What OD is
Organisational development is the practice of helping organisations, teams and groups work better and change well, by working with the people in them rather than doing change to them.
The classic definition comes from Richard Beckhard (1969): OD is an effort that is planned, organisation-wide and managed from the top, to increase an organisation’s effectiveness and health through planned interventions in its processes, using behavioural-science knowledge. Today’s definitions put more weight on collaboration and values. The OD Network describes the field as building system-wide capacity, effectiveness and vitality, guided by humanistic, developmental, inquiry-based and evidence-informed values.
In practice, “OD” is used in three ways:
- A field of knowledge about how groups and organisations function and change. It draws on social psychology, systems theory, organisational behaviour and, in one strand, psychoanalysis.
- A professional role. Many organisations have OD practitioners or OD teams, often sitting in or near HR, alongside external OD consultants.
- A set of values: participation, respect for people’s own knowledge of their work, learning from experience, and attention to process (how things are done) as well as content (what is done).
OD overlaps with neighbouring fields but is not the same as them. Change management tends to focus on implementing a defined change, such as a new system, structure or policy. Learning and development focuses on individual skills. HR manages the employment relationship. OD is more concerned with the health and capability of the whole system, and with how the people affected take part in the change.
Like psychotherapy, OD is a family of schools rather than one method. Practitioners differ in theory and style, and argue about evidence, much as CBT, systemic and psychodynamic therapists do.
The client is a system, not a person. OD is not therapy for organisations, and no one in the room has agreed to be a patient. Most of what follows comes back to that difference.
A manager asks you to “sort out” a team that keeps arguing. Is that OD, coaching, HR or therapy?
It could be any of them, and that is the first thing to work out. If the question is how the team is set up and works together, it is OD. If it is one person’s performance, it may be coaching or HR. If someone is unwell, it is a clinical matter, outside the contract. Clarifying this is the start of contracting (section 4).
- OD Network: What is OD? Professional definition
- Richard Beckhard and his 1969 definition Background
- Burnes & Cooke (2012), The past, present and future of organization development Field history, Human Relations
Clinical work and OD side by side
Much of OD will feel familiar. Many terms have a clinical cousin. The table shows where the two line up and where they part.
| Clinical / psychodynamic work | OD consultation | |
|---|---|---|
| Who is the client? | A person, couple or family | A team, unit or organisation. The sponsor who commissions the work and the client system it affects are often different people. |
| What starts it? | Referral or self-referral, usually because of distress | A request from a manager or leader, often framed as a problem in someone else (“the team”, “the culture”) |
| The frame | Time, place, fee, confidentiality, therapeutic aims | The contract: purpose, boundaries, who sees what data, what success looks like, how to renegotiate |
| Assessment | History, mental state, formulation | Diagnosis (or “discovery”): interviews, observation, surveys and documents. Data is usually fed back to the system. |
| Making sense | A formulation the clinician holds and shares with care | Working hypotheses developed with the client system and tested in action |
| Intervention | Interpretation, the relationship, technique | Structured conversations, facilitation, redesigning roles and processes, team development, feedback, coaching, large-group events |
| The relationship | Transference and countertransference; therapeutic alliance | The consulting relationship and the consultant’s “use of self”: your experience of the system is data |
| Confidentiality | Strong, with clear legal and safeguarding limits | Negotiated. Often anonymised themes go to the group and sponsor. Every party has to understand this in advance. |
| Outcomes | Symptoms, functioning, wellbeing | How well the system does its work: performance, learning, collaboration, staff experience, and the quality of the service |
| Power | Clinician–patient power, held within a professional ethic | You often work for those with the most power in the system. Who benefits is an ethical question in every engagement. |
In therapy, you help a person who has chosen to come. In OD, you are usually invited by one part of a system to work with other parts that did not choose you. Contracting, consent and neutrality become live questions every time.
Where OD came from
OD grew from two post-war roots, one American and one British. They met early. Knowing both explains why OD can feel both familiar and foreign to clinicians.
