Dialogic Organization Development: The Theory and Practice of Transformational Change

More Praise for Dialogic Organization Development

This timely new book promises to further energize and advance the field of OD during a time when we need all the help we can get in terms of designing and effectively managing complex organizations. This volume represents a significant contribution to the literature of the field.

—Richard W. Woodman, Texas A&M University, and former editor of the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science

In this outstanding collection, one gets a clear sense that ‘dialogic’ is bringing OD into the new, contemporary contexts, so real today and so different from the contexts in which foundational OD was developed.

—David W. Jamieson, University of St. Thomas, and co-editor of Consultation for Organizational Change

"Dialogic Organization Development moves beyond the stability-biased assumptions of social science and allows us to feel, see, think, and act in new ways. It is a key contribution."

—Robert E. Quinn, University of Michigan, and author of Deep Change and Change the World

This is an exciting and much-needed book! Bushe and Marshak with the help of a global team of scholar-practitioners have brought us a comprehensive discussion that pulls together the latest thinking and practices shaping the field of Organization Development. This is a book you will return to many times!

—Mee-Yan Cheung-Judge, Director, Quality & Equality Ltd., UK, and coauthor of Organization Development

"Dialogic Organization Development will prove to be a milestone in the evolution of Organization Development. This volume provides both an essential orientation and pragmatic advice for employing an arsenal of impactful techniques."

—Loizos Heracleous, Warwick Business School and Oxford University

"Dialogic Organization Development provides a must-have guidebook for organizations wishing to constructively and sustainably embed themselves in emerging economies that are in the throes of radical transformation."

—Theo H. Veldsman, University of Johannesburg, South Africa

"Dialogic Organization Development is a truly pioneering work that puts the focus back on the heart of OD—the spirit of inquiry. Instead of change driven by diagnosing how to align organizational elements with the demands of the broader environment, Dialogic OD concerns itself with how to induce new ways of thinking by engaging with the organizational conversations that create and frame understanding and action."

—S. Ramnarayan, Indian School of Business, and coauthor of Change Management

This is a perfect book for consultants or corporate executives who not only want to innovate and be more effective in Organization Development but want to know and better understand why and how human dynamics are so relevant.

—Anna Simioni, Leadership and Change Practice Leader, Boston Consulting Group, Italy, Greece, and Turkey

This exciting and comprehensive book is the first and only book to deeply and fully describe the origins, root assumptions, and key practices of Dialogic OD and is a source of many new ideas and insights about organizational consulting and change.

—Kazuhiko Nakamura, Nanzan University, Japan

"OD is in the midst of its own transformation. Dialogic Organization Development, with its A-list of authors and contributors, is the much-needed book that puts the stake in the ground upon which that transformed future will be built."

—Ian Palmer, RMIT University, Australia

Gervase Bushe and Bob Marshak offer a comprehensive approach to organizational change that reinvigorates our conversation about OD and helps us reimagine the theories and approaches that inform our consulting practices. This is a valuable resource for both graduate OD courses and OD practitioners.

—John Vogelsang, Editor in Chief, OD Practitioner

"Dialogic Organization Development brings a much-needed focus on the less rational and mechanistic processes that honor the emergence of new meaning, new thinking, and new understanding of the systems we work and live in. This unusually well-integrated anthology will certainly disrupt the status quo of prevailing contemporary OD practices."

—John D. Adams, Saybrook University, and author of Transforming Work

"Dialogic Organization Development closes a painful gap in the scientific community and among practitioners. It will certainly be a valuable contribution to important research in the field of applied sciences. I hope this new volume, with its rich variety of contributions, will find a broad reception, especially in Europe."

—Rudolf Wimmer, Universität Witten/Herdecke, Germany

"Dialogic Organization Development brings together an impressive international group of scholars and practitioners to clarify the conceptual foundations and provide practical illustrations of what OD may be in a contemporary context. In a Scandinavian context, Dialogic OD resonates with a long, social-constructionist and interpretive tradition in organization theory."

