Reinventing organization development: How a sensemaking perspective can enrich OD theories and interventions

Abstract

Organization development (OD) has traditionally devoted much attention to organizational change. Recently, however, questions have emerged concerning OD's relevance to solve issues of stagnation in change processes. In this article, it is argued that traditional OD's basic assumptions about people, organization and change may cause a certain myopia with regard to problems that result from patterns of action that people have constructed in their mutual interactions and that may lead to stagnation or deadlock. The goal of this article is to study how a sensemaking approach might help OD practitioners to better understand the phenomena with which they are confronted in organizational change and enrich OD interventions by a more explicit focus on actors' habituated patterns of sensemaking and action. This article describes such a pattern in a police organization, its implications for the change process and lessons for OD assumptions, theory, and interventions. © 2010 Taylor & Francis.