: activities and commitments required to reach the future
state
Developing strategies and action plans for managing this transition
(Beckhard and Harris 1987, 30)
Underlying this deceptively simple list of managerial actions was what Dick had
learned about systems thinking from his NTL experiences. He looked at organiza-
tions, groups and individuals as interconnected systems and applied open systems
theory (introduced to him by James Clark, Charles Krone and Will McWhinney at
UCLA) as a diagnostic tool for strategic planning and shaping future goals. He found
it useful to managers at the beginning stages of defining goals and desired change
state to:
Richard Beckhard (1918–1999) 7
1. Identify the present demand system; those domains that were making demands on
the management (competitors, unions, media, employees, family, self?)
2. List current response pattern(s).
3. Look ahead 2 years to a future without change by you. If you didn’t do things
very differently, what would the demand system look like then?
4. Project your ideal or desired condition for the same time frame
5. Determine what behaviors would have to occur for you to reach the desired future
condition
6. Perform a cost-benefit analysis of these activities and feed this into your strategic
planning process
(Beckhard 1997, 50).
To lead and coordinate the processes involved in the transition state, a critical
mass was needed. Referred to today’s literature as a “champion group” or “steering
group” this is a sufficient number of key stakeholders that must be committed to the
change goal and necessary transition steps. To this end, Dick introduced Commit-
ment Charting. This tool identifies key players in the change context and initially
identifies their commitment to the desired state by labelling them as “No Commit-
ment,” “Let it Happen,” “Help it Happen,” or “Make it Happen.” For each person,
you first identify the minimum commitment level you need from them and mark that
cell with an O. Now assess their current level of commitment and put an X in that
cell. If the O and x are in the same cell, you are all set! Where the O and x are not in
the same cell for a given person, draw an arrow from the X to the O and that gives
you and agenda to work on with that individual. (Beckhard and Harris 1987) This
tool has also been adapted to assess readiness for change as a precursor to action in
the transition state.
Another widely used tool to help in managing the transition state is Responsibility
Charting. Since people will be required to act in new ways during the transition,
customary roles and responsibilities will be altered as well. Temporary work groups
or teams with form and disband. This technique clarifies behaviour that is required to
implement important change tasks, actions or decisions. The chart lists key actions,
decisions or activities that will require collective input (e.g. developing a budget,
allocating resources, deciding on use of capital or funds). Each stakeholder, team
member, or key person is then allocated an “A” (approval or right to veto), an “S”
(support or put resources toward), an “I” (inform – to be consulted before action), or
an “X” (irrelevant to this action item). Then only one of the listed persons is given
and R (responsible for seeing that it gets done). (Beckhard and Harris 1987) this
helps reduce ambiguity, wasted energy and adverse emotional reactions between
individuals or groups whose interrelationships are bound to be affected by the
changing, transitional state. Having adapted this numerous times in working with
teams, I also see the benefit is foreshadowing to the team what kinds of decisions it
will have to make, and when. If more than one person has an A for a particular
action, then there will have to be consensus building. People wanting involvement
become clearer as to the extent of that in a given action; both S and I provide ways to
be involved, but not actually making the decision. Again when two or more
8 R. Fry
receive A, it is critical to be clear about who has the additional R so there is not
duplication, confusion or the ball gets dropped.
Managing Resistance: A Formula for Change
Perhaps the most cited contribution of Dick Beckhard is referred to as the “formula
for change.” The common reporting of this idea is that Change happens when
Dissatisfaction with the status quo, Shared Vision of a desired state and clarity of
First steps combine to be greater that inherent Resistance to change:
D V F > R.
Dick actually learned this concept from an Arthur D. Little consultant, David
Gleicher, whom he met while engaged at Proctor & Gamble. The idea was more
oriented to helping product development team leaders to keep a positive change
momentum going in their teams. The original formulation was that in order for
change momentum to be moving forward, the combined effect of degree of felt need
to change, degree of shared future image, and clarity around very next steps had to be
greater that the force of resistance in the situation: C = (A B D) > R.
C = Change
A = Level of dissatisfaction with the current state
B = Desirability of the proposed change or future state
D = Clarity of the next steps required to implement the change
Factors A, B and D must outweigh (as if a mathematical product, if any were to
approach zero or be small, then the total product approaches zero) the perceived
“costs” of changing for change to occur. Beckhard and Harris cite this as a resistance
management tool in their book rather than a basic formula for change as it has been
widely adapted. Nevertheless, this idea signifies Beckhard’s support of Lewin’s
noted change process of unfreezing-adapting-refreezing. Dick viewed learning and
change, or “inquiry” and change as he later phrased it as inseparable (Beckhard and
Pritchard 1992).