—Andreas Werr, Stockholm School of Economics

Dialogic

Organization

Development

Dialogic Organization Development

The Theory and Practice of Transformational Change

Gervase R. Bushe and Robert J. Marshak,

editors

Dialogic Organization Development

Copyright © 2015 Collection only by Gervase Bushe and Robert Marshak

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First Edition

Hardcover print edition ISBN 978-1-62656-404-6

PDF e-book ISBN 978-1-62656-405-3

IDPF e-book ISBN 978-1-62656-406-0

2015-1

Book produced by: Westchester Publishing Services

Cover design: Seventeenth Street Studios

Interior illustration: Westchester Publishing Services

Copyeditor: James Cappio

Indexer: Robert Swanson

Contents

Foreword: Dialogic Organization Development: Past, Present, and Future

Edgar H. Schein

Introduction and Overview

Gervase R. Bushe and Robert J. Marshak

1. Introduction to the Dialogic Organization Development Mindset

Gervase R. Bushe and Robert J. Marshak

2. Introduction to the Practice of Dialogic OD

Gervase R. Bushe and Robert J. Marshak

Theoretical Bases of Dialogic Organization Development

3. Social Constructionist Challenge to Representational Knowledge: Implications for Understanding Organization Change

Frank J. Barrett 59

4. Discourse and Dialogic Organization Development

Robert J. Marshak, David S. Grant, and Maurizio Floris

5. Generative Image: Sourcing Novelty

Gervase R. Bushe and Jacob Storch

6. Complexity, Self-Organization, and Emergence

Peggy Holman

7. Understanding Organizations as Complex Responsive Processes of Relating

Ralph Stacey

8. Consulting as Collaborative Co-Inquiry

J. Kevin Barge

Practices of Dialogic Organization Development

9. Enabling Change: The Skills of Dialogic OD

Jacob Storch

10. Entering, Readiness, and Contracting for Dialogic Organization Development

Tova Averbuch

11. Transformative Learning during Dialogic OD

Yabome Gilpin-Jackson

12. Framing Inquiry: The Art of Engaging Great Questions

Nancy Southern

13. Hosting and Holding Containers

Chris Corrigan

14. From Them to Us: Working with Multiple Constituents in Dialogic OD

Ray Gordezky

15. Amplifying Change: A Three-Phase Approach to Model, Nurture, and Embed Ideas for Change

Michael J. Roehrig, Joachim Schwendenwein, and Gervase R. Bushe

16. Coaching from a Dialogic OD Paradigm

Chené Swart

17. Dialogic Process Consultation: Working Live

Joan Goppelt and Keith W. Ray

Commentary on Dialogic Process Consultation

Patricia Shaw

Conclusion: The Path Ahead

Gervase R. Bushe and Robert J. Marshak

Acknowledgments

Index

List of Contributors

Foreword

Dialogic Organization Development: Past, Present, and Future

EDGAR H. SCHEIN

Dialogic Organization Development (OD) could not have arrived at a better time. The assumptions underlying it and some of the goals for social change and improvement that it articulates not only build on an important historical legacy but reinforce those aspects of OD that will be most needed in the future. I would like to review some of these trends in terms of my own experience of the last sixty years and show how that leads to my enthusiastic embracing of what Bushe and Marshak are trying to get us to see and do with this powerful book.

When I was in graduate school my old mentors such as Gordon Allport were always carrying on about the importance of history and seeing connections to one’s roots. Now that I am old I realize how strong this need to see continuities really is, in part because the young proponents of new things, as is the case with many of the authors of this book, only perceive the most recent connections and miss some of the strong legacies. This is important because in seeing the historical patterns, we see more clearly what the deep value streams are in what we do today and what we need to preserve for the future, as yet other new things come onto the scene.

The T-Group and the Human Relations Labs

When I first heard my colleague Bob Marshak refer to Dialogic OD some years ago I was intrigued, puzzled, and, frankly, somewhat skeptical—is this another OD concept or tool with which to intrigue and mystify our clients (Bushe, 2013; Bushe and Marshak, 2009; Marshak and Bushe, 2013)? At the time I was busy, just skimmed the article and thought little more about it. I was in the midst of writing memoirs; I had given quite a bit of attention to the invention of experiential learning in the late 1940s and described in detail my own first experience with the T-group in 1958 (Schein, 2014). I did not fully appreciate at the time why the National Training Laboratory for Applied Behavioral Science had chosen to call the Bethel programs Labs, but then learned that one of the important concepts underlying the creation and evolution of the T-group was the notion that neither the staff member nor the twelve or so participants really knew when, how, and what sort of learning would occur. We heard a lot about the spirit of inquiry (Schein and Bennis, 1965) and I now realize that this phrase functioned as what Dialogic OD would now call a generative image as explained in Chapter 5. In the T-group we were responsible for our own learning; the teacher was there to create the setting and help us to learn, but all other structural supports were deliberately removed. And so we learned something about ourselves, about each other, and most importantly about the process of learning itself. We were told we were there to learn how to learn and we soon discovered that reconstructing and analyzing interpersonal and group processes was the key to such learning. This theme has been one of the strongest elements of dialogic OD.

In the Labs we also went off to hear lecturettes or were put into various kinds of games and simulations where there were lessons to be learned about what made for better or worse communication and group action. The research output of the group dynamicists spawned by Kurt Lewin had revealed a great deal about how groups and leadership really worked and what one should aspire to if one wanted better outcomes. So paradoxically the Lab both fostered a spirit of inquiry and taught a lot of lessons through various kinds of experiential exercises. The T-group was genuinely different in being more open-ended, more existential, and by virtue of those characteristics more anxiety provoking and more potentially creative. It was the T-group that Carl Rogers allegedly called the most important social invention of the 20th century.

I did not give it much thought at the time, but as I was analyzing the characteristics of experiential learning, it occurred to me that it made a big difference whether the teacher had a lesson in mind and was manipulating and seducing students into learning what they were supposed to learn from their own experience, or whether the Lab designer had in mind some genuinely open-ended experiences in which the learner had control of what was learned and it was, therefore, unpredictable. In fact, the most fundamental way in which experiential learning differs from traditional learning is in how much the teacher designs all the contents as well as the process of learning. Experiential learning primarily controls the process of learning, especially in the T-group and in selected exercises, but within that domain there is also some variation in how much the teacher has a lesson in mind.

