A Self-Directed Journey towards Organizational Development Mastery
A curated resource for exploring Organizational Development competence.
Start your journey towards Mastery
Our Purpose
Two Parts
The content of the app comes in two parts: 11 foundational OD competences and a growing list of OD specialisms. Taken together, these reflect the richness of the field of OD. The processes suggested in the app are intended to be used first and foremost with respect to the competences. This is because the specialisms, while important, are necessarily dependent upon the OD competences. Professional OD mastery, including the practice of OD specialisms, must be strongly rooted and grounded in the foundational OD competences. The app reflects this reality, being organized with a strong focus firstly on the foundational competences before considering the OD specialisms.Three characteristics
- The app is first and foremost an educational tool. It lays out the principal patterns that characterize competent OD performance and practice, enabling individual OD practitioners or OD teams to make their own decisions about what they wish to strengthen and develop as they seek mastery in areas to which they are called and motivated to serve.
- The app is a user-centric, self-directed app. Its content reflects the practice patterns of OD competence which are NOT ‘compulsory’ competences imposed by any external bodies. Responsibility and control therefore are firmly in the hands of the practitioners, trusting that they are the ones best placed to take ownership for their personal OD developmental journey.
The self-directed character of this process is a crucial feature that reflects the ‘life-long learning’ values of OD. The app exists to promote continuous development among its users. It is of course true that there is a wide and diverse range of OD practitioners, who enter into the field of OD via different routes and at different stages in their careers. As such, they bring unique experience and knowledge in their specialisms, reflecting the rich variety of their professional knowledge/skills and life histories. This diversity makes it unhelpful and unnecessary to speak of mandatory competences. Successful practitioners are typically competent in many areas but not in all. And all competent practitioners, as life-long learners, will take personal responsibility to pursue their on-going professional development. - The app is a free community resource for all to use. As a community app, users from different cultural backgrounds will have different experiences in their use of the app. For that reason, their continuous and thoughtful feedback to the content and processes of the app will be heartily welcome. In this way, the educational and informative value of this resource for exploring the remarkable richness of the manifold OD patterns of professional practice can be kept up to date and relevant for the diverse global community of OD practitioners.
Who is this app for?
The intended users are primarily individual practitioners who are encouraged to take a self-directed approach to growing their OD mastery. However, the content of the app should also be useful to internal OD teams whose desire is to increase their collective effectiveness and mastery in doing OD within their organisation contexts. Of course, the app will also be useful for educational institutions, educators and developers, as they design programmes and curricula to aid the development journey of OD practitioners in a more systemic way.
As well, the app should be useful for professional associations as a part of the range of services they offer to their members. By encouraging members to take the app seriously, these associations can add to the services with which they support their members. These might include, for example, offering developmental coaches to support their members to undertake the work of the app, or offering mentoring and coaching support post self-assessment. By asking members to pursue their own sense of mastery, professional organization can offer bundles of services (e.g., coaching, specific developmental programmes, etc.) to their members which may also help the associations to generate income.
Finally, the app can be useful to employers who (with appropriate permission from the sponsoring organisation – Quality-Equality, Ltd.) may adapt the app for internal use, with the app providing a frame of reference for things like informing their recruitment/selection processes, guiding performance management conversations, identifying talent and making promotion decisions.
Why This App?
Note from sponsor
It is hoped that all who use this app will become increasingly aware of the rich set of practice standards in the field of OD, with the app serving as a means to support and grow effective and productive OD patterns of practice, generating positive impacts for clients, organizations, communities and society.
To those ends, the app attempts to lay out the contours of the OD practitioner’s professional journey, the ‘must see’ points of interest and some rules of the road. The app will be successful to the extent that its users are provoked towards greater mastery as OD professionals.
This app has been sponsored by an Oxford, UK based OD consultancy firm, Quality and Equality Limited, with the intent to serve the global OD community as a free resource.
Please draw attention to this resource widely in your network to build the future of the field of OD.
Note on language
Key words and phrases in the app include:
• Foundational OD Competence,
• OD • Specialism,
• Personal OD Competency Profile,
• Professional OD Performance Pattern,
• Professional OD Practice Pattern.
The latter two concepts are from HSD (Human System Dynamics). HSD encourages all practitioners to become savvy in recognizing their personal practice patterns and how they lead to various types of performance patterns and outcomes.
OD, like every field, has its required professional patterns of performance which are about outcomes, processes in action, and results which those who draw on OD services and expertise would expect.
To achieve those outcomes and results, effective practices (recognizable patterns) are required, and these practice patterns also help to make the field of OD distinct. To acquire and develop these practice patterns, practitioners need to identify what are the field standards of OD, and what is required of them as practitioners as they pursue mastery in areas toward which they feel motivated and to which they feel called.
