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

CHAPTER THREE

On the Shoulders of Giants

The Origins of OD¹

 

John J. Scherer and Billie T. Alban

 

 

 

 

 

In our work as OD practitioners, whose shoulders are we standing on? Whose “conceptual DNA” runs in our veins? What are our operating assumptions and where did they come from?

More often than not, we do our OD work inside a culture of practice whose principles are simply taken for granted—things like involving people in planning and taking action, group decision making, action research, “feedback,” high-performance/high-satisfaction team development, leadership and management coaching, the stages in the consulting process. These methods and principles have not always been around. Who figured them out—and passed them on to us?

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