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We explore how scholarly understandings of and the practice of organizational transformation have evolved since Bartunek and Louis’s (1988) Research in Organizational Change and Development chapter. While Bartunek and Louis hoped to see strategy scholarship and OD approaches to transformation inform each other, strategy literature has drifted away from transformation toward more continuous change. OD practice has focused on the implementation of its own versions of transformation through Large Group Interventions, Appreciative Inquiry, the new dialogic OD, and Theory U. Based on a discussion of Theory U, we call attention to the importance of individuals as an important source of new ideas in understanding and practicing large-scale change.

To share ten integrated OD practices that propels the entire enterprise to transform itself to a higher state of performance

We have distilled the evolutionary learning of 47 years with over 1,000 organizations the application of authentic organization development universal principles and methodology that can apply universally to most organizations regardless of industry, culture, country or issue.

We have the confidence that if these practices are competently applied, extraordinary results will occur. The key is having the process led by a competent internal change agent.

This is not disciplined qualitative or quantitative research. It is the boiling down of years of reflection by the authors on what needs to change our methodology in order to achieve organization development's original focus and that is of changing the entire system through engagement and action research.

We believe that all aspiring OD professionals would best consider bringing each and every one of these practices into their approach. We would welcome research artists to contact us and get involved in researching our on-going work.

Organization development is coming back to its original focus of the whole system. Whole system transformation is but one of many new organization wide change methodologies. It is of value to any student or seasoned practitioner of organization change who wishes to embellish their practice.

In the new millennium, organisations are going through rapid changes and the role of strategic management is challenged. When the organisation is threatened by environmental changes such as crises or competition as a result of information technology development or increased customer demands, the need for communication increases. During high change situations, when the publics of the organisation become involved in the change issues, they actively seek information about the issues. If the organisation could utilise communication management more effectively and in a twoway, participative way, they would build more positive relationships with the publics involved and reorganise themselves out of disorder. Strategic planning will become even more important, but will have to change to a contingency approach and emphasise flexibility and relationship building. This paper looks at organisational processes during change and how they can be managed by communication. Implications are drawn from chaos, postmodern and complexity theory as well as the contingency view of communication. The authors create a framework for scanning and analysing processes and settings, and suggest an alternative strategic, symmetrical and ethical communication approach to respond to problems. They present a new paradigm that emerges as a response to polarisation and treats communication as more receiver‐centred, stakeholder‐based, relationship‐building‐oriented and of strategic importance. This paper lays a foundation for an alternative perspective to the central problems of the communication discipline against the background of new emerging multidisciplinary approaches.

Climate change is upon us, and the soft landing window has almost certainly closed given the current pace of response. But climate change is only one of the huge issues facing humanity – indeed, the planetary boundaries model (Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2015) ranks biodiversity loss and biochemical flows even further along the path of irreversible planet-threatening change. In the face of powerful inertia, how can we at least shape the hard landing that seems inevitable, where civilization as we know it will likely collapse to support the rising of much better ones? The SDG Transformations Forum supports development of powerful T-systems as a purposeful transformation strategy with this goal. To do so, the Forum has developed a strategy drawing from leading knowledge about how transformation happens, and creating systems change communities that are applying and advancing the strategy in the experimental, adaptive manner focused on deep learning and radical action.

The purpose of this essay is to honor, position and reflect on key themes related to high school reform within the careerlong scholarship of Karen Seashore Louis. It is presented in relation to my own and others' key studies and book-length arguments regarding educational change, knowledge utilization, professional communities and innovation, over the past 30 years and up to the present time.

The article examines and interprets major works by Karen Seashore Louis and other educational change theorists that address repeated systemic failures, and episodic outlier efforts, at transformational change in high schools.

High school change has only failed if it is judged by the overarching criterion of system-wide transformation. Fair assessments of high school change must also examine accumulated incremental innovations. In light of the need for transformational aspirations in schools to mesh with transformational directions in society, the global pandemic and its aftermath may provide five key opportunities for long-awaited transformation.

There are different levels and degrees of innovation. Incremental innovation is as important as wholesale transformation. The growing number of networked outliers of innovation raises questions about the false equation of whole system change with bureaucratic state reform. Although the influential literature on whole system change is rooted in a small number of English-speaking countries, transformational change on a system-wide basis already exists in Northern Europe and parts of the Global South. Last, the pandemic and other major disruptions to the global social order have produced conditions that are highly favorable to transformational change in the future.

