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Dialogic Organization Development

The concept of an organization has evolved from thinking of organizations as organisms that adapt to their environment, to organizations as conversations between individuals and groups. As such, Dialogic Organization Development is the progression of organizational change practice.

Organizational actions result from self-organizing, socially constructed realities created and sustained by the prevailing narratives, stories, and conversations through which people make meaning about their experiences. Organizations are seen as complex responsive processes where people's thoughts and actions are in a continuous process of meaning-making and emergence. Change is not something that happens between periods of stability.  Rather change is always happening at varying rates of speed.

Change in beliefs and actions takes place by changing the conversations that shape everyday thinking and behaviour. With change methods like Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space, World Cafe, Solution Focused Dialogue and Organizational Learning Conversations, Dialogic OD is not simply about creating good dialogues or objective exchanges of information. Rather, transformational change depends on the ability of these conversations to disrupt the current status quo, introduce new, generative images that allow people to see old situations from new perspectives, and change the core organizational narratives - the prevailing beliefs, stories and images that shape how people in the organization make meaning of any situation.

For instance, leaders fail to notice the dropping level of engagement in their workforce, until the annual Pulse survey opens their eyes with alarming data in the form of hard numbers. And this is the stage which requires drastic measures. However, if the leaders had focused on the conversations in the organization, engaged himself in conversations with the employees, and made sense of those conversations, he would have known the condition before it turned grave. Thus, allowing taking small adaptive steps, and not lead to a situation demanding drastic measures. One may look at this as, daily efforts to keep your health in check as opposed to ignoring your health for a long time only to later resort to surgical methods which are perilous.

The challenge in the acceptance of Dialogic OD as a practice lies in the fact that it is still seen as a fuzzy concept as opposed to the straightforward practice of Diagnostic OD which uses well-defined models to assess any situation in the organization. It is important to understand that these two practices are not to be seen as opposing but rather complementary processes, both aiding the achievement of the same goal.

Food for thought: 
In a world that is constantly changing, having a fixed vision helps by giving a clear direction, or does it get in the way of adaptive changes that need to be generated from the bottom up in the system.

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