Let me suggest two examples to make this clear. We often used some version of what was known as the survival exercise, in which a group must decide what objects from a set list are most important to its survival. Individuals first rate the items alone and then again after a period of group discussion. In almost all cases it turns out that the group decision is more valid in terms of what the survival experts’ ratings were than even the best individual decision. We used that to show the power of group decision making.

On the other hand, the greeting-card exercise asks groups of participants just to organize themselves to prepare to write two-line jingles suitable for sales to a greeting-card company. Most groups fall immediately into a pattern of reproducing standard organizational forms, but there is nothing in the exercise that predicts that or that makes a lesson out of it. The group is asked in an open-ended way to analyze why they did what they did and what they can learn from it.

Experiential learning thus falls into two different categories, according to the degree to which the designer of the experiences creates a design to make a point or designs experiences that allow the learner the freedom to learn whatever needs to be learned in terms of the learner’s motivation. In the human relations labs we were exposed to both kinds of learning—open-ended existential T-groups and various kinds of exercises to teach specific things. In the latter category we learned a great deal about ideal types of organizations or management techniques—McGregor’s Theory Y (1960), Likert’s System Four (1967), Blake and Mouton’s Managerial Grid (1964), in which 9.9 was the ideal to be aspired to. Underneath it all was a set of democratic and humanistic values.

Organization development grew out of these labs, and as I look back on history I see that what Bushe and Marshak would now distinguish as two types of OD—Diagnostic OD and Dialogic OD—could both be seen to have their roots in these two types of experiential learning. The survival exercise would clearly fall into Diagnostic OD while the T-group and the greeting-card factory would clearly fall into Dialogic OD. Both exercises would qualify as experiential methods, but the survival exercise is what Heifetz would refer to as a technical problem, in which there is a better solution to be found through diagnostic methods, while the greeting-card factory or the T-group require adaptive behavior, in which learning improves matters but does not solve problems because they are more open-ended, complex, and perpetually changing (Heifetz, 1998).

Blake and Mouton created a whole school of Diagnostic OD with their program of introducing the Grid to various levels in an organization to stimulate and facilitate 9.9 management. Benchmarking, identifying competency profiles for leadership, using surveys to identify different kinds of organizational cultures, and suggesting ideal types can all be seen as variants of this kind of goal-driven, Diagnostic OD. But as these methods were evolving we could see Dialogic OD emerging as well, for example with Richard Beckhard’s creation of what he called The Confrontation Meeting, which became a kind of prototype of what Dialogic OD practitioners would today design (under the broad category of large-systems intervention) to help an organization deal with complex adaptive problems (Beckhard, 1969).

Dialogic OD invites us to revisit the early spirit of OD, when we saw ourselves more as the conveners of processes of inquiry whose outcomes we did not control that led to answers we did not already have. This kind of OD supports the dialogic premise that self-organizing wisdom seems to be an inherent quality of well-intentioned people, willing and able to communicate authentically, with common interests in creating the kinds of learning and change they need for themselves.

Process Consultation

As I learned to be a consultant to organizations I learned from my own experience how ideal types and benchmarking were useless in most situations, because the organizational and occupational cultures I encountered could only solve their problems in terms of their own cultural affordances and constraints (Schein, 2009b, 2010). And if I had the good fortune to consult with an organization over a period of time I soon learned that problems never get solved permanently, only ameliorated, and that the most important thing the consultant did was to help the client learn how to learn so that he or she could continue to adapt as new issues arose (Schein, 2003). In my own experience I found the need to distinguish being a content expert who delivered information from being a doctor who diagnosed and prescribed solutions, and both of those roles from being a process consultant who created a relationship with the client that enabled the client to solve the problem and learn how to learn (Schein, 1969, 1999, 2009a). I found myself advocating that the helper/consultant/coach had to be agile and flexible because one might not know ahead of time what form of help was needed. I also learned that most problems that involved people and groups tended to be of the adaptive kind, in which not only did the client have to do most of the learning but the learning had to become more or less perpetual. I would have labeled what I did as moving with agility between Diagnostic (expert or doctor) and Dialogic (process consultant) OD, a process that is well illustrated in the activities of the Dialogic OD consultants in this book.

Sociotechnical Systems and the Toyota Production System

The distinction between technical and adaptive issues brings to mind another historical trend and forces some thoughts about the future. The concept of sociotechnical systems was first proposed by the Tavistock researchers and clinicians after World War II (Trist and Murray, 1990, 1993) as they discovered in their famous coal mining studies that changing a technology can so disrupt the existing social system that one cannot simply impose technical solutions. In fact, it often works better, as the Japanese Toyota production system has shown, if the people doing the work are involved in the technical solution (Womack, Jones, and Roos, 1991). The early evolution of sociotechnical models made it very clear that the label really meant something—social/human factors were as critical or more critical than the purely technical design of work for maximum efficiency.