The American root: Lewin, action research and T-groups
Kurt Lewin, a German-American social psychologist, argued that you understand a system best by trying to change it. His action research cycle (plan, act, observe, reflect, repeat with the people involved) is still the backbone of OD. In the mid-1940s Lewin and colleagues found that groups learned powerfully from feedback on their own here-and-now behaviour. That became the T-group (training group). In 1947, the year Lewin died, the National Training Laboratories (NTL) began at Bethel, Maine, and T-groups spread through American business and public services. Survey feedback (collecting staff views and feeding them back to the group to act on) grew from the same tradition.
The British root: the Tavistock
In Britain, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts who had worked on wartime problems (officer selection, rehabilitating returning soldiers) founded the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations after the war. Wilfred Bion’s work with groups, Eric Trist’s studies of coal mining, and later Isabel Menzies Lyth’s hospital study brought psychoanalytic and open-systems thinking into the study of work. This strand became known as systems psychodynamics (section 8).
Where they met
In 1947 the Tavistock Institute and Lewin’s Research Center for Group Dynamics at MIT jointly launched the journal Human Relations. So the two roots shared a journal from the start. Over the next decades OD became a recognised profession in the US, mostly drawing on the Lewinian side. The Tavistock tradition stayed closer to psychoanalysis and more influential in the UK, Europe, Australia and South Africa.
- Bion’s wartime work with groups; Tavistock Institute founded
- Lewin and colleagues develop action research and the T-group
- Human Relations launched by the Tavistock and MIT; NTL begins at Bethel, Maine; Lewin dies
- Trist & Bamforth: changing a mining method breaks up working groups (the socio-technical idea)
- Jaques (1955) and Menzies Lyth (1960) on social defences against anxiety; Bion’s Experiences in Groups (1961); first Leicester group relations conference (1957)
- Beckhard’s definition of OD (1969); Schein’s process consultation; Argyris on organisational learning
- Miller & Rice, Systems of Organization: primary task and boundaries
- Diagnostic models (Weisbord 1976; Burke–Litwin 1992); appreciative inquiry (1987); ISPSO founded (1983); The Unconscious at Work (1994)
- Bushe & Marshak name “dialogic OD”; psychological safety becomes a central idea in team research
Blue markers: the British (Tavistock) strand. Green: the American (Lewinian) strand and later developments.
Group therapy and the T-group share ancestors, and Bion’s group theory came from clinical work. If you have run or attended groups, the core idea of learning from what is happening in the room now will be familiar.
T-groups and group relations conferences are for learning, not treatment. People take part as members of organisations, not as patients, and nobody holds clinical responsibility for them.
Lewin is famous for a three-step model of change: “unfreeze, change, refreeze”. Cummings, Bridgman and Brown (2016) show that Lewin barely wrote about it; the tidy model was largely built by later textbook writers. His real legacy is action research and group dynamics. It is a useful reminder to check the sources behind simple models.
- Action research Overview
- T-groups Overview
- Cummings, Bridgman & Brown (2016), Unfreezing change as three steps Open-access paper, Human Relations
- Fraher (2004), Systems psychodynamics: the formative years at the Tavistock Institute History of Psychology
- Human Relations (journal) Background
The consulting stance
Before any model or tool, OD is a way of being with a client system. Edgar Schein called it process consultation.
Three ways to help
Schein distinguished three models of helping:
- The expert. The client knows the problem and buys an answer: a survey, a restructure, a training course. This works only if the client has diagnosed the problem correctly.
- The doctor. The consultant investigates, diagnoses and prescribes. This assumes the client gives accurate information, accepts the diagnosis and follows the prescription. In organisations, often none of these hold.
- The process consultant. Consultant and client inquire together. The client keeps ownership of the problem and learns to solve similar problems later. Schein’s advice: start here, and move into expert or doctor mode only once you understand the situation.
Process consultation will feel close to psychodynamic and person-centred practice: not knowing too early, staying curious, attending to what happens between you and the client, and helping the client think rather than thinking for them.
Organisations often want the doctor. A consultant who only reflects can be experienced as unhelpful or evasive. OD practitioners move between modes on purpose, and sometimes give direct advice, data or a recommendation.
The consulting cycle
Most OD work follows a version of the action-research cycle:
- Entry. Who called, why now, and what did they ask for? The first request is data. It is rarely the whole problem.
- Contracting. Agree purpose, sponsor, client system, boundaries, confidentiality, timescale and how you will both know if it helped. Re-contract when things shift.
