This is the second paper on my ideas about where the OD field needs to go and how to best position OD with managers and potential clients. I'm proud to say it won the Val Hammond Prize from the Roffey Park Institute in the UK this summer, and you can download it here. Here is the introduction:
This article proposes that organization development (OD) only thrives under specific change conditions and is particularly well suited to certain kinds of issues. OD thrives in that space because OD is not “about change”, but about creating great organisations (Bushe & Marshak, 2018). Under these specific conditions OD can help leaders create change while developing a great organisation. However, there is no one viable, generalized model of a great organisation because any solution to a problem of organizing inevitably creates another problem. Organizing is a never-ending process of accommodating polarities, paradoxes and competing values that all organisations must grapple with to meet their local contingencies and constraints. We can, however, identify general characteristics of a more developed organization, assume that developmental issues are always present (no one ever finishes being developed), and use those as criteria for assessing the success of OD efforts. The paper concludes by offering 3 underlying characteristics found in all developmental models and ideas on how we can use those to assess the success of organization development efforts.
