The United States Army had an skill requirement for Organizational
Effectiveness Staff personnel. These people were knowledge managers,
organizational behaviorists, systems thinkers, pre-TQMers etc. etc. etc.
The Organizational Effectiveness Staff Office Course provided training to
civilian government service employees as well as Army, Air Force and Navy
service members. In the mid-70s a certain element of practice became
popular in industry and leaked over to the school (located on Fort Ord,
CA). This element was weighted heavily with using interpersonal, personal
information, comforting environment interventions that had become popular
(at least in CA). The aim of these was to have each participant recognize
the emotional value, some personal history and interpersonal interaction
influences of human teams (permanent or temporary). The descriptive term
used for these intervention was "touchy-feely." Unfortunately, the valued
(those that had improvement value) interventions that had no touchy-feely
aspects were viewed as such simply because they were practiced by a set of
trained interventionists among whom there were "touchy-feely" users.
Bottom line? The OE course no longer exists in its original form. Course
tenants were spread among many other courses and have since been
inculcated into those courses. Is that good news? Could be, but
unfortunately, the impact of the intervention ideas has been diminished.
That has been about 10 years now.
Icebreakers can fall into this general touchy-feely category. The intended
outcome of the icebreaker defines it. If it is to get the target audience
to feel good about participation or each other or themselves, then it may
well be touchy-feely. Problem? Measurable or not, managers are looking
for return on investment (ROI). Touchy-feely doesn't make it, and the
interventionist may not either, for vary long weather the label is
deserved or not.
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