However, in the U.S. culture of valuing doing, efficiency, and individualism and avoidance of group accountability or relationship building, we turned job design and organizational structuring over to the engineers and production experts and ended up telling workers what to do and how to do it (Schein, 2009a, 2013). As a result, many efforts to introduce lean manufacturing have failed as improvement technologies because the employees could not do exactly what the engineered design demanded unless they were coached, which brought the socio-part of sociotechnical back into the picture. In the safety arena we have uncovered such dilemmas as safety glasses, which are required to be worn but which immediately fog up when a worker gets into a hot and humid situation. This problem was eventually solved in one organization by having the employees and engineers work together on a task force to identify materials that could be used under such conditions (Schein, 2013).

Diagnostic OD recognizes the importance of seeing both the technical and the human factor, but only Dialogic OD is so bold as to admit that for many situations the human system has to accept that there will be no technical solution.

Dialogue

Chris Argyris (1964) eloquently pointed out in book after book that the climate in most managerial situations made complaints that the work could not be done as designed, or was unsafe, undiscussable because subordinates did not feel psychologically safe enough to point out efficiency or safety problems (Schein, 2009b, 2013; Edmondson, 2012). Cultural rules of what one can and cannot say openly dominate behavior even as consultants and management gurus call for openness and transparency. What made the T-group and the Labs work was that the learning occurred in a cultural island that provided a container in which people could say more safely what was on their mind and, thereby, open up brand-new opportunities for learning about groups, self, and leadership. The importance of the cultural island was confirmed when we learned, in our efforts to import T-groups into organizations, that they did not work when subordinates did not dare say what they saw and felt, or if they did, bosses and peers resented it and became punitive.

So this kind of open-ended learning seemed to need a situation in which the cultural rules about what it is OK to say could be suspended because a safe container had been created by the lab design. I had forgotten the significance of these two words until I reencountered them when I attended some of the dialogue groups run by Isaacs (1999) on a model first proposed by the physicist David Bohm (1989). Dialogue purported to be different from the T-group in several ways. First, Isaacs produced a model that showed how suspension of one’s reaction to what someone else had said was a clear alternative to blurting out one’s reactions or even answering a direct question. If someone disagrees with me I can argue or I can stay silent and ask myself why I disagree and what this tells me about myself. I can learn something quite different about myself in this way. Isaacs argued, and I confirmed this for myself, that suspension permits more ideas to surface, more ideas to be digested, and more group consensus to be achieved in a natural way. On the other hand, immediately responding to every difference of opinion leads to debate and suppression of minority views and possibly important outlier ideas. The model for this kind of dialogue was the old tribal council at which the elders spoke to the campfire rather than to each other directly, and one spoke only if one was holding the talking stick. Speaking to the campfire allows ideas to simmer and percolate rather than to be dealt with one at a time. The absence of eye contact also, in my experience, makes it easier just to listen to others and to listen to my own inner voice.

The extent to which Dialogic OD practitioners incorporate the emphasis on developing safe containers and encourage the expression of differences may vary, but these are clearly central themes in Dialogic OD.

Systems Thinking and Complexity

Yet another historical trend that feeds into this discussion is best captured by some of the work on intercultural and interethnic conflict resolution illustrated best by the writings of Adam Kahane (2004, 2010), Peter Senge (1990); Otto Scharmer (2007), and Joe Jaworski (1996). The common elements that I see here in relation to the previously mentioned points are the creation of a safe container and the invitation to groups that have been in deep conflict with each other to try to communicate more from the heart, through telling stories and thereby building some common empathy. Where complex intergroup problems are involved or where the technical solutions are blocked by deep cultural and intergroup differences (e.g., climate change, global sustainability), it is clear that the emergent, generative, systemic view that Dialogic OD argues for, in combination with more exploration of differences through historically based narratives will be a necessary component of any kind of adaptive learning.

A Thought about the Future

Is one of the subtle and implicit conclusions of the proponents of Dialogic OD that the world of tomorrow has very few technical problems remaining and that most human problems are, by definition, adaptive? Food for thought there.

It is certainly my experience that the world is becoming more complex, less predictable, more culturally interdependent, and more riddled with problems and issues that can only be dealt with adaptively. We will therefore need OD processes that are capable of dealing with such issues, that admit from the outset that benchmarking and scanning the current scene will not produce the creative solutions that we will need.

As I have tried to show, Dialogic OD in one form or another has been around for over fifty years. But with the growth of tool-oriented Diagnostic OD, the dialogic stream has not yet found its full voice. This book will help.

References

Argyris, C. (1964). Integrating the individual and the organization. New York: Wiley.

Beckhard, R. (1969). Organization development. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Blake, R. R., & Mouton, J. S. (1964). The managerial grid. Houston, TX: Gulf Publishing.

Bohm, D. (1989). On dialogue. Ojai, CA: David Bohm Seminars.

Bushe, G. R. (2013). Dialogic OD: A theory of practice. Organization Development Practitioner, 45(1), 11–17.

Bushe, G. R., & Marshak, R.J. (2009). Revisioning organization development: Diagnostic and dialogic premises and patterns of practice. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 45(3), 348–368.

Edmondson, A. C. (2012). Teaming. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Heifetz, R. A. (1998). Leadership without easy answers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Isaacs, W. (1999). Dialogue and the art of thinking together. New York, NY: Doubleday.

