OpenSourceOD
“No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it.” ~ Albert Einstein
Contents
Welcome
Ways to use your Report
2. Organization Development
OD Refresh
OD Fundamentals
OD Career Landscape
3. Meaningful Work
The Thing about Meaningful Work
Sources & Outcomes
A M.O.S.T. Meaningful Assessment
4. Your OD Career Calling
Your Preferences
Market Demand
Do you have a Twin Calling?
5. Oh, the Difference you'll Make!
The Unique Impact of your Calling
Inspiring Examples
6. Careers you'll Love
OD Careers for you
Real Examples
7. How to Equip Yourself
Fill your Toolbelt
Stretch Yourself
8. How to Develop your Calling
Global Career Development
Personal Career Development
9. Thank you!
Getting Started
Welcome!
Get ready to answer your career calling, ignite your passion, boost your career capabilities, and Master Organizational & Societal Transformation (M.O.S.T.)! Work your way through each section in your report to learn about transformative careers you'll love. Then, plug directly into resources that energize and propel your career calling, including carefully curated books, articles, podcasts, and a community of positive change agents just like you!
Before you get started, share your results online! You'll trigger social media algorithms that attract connections with like-minded leaders, employers, and communities who wish to influence positive, healthy, and sustainable change. Attracting the right people to your network will supercharge your career trajectory.
Graduate students watch this first
Ways to use your Report
You're about to learn a lot about your unique fit as an aspiring practitioner in the field of Organization Development (OD). And the good news is that you're not starting from scratch! If you're reading this report that means you already have some or many of the key strengths and interests associated with a meaningful OD career. And whether you are a graduate student or are simply investigating a career transition, each section in this report is designed to bring you a very deep level of OD career clarity.
There are thousands of resources orbiting the field of OD, but we're gong to help you cut through the clutter and get right to the knowledge and resources that will feel personally tailored to your tastes. We'll hook into your interests in ways that inform, inspire, and equip you for a personally meaningful OD career journey! You'll also have an opportunity to fill your very own professional bookshelf, podcast playlist, and toolbelt! Here are just a few ways you can utilize your report...
Aspiring Practitioners, explore M.O.S.T. Meaningful Career coaching with Dr. Brendel, who can help you gain even deeper critical insights around the relationship between this report and your career narrative and portfolio. Contact Dr. Brendel for a 15m discussion about coaching and learn how he can help you develop a career vision and mission, practical strategy, and objectives for career development.
OD Departments and Firms, consider utilizing this assessment with your team. Contact Dr. Brendel for more on how this can be used to develop an OD Department design that not only caters to your organization's strategy but also orchestrates your OD team in ways that provide mentoring relationships based on individual strengths, interests, and career aspirations.
Professors & Instructors in a OD or Change Leadership degree or certificate program, consider having Dr. Brendel come to class and guide a discussion around ways this report can give your students tailored direction regarding paper topics, practicum opportunities, course electives, stretch assignments, and research areas.
Organization Development
What is Organization Development?
OD is known for its breathtaking diversification of professional titles, competency combinations, change impact areas, and approaches. But how do you know an OD career when you see it?
If you are looking for a career capable of transforming organizations and society, look no further than Organization Development (OD)! A quick Google search for "Organization Development Jobs" yields an impressive number of results, but not all of these job descriptions are created equally or meet the definition of a real OD career. So how can you tell whether a career shares the core qualities, aims, essence, and impact of real OD practice?
We've got you covered! Let's begin with a universal definition of Organization Development that can be applied to your job search, as well as efforts to launch your own consulting business. Analysis originally published in the OD Review, which now includes 98 scholarly definitions of OD, 11 competency models, and 750 jobs leads us the following definition:
People & Culture Consultant
Business Transformation Specialist
Manager of Culture Change & Teaming
Organizational Strategy & Culture Consultant
Director of DE&I and Organizational Development
People & Organizational Performance Manager
Global Organizational Culture Business Partner
Organizational & Leadership Development Mgr.
Learning & Organizational Development
Global Talent & Organization Development Mgr.
