Dialogic Organization Development From a dialogic perspective, change results from transformational conversations

Dialogic Organization Development or Dialogic OD, for short, is about “changing the conversations” that shape everyday thinking and behavior.

Diagnostic OD

Organization Development (OD) has been around since the early 50s and traditionally has focused on what is termed diagnostic OD.

OD is the theory and practice of planned, systematic change in the employees’ attitudes, beliefs, and values by creating and reinforcing long-term training programs.

OD is action-oriented. It starts with a careful organization-wide analysis of the current situation and future requirements. It employs techniques of behavioral sciences such as behavior modeling, sensitivity training, and transactional analysis.

Its objective is to enable the organization to adapt better to the fast-changing external environment of new markets, regulations, and technologies.

This is often termed a diagnostic approach to OD or simply diagnostic OD.

In the last few years, a new approach to OD has started to emerge called Dialogic OD.

Dialogic OD

There is considerable overlap between Conversational Leadership and an emerging form of Organization Development known as Dialogic OD.

The fundamental difference seems to be that while Conversational Leadership is primarily about a set of behaviors adopted by everyone in an organization, Dialogic OD is more about conversational interventions by OD practitioners and consultants.

Many of the tools and techniques are the same.

The chief advocates of dialogical OD are Professor Gervase Bushe and Robert Marshak.

Gervase is a Professor of Leadership and Organization Development at the Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada.

Bob Marshak is a Senior Associate with Strategic Concepts International and Senior Scholar in Residence at the School of Public Affairs, American University, Washington, DC.

Dialogic OD is a label used to group dozens of organizational development approaches, such as Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space, Future Search, and World Café.

From a dialogic perspective, change results from transformational conversations.

It is about “changing the conversations” that shape everyday thinking and behavior by:

• involving more and different people in the change discussions
• altering how and which people engage with each other
• by stimulating different perspectives to shape how people think about things

Therefore as an alternative to change driven by diagnosing how to objectively align or re-align different elements of the organization or system (strategies, structures, people practices, etc.), the dialogic perspective invites us to consider how to induce new ways of thinking by altering the ongoing organizational conversations that continuously create, re-create, and frame understanding and action.

In dialogical approaches, the focus is on encouraging new thinking in the people who are the targets of change themselves – new thinking that is not prescribed by some expert or management consultant, but that emerges individually and collectively from going through the change process.

The creation of new perspectives, images, stories, texts, narratives impacts how people think and make sense of things – and that, in turn, impacts how they act.

Conversational Leadership and Dialogic OD

While there is considerable overlap between Conversational Leadership and Dialogic OD, the two concepts are fundamentally different.

Conversational Leadership is primarily about behaviors that anyone can adopt within an organization or without, while Dialogic OD is about organizational interventions by OD practitioners and consultants.

Many of the tools and techniques are similar, however.

Resources

• Wikipedia: Organizational Development
• Wikipedia: Dialogic
• Wikipedia: Dialogical Learning
• Wikipedia: Dialogical Analysis
• NTL’s “Conference on the New OD”:  Turning Thought into Action by Katherine Farquhar
• The Future of Organization Development. Dialogic OD: Turning Away from Diagnosis by Gervase R. Bushe
• An Introduction to Advances in Dialogic Organization Development by Robert J. Marshak and Gervase R. Bushe
• Revisioning Organization Development Diagnostic and Dialogic Premises and Patterns of Practice by Gervase R. Bushe and Robert J. Marshak
• Dialogic Organization Development by Gervase R. Bushe and Robert j. Marshak
• Dialogic Organization Development: The Theory and Practice of Transformational Change

Posts that link to this post

•  The Dialogic Mindset Leading Emergent Change in a Complex World

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