The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science

This introductory article argues building intentional design capabilities is a primary approach to bridging theory and practice. To address the complexity and challenges of today’s organizational environments, the organizational development (OD) profession’s focus on humanistic development should be complemented by equally strong attention to bringing expertise to help design solutions to thorny problems. This requires attention to management as design and development of a design science to provide content and methodological knowledge to guide the design process. Treatments of organizational design science, just as other design sciences such as architecture, must juxtapose development of the guiding knowledge of the field with the descriptions of designing processes that bring to bear the perspectives, aspirations, and experiences of varied participants. The combination of the perspectives of organizational development and organization design science is critical to provide a knowledge foundation to build organizations that are sustainable and meet the needs of their stakeholders.

In this article, the authors describe characteristics of design science as a type of organization development (OD) intervention and as an approach to actionable theorizing. The authors discuss ways that design science approaches are typically but not necessarily consistent with OD’s values as well as the types of intervention motors they typically use. That is, they often reflect humanistic values, but they need not necessarily do so. Design science typically uses action research and participation intervention motors but does not include as much self-reflection as is the case in much OD work. Design approaches focus much more on action than do most current OD interventions; thus they add an important dimension to OD practice. In addition, they suggest ways of linking this focus on action with hypothesis testing and theorizing more than do most current OD interventions. Thus, they offer the possibility of revitalizing OD.

This article argues for a major shift in focus from the strong management orientation of organization development (OD) to a more “user-centric” OD, one that seeks to mobilize and privilege change on behalf of the consumers or users of an organization’s product or service, involving them at every stage of the design process, from problem diagnosis to solution generation and implementation. This reconceptualization of OD draws its inspiration from the rapidly expanding field of experience-based design (EBD), a subfield of the design sciences whose distinctive features are direct user participation in the design process and a focus on designing experiences as opposed to systems or processes. The article reports on an original EBD intervention methodology designed and tested by the authors and colleagues in a cancer clinic within the National Health Service, which following successful “proof of concept,” offers OD some promising new directions for the future.

This article discusses a design science approach to organizational development (OD) resulting in some new perspectives about how OD interventions might support more effective organizational change. These relate to the way in which the formal organization is redesigned, the way this design is translated by the members of the organization into their own roles and routines, and the way in which subsequent organizational learning produces the intended performance improvement. The background, nature, and characteristics of design science and design science research are discussed, and using a design science perspective, a process model of planned change projects is presented. Drawing on a case in planned change, it is argued that a design science perspective can provide a powerful combination of the original strengths of OD in human behavior and planned change based on humanistic values on one hand and design competencies involving both humanistic and business values on the other.

This article presents a design-based research study on the reporting of intellectual capital in firms. It combines the designing of an organization development (OD) intervention with the testing of the intervention using an action research methodology. A growing gap between theory-based research and practice has been identified in the literature as one of the reasons for a lack of renewal in the field of OD. Design-based research (DBR) has been proposed as a methodology that can help bridge the gap between theory-based research and practice. The purpose of this article is to illustrate what a comprehensive methodology for design-based research might look like and to demonstrate the type of OD knowledge this research can produce. The DBR approach is used to design and test a tool for the reporting of intellectual capital within firms as an OD intervention aimed toward influencing the individual and collective sensemaking of managers.

Herbert Simon once suggested that the social sciences are actually the hard sciences due to the enormous complexity and interconnectedness of the elements within social systems. This insight is also critical in understanding the nature of change and development of large organizational systems. Adopting a science-based design approach, the authors place emphasis on the importance of developing construction principles and design rules for the implementation of large-scale organization development (OD) interventions. The empirical part of the article draws on several case studies of OD projects that employ the methods of circular redesign. The first case illustrates how implementation may fail as a result of a lack of awareness of the complexity of OD implementation and experimentation processes. The second case suggests that a coherent set of principles and rules can provide a common framework and language for scholars, managers, and consultants working together in large-scale organizational change projects.

This article promotes the idea that prototyping, a method regularly employed in the design and development of products and services, is a powerful means to facilitate organizational development and change. The authors present three objectives related to prototyping that facilitate behavioral change within organizations. These objectives include building to think—creating tangible expressions of ideas enables organizational thinking to develop concretely through action; learning faster by failing early (and often)—making things tangible allows small, low-impact failures to occur early, resulting in faster organizational learning; giving permission to explore new behaviors—the presence of a prototype encourages new behaviors, relieving individuals of the responsibility to consciously change what they do. The significance of these objectives is illustrated through reference to client organizational change projects. The article concludes by reflecting on the value of applying this less analytical design-based approach to helping organizations transform the ways they work.

A team of practitioners, university researchers, and health care policy makers has been working to develop and apply “design sciences” thinking within the challenging context of a national system aiming to bring about a “revolution in health care.” As members of that team, the authors share that thinking and early findings with those interested in the concept, theory, and practice of design as an approach to large-scale organizational change. The article builds on what to date has been a somewhat abstract debate around the design sciences, its aim being to forge stronger links between the concept and the practice of design. Using empirical data from the English National Health Service as a case study, the article seeks to demonstrate how design sciences may first, expand our thinking around organizational theory and practice and second, offer organization development some new methods, approaches, and processes around the “doing” of large-scale change.

The concept of design rules, an element of design science, helps convert the tacit knowledge of organizational change agents into explicit, actionable knowledge. Design rules are heuristic statements in the form: If you want to achieve outcome Y in situation S, something like X might help. Research suggests that experts tend to think using such heuristic rules, and the authors propose that this is also true for organizational managers leading successful change programs. Although design science approaches aim to build a body of design rules applicable in a variety of settings, little has been done to explore how design rules are elaborated from particular change efforts. The authors describe experience in testing four methods for extracting explicit design rules from existing programs of organizational change. They found this to be both a promising field of research and a potentially valuable methodology for practicing managers and change leaders in organizations.