- Data gathering. Interviews, focus groups, observation, surveys, documents, and your own experience of the system.
- Feedback and sense-making. Share themes with the people who gave the data, and make sense of them together. How the system responds to its own data is often the most useful information you get.
- Action. Plan and carry out changes with the people involved: in structure, roles, processes, relationships or ways of meeting.
- Review and exit. Did it help, for whom, and what else changed? Leave the system more able to do this itself.
A clinical referral comes with an implicit frame. An organisational request does not. Questions to settle early: Who is my client: the person paying, the team, or the service users? What will the sponsor see? What if the data points at the sponsor? What happens to people who decline to take part? Peter Block’s Flawless Consulting is the standard practical guide.
A director asks you to interview her team and tell her who the problem is. What do you do?
Re-contract before you start. Naming individuals to a manager turns consultation into covert performance management and destroys trust. A common alternative: interview the team on condition that you feed back anonymised themes to everyone, including the director, and work on them together.
- Schein, A general philosophy of helping: process consultation MIT Sloan Management Review
- Block, Flawless Consulting Practical book on contracting
- Lawlor et al. (2021), Systems psychodynamics and organisational consultancy Book chapter
Making sense of a system
OD has its own versions of a formulation framework: models that tell you where to look and how the parts connect.
Open systems
The basic idea under almost every OD model: an organisation is an open system. It takes in inputs (people, money, referrals, information), transforms them through its work, and sends out outputs (services, products) into an environment that keeps changing. Trouble in one part shows up somewhere else. A problem that looks like poor morale on one team may begin in how work is handed over from another.
Three widely used models
Weisbord’s six boxes (1976)
Six places to look: purposes, structure, relationships, rewards, leadership and helpful mechanisms (planning, budgeting, information systems), all inside an environment. Weisbord also asks you to compare the formal system with the informal one: what people actually do.
Like a biopsychosocial checklist: a way to avoid fixing on the first explanation.
Burke–Litwin (1992)
Twelve linked factors. It separates transformational ones (external environment, mission and strategy, leadership, culture), which need deep change, from transactional ones (structure, management practices, systems, climate, motivation), which change through everyday management.
Like telling apart a presenting problem from an underlying pattern that needs longer-term work.
Schein’s levels of culture (1990)
Artefacts (what you can see: dress, layout, rituals), espoused values (what people say matters), and basic underlying assumptions (taken-for-granted beliefs that really drive behaviour). Culture change that only touches the first two rarely lasts.
Like the difference between what a patient says and the unconscious assumptions that organise their behaviour.
Clinicians are good at holding several explanations at once, noticing what is not being said, and treating the referral as only part of the story. All of these transfer directly to organisational diagnosis.
Diagnosis in OD is usually done with the system and fed back to it, not held privately by the expert. Many practitioners now question “diagnosis” altogether. Bushe and Marshak’s distinction between diagnostic and dialogic OD (section 9) is about exactly this.
A service has high sickness absence. A manager says the staff are “burnt out and need resilience training”. Using the six boxes, where else would you look?
Purposes (is the task clear and achievable?), structure (caseloads, rotas, handovers), rewards (is the work recognised?), relationships (with managers and other teams), leadership (is anyone holding the problem?), and helpful mechanisms (do the IT and referral systems help or hinder?). Resilience training targets individuals. The causes may lie in the system.
- Weisbord (1976), Organizational diagnosis: six places to look for trouble Original paper (PDF)
- Burke & Litwin (1992), A causal model of organisational performance and change NHS Education for Scotland summary
- Schein (1990), Organizational culture American Psychologist (PDF)
- Trist & Bamforth (1951), the longwall coal-getting study Foundational socio-technical study
Change, loss and “resistance”
This is where a clinical background helps most, and where OD’s everyday language can sound oddly thin to clinicians.
Organisational life often talks about “change resistance” as a problem to overcome. A clinician will recognise something else: people grieving. Two writers make this link explicit.
- Peter Marris (Loss and Change, 1974) argued from studies of bereavement and of communities being rehoused that people need continuity of meaning. Any change, even a welcome one, breaks the link between what we did and why it mattered. The loss has to be worked through before people can commit to the new.
