Organizational Effectiveness Guiding Principles

Guiding principles of APHSA’s OE Practice

Open Systems- Social systems, including agencies, are comprised of inputs, performance capacity (leverage of inputs), performance actions and outputs, client impacts, and relationships within their environment, all of which are dynamic and interrelated.

Functional Capacity- Building and sustaining organizational capacity requires a rational organizational structure with well-aligned departments, roles, functions and hierarchical levels.

Effectiveness- Results are best achieved through identifying and improving upon the processes and activities that lead to them, vs. focusing primarily on the results themselves.

Experiential Learning: “Learning by Doing”- Learning is best accomplished by reflecting on one’s own concrete experiences, forming new ideas about them, making specific changes to one’s actions and behaviors, considering the impact of those changes, and making related adjustments. This process, when working effectively, constitutes an ongoing cycle.

Readiness- Readiness to learn, change and perform progresses through stages, with each stage enabling faster and more comprehensive change, requiring less support.

Empowerment- Energy and buy-in for change that is aligned to system goals is best accomplished through increasing participation in decisions, sharing information, and enabling discretion within clear and healthy boundaries.

Relationship- Task Balance- Proficiency in fostering relationships and accomplishing tasks are not either-or or zero-sum propositions. Each benefits from advances in the other or suffers from the lack of those advances.

Facilitation- Effective consulting and facilitation is based on techniques that rely on participant safety, energy, induction and context focus, leading over time to participant accountability, deduction and more systemic generalizations and connections.

Evaluation- Professional development interventions should not be evaluated with a presumed cause and effect that links participant satisfaction, retention of concepts and knowledge, performance, and impact on the overall agency and its clients. These interventions should be directly connected to their impact on performance in alignment with agency or system goals.