Organization Development: A Process of Learning and Changing, Third Edition

6. Understanding Organizations: The Process of Diagnosis

Without a framework for understanding, the data an organization development (OD) practitioner collects about a client organization may remain nothing more than an array of personal comments of the who-said-what-about-whom variety. For the information to become useful, it must be treated in organizational terms. Because OD represents a systematic approach to change, and the data for diagnosis are largely in systems language, the categories for diagnosis are systems labels.

This chapter covers selected models of and theories about organizations that are useful in the diagnostic phase of OD consultation because they help to organize and systematize the potentially confusing masses of data. ...