- William Bridges distinguished change (the external event: a new structure starts on Monday) from transition (the inner process of letting go). Transition has three phases: an ending, a confusing neutral zone, and a new beginning. Organisations usually plan for the change and ignore the transition.
Mourning, ambivalence, idealising the past and blaming the new: you know these from clinical work. You can help leaders see that “why won’t they get on board?” is often “they have not been allowed to grieve.”
Not all resistance is loss or defence. People may object because the change is badly designed, costs them real things, or is simply wrong. In organisations, calling an objection “resistance” can silence people who are right. Treat it as information first.
Survey research supports a link between how people defend against anxiety and how they respond to change. Bovey and Hede surveyed 615 staff across nine organisations and found that some defence mechanisms were associated with intention to resist change. This is an association, not a demonstration of cause.
Six months after two teams merged, staff still use the old forms and talk about “how we used to do it”, although they agree the merger made sense. What might be going on?
Possibly an ending that was never marked: the old teams were not given a chance to acknowledge what they lost. Check the practical explanations too. Are the new forms worse? Was anyone trained? Both may be true.
Learning, defences and safety
Mainstream OD has developed its own ideas about defences, without using psychoanalytic language.
Single-loop and double-loop learning
Chris Argyris and Donald Schön described two kinds of organisational learning. Single-loop learning corrects errors within the existing rules, like a thermostat switching the heating on when it gets cold. Double-loop learning questions the rules themselves: why is the thermostat set to that temperature? Argyris found that professionals and managers are often good at single-loop learning and bad at double-loop learning. Under threat, they protect themselves with defensive routines: smoothing things over, making issues undiscussable, then making the undiscussability undiscussable.
Psychological safety
Amy Edmondson (1999) studied hospital and manufacturing teams. She found that teams learn better when members believe it is safe to take interpersonal risks: to admit mistakes, ask questions or disagree. She called this psychological safety. It is now one of the most used ideas in team development, including in healthcare safety work.
Defensive routines are close to what you would call resistance or avoidance in therapy. Psychological safety is close to the conditions for a working alliance. Clinicians can often spot when a team meeting has become undiscussable.
These ideas work at the level of behaviour and group norms, not inner life. The intervention is usually to change how meetings, feedback and decisions are run, not to interpret anyone’s motives.
A team keeps having the same incident and writes the same action (“remind staff of the procedure”) each time. Single or double loop?
Single loop. A double-loop question would ask why the procedure keeps failing, what makes it hard to follow, and what the team believes about who is to blame when things go wrong.
- Double-loop learning Overview with references
- Argyris (1991), Teaching smart people how to learn Harvard Business Review (PDF)
- Edmondson (1999), Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams Administrative Science Quarterly (PDF)
The psychodynamic strand: systems psychodynamics
This is the part of OD built from the ideas you trained in. It joins psychoanalytic thinking about anxiety and defence with open-systems thinking about task, boundary and role.
The core claim: work stirs up feelings, and some work does so by its nature (caring for people in distress, holding risk, deciding who gets scarce help). Groups and organisations develop shared ways of managing those feelings. Some help the work. Some quietly replace it. The consultant studies the person-in-role-in-system: not people’s inner lives as such, but how task, structure and emotional life meet.
Key ideas
Work group and basic assumptions
Bion: every group works on its stated task (the work group) while also acting as if it had met for another purpose. In dependency the group waits to be looked after by a leader. In fight/flight it attacks or avoids an enemy. In pairing it pins its hope on a pair or a future saviour. Later writers added oneness and me-ness.
You may have seen these in group therapy. Here they are read against the group’s work task.
Valency
A person’s readiness to take up a certain role in a group’s emotional life: always the critic, always the rescuer. The group recruits; the person obliges.
Close to repetition and role responsiveness, but read as a fit between person and group.
Social defences against anxiety
Jaques (1955) and Menzies Lyth (1960): routines and structures that protect staff from the anxiety of the work. In Menzies Lyth’s hospital: task lists that split up the nurse–patient relationship, depersonalised patients, checking and re-checking decisions, and pushing responsibility upward. They eased anxiety but made the service rigid and stopped people developing.
Defence mechanisms, built into the structure rather than held by a person.
Splitting and projection
Under pressure, groups put all the good in one place and all the bad in another: frontline and management, clinicians and finance. One person or team can become the scapegoat that carries a problem for everyone.
