Explicit Problem Modeling: An Intervention Strategy

Abstract

The problems that organizational team members define depend on their idiosyncratic, subjective, and organizationally political beliefs. Organization development (OD) consultants are frequently highly skilled in attending to and working with the nuances of the team processes. They are frequently less skilled at finding ways of representing explicitly the complex problems that members bring to a team and the complex responses of other members in the processes of problem definition. The authors contend that OD consultants could usefully employ more explicit and less piecemeal representations of the problems that they work on with client teams. They examine some reasons why this is not usually done and offer one approach to overcome many of the difficulties and provide a strategy for intervening in the processes of problem definition in teams.