Introduction to OD If you need to start with an overview of basic OD trends (press here) or see OD Institute and OD Journal (press here).  I am seeking to move beyond OD to TD perspectives in what I call "the death of [traditional] OD" (Press here).

The Rebirthing of OD as TD - Consulting to networks of organizations is represents the rebirth of organization development (OD) in the arena of relationships between organizations that affect relationships within organizations. It is the move from retelling one organization’s story, to retelling the story of the entire network of organizations. 

Transorganizational Development (TD) Networking is defined as planned change in the collective relationships of a variety of stakeholders to accomplish something beyond the capability of any single organization or individual (e.g. Culbert et. al., 1972).

The “something beyond” the single organization is the story that the network players fashion collectively. 
I assume organizations are Storytelling Collectives or plain Storytelling Organizations embedded in Transorganizational Storytelling Networks. For more on Storytelling Organization Theory (press here).

Organizational Development (OD) transcends single organization game playing.  The term “transcend” is used throughout this book in a critical sense, to mean ways that the organizational players move beyond their established and status quo universe of discourse and action to discern alternatives, and fashion new stories (Marcuse, 1969: p. xi, note 1).

OD is stretching to find new ways of multi-organization network development, especially as we move from the modern to late modern postindustrial life modes of the 1970s and most recently from post-Fordist production and consumption to postmodern capitalism of the 1990s.  Very simply put, the postindustrial supply chains are now global, and the postmodern networks of contesting and contradictory protest groups and advocacy stakeholders who want to redefine how business is conducted is also global (for more on the move from OD to TD and its postindustrial and postmodern roots see Appendix A). 

There are many fine consultants doing great OD process consultation to effect better conditions. The challenge is to move beyond the single organization focus, or even the organization and its turbulent environment focus, to the global playing field of TD networks. Since most of the process consultation is rooted in philosophies of unitary, isolated organization change, we will need to stretch OD’s consultation horizon.

I am calling for OD to rebirth itself as TD in order to move beyond the open system model of an organization embedded in a "target model." A target model places the one organization at the center of the universe, draws a circle around it and puts supplier, customer, subcontract, and collaborator relations around it. Yet, as with Copernicus, we know the one organization is not the center of the solar system or the universe.

Centered (focal organization) models do not explain the dynamic patterns of cosmology any more than target or ice-cube (unfreeze, move, refreeze) models explain the collective dynamics of large system, multi-organization change. TD involves us in the Alice in Wonderland croquet game in which the mallets, loops, and balls move on their own and never refreeze.

It is time for a paradigm shift from unitary-OD to network-OD with polycentered (many centers), polyvocal (many voices), and polysemous (many meanings).  That is the new TD theory and it necessitates novel Transorganizational praxis. Yet, it is not entirely new. In this practice that Mary Parker Follett wrote about in the 1920s, the consultant worked across systems, across organizations, across the divide of management and labor to bring about multiorganizational collaboration. Like, Follett, the TD consultant is not tied to one CEO, or one firm, but networking to effect changes in a Transorganization system within systems orbiting fragmented global contexts. And these are transcendent changes, changes beyond the one that affect the collective pattern of relationships, practices, and possible futures.  In sum, OD is being reborn. 

HISTORY of TD WORK - A pluralistic assembly of Transorganizational Development (TD) consultants attended OD rebirth. There was Samuel A. Culbert, J. Max Elden, Will McWhinney, Warren Schmidt and Bob Tannenbaum acting as OD midwives in their 1972 call for Transorganizational praxis to go beyond traditional OD practices.

Despite Thayer's (1973) similar call, the ghost of OD continue the same practices untile the late 1970s and early 1980s. In 1978, Kurt Motamedi sent a wake up call for the evolution from interorganizational design into TD. In 1979 and 1981, I called for activist TD interventions into networks of organizations. Motomedi and Cummings (1981) did the same.

Kurt Motamedi and I experimented with Transorganizational Development (TD) while we worked at UCLA in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1972 the UCLA department I would join had written the original work on TD (see list below). My own approach was rooted TD in storytelling and folklore. I started writing about it in 1979. Work with Michael Jones of UCLA folklore and mythology helped extend the storytelling aspects into the ICEND model of consultation to large interorganizational network for long-term change (see below). I assume organizations are Storytelling Collectives or plain Storytelling Organizations embedded in Transorganizational Storytelling Networks. Several approaches (e.g. Emery-Search Conference, AI, Future Search, Learning Organization, etc.) involve storytelling and TD. The ICEND theory, along with various search conference models assumes that by convening people to interact, communicate their stories, and form common experience, a network for action and change develops around their collective storytelling (See Boje, 1982).

The work of Boje, Motomedi and Cummings got little notice among the ghosts of OD. One exception was Tom Cummings, who in 1984 reconstructed Motomedi's and my work into his revitalization of sociotechnical systems.