Kleinian ideas, applied between groups.
Containment
What lets a system think under pressure: clear roles, protected time to reflect, supervision, leaders who can hear bad news. In organisations the container is the structure, not one person.
Bion’s container–contained. Your job is to help build containment, not to become it.
Boundary, authority, role, task (BART)
Four questions for any group. What is the primary task? Who is authorised to do what (from above, from below, from within)? What roles, formal and informal? Which boundaries of time, task and territory?
The organisational equivalent of the frame.
Organisation-in-the-mind
The picture of the organisation each member carries: a family, a machine, a parent who never notices. These pictures shape behaviour and are treated as data about the organisation.
Like internal objects, but about an institution.
The consultant’s experience
What you feel working in a system (hopeless, idealised, dismissed) may mirror what is happening inside it. Record it separately from what you observe, and test it.
Countertransference, used with the same discipline and supervision.
How the ideas are used
Systems-psychodynamic consultants work through role consultation (one-to-one work on how someone takes up their role), team and organisational consultation, group relations conferences (temporary learning organisations where members study authority and group life as it happens; the first Leicester Conference was in 1957), organisational observation (adapted from infant observation), and social dreaming.
You already have the vocabulary, the tolerance for not knowing, and the habit of using your own experience as data. Many people from clinical backgrounds find this the most natural way into OD.
An organisation is not a patient. “Defensive” describes a pattern, not a diagnosis. Interpretations are offered as working hypotheses about the system, to people who did not ask for therapy. Jaques, one of the founders, later argued that most of what gets called unconscious is really poor structure and unclear accountability.
On a support line, night-shift calls have become shorter and more scripted, and more calls are passed to supervisors. What would a social-defence reading suggest, and what else should you check?
The scripts and upward referral may be protecting counsellors from staying with callers’ distress, much as task lists did on Menzies Lyth’s wards. Before you say so, check the other explanations: a new call-time target, fewer experienced staff on nights, or a recent incident review that made deciding feel risky. Several may be true at once.
- Obholzer & Roberts (eds), The Unconscious at Work (2nd ed., 2019) The best first book for people from health and care
- Menzies (1960), Social systems as a defence against anxiety Classic case study
- Smith (2014), Work from the 1950s that can help us reform healthcare today Accessible summary, BMJ blog
- Green & Molenkamp (2005), The BART system Short practical paper (PDF)
- Petriglieri & Petriglieri (2020), The return of the oppressed Scholarly review, Academy of Management Annals
- French & Simpson (2010), The “work group”: redressing the balance in Bion Human Relations
- Krantz (2010), Social defences and twenty-first century organizations British Journal of Psychotherapy
- Armstrong (2005), Organization in the Mind Book
- Jaques (1995), Why the psychoanalytical approach to understanding organizations is dysfunctional Critique from within
- Tavistock Institute: Group Relations · Social Dreaming Methods
Strengths-based and dialogic OD
A large part of current OD practice works almost the opposite way to depth psychology. It is worth knowing well, because you will meet it everywhere.
Appreciative inquiry
Developed by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva in the 1980s, appreciative inquiry (AI) starts from what works rather than what is wrong. A typical cycle has four stages: Discover (what gives life here at its best?), Dream (what could be?), Design (what should be?) and Destiny or Deliver (how do we make it happen?). The theory is that organisations move in the direction of what they repeatedly ask about.
Diagnostic and dialogic OD
Gervase Bushe and Robert Marshak (2009) described two families of OD. Diagnostic OD treats the organisation as something that can be assessed against a model, then changed by planned intervention. Dialogic OD treats an organisation as made of conversations and stories. Change comes from changing the conversations: who takes part, which questions get asked, and what new language emerges. Dialogic methods include appreciative inquiry, Open Space, World Café and other large-group events.
If you know solution-focused, narrative or systemic family therapy, dialogic OD will feel familiar: meaning is co-constructed, and changing the story changes the system.
For someone trained psychodynamically, the emphasis on the positive can feel like a defence against looking at difficulty. That tension is real and is debated within OD. Equally, a depth-oriented consultant can fall into always looking for what is wrong. Each approach can correct the other.
Is appreciative inquiry just “being positive”?
