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.
Author: Renate Werkman,
2010.
Read more