The Lewinian Roots of Dialogic OD.

The founders of Dialogic OD have repeatedly explained their approach by contrasting it with a form of Organization Development (OD) they refer to as Diagnostic OD (Bushe and Marshak, 2009) and/or as Planned Change (Bushe, 2020). Diagnostic OD has existed since the dawn of the profession, can be traced to Ronald Lippitt (1914-1986), and has been documented as continuing to be taught in schools of Organization Development and practiced in the field (Bushe and Lewis, 2023). This paper attempts to establish that Kurt Lewin (1890-1947), who many regard as the primary source of the OD profession, practiced a change model much more closely aligned with Dialogic OD than with Diagnostic OD, and that the group dynamics and dialogue based Lewinian OD model predates Diagnostic OD. To support that conclusion, Lewinian, Dialogic, and Diagnostic OD are described and compared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]