Jaworski, J. (1996). Synchronicity. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler.

Kahane, A. (2004). Solving tough problems. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler.

Kahane, A. (2010). Power and love. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler.

Likert, R. (1967). The human organization. NewYork, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Marshak, R. J., & Bushe, G. R. (2013). An introduction to advances in dialogic organization development. Organization Development Practitioner, 45(1), 1–3.

McGregor, D. M. (1960). The human side of enterprise. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Scharmer, C. O. (2007). Theory U. Cambridge, MA: SoL Press.

Schein, E. H. (1969). Process consultation. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Schein, E. H. (1999). Process consultation revisited. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Schein, E. H. (2003). DEC is dead: Long live DEC. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler.

Schein, E. H. (2009a). Helping. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler.

Schein, E. H. (2009b). The corporate culture survival guide. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Schein, E. H. (2010). Organizational culture and leadership (4th ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Schein, E. H. (2013). Humble inquiry. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler.

Schein, E. H. (2014). The role of coercive persuasion in education and learning: Subjugation or animation? Research in Organizational Change and Development, 22, 1–24.

Schein, E. H., & Bennis, W. G. (Eds.) (1965). Personal and organizational change through group methods. New York, NY: Wiley.

Senge, P. (1990). The fifth discipline. New York, NY: Doubleday/Currency.

Trist, E., & Murray, H. (1990). The social engagement of social science, Vol. 1. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Trist, E., & Murray, H. (1993). The social engagement of social science, Vol. 2. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Womack, J. P., Jones, D. G., & Roos, D. (1991). The machine that changed the world. NewYork, NY: Harper Collins.

Part I

INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW

Gervase R. Bushe and Robert J. Marshak

Organization Development (OD) has been a recognized form of organizational consulting and change and a scholarly discipline for almost six decades. Its antecedents date back to Kurt Lewin and his associates in the 1940s (Jones and Brazzel, 2014). As all textbooks on OD describe (Anderson, 2015; Cummings and Worley, 2014; French and Bell, 1978; McLean, 2005) it resulted from various streams of post–World War II thought, values, and action coming together, including planned change, action research, humanistic psychology, group dynamics, survey research methods, participative management, and laboratory education. These foundational theories and methods of OD led, in the 1960s, to the formation of the OD Network, the original 1969 Addison-Wesley series of OD books edited by Warren Bennis, Richard Beckhard, and Edgar Schein, and the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science and OD Practitioner, two of the leading OD-related scholarly and practitioner journals to this day. By the 1970s, OD certificate and graduate degree programs taught the foundational concepts of OD—process, not prescriptive consultation; the tenet that change involves unfreezing, movement, and refreezing; action research methods including data collection, diagnosis, and feedback to identify the real issues and stimulate movement from the initial frozen state, followed by planned interventions based on behavioral science research to help achieve and secure the desired future state—all supported by an underlying normative value base that emphasized a humanistic, democratic, client-centered orientation (Marshak, 2014).

What is not emphasized in these accounts is that OD did not suddenly appear one day as a fully formed and identifiable construct. Instead, consultants, change agents, and academics experimented with different ideas and methods based on the social sciences and cultural norms of the times. While the components of OD were mostly present and being practiced by the mid-1950s, it was not until they were conceptualized as a coherent approach to consulting and change that people thought of these components as linked together to form an understandable paradigm. What helped this happen was having a new name, organization development, become an accepted term to connote this new approach, even if defining exactly what OD means continues to be difficult to this day. So in that sense one day there was no organization development and then as if overnight the name was articulated, accepted, and used to bring people, practices, and ideas together. Exactly where and when and with whom the term organization development originated is part of OD folklore and has not been proven, but the usual attributions are to important founders of the field. In 1974 Larry Porter, the first editor of the OD Practitioner, diplomatically recognized two independent originators. Dick Beckhard while consulting at General Electric in 1957 invented the term organization development. Herb Shepard while consulting at Esso in 1957 invented the term organization development (Porter, 1974, p. 1). Marv Weisbord had a somewhat different story: "Douglas McGregor and Richard Beckhard while consulting together at General Mills in the 1950s … coined the term organization development (OD)" (Weisbord, 1987, p. 112).

We raise this aspect of OD history because it helps to explain what we have been doing for the past several years and what we hope this book will do for its readers. Both of us are longtime academics and practitioners of OD, going back to the 1970s. We have participated in and observed changes and additions to OD practices beginning in the 1980s and accelerating into the new century. We became uncomfortable with how most OD textbooks and articles try to fit these newer practices into the foundational models formulated in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. We think this limits understanding of deeper differences, leads to confusion about what is or is not OD, and reduces the possibilities for how OD can be practiced. We think that when a new blend of premises and practices is freed from the constraining foundational framings, an outline of a different approach to OD is revealed. We also think that this different approach is still a form of organization development because it emerged mainly from OD practitioners and academics and is consistent with core foundational OD values and ideas about collaborative consulting.