In this chapter, we identify three distinct transformational performance improvement (TPI) approaches commonly used to redesign work processes in health care organizations. We describe the unique components or tools that each approach uses to improve the delivery of health services. We also summarize what is empirically known about the effectiveness of each TPI approach according to systematic reviews and recent studies published in the peer-reviewed literature. Based on examination of this research, we discuss what knowledge is still needed to strengthen the evidence for whole system transformation. This involves the use of conceptual frameworks to assess and guide implementation efforts, and facilitators and barriers to change as revealed in a recent evaluation of one major initiative, the Lean Enterprise Transformation (LET) at the Veterans Health Administration. The analysis suggests ways in which TPI facilitators can be developed and barriers reduced to improve the effectiveness and sustainability of quality initiatives. Finally, we discuss appropriate study designs to evaluate TPI interventions that may strengthen the evidence for their effectiveness in real world practice settings.

This uses a framework of systemic change to understand the contextual factors including stakeholder, social, political, cultural and economic, which contribute to the social and environmental narratives of a conservation organisation that has and continues to undergo transformation.

The social and environmental disclosure annual report narratives for a 27-year period were coded to a framework of systemic change.

The end of apartheid in 1994 meant that South African society required transformation. This transformation impacts and drives the social and environmental accounting disclosures made by SANParks. The social and environmental disclosures coded against a framework of systemic change, fluctuated over the period of the study as the format of the annual reports changed. The systems view was the most frequently disclosed category. The political ecology subcategory which details the power relationships showed the most disclosures. However, 25 years after the end of apartheid, the transformation process remains incomplete. Although the evidence in the paper does not support Joseph and Reigelut (2010) contention that the framework of systemic change is an iterative process, it nevertheless provides a useful vehicle for analysing the rich annual report narratives of an organisation that has undergone and continues to undergo transformation.

This paper makes two primary contributions. First, to the limited developing country social and environmental accounting literature. Second, the development, refinement and application of a framework of systemic change to social and environmental disclosures.

A decision to don the chaos lens, adopt dialogue as its primary mode of communication, and to recognize the power of the organizational mind has fundamentally and irreversibly changed the way a Dutch capital‐equipment manufacturer operates in its rapidly complexifying global marketplace. Beginning in September 1999, the focus of an ever widening circle of its membership has been on transforming itself from the inside out, that is by changing profoundly the organizational mind – the “orgmind”. Two factors make this change process particularly noteworthy: first of all, it was designed on the fly. In other words, virtually every action, activity, meeting, workshop and so on was made up as they moved along their path to the future. Second, profound change was undertaken before it was time to do so. That is, the company was “sitting pretty” enjoying a major share of the market, solid profitability as well as strong morale and employee loyalty.

Organizations facing issues related to growth, innovation, and strategy are embracing design thinking, a problem-solving process. This study explores 40 design thinking initiatives and identifies operational practices emerge and empirical categories across various contexts. Quantitative analyses of the initiatives and qualitative interview data are used to distinguish four configurations of action analogous to races: training, emphasizing learning-by-doing; marathons, capturing personal reflection over a long project; relays, highlighting team collaboration; and sprints, reflecting fast-paced product innovation. The initiatives are differentiated as designer-led versus team-driven and, low-urgency versus high-urgency. Implications of practicing design thinking in Organization Development and Change are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of a commissioned research study that analyzed a schooling initiative with the ambitious goal of transforming learning environments across the district by advancing innovative, inquiry-driven pedagogical practices combined with 1:1 iPad distribution. The paper explores impacts of the initiative on pedagogical innovation, twenty-first century learning, and related impacts on professional learning, collaboration, and culture change in the pilot schools analyzed in the study.

A multi-dimensional case study approach was used to analyze how the initiative was implemented, and to what extent teaching, learning, and professional cultures were transformed, based on action plan inputs and “change drivers”. Research methods included structured, open-ended interviews conducted with randomly selected teachers and key informants in leadership roles, focus groups held with students, as well as analysis of policy documents, student work samples, and other data sources.

The authors found evidence of a synergistic relationship between innovations in inquiry-driven pedagogy and professional learning cultures, with evidence of increased collaboration, deepened engagement and persistence, and a climate of collegiality and risk-taking at both classroom and organizational levels. Based on initiative inputs, the authors found that innovations in collaborative technology/pedagogy practices in classrooms paralleled similar innovations and transformations in professional learning cultures and capacity-building networks.

This initiative analyzed in this paper provides a case study in large-scale system change, offering a compelling model for transformative policies and initiatives where interwoven innovations in pedagogy and technology mobilization are supported by multiple drivers for formal and informal professional learning/development and networked collaboration. Challenges and recommendations are highlighted in the concluding discussion.

The transformative initiative analyzed in this paper provides a very timely case-model for innovations in twenty-first century learning and, specifically, for enacting and sustaining large-scale system change where inquiry-driven learning and technology tools are being mobilized to support “deep learning”, “new learning partnerships”, and multilevel transformations in professional learning (Fullan and Donnelly, 2013). This research advances scholarly work in the areas of twenty-first century learning, identifying relationships between technology/pedagogy innovation and professional capital building (Hargreaves and Fullan, 2012).