How to Use This Book

How to Use This Book

This book is intended to be a practical guide to explore how to facilitate change within organizations. We want this book to be a comprehensible classroom tool for both students and instructors. Below we have briefly outlined some best practices and considerations for how to use this book, from both the student and the instructor perspective.

For Students

This book was developed with undergraduate students in mind, first and foremost. We tried to make it engaging, easy to read and easy to navigate. Each chapter begins with a summary of the content to come in that chapter and ends with a high level wrap up conclusion. There are reflection questions for each chapter that can be used for individual reflection and to deepen students’ understanding of the material by relating it to their own life and re-contextualizing the information presented in a different way. Each chapter also includes a specific OD skill that students can develop in order to both help them in this work professionally and often also highlight important interpersonal skills within the broader context of interpersonal relationships.

After reading this book, we hope that students will be able to:

1. Articulate the organizational necessity of being change-capable.
2. Identify how OD skills and techniques are present across an entire organization in a variety of jobs, roles, contexts.
3. Describe how the discipline of Organizational Development (OD) supports creating and sustaining effective and productive change.
4. Describe the stages of the OD process and common roles and responsibilities in each stage.
5. Apply the OD process to examine, diagnose, and develop an intervention for a case study.
6. Describe and apply the basic skills for effective collaboration on a team project.

For Instructors

This book was developed in order to be a helpful tool for instructors. It includes the essential content necessary for teaching an introductory course aimed at understanding organizational development and how to lead students in developing their skills as a change facilitator in teams and organizations. While some of the textbooks content acts as an anchor in introducing certain topics, we have chosen other facets of the material to be introduced through links, resources and videos in hopes that instructors will be encouraged to direct their students to look outside just this textbook to explore these topics. Further, we have intentionally decided to not include case studies at the end of each chapter as we believe this material is better suited to be part of each instructor’s tailored approach to their own course. We encourage instructors to bring in case studies that are timely and most relevant to their approach in teaching this course and even brainstorm ways to work with local business partners so students have hands-on, practical experience using some of these concepts.