Forward to the Past

In this essay, we propose – in a hopeful but provocative tone – three ways organization development (OD) can contribute to the future of organization change.

Two narratives dominate the OD community. One is that the field should return to its process-oriented, human potential days; another is that the past is a constraint to progress. We would like to re-write both narratives. While our title, “Forward to the Past,” does not recommend a wholesale return to the old days, we believe the past provides a blueprint to be brought forward, updated, and applied. More to the point, we believe that OD represented a discipline for supporting change in people and organizations, generating new knowledge about that process, and impacting society. And we continue to believe that. OD, as a field of practice and research, can be effective in addressing many of today's current and grand challenges but it is not prepared to deliver on that potential. OD has forgotten, allowed, or failed to maintain its ability to change, research, and impact humanity. Let's step toward the future – without regret – and demonstrate what works.

We believe that OD is a “system-wide application and transfer of [social] science knowledge to the planned development, improvement, and reinforcement of the strategies, structures, and processes that lead to organization effectiveness” (Cummings & Worley, 2019, p. 2). It is an integrated approach to working with the people in a system, under humanistic values of learning, participation, and democracy, to foster the realities they desire and in so doing build the capacity to change and adapt.

To lead in the future requires OD to recommit to its principal orientations, perspectives, and processes as they play out in the modern context. First, OD must demonstrate the power of a development orientation. Next, as a natural extension of the development orientation, OD must demonstrate the advantages of an action research epistemology. Finally, OD must demonstrate how reclaiming a systems perspective can influence social change at higher levels of analysis. If these seem a bit too head-noddingly obvious – we agree! And yet, OD has turned away from or failed to update the simple and powerful playbook that had once served individuals, organizations, and society so well.

Demonstrating the Relevance of a Development Orientation

Cummings and Cummings (2014) pointed out that “OD's most distinct and basic feature comes from the ‘development’ part of its title, which is frequently passed over without considering its meaning and significance in an organization context” (p. 143). Rooted in a system of humanistic values, a development orientation (1) seeks out, clarifies, and diffuses a shared understanding of the organization's purpose and the extent to which its ways of working are designed to meet that purpose, (2) works with people to identify the changes and capabilities that need to be developed, and (3) provides the process for helping the organization learn how to adapt routinely. What is OD for if not to help people and organizations move toward greater self-determination, by developing the ability to adapt and improve themselves over time?

Which doesn't sound too provocative until you realize that OD no longer embodies this integrated, development orientation. Instead, scholars and practitioners largely (the authors included) acquire expertise in topics like agility, emotional intelligence, mindfulness, diversity/equity/inclusion, and change management; the increasingly popular obsessions and standalone knowledge-bases that address expedient needs in organizations. Unfortunately, expertise in the latest fad is not change and fragments OD's integrated approach. Change management is a particularly pernicious example. It is the exercise of power dressed up in the language of inclusion. It does not represent a development orientation because there is no broadly inclusive diagnosis. All the participative visioning processes and proactive communication in the world will remain developmentally hollow when management predetermines what needs to be changed. Moreover, as a specialized sub-set of OD, it suggests that change can be programmed. Follow the steps, involve the people, and track your progress.

Embracing and demonstrating the development orientation asks, “What's the next, best, right thing we need to learn to do?” It's the question that emerges in the context of a shared purpose and a strategy rooted in values and beliefs about social and economic progress. A development-oriented response comes from the desire to realize the system's inherent potential. Instead, organizations are often whipsawed by trends and the ambitions of people who hold authority. Digitalization is only the most recent example and if you aren't scared by the cautionary tales of Facebook (Horwitz & Seetharaman, 2020) and Amazon (MacGillis, 2021) then you aren't paying attention (Zuboff, 2019).

OD needs to demonstrate that organizations can change to a more engaged workforce, adopt and apply technology in developmental ways, or become more agile in ways that reflect the integrated, participative experience. A development orientation is not about short-term efficiency, it's about long-term effectiveness and adaptability and we need to show that this works. This is OD at its best.

Such an objective seems not only desirable but urgent. As a place to start, we suggest centering and re-grounding our practice in the integrated experience of change and the development orientation. Such a focus should be ontologically prior to but integrated with topical expertise. In response to the demand, we often lead with our topical expertise before understanding if and why the organization needs it. For example, extolling the virtues and dimensions of employee engagement without first knowing whether an organization wants and needs to improve its engagement is not OD. The capability to perform some activity (e.g., develop new products or effectively manage a subsidiary) or achieve some outcome (e.g., engagement or productivity) is best understood by the systems, structures, competencies, and processes that operationalize and produce them (Teece et al., 1997). As a result, OD's development orientation must be central and its power demonstrated by integrating it with relevant knowledge of strategy and organization design (Mohrman, 2007).

Demonstrating the Advantages of Action Research

Donald Schön argued that a “new epistemology” comprising action science, engaged scholarship, and collaborative inquiry moved research from the “high ground” of easily-framed problems conducive to rigorous research to the “swampy lowlands” where problems are messy, confusing, and of practical relevance. “The irony of this situation is that the problems of the high ground tend to be relatively unimportant to individuals or to society at large … while in the swamp lie the problems of greatest human concern” (Schön, 1995, p. 28).

To breathe fresh life into the development orientation advocated above requires the continual creation of new knowledge for both practice and theory. It was field research from professors at Harvard, MIT, and UCLA among others, working with organizations, which produced insights about practice and contributed to scholarly debates in the human relations movement (Scott, 1981). Researchers and practitioners collaborated to puzzle out organizational challenges informed by extant theory and local knowledge, made interventions to improve effectiveness and adaptability, and then wrote about and disseminated the work.