Not in its stronger forms. Bushe and Kassam’s review of published AI cases found that the transformational ones changed how people thought, by producing new knowledge or new metaphors. They also let action emerge improvisationally rather than through a fixed plan. Cases that only focused on positives tended to produce smaller changes.
- Bushe & Marshak, Diagnostic vs dialogic organisation development Authors’ summary of their 2009 paper
- Bushe & Kassam (2005), When is appreciative inquiry transformational? Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 41(2)
- An appreciative inquiry framework Short practitioner summary (PDF)
What the work looks like
OD interventions are usually grouped by the level of the system they work with.
| Level | Typical work | Clinical cousin |
|---|---|---|
| Individual in role | Leadership coaching, role consultation, 360° feedback, supporting people into new roles | Individual work, but focused on the role and its context, not the person’s history |
| Team | Team development days, process consultation in meetings, clarifying roles and decision rights, reflective practice groups, team reviews after incidents | Group work, supervision groups, Balint-style case discussion |
| Between groups | Working on interfaces: handovers, referral pathways, conflict between professions or departments | Family and systemic work: the problem lives in the relationships |
| Whole organisation | Culture work, mergers and restructures, staff surveys with feedback, strategy processes, large-group events, values work | Service development, therapeutic community work |
| Beyond the organisation | Partnerships across agencies, system-wide change, place-based work | Multi-agency practice |
A worked example
A mental health service asks for help because “morale is low on the duty team”. Here is how an OD engagement might go:
- Entry: the service manager wants a wellbeing day. The OD practitioner asks why now. A senior clinician left recently, two serious incidents happened, and there is a new waiting-time target.
- Contract: agree to spend six weeks understanding the duty system, with anonymised themes going back to the whole team and the manager together. Clinical concerns about individual staff will go through normal line management, not the consultant.
- Data: interviews with duty staff, managers and partner teams; sitting in on handovers; looking at referral and incident data; noting the consultant’s own experience. (Everyone seems to expect to be blamed.)
- Sense-making: themes fed back in a facilitated session. Working hypothesis: since the incidents, decisions are pushed up to the senior on shift, who is now overloaded. The waiting-time target rewards closing calls quickly, which cuts across careful risk assessment.
- Action: the team and manager redesign the duty rota and decision rules, set up a fortnightly case-discussion group, and take the target conflict to senior management.
- Review: three months on, look at escalations, staff experience and service-user feedback. Then the consultant steps back.
The wellbeing day may still happen. But the work addressed structure, task and anxiety together, and the team did most of the thinking.
What carries over, and what to put down
A summary of the crossings made throughout this page. Cilliers and Henning’s study of clinical psychologists moving into OD describes this transition from the inside.
Listening for process: what is happening, not only what is said.
Tolerating not knowing and resisting premature solutions.
Formulation: holding several explanations and linking past to present.
Using yourself as data, with supervision.
Working with groups and noticing group dynamics.
Understanding loss, anxiety and defence in change.
Ethical seriousness about boundaries and confidentiality.
Treating the person as the unit. In OD, task, role and structure come first.
Interpreting individuals. Commenting on someone’s inner life at work is almost always out of contract.
Assuming the frame. Every engagement has to be contracted, often more than once.
Holding the formulation privately. In OD, sense-making is shared.
Looking only for pathology. Strengths-based approaches have real value.
Ignoring business language. Strategy, budgets and performance are the system’s reality too.
Ethical questions that become sharper
- Dual roles. If you are a clinician in the same organisation, can you be its OD consultant? Who knows which hat you are wearing?
- Consent. The sponsor’s permission is not the same as each person’s consent. What happens to people who would rather not take part?
- Power. You are often paid by those with most power. Whose interests does the work serve? Do not let psychological language hide structural problems such as unsafe staffing, discrimination or unfair pay.
- When clinical need appears. Someone discloses distress during an interview. You are not their therapist. Know in advance how you will signpost or refer.
- Culture. Most OD theory comes from North American and European institutions. Ideas about authority, voice, hierarchy and emotional expression need translating, not just applying, in other settings, including much of Asia.
- Cilliers & Henning (2021), Clinical psychologists’ role transition towards becoming OD consultants Qualitative study, open access
- Harkins et al. (2021), Group relations conferences in China 2014–2019 Cross-cultural translation
What the evidence says
If you are used to evidence hierarchies in mental health, OD will feel thin. That is partly because organisation-level change is hard to study. It is also because parts of the field have not tried very hard.
