Greetings, Colleagues!
Please join us for a mid-morning on Friday 7 August (10 am ET) Professional Development Workshop to explore the results of a 3-year project on the future of Organization Development. This session is hosted by the Organization Development and Change Division and co-sponsored by the Management Consulting Division.
All presenters for this PDW attended 2-3 years of the project sessions, and were leaders in developing ideas in person or in virtual meetings during the project years. Presenters will address four areas of work conducted through engagement of 200+ scholars and practitioners from 2017-2019. Here is the background:
In the mid-2000s scholars were concerned that organization development may have become a dying field. Since then, others have studied a number of developments associated with OD, including discourse analysis, agility, coaching, appreciative inquiry, complexity theory, and dialogic OD, to name a few that surfaced in the late 2000s and 2010s. The emergence of these practices created for practitioners a tension between the legacy of the founders of OD focused on interpersonal relationships, groups and teams, and internal organization relationships, and the requests of clients for assistance in these new areas. Further, practices once part of OD work, such as organization design, coaching, project management, and change management, became the purview of other professionals. Last, the role of human resource professionals was changing from transactional to more strategic engagements in organizations that at times closely resembled OD work. Both the extension of practices within the field of OD and the wide array of historic OD work now performed by HR and other professionals led to a sense of fragmentation in the OD field. This PDW presents the results of work by OD scholars and professionals during the Founders to the Future Project to both honor the past and recommend a coherent future for the field of OD. In an interactive setting, participants will provide feedback on reports in four areas provided to registrants prior to the conference: vision for the OD field, values for the future, competencies that will be needed, and a dynamic definition of OD.
We look forward to seeing you tomorrow!
Julie Smendzuik-O'Brien
Ilene Wasserman
Deborah O'Neil
Todd Matthews
Mike Horne
Matt Minahan
Olga Blouch
Hyung Joon Yoon
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Julie Smendzuik-O'Brien, PhD, MPA
Executive Practitioner Representative-at-Large
Membership Engagement Coordinator
Organization Development and Change Division
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