Factors That Affect Team Performance
Another lasting area of contribution from Beckhard’s work and writing has to do
with the dynamics that help teams to be effective in learning and performing. In
trying to bridge the gap he perceived between the knowledge and theory he was
receiving from his NTL experiences and colleagues, and his observations of groups
at work he derived what is commonly referred to as the GRPI model. This maintains
that for any interdependent group to do its work, it must continuously manage:
(1) clarity and agreement on its Goals, purpose or objectives; (2) clarity and
agreement on the Roles members are to play; (3) clarity and agreement on the key
Procedures the group will use to communicate and make decisions; and (4) how they
Richard Beckhard (1918–1999) 9
will Interpersonally relate to one another during their work. (Beckhard 1972) If
group members are not clear or disagree with group goals, their roles in the group,
the way key decisions are made, or with the relational norms that exist, then their
energy and attention to their work is diverted to coping mechanisms or
unconstructive emotional expressions. This notion of an agenda to manage in groups
aligned with Dick’s early observations that OD work was in service of changing how
work is done for organization health and effectiveness, not for developing new
knowledge or skills in individuals. Further he was challenging the tendency he
observed in many OD practitioners to focus their attention on interpersonal dynam-
ics, communication styles and norms without concern for the task to be
accomplished.
This GRPI model has been since delineated into a hierarchal intervention model
with an additional Systems factor based on extensive, multi-year OD project that
Dick coordinated with primary healthcare teams through a grant from the then Office
of Economic Opportunity (and now Robert Wood Johnson Foundation). The revised
SGRPI model (Fry et al. 1977) has been published as a task-oriented team develop-
ment manual (Rubin et al. 1978) and used widely in North America and Europe. The
extension of Dick’s core concept, based on interventions with multi-disciplinary
health care teams was that lack of clarity or agreement at one level in the SGRPI
hierarchy is most likely a symptom of, or will most likely be resolved by, working
for clarity and agreement at the level above. Thus an apparent role conflict between
two team members that seemingly cannot be resolved through some kind of role
clarification or negotiation actually needs to be addressed at the level of team goals;
do the two parties still agree on the overall reason for the team’s existence? If that
cannot be resolved, then it is a systems issue; someone outside the team who
chartered it or designed it to do important work has to be brought in to help clarify
the team goals. Again, the biggest implication of this model lies in the implication
that apparent interpersonal conflicts (what we often refer to as personality clashes)
are most likely to be symptoms of basic disagreement or lack of clarity about team
goals, roles or procedures.
It’s All About the Work
On several occasions, I co-facilitated with Dick an NTL Training Program on
Large Systems Change. In this program (as well as other executive training
settings) he would often conduct a short exercise where he would build a list
with the participants of “things that all organizations have.” A typical list
would look like this:
Structure
Communication
Reward system
Work
(continued)
10 R. Fry
Decision-making Process
Strategy/Strategic Plan
Power and Authority
Supervision
Dick would then ask, “Which on the list is the most critical for what the
organization does?”
Seldom, if ever, did anyone choose “work” which Dick felt was the correct
answer. He was adamant! “This is the problem with us as consultants or
change agents. Everyone in the organization understands that work is what
matters most. You must make a critical choice. If you don’t see work as the
key, perhaps you should change your career and not be a change agent.” (Field
notes by Bob Toft from NTL program, Facilitating and Managing Complex
systems Change, August 12–18, 1979).
The Confrontation Meeting
Dick understood organizations as groups of groups and as his reputation spread as an
expert in convening large or multiple group events, he began to experiment with
rapid, whole system interventions that he deemed necessary particularly during the
transition stage of a large change effort. In conditions of uncertainty, formation of
new (often temporary) groups, and experimentation that characterize the transition
phase of his change model, Dick saw that managers at the top tended to spend less
and less time with their subordinates, communication decreased between top and
middle levels and more employees were likely to express that they felt left out, less
influential, even ignored. The organization potentially suffers from undue stress
during the most important period of the overall change effort. Dick designed and
perfected The Confrontation Meeting to provide a way for a large system to convene
to take stock of their cohesion, alignment, and to deal with real conflicts that are
getting the way of collaboration, all in 4–5 h.
A typical confrontation meeting agenda would be:
(A) Stage setting by top management: goals for the meeting, norms for participation,
concern for real, honest communications including tough topics and
conversations
(B) Information collecting: Small cross functional and multi-level groups of 7–8
form to discuss what are the current obstacles, demotivators, poor procedures or
policies, unclear goals, that are getting in the way of doing good work? What
different conditions would make life in the organization better?
(C) Information sharing: Group summaries are posted around the meeting space and
duplicated for individual handouts after a break or lunch.
(D) Priority setting and Action planning: total group reconvenes to go through raw
data on duplicated sheets and code each item with a category suggested by
