Practicing Organization Development, 5th Edition

CHAPTER SEVENTEENDialogic Organization Development: Emerging Directions

Gervase R. Bushe

In 2009, Bob Marshak and I published a paper making a distinction between the traditional approach to organization development (OD) that we had grown up in and new forms of OD practice that violated some central OD tenets, particularly requiring diagnosis before embarking on change (Bushe and Marshak 2009). Our distinction between Diagnostic and Dialogic captured the imagination of academics and practitioners. Dialogic OD has proven to be a generative image, spurring new research and models, some of which will be reviewed in this chapter. After a brief summary of the chapter produced for the previous edition of this book (Bushe and Marshak 2016a) we look at how Dialogic OD continues to evolve for large systems applications, process consulting, and team building.

A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE BASIC IDEAS

The initial intent was to show that new forms of OD had emerged since the mid-1980s, like Appreciative Inquiry, Future Search, Open Space, and World Café, that did not conform with, and in some ways violated, central principles of OD found in US textbooks and taught in US graduate programs (see Table 17.1 for a list of 66 dialogically used methods). The Diagnostic mindset emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, a product of the desire to bring social science thinking into management and replace the mechanistic organizing paradigm with an organic one. The Dialogic Mindset emerged in the 1980s and 1990s ...