Organization 21C: Someday All Organizations Will Lead This Way

The Historical Phases of OD

Through the late 1970s, OD saw its most dramatic changes. The years since the late 1970s have been mostly marked by a search for role and identity within institutions.

Conception Phase (Late 1950s to 1963)

The roots of OD clearly draw on work from the late 1940s, when a group of Kurt Lewin's MIT researchers, led by Morton Duetsch, ran a workshop in New Britain, Connecticut, on race relations. In the process they discovered “experiential learning,” or the examination of group and individual behavior in the “here-and-now” to draw conclusions about group dynamics and individual behaviors. This led to the launch of the National Training Lab (NTL) at Bethel, Maine, where T-groups (“T” for training) and sensitivity training ...