• Can we create a renewed agenda for OD that places it at the center of corporate change?
• What would a renewed focus on our clients’ core business issues require of us as OD practitioners?
• How would it affect our identities, our relationships, our knowledge base?

For more than a decade until 2007, OD practitioners experienced a rapid expansion in the demand for our work in leadership development, large group facilitation, team effectiveness, and coaching. At the same time we were becoming increasingly marginal to the rapidly growing market for strategic business change, and we’ve seen our management consultancy competitors neglect or mishandle vital issues of culture, employee engagement, and organizational alignment. Since the financial crisis hit, we’ve done some of our best work ever with our client organizations as they have fought to survive and thrive – yet often we still struggle to show how OD impacts the core business and worse still, sometimes our practice seems quite marginal and rather stuck.
Re-positioning our role inside corporations requires grappling with some thorny issues and challenges including our identity (it can feel like moving away from our core value of human development), relationships (it entails difficult conversations with executives), knowledge (we don’t want to be like management consultants, do we?). Somehow we need to overcome our own resistance to change (as we so often advise our clients), so we can support the humanistic side of OD, and show clear business results at the same time. Join us to explore these key issues and together create a new agenda.