Our shared belief—that something going on in the world of practice was not being well represented in the official texts of the field—led us to work together on articulating this new approach and how it might be similar to and different from the foundational forms of OD. Our 2009 article in the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science called it Dialogic OD in contrast to the foundational form we called Diagnostic OD, picking up on a central aspect of each approach (Bushe and Marshak, 2009). Importantly, as our brief revisiting of the early days of OD in the 1950s helps underscore, dialogic change ideas and methods were being used by practitioners long before we offered our conceptual understanding of how they had converged into a still evolving, new(er) form of OD (Coghlan, 2011). It is the conceptualization of a set of underlying premises and practices named Dialogic OD in combination that is new, more than the streams of ideas, theories, methods, and practices that contribute to it.

After the publication of that article and presentations at various conferences we met with practitioners and academics who felt we were articulating something that gave coherence and meaning to what they were experiencing, and wanted us to say more. That led to other publications (Bushe and Marshak, 2013, 2014a, 2014b) that sparked even more interest. These efforts seem to have captured something for many people, and the term Dialogic OD and its associated concepts are now being used and explored in consulting and change communities around the world. At the same time, despite the growing interest in Dialogic OD there was no comprehensive source of information about it. No Addison-Wesley series. No book that would help explain it in some detail. So we decided, with the help of an international cast of scholars and practitioners, to provide such a resource.

The purpose of this book is to provide a comprehensive understanding of what Dialogic OD is as an approach to organizational change and consulting; how it differs from and is similar to Diagnostic OD; the key ideas that have shaped its current form; and the considerations that influence how it is practiced. We wish to legitimate Dialogic OD as an OD approach in its own right, and free its potential from the limits imposed by trying to fit its concepts and methods into previously established models that may seem similar but are based on very different premises. The term Dialogic Organization Development will become, we hope, a generative image that will allow OD scholars and professionals to reimagine and reinvigorate the theory and practice of OD. In offering the image of Dialogic OD, we hope to create a space where conversations can take place about the nature of organizations and organizing, about the nature of change processes and change agentry, and about the nature of leadership and consulting, that adhere to OD values but fall outside the traditional diagnostic mindset.

Outline of the Book

This book is divided into three sections. The first section presents our overview of the theory and practice of Dialogic OD. In Chapter 1 we review the basic premises we think underlie the successful use of Dialogic OD methods. We list dozens of methods OD practitioners are currently using to support change in organizations, but we do not talk about those in this book. Rather, this book is about the theories and practices that support thoughtful and successful utilization of those methods. We call this a Dialogic OD Mindset, and describe its eight key premises and the three main underlying change processes that have to be present for any method to work. In Chapter 1, we just look at them briefly, inasmuch as each will be further elaborated in the Theory section of the book. In this chapter we also describe how the Dialogic OD Mindset is different from, and similar to, the foundational Diagnostic OD Mindset that it sprang from.

In Chapter 2 we provide an overview of the theories of practice we see underlying all the different Dialogic OD approaches. We briefly identify the kinds of things OD practitioners do to facilitate dialogic interactions, design dialogic events, and design strategies for change. In general, we find that Dialogic OD is being practiced in two main ways. One is a more structured approach, whereby an OD practitioner helps design and facilitate a process for engaging the relevant stakeholders in a dialogic change process that has a beginning, middle, and end. The other is a less structured approach in which an OD practitioner joins into a client system and engages in multiple, ongoing interactions with the intent of helping the system to develop and be more effective. We call this latter form dialogic process consulting. These forms of practice will be covered in much greater detail in the book’s third section on practice.

The second section of the book provides a solid theoretical base for the Dialogic OD practitioner. We strongly believe that what helps practitioners succeed is the depth and breadth of the theoretical base they draw on for choosing, using, and mixing different methods. In this section noted OD scholar-practitioners provide guidance on how to think about organizations and change. These theory chapters relate to the three underlying change processes introduced in Chapter 1: discourse and narratives, generative images, and emergence and complexity. The first two chapters offer different and complementary ways of thinking about the nature of social reality and creating change through changing narratives.

Chapter 3, by Frank Barrett, provides the student of OD with an understanding of the philosophical foundations of Diagnostic and Dialogic OD. Barrett outlines the pillars of modernist thinking that grew out of the Enlightenment and shows how several of these pillars informed the early practice and theories associated with OD. He then reviews challenges to this approach that call attention to the importance of attending to social life as a continual process in which the impermanence of confluences of continuous change means that organizations are in perpetual motion, continually in the process of becoming, not as things made, but as processes in the making. In sections on Heidegger, Gadamer, Wittgenstein, and Gergen, he demonstrates how the move from knowledge as representation to knowing as activity has had radical implications for the way we study and approach change and organizational development, making possible the innovations in change practices described in this book.

Chapter 4, by Bob Marshak, David Grant, and Maurizio Floris, deals with discourse and narrative. It reviews current research on how discursive devices such as narratives, stories, metaphors, and conversations and other forms of communication such as visual representations, symbols, or gestures shape meaning and influence organizational behavior. They offer eight research-based implications for Dialogic OD work, including important comments about power dynamics and political processes as well as the need for dialogic practitioners to be self-reflective.