VP of DE&I and Organizational Effectiveness
Organizational & People Development Specialist
Director of Culture & Organizational Effectiveness
Organizational Design & Transformation Manager
Organizational Transformation Manager
Organizational Design & Effectiveness Manager
Future of Work Strategy Consultant
Excellence, Strategy, & Innovation Consultant
Search Results
About 1,090,000,000 results
Organization Development is a dynamic field of practice that uses caring and collaborative change frameworks and interventions to generate sustainable and flexible improvements to well-being, performance, and prosperity in human systems.
...a dynamic field of practice
OD is known for its breathtaking diversification of professional titles, competency combinations, change impact areas, and approaches. But how do you know an OD career when you see it? And for that matter, how did OD become so dynamic in the first place? OD is informed by numerous theories including Western humanism and postmodern philosophy, as well as an array of social sciences — most notably, the applied behavioral sciences. More recently, OD has become informed by Eastern philosophies and traditions including the expansion of consciousness through mindfulness and contemplative practices. The M.O.S.T. assessment demonstrates that there are 16 predominant types of OD positions, and most professionals gravitate toward one of these types or preferences. Just like wildflowers, there is always room for variation that branches from these 16 types, however, understanding your dominant type provides a clear frame of reference for developing your unique career development strategy!
...caring and collaborative
An OD practitioner’s first obligation includes care and consideration for the well-being of individuals, teams, organizations, surrounding ecosystems, and themselves. OD practitioners always strive to include diverse perspectives through a wide variety of collaborative models, participatory discovery approaches, consensus-driven decision-making processes, and collective action frameworks. In other words, change is not directed or carried out by the practitioner, but instead, the practitioner utilizes change frameworks and interventions that help organizations spark their own common sources of motivation, collective understanding and consensus, common language, and customized strategies. Each practitioner cares and collaborates through a unique core value, which you will identify in your first coaching assignment!
...change frameworks and interventions
There are numerous OD frameworks, interventions, and practices. They may include team-based interventions that entail active experimentation with new ways of operating together on an everyday basis. They may also include dialogic methodologies that seek to transform mindsets across large organizations. Additionally, they may seek to improve a system's ability to be agile not only through adaptive design and structure but also by reducing attachment to the status quo through mindfulness- based interventions. Due to the diversity of OD, new change frameworks and interventions seem to emerge on a regular basis. Nonetheless, OD practitioners tend to lean toward approaches that differ, and your M.O.S.T. Career Calling Assessment tells you what your Preferred Approach is! We will cover this in your first coaching session!
...generating sustainable and flexible improvements
OD provides organizations, communities, and social impact initiatives with a pathway to establish new ways of operating, relating with others, and making sense of systems. However, given that change is a constant feature of organizational life, the changes that do take place must always leave room for additional change. This is done by developing structural and cultural mechanisms that allow for continuous improvement, such as effective feedback systems and psychological safety, which encourage individuals to continue to experiment and learn from mistakes. In addition to flexibility, OD also helps individuals establish a new relationship with change itself! In this way, as OD practitioners help organizations change and build some level of internal capability for continuously adapting in healthy ways long after the OD engagement has taken place.
...to the well-being, performance, and prosperity
The impact of an OD career becomes observable to the degree that people, systems, structures, strategies, leadership, teams, and culture align to produce a wide array of improvements including more humane, adaptive, and effective forms of awareness, learning, and relating. Though well-being, performance, and prosperity are subjective enough to allow for customization, they also make sense on a universal level. Well-being includes physical, psychological, and spiritual safety, ease, and fulfillment. Performance is a wide-ranging term that includes a human system's ability to achieve its stated goals, operate effectively, and adapt to internal and external change in ways that do not produce unintended negative outcomes. Prosperity is also an intentionally broad term as it refers the overall strategic, ethical, and spiritual success of these human systems.
...of human systems.
Whether an OD practitioner works with, in, or between organizations and/or communities, their work focuses on the intersection of humans and systems (a.k.a. sociotechnical systems). This implies a wide variety of contexts for OD work, including individual organizations, loosely coupled systems, trans-organizational systems, communities, nations, and trans-national organizations. Depending on a practitioner's professional strengths and interests, as well as the size and requirements of the human system, the desired approach to influencing these systems can range in complexity.
