The Apprenticeship Has Gone Missing

Joseph George wrote a fine piece about the organisation development career. It arrested me for a bit. He is passionate and deep. I always sit with what he writes. This time was no exception.

His argument runs like this. The field has sold itself badly. For decades it has described itself by listing what practitioners do.

Facilitate.
Diagnose.
Redesign.
Work with culture.

All accurate, and all of it hides the more unusual thing. In this trade, the continued development of the person doing the work is part of the work. Not a refresher course that is an optional extra. Something closer to formation. Attention. Judgement. Comfort with ambiguity. The ability to tell your own discomfort apart from useful information about the room.

He then adds a second move, and it is the one that will interest people outside the field. For most of the last century, the consultant’s value came from knowing what the client did not. That asymmetry is collapsing. Analysis is now cheap and instant.

Careers are also getting longer, so the question of what sustains forty years of work has become a live one. If information is no longer scarce, the scarce thing becomes discernment. A slow career built on judgement stops looking inefficient and starts looking well timed. What seemed an awkward gestation may be the point.

He backs this with lives rather than argument. Fred Emery in Australia disciplined himself by letting field reality wreck his theories. Pulin Garg at IIM Ahmedabad ran personal growth labs and then spent his later years inside the Yoga Sutras, looking for correspondences with process work.

Mee-Yan Cheung-Judge in Britain made it explicit: technical polish without continuing self-work produces consultants who look sophisticated and come apart when power and anxiety enter the room. Different practices. One habit. None of them stopped once they had earned the right to.

I think he is right about the work. My mind runs to two additional points.

The people who made him right had somewhere to learn

Every practitioner he names came up inside an institution that carried them. Long labs at IIM Ahmedabad. Tavistock in Britain. NTL in America. Client relationships that ran for years, where somebody senior watched you work and told you the truth about it afterwards.

India had its own version, and I would add two names. Gouranga Chattopadhyay brought the Tavistock approach here at the end of 1972 and ran group relations work out of IIM Calcutta for years. Provocative to the point of discomfort, and a Bangla poet besides.

Udai Pareek matters more for my point. He did not only practise. He built the places where others could be formed. The T-groups at ISABS. The first dedicated HRD department in the country, designed with T.V. Rao at L&T . A generation learned this work because he made somewhere for them to learn it. And what he built eventually grew large enough to absorb the thing it came from.

That is what formed them. Not just the reading.

Precious little of that is available now. Ten-year apprenticeships? You can count yourself lucky to get a ten-week one. Assignments are shorter. Budgets are tighter. A young person entering this work today gets a certification, a methodology deck and if lucky, a client who wants results in a quarter.

So we have a good description of a slow craft and next to nothing of a route into it. If the formation was real and the pathway has gone, what forms people now?

I do not have a clean answer. Some of it may happen inside companies rather than consultancies. Much of it may not happen at all. That would be a quiet loss, and a slow one. The certificate arrives early and confidence arrives with it. No senior is watching closely enough to say otherwise.

The work gets done, the client is satisfied, and the consultant never finds out what she missed. Repeat that across a career and across a field, and the whole thing drifts downwards without anyone noticing the year it happened.

The listening is the hard part

My second point is about emphasis rather than accuracy.

Joseph’s argument sits almost entirely on the consultant. Her formation, her judgement, her capacity to keep developing. Get that right, the logic goes, and better work follows. My experience says the consultant is rarely where things break. The organisation is.

Picture the developed, patient, self-aware consultant inside an organisation that cannot absorb what she tells it.

She sees clearly. She names the thing. And nothing is different on Monday. The finding goes into a deck. The deck goes into a folder. Everyone agrees it was a useful conversation.

I have watched this happen more times than I want to count. The consultant was good. The listening was not.

What is missing is the ability of a group of people to take in something new, work out what it means for them, and have the gumption to act differently as a result. Most organisations are weaker at this than they believe. They can gather information. Companies are drowning in information. What they cannot reliably do is make sense of it together, fast enough for the sense to matter, and then hold a line of action long enough for it to count.

AI has made this visible. Firms have analysis on tap now. Very little changes. The bottleneck was never the analysis.

So a well-formed consultant inside a company that cannot make sense of things is an expensive ornament. Two different problems, and the field has spent most of a century on the first.

What I am left with

The organisation development career Joseph describes is real and I would recommend it. The knowledge is still there, better documented than ever. The apprenticeship that turned knowledge into judgement has quietly gone. And the thing most in need of development now sits inside the company rather than the consultant.

Which leaves a question I cannot answer. If a company needs to build its own ability to make sense of things, and the people who know how to help were formed by a system that no longer exists, where does the next generation of that skill come from?

Possibly from inside companies. The operator who has run three businesses and knows how a room goes quiet. The HR head who has sat through four restructures. They have the immersion and the years. Nobody has ever called them practitioners of anything, and they may be closer to it than the certified.

I would like to think it works out. I am not sure it does.