With jobs haemorrhaging at every turn, organisation development (OD) can seem laughable, but creating a robust outfit that can surface from the recession as fit and healthy as before is important for those that wish to build capable businesses for the future. Annie Hayes looks at recession-beating OD strategies.
To make matters complex, it is far from clear what people mean when they talk about organisation development (OD). For some, it's not really OD unless its purpose is to change the organisation 'as a whole'. For others, OD refers to any intervention – whatever its scope – provided that it comes from the OD 'toolkit'.
Aficionados of OD would also argue that OD implies a set of humanistic, people-based values that need to inform all OD work.