OD in general
Robertson, Roberts and Porras (1993) meta-analysed 52 evaluations of planned organisational change. They found that interventions did change work settings, though modestly, and that changes in individual behaviour were associated with changes in organisational outcomes. But not all OD helps. An earlier large-system study by Porras and Wilkins (1979) found mostly negative effects on attitudes and behaviour. More broadly, an overview of 52 systematic reviews (Aust et al., 2023) found moderate or strong evidence for some kinds of organisation-level intervention on the psychosocial work environment, health and retention, but not for others.
Appreciative inquiry
Mostly case studies. Bushe and Kassam’s meta-case analysis found that only some published AI cases produced transformational change (see section 9).
Systems psychodynamics
Strong as theory, history and rich case description: Menzies Lyth’s study, institutional consultations and recent ethnographies such as Fitzsimons et al. (2024) on “defensive organising”. Weak on independent, comparative evidence that it improves organisation-level outcomes. Geldenhuys (2022) notes that much of the evaluation comes from inside the same practitioner community.
| Type of evidence | What it can tell you | What it cannot |
|---|---|---|
| Historical and conceptual work | Where ideas came from; what they mean | Whether applying them helps |
| Case studies and ethnography | How processes unfold; mechanisms worth testing | How often, or compared with what |
| Surveys and associations | That things move together | Cause and effect |
| Controlled and comparative evaluations | Whether a defined intervention changed defined outcomes | Why it worked, or whether it transfers to your setting |
There are few randomised trials, interventions are rarely standardised, and outcomes are contested. Is success productivity, staff wellbeing, or service quality? Expect to judge each claim by its design, and to evaluate your own work: agree outcomes at the contracting stage and track them, including unintended effects.
- Robertson, Roberts & Porras (1993), Dynamics of planned organizational change Meta-analysis (PDF)
- Porras & Wilkins (1979), Organization development in a large system Evaluation with negative findings
- Aust et al. (2023), How effective are organizational-level interventions? Overview of systematic reviews
- Geldenhuys (2022), Systems psychodynamics as an OD intervention Conceptual analysis, open access
- Fitzsimons et al. (2024), The fury beneath the morphing: a theory of defensive organizing Longitudinal ethnography
Getting started
A first reading path
- The Unconscious at Work (Obholzer & Roberts): the gentlest bridge from clinical work, with examples from health and social care.
- Schein on process consultation: the consulting stance.
- Block, Flawless Consulting: contracting and feedback, practically.
- Weisbord’s six boxes and Schein on culture: how to look at a whole system.
- Bushe & Marshak on dialogic OD: the other half of the field.
- Menzies Lyth (1960) and Jaques (1995) read together: the classic case and the strongest critique from inside the field.
Learning by experience
- A group relations conference (Tavistock’s Leicester Conference, or conferences run by sister institutions in many countries) is often where the ideas make sense from the inside.
- Practise contracting on small pieces of work: a team away-day, a meeting review. Get supervision from someone experienced in OD as well as clinical supervision.
- Professional communities: the OD Network for mainstream OD, and ISPSO (International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations, founded 1983) for the psychodynamic strand.
Glossary: clinical ↔ OD
- Client system
- The people and units the work is meant to help. Compare: the patient, but plural and often not the one who asked for help.
- Sponsor
- The person who commissions and usually pays for the work. Compare: the referrer, but with far more say over the work.
- Contract / contracting
- The agreed purpose, boundaries and terms of the work, renegotiated as needed. Compare: the frame.
- Diagnosis / discovery
- Gathering and making sense of data about the system, usually with it. Compare: assessment and formulation.
- Working hypothesis
- A provisional explanation offered to the system to test. Compare: a formulation or interpretation, but shared and revisable.
- Intervention
- Anything the consultant does that affects the system, including asking a question. Compare: broadly the same idea.
- Process vs content
- How a group works versus what it works on. Compare: process and content in therapy.
- Primary task
- What a group or organisation must do to fulfil its purpose. Compare: the therapeutic task.
- Use of self
- The consultant’s reactions and presence as instruments of inquiry. Compare: countertransference.