I tried again in 1989 (with Wolfe) to call for TD to replace OD. Finally, the call for TD got heard, not by reading Culbert et al., (1972), Thayer (1973), Motomedi (1978), Boje (1979), Cummings (1984), or Boje and Wolfe (1989) but from awakening to the realities of global economic restructuration of corporate work life. The burgeoning field of large systems change or TD, as I prefer to call it, is today a jungle of contending epistemologies and ontologies that seek to be successor to OD throne. And succession to the throne means big consulting bucks.

What is TD Consulting? – At a very practical level, TD networking involves consulting strategies ranging from IT reengineering, knowledge organization, learning organization, appreciative inquiry, participative democracy, sociotechnical systems, network organization design, supply chain management, military cyber-war game simulations to various postmodern approaches such as restorying spectacles of mass production and consumption with more ecocentric and socially responsible ethics (Boje, 1999c). As we moved from the modern to late modern postindustrial life modes of the 1970s and most recently from post-Fordist production and consumption to postmodern capitalism of the 1990s traditional OD practice focus on a single firm and its environment is being replaced by TD consulting. TD consulting takes a network of firms embedded in a community of action as the starting point. This article is written for people engaged in large system change decisions, those doing comparative work, and teachers of TD practice and theory. We will examine ways to trace, visualize and develop multi-organizational systems using storytelling processes, but first a brief look at billion dollar consultation firm strategies.

Beyond OD to TD Current TD efforts seek to look at the more postmodern aspects of fractionated and chaotic networks including cyber activism and cyberwar collective storytelling (see Network Organization). See for example the critical and postmodern themes in Journal of Organizational Change Management (JOCM, press here). Postmodern applications of chaos and complexity theory are being applied to . There are several global trends. The first global trend is to move to "lean" and "green" Supply Chain distribution to complement lean and green consumption and production webs. Second, a two-tier global structure is developing in Supply Chain management. There has been a consolidation of the carrier base, with many transnational companies employing a central logistics provider who in turn employs numerous sub-contractors (Radstaak & Ketelaar, 1998). Please let me know if you have a TD story to share - David Boje. If you are thinking of turning postmodern, work through these study guides: How to become a postmodern theorist

Three subsystems are formed. Subsystem One (outside process consultant) facilitates the formation of the second subsystem (internal problem solving networking cycle) so people can crystallize issues, identify leaders, form a temporary organization (of organizations) that will change the status quo response patterns of a TD1 (Subsystem Three: Extended Network Involvement Cycle).

TD1 The first type of transorganizational network tells the "good story" of progress through business and masquerades predatory and exploitative behaviors such as massive layoffs through reengineering and downsizing behind Greenwash advertising, public relations spin control, and token efforts to elevate world poverty and environmental degradation. The largest U.S. based consulting firms such as IBM Global Services with $29 billion in 1998 revenues focuses upon the highly mechanistic business process reengineering in its IT outsourcing and supply chain work. A long list of other firms follow that lead. In fact, most TD consulting is based in mechanistic, social engineering approaches to large systems multi-organization change and centrist control.  In sum, TD1 network consulting seeks to recombine and control the community or global division of labor such that fragments of the self, social, and market can keep the status quo capital accumulation machine in tact (Boje, 1999: 14-189). Barker (1999: 171) refers to how in concertive team concept control; the market acts as a transorganizational means of discipline:

"They [teams] had a hierarchy of abstract moral gods, with "transorganizational" conceptualizations of being productive and successful as a team at the top, meaning that their understanding of success and productivity was more than, say, a quantitative indicator of meeting the production schedule" (p. 171, emphasis mine).

In TD1 instrumental-reasoning fashion the team came to believe that "team' "quality" and "service" in a disciplined regime equaled happiness and a functionalist solution to turbulent and changing market forces.

TD2 is defined as seeking and actively organizing networks to change/resist or go beyond the status quo relations of a dominating TD1 networks (Boje, 1979; Boje & Wolfe, 1986).  TD2 networks take advocacy positions on global ecology and social responsibility. Examples range from community organizing of multi-organization networks such as the work of Saul Alinsky and Ted Watkins. Participative democracy search conferences by the Emerys is another example of an advocacy model. In the Emery case it is advocacy for environmental and purposive system reasoning in somewhat less hierarchical arrangements. There are also more postmodern and critical theory approaches to consulting that advocate either more grassroots or more ecocentric praxis options. KPMG International is a multi-billion dollar consulting firm based in Europe that does what I would term TD2 consulting by advocating environmental accounting practices, bring firms together to work on environmental and world hunger projects.  In sum, TD2 networking seeks to attain greater democratic control and local community accountability over multinational as well as local corporate behavior. TD2 networking seeks to resist or modify the behavior of TD1 networks by forming an alternative TD2 network to conduct campaigns of resistance and power realignment that change TD1 behaviors (Boje, 1999: 14-18).

