Chapter FourOrganization Development and Transformation
What It Takes
Linda Ackerman Anderson
My OD practice in “planned change” evolved significantly over a 37-year career as an internal and external practitioner. It started with meeting facilitation, event design, organization assessment, and performance systems, and evolved to focus solely on large-scale strategic change consulting. I realized that my understanding of organizational change had to expand in order to achieve outcomes and business benefits at scale that, heretofore, my colleagues and I were not able to attain. Was the shortcoming in the way we were practicing OD, or was it that the nature of the changes we were attempting to guide was different, more complex, and unable to be “planned” or controlled as we had been taught?
It was both. This recognition gave rise to the identification of a unique type of change—transformation—that was far more complex than our OD practices were originally designed to serve. Transformation is defined below, and its unique requirements outlined. OD is now optimally positioned to take on the challenge of consulting to transformational change as a primary focus of our practice.
This chapter starts with a description ...
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