Action research is a defensible, credible, and relevant methodology that deals with the messes and complexities of reality. Related clinical methods generate clear, robust, local knowledge in situ (Schein, 1987). Together, these methods can produce important practical and theoretical knowledge about helping people and organizations adapt. And yet, action research has been largely relegated to a lecturette in many graduate programs and we have stopped relying on it as our primary practice.

Today, there are real constraints and few incentives to pursue such work. The truth is that attempts to bridge the scholar-practitioner gap have largely fallen flat. Most organizations would welcome a credible, alternative source of help in adapting to the challenges of a changing marketplace, but their primary source of assistance – the large consultancies – are neither interested in nor incented to develop an organization's change capabilities or share the knowledge that is produced. The opportunity for scholars and practitioners to join together to help, learn, research, and share is a wide-open door. In addition, academic incentives to make significant contributions to theory and publish in “A” journals discourage the long-term, methodologically messy, and practice-oriented contributions of action research. The hope for a new generation of scholar-practitioners seems dim under such a system. Do leading scholars and practitioners really understand so much about change that they can afford to remain apart?

And so, the drumbeat for more responsible, relevant, and rigorous research should be amplified (Mirvis et al., 2021; Rynes et al., 2001; Van de Ven, 2007). Mirvis et al. (2021) provide an important blueprint for doing applied, rigorous, and relevant research. However, their grounded suggestions will struggle if business schools don't step away from the broken altar of rankings (Gladwell, 2021) and other measures of quality that are irrelevant to practice.

Demonstrating How Systems Theory Addresses Today's Grand Challenges

There is much discussion within the OD community about today's world needing what it offers…and a long and deep silence from many of the people to whom we offer it. OD is smaller today than 30 years ago in terms of the number of people who practice it, the number of masters and doctoral graduates who research it, and the impact on society from it. For a field that promises so much, it's a sober realization. What do we need to demonstrate to enact our potential?

We believe the development orientation and a robust action research approach provides the best platform for engaging with those silent voices. But to extend that platform beyond individuals and organizations to the grand challenges of climate change, equity, or poverty, we must resurrect an OD strength that has atrophied: systems thinking.

OD's retreat into the safe and specialized topics and processes described earlier, including coaching, diversity, and change management, optimizes individual behavior over collective action. Coaching leaders and rewriting mission, vision, and values statements will not change a culture; unconscious bias training will not end racism; and what better way to ensure that diversity and sustainability initiatives flounder than to successfully manage the transition to specialized units that compete with functions, businesses, and change initiatives for executives’ attention and scarce resources? That is not systems thinking.

Expertise in specialized areas reinforces siloed thinking, and changing without diagnosing or understanding prevents people from “seeing the whole board.” The privileged twist themselves into knots explaining how their win-win business models will do good by doing well (Giridharadas, 2019) but ignore the structures that support and depend on keeping some impoverished (Klein, 2021). For those who hold privilege, OD's devotion to topical expertise and fragmented processes allows them to dictate piecemeal approaches to change while claiming to make a contribution and leaving their privilege intact. Under such conditions, it's difficult to understand – let alone approach developmentally – the inter-organizational system that underpins sustainability, access to health care, effective education for all, income inequality, or systemic racism. That's not the kind of wisdom born out of disciplined systems thinking.

These grand challenges will not be solved by individuals or single organizations. OD must relearn, extend, and apply systems theory and action research to reconceive the purposes and structures of organizational networks under success criteria that include social and environmental as well as economic outcomes. Despite groundbreaking work (Cummings, 1984; Gray, 1985; Huxham, 1996), we do not understand the theoretical and practical processes for bringing about inter-organizational cooperation, coordination, and collaboration (c.f., Castañer & Oliveira, 2020; Gulati et al., 2012). It will require OD practitioners and researchers to not only see the system and its dynamics of power, but devise processes for changing them in service of humanity. These are the kind of messy, wicked problems that an applied social science should be good at working on.

To do so, we must appreciate how our turn away from certain values (i.e., development orientation), perspectives (i.e., action research), and processes (i.e., systems thinking) have contributed to the grand challenges we seek to solve and how we might recommit to them. As a mostly progressive and probably liberal leaning community, what's OD's response to the populist message that it has been the elites – the ones we wanted to work with – that screwed up the environment, perpetuated racism, and created the income inequality we want to address? Aren't “we” the “they?” As a field, we need to learn to square our values with the realization that the majority of the people we work with on change may in fact be more politically moderate. We must be careful to not collude with those who pay us by assuming our agreements are supported by the silent majority of our stakeholders.

A developmental orientation, an action research approach, and rigorous systems thinking should support us in avoiding these traps. The wisdom and potential for navigating our steepest challenges rests within the collective spirit of the system's stakeholders – whoever they may be. It calls on us to recommit to the field's first principles, apply them systematically in the modern context, and adapt them accordingly. Only then can OD move toward the higher purpose that has long been its aspiration.

Summary

OD has never been about change for change's sake, but about change that champions human potential, social justice, and economic progress. It's never been about epistemological objectivity, but about finding and sharing credible, robust, and practical solutions to the challenges of the day. It's time OD learned to do those things in today's context and reclaim its central position as the voice of organization change. That is a tall order; we don't believe it is tilting at windmills. It does require credible and legitimate perspectives and processes, to up our game in terms of complimentary knowledge and skill, and to soberly recognize the power we are challenging.