Chapter 5, by Gervase Bushe and Jacob Storch, concerns generative images, shifting attention to the second underlying process of dialogic change; one that is closely aligned with issues of social construction but revolves around the question of where do new ideas come from. After a review of the literature on generativity, and how that concept has been discussed in OD research and writing, they offer a definition of generative image and a number of ideas for how OD practitioners can help leaders to create and use generative images to stimulate transformational change.

Chapter 6 focuses on the third underlying set of change processes: complexity, self-organization, and emergence. Peggy Holman provides an overview of the key ideas in complex adaptive systems theory and traces the history of how these ideas entered managerial thinking and the practice of OD. She concludes with an overview of how scientific ideas on emergence can be applied to Dialogic OD practice, providing a summary of her model of emergence as an OD process.

In Chapter 7 Ralph Stacey summarizes the theory of complex responsive processes of relating he has developed over the past two decades with his colleagues. Arguing that complex adaptive systems theory is too limited to be applied directly to human systems, Stacey identifies how issues like sense making, anxiety, and political processes influence the always-emerging social construction of reality. Stacey directly challenges the dominant managerial discourse—the belief that leaders can provide visions and plans that can be executed—by describing how that narrative does not match people’s actual experience of the uncertain, surprising, sometimes predictable and sometimes not flow of organizational life, and is a provocative ground for building Dialogic OD processes.

Chapter 8 focuses on the classical organization development issue of engaging clients collaboratively in co-inquiry, but from a decidedly dialogic point of view. Kevin Barge offers a model of four different conversations that take place between consultants and clients during Dialogic OD work: co-missioning, co-design, co-reflection and co-action. He looks at the value commitments of Dialogic OD practitioners and how they shape patterns of communication, as well as the political and other tensions that can arise in this form of consulting, providing advice on how to cocreate conversations with others designed to foster learning.

In the third section we shift to Dialogic OD practice, with accomplished Dialogic OD consultants from around the world providing insight into what they do and how they do it. Each chapter provides cases that illustrate various issues and possibilities for Dialogic OD.

The Practice section begins in Chapter 9 with Jacob Storch discussing essential skills for Dialogic OD consulting from social constructionist and complexity perspectives, with a focus on how learning and change happen in organizational groups. Using a model of three skill sets needed to create the conditions wherein people will engage in changing how they act at work (strategic process design, event design, and facilitation of dialogic encounters), he presents a case to illustrate dialogic change practice in each. Storch emphasizes that change comes from engaging with people in relationally responsive conversations that enrich language, offer generative images, and allow people to respond to the social reality that emerges from having different conversations with participants holding a diversity of ideas and points of view.

Chapter 10 by Tova Averbuch deals with entry, readiness, and contracting, exploring issues of client readiness to engage in Dialogic OD and describing why and how to contract for Dialogic OD consulting work. Averbuch offers a model of four entries that normally take place when consulting dialogically: aligning with the initial caller, partnering with the sponsor, engaging the management team, and cocreating with a diverse steering committee. She identifies the issues that consultants have to manage and provides key questions for making the transition between each of these stages of entry. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the complexities of contracting for change when the actual outcomes cannot be predicted, and the solutions Averbuch and her colleagues have created to manage those issues.

In Chapter 11, Yabome Gilpin-Jackson reviews a model that provides useful tools and advice for working with sponsors to engage them in the personal transformational change process a successful organizational transformation often requires. Then she offers useful tools and advice for working with the people who will have to engage in the Dialogic OD process and ultimately go through personal transformation themselves. She maps Mezirow’s (1991, 2000) ten-phase model of transformative learning onto a three-stage model of Dialogic OD: initiating dialogic inquiry, facilitating the dialogic journey, and sustaining transformational momentum. In clarifying the many connections between transformative learning theory and Dialogic OD, she provides concrete advice on how to effectively disrupt prevailing social narratives, when and how to manage the emotional fallout disruption creates, and how to meet the needs individuals have as they go through a transformational journey.

Nancy Southern, in Chapter 12, describes her model of five kinds of inquiry and offers guidance for the Dialogic OD practitioner on what kinds of inquiry to use in what conditions and how to generate questions that lead to productive conversations. She positions inquiry as a cocreative learning process that builds relationships as people come to assign meaning to the current contexts they inhabit and as they uncover the multiplicity of perspectives and aspirations, some shared and some not, that animate the life of the organization. She offers guidance about when and how to promote informative, affirmative, critical, generative, and strategic inquiries.

Chapter 13, by Chris Corrigan, deals with hosting containers and describes the theory of practice he and his colleagues have developed for ensuring productive events in which diverse people have new conversations in new ways. Many Dialogic OD processes involve large group events, and this chapter looks at generic issues in hosting such events. Corrigan describes containers as a set of concentric rings that involve various levels of engagement by ever-increasing numbers of people, explains how to create them, sets forth common stages of container development, and shows how to end them. He provides insight into the skills and attitudes required by Dialogic OD practitioners for hosting and holding containers.

In Chapter 14 Ray Gordezky provides an excellent synthesis of all the previous chapters while looking at the issues raised by using Dialogic OD in systems composed of multiple groups that do not consider themselves a single entity. Such systems could be different departments in one organization, or multiple organizations. Through a number of case examples, Gordezky looks at the issues to consider in sponsorship, design teams, and hosting events, and offers insights into how to work with these dynamics from a dialogic orientation.

