Practicing Organization Development: A Guide for Leading Change: A Third Edition

WHY OD IS CHANGING

Dialogic OD has emerged more from practice than theory—and theory needs to catch up. If practice is changing, it’s changing because, in some cases, it’s more effective to do things this way. I want to conclude with some ideas about why that might be. It might be that conventional action research processes have become too much a part of what normally happens in contemporary organizations to be transformational. It might be that “scientific” approaches to human systems only work in fairly homogeneous cultures. As our organizations become composed of ever more diverse people, the assumption that there is some social reality “out there” to be studied and understood becomes less tenable. It might be that in a world of persistent ...