Practicing Organization Development, 5th Edition

Introduction: Getting the Most from This Edited Volume

William J. Rothwell, Jacqueline M. Stavros, and Steven H. Cady

The fourth edition of Practicing Organization Development, subtitled Leading Transformation and Change, was about facilitating transformational and incremental changes. The edition recognized that organization development (OD) is both a field and a profession and that there are diverse frameworks, models, and approaches to handling organizational issues. The book was about the power and possibilities of OD, which place human conversation and behaviors at the heart of change, leading to enhanced performance.

There are many popular definitions of OD. However, it is best understood as facilitating system-wide growth and human systems’ evolution. Change is messy and complicated because our organizations are living systems. For this reason, it is best managed by applying complexity theory and tapping complex adaptive systems (Church et al. 2018). OD must adopt an open systems perspective (Gopinath and Kendall 2021).

The fifth edition of Practicing Organization Development is subtitled A Guide for Leading Change. The word transformation has been dropped. It has grown to be a controversial word. Some people think it implies ordinary change. For other people, the word transformation suggests an abrupt change that is neither well-planned nor well-accepted by those affected by the change. Neither way of understanding that word is helpful. For that reason, it has been ...