Chapter 15, Amplifying Change, by Michael Roehrig, Joachim Schwendenwein, and Gervase Bushe, offers a model to ensure that the energy and ideas unleashed during dialogic events translate into sustained change after the events. The authors discuss important leadership roles in creating the structures and processes that allow for experiments and improvisational change and that ensure that good ideas do not get stymied by current structures, processes, and culture. They offer a different way of looking at behaviors that might appear to be resistance, seeing these behaviors as essential for ensuring that change proposals are grounded in organizational realities. They review what sponsors and design teams should think about in advance about the three different change stages of Modeling, Nurturing, and Embedding and how they can go about amplifying the impact of innovations that emerge from dialogic change processes.

In Chapter 16, Dialogic Coaching by Chené Swart, we leave the world of more structured Dialogic OD. In this and the following chapter, we look more deeply at the facilitation of dialogic processes in one-on-one, in-the-moment encounters. Swart identifies issues for Dialogic OD practitioners who want to cocreate coaching relationships and spaces for transformation by the way they listen, express curiosity, invite, ask questions, journey with clients, and help identify and name taken-for-granted beliefs and ideas. By engaging people in exploring the consequences of the narratives that they are living and envisioning the life they want, Swart offers useful questions for assisting clients in identifying alternative preferred narratives of their lives. Her models are useful both for one-on-one coaching and for facilitating any Dialogic OD process.

In Chapter 17, Dialogic Process Consultation: Working Live, Joan Goppelt and Keith Ray invite us into a provocative perspective on OD consulting. Grounded in such ideas as Stacey’s complex responsive processes of relating, the coordinated management of meaning (Pearce and Cronen, 1980), and Shotter’s (1993) social constructionism, they provide a series of consulting vignettes and explain the mindset behind the choices they make to disrupt habituated processes and create changes to the social construction of reality. They describe a form of consulting wherein the OD practitioner fully joins into the ever-flowing now, recognizing that every conversation they enter into is part of a series of conversations that have already taken place and will continue to take place. Eschewing the use of dialogic events or special techniques, they instead describe a set of micropractices in which the consultant authentically shows up, engages fully, and encourages reflexive and generative conversations.

Patricia Shaw provides a commentary on this chapter, deepening our thinking about the nature of working live. She suggests that dialogic process consultants offer clients comfort with experiences of open-endedness, incompleteness, multiplicity of intentions, and goals—experiences managers think are the antithesis of well-run enterprises. She argues that this is a powerful form of leadership education because the capacity to live in an uncertain, complex world cannot be taught, modeled, or demonstrated, but only emerges in relationships that invite a profound shift in how we experience the world and ourselves. She reminds us that the human tendency to want to make organizational action more controllable leads to various forms of oppression, and points out that our emphasis on narrative modes of sense making allow us to reveal meaning without making the error of trying to assert one truth or reality.

In the concluding chapter we discuss some of the key questions yet to be answered and provide tentative propositions, hoping to provoke more study and writing about the nature of Dialogic Organization Development.

Closing Comments

The seventeen chapters in this book offer a treasure trove of theories, models, and techniques. Some of the authors have read and commented on other authors’ chapters. We have worked hard with each author to integrate the ideas presented and the form of presentation, so that this book reads less like a set of disconnected voices and more like a coherent set of different voices that are aware of each other, in dialogue with each other. We think that this book, unlike most edited volumes, flows well from start to finish, each chapter coming in a more or less logical progression and offering a different and useful set of ideas for the Dialogic OD practitioner. Together, they offer a vision of an inquiry-based change process, able to help individuals, groups, organizations, and communities take on complex challenges and wicked problems better than any other method. Ultimately, we believe that is the ambition and future of Dialogic OD theory and practice.

References

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1

Introduction to the Dialogic Organization Development Mindset

Gervase R. Bushe and Robert J. Marshak

It is our contention that any specific instance of Organization Development practice is a product of the mindset of the practitioner; the combination of theories, beliefs, assumptions, and values that shape how one sees and engages the world. In this chapter we provide a brief introduction to what we call the Dialogic OD Mindset. Because we believe the practice of Dialogic OD involves a way of thinking that is significantly different from Diagnostic OD, we begin by contrasting it with a Diagnostic Mindset. It is important to understand that we do not believe that Dialogic and Diagnostic Mindsets are mutually exclusive. Most OD practitioners will be influenced to some extent by both. However, most OD textbooks currently teach only the Diagnostic Mindset, so we briefly highlight what we think that is and contrast it with the Dialogic Mindset. We then describe eight key premises about the nature of organizations and change, and three underlying change processes that are central to the ways in which Dialogic OD practitioners think about and engage in practices that differ in form and/or intent from the ones described in most OD textbooks. We conclude the chapter by discussing the similarities between the Diagnostic and Dialogic Mindsets, and why they are both variants of organization development.

The Foundational, Diagnostic Mindset

The Diagnostic OD Mindset and associated practices are based substantially on the social psychology and change theories developed in the