Positive Organization Development : Beyond Intervention, Toward the Design of Strength-Based Innovation

Offering a comprehensive overview, this volume defines the new Organizational Development (OD), describing where it came from and where it is going. Moreover, it provides a unified resource for bridging theory and practice and provides a panoramic presentation of methods for working at the individual, organizational, and societal levels.

Unifying and Defining the new OD Innovation-Inspired Positive Organization Development gives shape and coherence to the field's vast potentials and most promising horizons. To underscore the new theory of change transforming the whole of OD, Cooperrider and Godwin provide definition and direction to what they call "the next ipod"—innovation-inspired positive OD. Drawing from decades of real-world experience and experimentation, as well as cataloguing and synthesizing the exciting research and many of the most productive practices from strength-based management, positive psychology and allied disciplines, this book does what French and Bell's enduring classic did for the earliest days of OD. It defines the new OD, describing where it came from and where it is going. It provides a unified resource for bridging theory and practice for managers and change agents of all kinds, by providing a panoramic presentation of methods for working at the individual, organizational, and societal levels--the "three circles of the strengths revolution." Beyond presenting a new model of change, Innovation-Inspired Positive Organization Development also anchors the vision to a comprehensive set of positive change methods such as Appreciative Inquiry's action research 4-D cycle, the positive-strengths strategy innovation lab, solution-focused team development, positive deviancy analysis, design studio and prototyping tools, biomimicry, the art of the question, whole system multi-stakeholder AI Summit methods, the accelerating strengths network tools, outsourced inspiration practices, the new AI digital planning and design platform, and more. The result is shape shifting for the field. What was once a fragmented and unassembled jigsaw puzzle is pulled into a conceptually inspiring and pragmatically powerful combined framework. The book shows how the pieces of the strengths revolution puzzle fit together to catalyze a radically new model of change management.