- Social defence
- A structure or routine that protects people from the anxieties of the work. Compare: defence mechanisms, held by the system.
- Psychological safety
- A shared belief that it is safe to take interpersonal risks in a team. Compare: conditions for a working alliance.
- Action research
- Cycles of planning, acting, observing and reflecting with the people involved. Compare: reflective practice, done collectively.
- Stakeholders
- Everyone affected by or able to affect the work. Compare: the family and wider network around a patient.
All sources
Every source linked on this page, grouped for independent reading. Book links that go to a library catalogue search are marked.
Definitions and history of OD
- OD Network, What is OD?
- Richard Beckhard (1969 definition)
- Burnes, B. & Cooke, B. (2012). The past, present and future of organization development. Human Relations.
- Cummings, S., Bridgman, T. & Brown, K. G. (2016). Unfreezing change as three steps. Human Relations.
- Action research; T-groups; Human Relations (journal)
- Fraher, A. L. (2004). Systems psychodynamics: the formative years. History of Psychology.
- Trist, E. & Bamforth, K. (1951). Social and psychological consequences of the longwall method of coal-getting. Human Relations.
Consulting, diagnosis and change
- Schein, E. A general philosophy of helping: process consultation. MIT Sloan Management Review.
- Schein, E. (1990). Organizational culture. American Psychologist.
- Block, P. Flawless Consulting (catalogue search).
- Weisbord, M. (1976). Organizational diagnosis: six places to look for trouble.
- Burke, W. & Litwin, G. (1992). A causal model of organisational performance and change (summary).
- Marris, P. (1974). Loss and Change.
- Bridges’ transition model (overview).
- Bovey, W. & Hede, A. (2001). Resistance to organisational change: the role of defence mechanisms.
- Double-loop learning; Argyris, C. (1991). Teaching smart people how to learn.
- Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams.
- Bushe, G. & Marshak, R. Diagnostic vs dialogic organisation development.
- Bushe, G. & Kassam, A. (2005). When is appreciative inquiry transformational? JABS 41(2).
- Appreciative inquiry framework (practitioner summary).
Systems psychodynamics
- Obholzer, A. & Roberts, V. Z. (eds) (2019). The Unconscious at Work, 2nd ed.
- Bion, W. (1961). Experiences in Groups (catalogue search).
- Jaques, E. (1955). Social systems as a defence against persecutory and depressive anxiety (catalogue search).
- Menzies, I. (1960). A case-study in the functioning of social systems as a defence against anxiety. Human Relations.
- Smith, R. (2014). Work from the 1950s that can help us reform healthcare today. BMJ blog.
- Miller, E. & Rice, A. K. (1967). Systems of Organization.
- Green, Z. & Molenkamp, R. (2005). The BART system of group and organizational analysis.
- Armstrong, D. (2005). Organization in the Mind (catalogue search).
- Krantz, J. (2010). Social defences and twenty-first century organizations. British Journal of Psychotherapy.
- French, R. & Simpson, P. (2010). The “work group”: redressing the balance in Bion’s Experiences in Groups.
- Petriglieri, G. & Petriglieri, J. L. (2020). The return of the oppressed: a systems psychodynamic approach to organization studies.
- Lawlor, D. et al. (2021). The systems psychodynamics approach and Systems psychodynamics and organisational consultancy.
- Jaques, E. (1995). Why the psychoanalytical approach to understanding organizations is dysfunctional.
- Tavistock Institute: Group Relations; Social Dreaming; ISPSO history.
Evidence and transitions into OD
- Robertson, P., Roberts, D. & Porras, J. (1993). Dynamics of planned organizational change. Academy of Management Journal.
- Porras, J. & Wilkins, A. (1979). Organization development in a large system: an empirical assessment.
- Aust, B. et al. (2023). How effective are organizational-level interventions?
- Geldenhuys, D. (2022). Systems psychodynamics as an OD intervention: a neuroscientific perspective.
- Fitzsimons, D. et al. (2024). The fury beneath the morphing. Academy of Management Journal.
- Cilliers, F. & Henning, S. (2021). Clinical psychologists’ role transition towards becoming OD consultants.
- Harkins, S. B. et al. (2021). Group relations conferences in China 2014 to 2019.