An Overview of the App
There are two aspects of the app: (1) the Content Sections and (2) the Process Steps.
(1) Contents Sections
Foundational OD competences
The foundational OD competences content has been identified and reinforced by numerous researchers and writers for more than seven decades. (Cf. “Organisation Development Core Principles, Competency, and the Way Forward?“) ‘Foundational’ means that these competences are the building blocks and scaffolding that support patterns of professional OD practice.
In this section, 11 foundational competences are identified, each with a short description of what the competence is and a set of elements that help to illustrate what the competence looks like in action.
OD Specialisms
The field of OD has a lot of conceptual ‘relatives’, ‘off shoots’, and ‘partners.’ Some preceded the development of OD, some came after, and some have only recently emerged. Most OD practitioners become interested and have invested time and effort to be experts in a few of these areas. There is continuous growth of these areas, with nearly 30 having so far been noted. The specialisms referenced in this app are thus an emerging list, trusting that app users will continue to contribute additional specialisms in the future.
The specialism descriptions in the app have been contributed by individual OD practitioners who have each generously shared their experience with respect to their area of specialization—how they arrived at it, what are its characteristics and what is involved if an OD practitioner wished to pursue mastery in that specialism. The contributors also include lists of what they have found to be useful resources. Many of them are open to being contacted directly by app users. The opinions expressed in these OD specialisms are solely owned by the contributors who wrote them.
Build a personal OD competence profile
This section provides a form with instructions, guiding the app user to consider and construct what will be a wholly personalized profile of their OD professional practice pattern, given their future aspirations.
Self-assessment process
Once the Personal OD competency profile is completed, this section will provide guidance to help the app user through a process of self-assessment using their personal construct as the yardstick. The data generated from this will enable the user to move on to the next section.
Personal Development Plan
With their Personal OD competency profile and their self-assessment insights in hand, this section provides resources and guidance to create a personal learning plan for the user’s professional development over the next 12 – 18 months, during which time they will be accountable to themselves in those areas that they concluded were important for their OD journey towards growing mastery.
The app, in order to facilitate and encourage this important step, provides some useful resources, including a sample personal development form and the ability of a registered user to save their work within their personal space in the app–to draft their own notes, review, revise, and print as needed.
Giving Feedback
Intended to be a living resource, the app is a tool that can be used by the global OD community both now and in the future. It is not imagined that the app is comprehensive or definitive. Rather it will always be a work in progress. To that end, in this section, users are warmly encouraged to provide timely feedback about the app. The importance of this cannot be overstated. By sharing their experience of the app—what did and did not work, what was and was not helpful, and their impressions generally—users will shape the future of the app as a genuine and relevant benefit for the global OD community.
(2) Process Steps
The first invitation is simply to review the app content overall, giving particular attention to the competences and OD specialisms. This step allows you to explore how the content of the app is laid out, becoming familiar with the various parts and distinctions. No decisions should be made in this step. You are merely becoming acquainted with the features, content and sections. This step is like becoming familiar with a map before setting out on a long walk. It is important to have a sense of the whole before diving deeper into any particular part.
After getting acquainted with each of the 11 foundational OD competences and the various OD specialisms, while also pondering the patterns of your own OD practice and results to date. You are invited to reflect about your personal motivation, your sense of professional calling, your current experience, and your hopes and aspirations relative to your future as an OD practitioner.
The intention of this step is to assist with noticing and learning about yourself within the larger context of expanding your own OD mastery. To that end, some questions will provide to help you think about each competence and specialism.
This section provides a form with instructions, guiding the app user to consider and construct what will be a wholly personalized profile of their OD professional practice pattern, given their future aspirations.
Once the Personal OD competency profile is completed, this section will provide guidance to help the app user through a process of self-assessment using their personal construct as the yardstick. The data generated from this will enable the user to move on to the next section.
With their Personal OD competency profile and their self-assessment insights in hand, this section provides resources and guidance to create a personal learning plan for the user’s professional development over the next 12 – 18 months, during which time they will be accountable to themselves in those areas that they concluded were important for their OD journey towards growing mastery. (The work of a registered app user is automatically saved within the app, allowing the user to revisit, revise, and print as needed.)
After you have formulated your personal development plan from the eleven foundational competences, you are invited to explore the OD specialisms, identifying any that are of particular interest to you, any in which you have expertise, want to refresh, or which might represent a new opportunity relative to your own career aspirations. After considering your interests from among the OD Specialisms, you may want to add new items into your Personal Development Plan.
As a community resource, this app will always be a work in progress, benefiting from the contributions of its global users. To that end, in this section, users are warmly encouraged to provide timely feedback about the app. The importance of this cannot be overstated. By sharing their experience of the app—what did and did not work, what was and was not helpful, and their impressions generally—users will shape the future of the app as a genuine and relevant benefit for the global OD community.