Middle Range TD1/TD2 - There are middle range approaches between TD1 and TD2 or involving combinations of both. For example many firms apply Learning Organization, Appreciative Inquiry, or "Alliance Collaboration" (Anderson Consulting) among competing firms in order to bring business practices into more sustainable and socially responsible praxis. Ernesto Cortez continues Alinsky's more radical approaches with somewhat more bureaucratic and multi-issue, rather than single issue advocacy praxis.  Ernst & Young and other billion dollar U.S. based firms adopt a Knowledge Organization approach as a successor to the more traditional Learning Organization models of Senge, Argyris or Schein-models. There is some experimentation by Ernst & Young with complexity and chaos theory modeling based in spin off operation from Santa Fe Institute. In sum, middle range approaches deviate from the profit maximization, free market economy view of TD1 to a non-traditional approach which may on occasion yield social or ecological advocacy or approach collective dynamics from a more multi-paradigm vantage point.

In sum, I find in most industrial and service sectors of the economy as well as the lucrative government consulting area, a contestation among TD1, TD2 and mixed TD1/TD2 consulting ontologies (views of being in the world), epistemologies (how knowledge is attained of that world) and praxis (practices in use that operationalize ontology and epistemology).

Appendix A: Why is OD becoming TD? We are moving into what Peter Drucker calls post-industrial capitalism and what my friends Steve Best and Douglas Kellner, call the postmodern adventure.  It is a strange fusion of postindustrial networks of suppliers, distributors and producers with the even stranger conglomeration of postmodern consumers bent on finding out who makes their clothing, what goes into their food, and how the workers are being treated in far away countries.  In late modern there was a significant turn in large system change praxis from modern to late modern assumptions. We learned to make organizations flatter, open, flexible, and populate them with self-managing teams.  This represented our move away from Fordism. Modern Fordism forms of capitalist production relied on mass production and mass consumption and paid high wages for union support including reluctant support of the welfare state. "Fordism involved a period of stable economic growth and capital accumulation that lasted until the late 1960s in the United States" (Otero, 1996: 4).

After World War II, the economy of capitalist nations transformed from a centered Fordist massive economy to a decentered postindustrial service economy of flexible and lean production, but still very massive in its distribution. In the 1960s transnational corporations (TNC) began to perceive a crisis in growth combined with excess capacity, began to niche and adapt to alternative consumer life style habits. By the 1970s it became increasingly obvious that U.S. worker output had fallen behind Japan and Germany. Not wanting to give up Fordist assembly work, TNCs began to locate manufacture and assembly to "less unionized parts of the United States or to Third World countries" (Otero, 1996: 4).

A neo-liberalism philosophy of "Post-Fordism" began to take hold that stressed linking national production and markets to global ones, de-unionizing, decreased regulation by the State, and free market economics. As firms left capitalist, union-countries in droves, the State promised everyone cushy jobs at slightly lower salaries in the service industry (now called KW). This late modern (Post-Fordist and Post-industrial) trend accelerated with the end of the Cold War. Patterns of global commerce also began to combine the polar opposites of standardized centrist mass production with the flexible and fragmented production.’

Organizations stretched as a construct when the perspective of the collective embedded in webs of holons became more fashionable than old "organization and environment" vantage point. The Greek word "holon" became popularized in Arthur Koestler's (1967) book, The Ghost in the Machine. A "holon" is Greek for "whole/parts" meaning literally the whole that is simultaneously a part, and vice versa.  Tracing out the holons gets us into the multiplicity of network relations into which organizations and people are webbed.

Ken Wilber (1996a, 1996b) has also applied holon in numerous ways we will soon explore. "We exist in fields within fields, patterns within patterns, contexts within contexts, endlessly" (1996b: 65). Here I am concerned with people in their whole/part relation to organizations that are whole/parts of mechanistic networks, organic communities, organizations, nations and the bios-universe, and the formistic ideal types our theories and metaphors (even these) impose on the world.

Holons and stories - While postmodernists and poststructuralists are critical of Grand narratives (Lyotard, 1984) that violently aggregate it all into universal histories. Yet most of postmodernists take a less radical stance that says, "you can not just toss all grand narratives" because some are humane and they just keep being constructed all about us (Best, 1995; Best & Kellner, 1991, 1997). A middle ground is to see the relation of micro and macro story as part/whole or holon. Microstories are embedded within macrostories within Grand narratives, and contexts within contexts. It is without foundation and without end.

Not only are organizations stretching, they are cracking.  From a Holon perspective part/wholes are fragmented and dispersed across different geographic locations so that no convergence of "organization" exists.  The organization does not locate its fragment in one place. We have lived through the death of the author and the subject. We have seen how writing is a corporate project, especially in academia where reviewers and journal editors and the discipline of the Academy have made single-author writing an illusion.  We are not living through the death of the organization, as it is rediscovered to be just fragments attached to networks of other fragments, that constitute transorganization networks.