The Organisation Development Certification Programme (ODCP) from ISABS is designed to equip participants in facilitating organisations to manage change and respond effectively and speedily to such challenges. It combines strong people competencies, the ISABS’ forte, with fundamentals of Organisational systems and change theories.
Defining Organizational Development:
The following two definitions capture ISABS’ human process oriented understanding and practice of Organization Development:
The story of OD in India is also the story of ISABS. From the late 1960s, pioneers in the field of OD in India were developing programs for Internal Change Agents and Facilitators. Indian Behavioural scientists such as Udai Pareek, Pulin Garg, Dharni Sinha, Somnath Chattopadhyaya, Manohar Nadkarni, Abad Ahmad, Ishwar Dayal and Francis Menezes, to name a few, were some of the founders of ISABS as also the first practitioners of OD in India, who made path-breaking contributions to the field of OD. ISABS continues to take this legacy forward in different ways. Specializing in human process work, ISABS continues to offer Human Process Laboratories and a variety of process-oriented programmes as well as developmental programmes for professionals capable of facilitating these programmes. The Organizational Development Certification programme (ODCP) is a natural extension and embodies the very essence of ISABS’ philosophy and heritage of process work expertise available within ISABS.
Many current ISABS Professional Members are leading practitioners of OD in India and abroad. The link with National Training Laboratories (NTL) is strong, with many ISABS members ALSO being NTL members, including some who are on the Academic Council of ODCP. New partnerships have been forged with other Behavioural Science organizations such as OEGGO in Austria. ODCP benefits from this abundant pool of expertise and experience.
1. “Organization Development is the attempt to influence the members of an organization to expand their candidness with each other about their views of the organization and their experience in it, and to take greater responsibility for their own actions as organization members. The assumption behind OD is that when people pursue both of these objectives simultaneously, they are likely to discover new ways of working together that they experience as more effective for achieving their own and their shared (organizational) goals. And that when this does not happen, such activity helps them to understand why and to make meaningful choices about what to do in light of this understanding.”
— Neilsen, “Becoming an OD Practitioner”, Englewood Cliffs, CA: Prentice-Hall, 1984, pp. 2-3.
2. “Organization Development is a system-wide application and transfer of behavioral science knowledge to the planned development, improvement and reinforcement of the strategies, structures and processes that lead to organization effectiveness”
— Cummings and Worley, “Organization Development and Change”, Sixth Edition, South-Western Publishing, 1997, p.2.
In the latter definition, ‘system’ means the organization or a function as a whole. Scope of OD is bigger and not limited to small teams and individuals. Behavioral science knowledge includes those skills and competencies that enable greater sensitivity to human beings as individuals or as members of a group on the one hand, and also enhance their ability to become more effective individually and collectively on the other. Ultimately the objective of OD is greater organizational effectiveness, understood as the ability of the organization to solve its own problems through a process where members of the organization develop the knowledge and skills to conduct OD on their own, by constantly partnering in, and influencing the process of OD.