We're pleased to announce the following plenary sessions for this year's conference! Stay tuned for more details!

Friday: OD in the Federal Government

Saturday: OD in Government Led Reform

Sunday: Featured Plenary Chris Worley, Ph.D.

Friday: OD in the Federal Government

This panel discussion will be moderated by Larry Kokkelenberg, who recently retired from the Federal Government Office of Personnel Management. In this role, he was the chief of employee engagement and directed their Nationwide OD efforts with other Federal Agencies.

Panelists include:

Saturday: The Emerging Possibility of the OD Field to Government Led Reform: Evidencing the International Reach of the Global Practice Framework

This panel will share the ongoing work by OD professionals in England's National Health Service. The discussion will explore how they have developed a robust process to enable OD practitioners to claim and evidence their practice by using the ODN Global Practice Framework, and how action research developed in one part of England has been spread to become a country wide OD intervention.

The UK has a proudly held socialised healthcare system which in terms of ROI is viewed to be the best in the world. Within England the service is facing the global challenges of ever increasing demand, changing demographics and rising cost. The National Health Service (NHS) directly employs 1.3 million people and has an expenditure of 122 billion pounds which equates to a per person spend of £2,200 annually.

The UK government is seeking to transform the NHS to ensure it continues to deliver. As part of this country-wide transformation programme CEOs are calling upon OD practitioners to support the system wide work. CEOs are rightly asking for assurance that the OD practitioners can evidence that they are capable of undertaking work at this level.

This is the back drop against which the presenters set out to:

• Design an OD intervention which would satisfy the CEOs need for professional assurance
• Put the OD practitioner at the heart of a development process which would enable them to CLAIM their practice, OWN their expertise and robustly EVIDENCE their competency

Participants will take away:

• An understanding of how to develop a country wide action research approach to OD
• Be curious about how they may go about validating their own practice in OD using the Global Practice Framework
• Be inspired to challenge ourselves as OD practitioners and how we evidence the value we bring to the world.

The session will be presented by:

• Karen Dumain is the National Lead for OD in the NHS Leadership Academy in England
• Deborah Davis is the Managing Director of the NHS North West Leadership Academy (Manchester)
• Dr. Maxine Craig is the OD Practitioner who has designed and supported the intervention since its inception, she is also a board member of the ODN Europe

Sunday: Creating New Possibilities in Change Theory
Featured Plenary Speaker Chris Worley, Ph.D.

I believe that the dominant approaches to organization change, those which assume a linear, project-management logic of unfreezing, moving, and refreezing, do not incorporate diagnosis as a critical and central early process, and address only one change at a time, have got to go. As I’ve listened to practitioners and researchers talk about how OD can be more relevant in a digitalized, diverse, and dynamic world, the consistent call for new change theories has not received enough attention or response. Based on action research work with my colleagues at Pepperdine’s MSOD program, USC’s Center for Effective Organizations, and the NEOMA Business School in France, I’d like to propose a new theory for how organizations change and develop. The core assumptions in the model are that change and design are the same thing and that agility and development in modern organizations are characterized by continuous, multiple, simultaneous, and interdependent changes. The engage and learn model suggests that organizations can increase their capacity and capability for change through awareness, designing, tailoring, and monitoring.

Dr. Chris Worley is a recognized leader in the field of organization development, agility, and organization design. He is the former Director of the Master of Science in Organization Development (MSOD) program at Pepperdine Graziadio Business School and served as past chair for the Academy of Management's Organization Development and Change Division.

Dr. Worley's applied research and consulting practice is complemented by more than fifteen years of management experience in academic, for-profit, and government organizations. His consulting clients include organizations in high technology, fast-moving consumer goods, aerospace and defense, health care, financial services, retail, the public sector, and natural resources.

Dr. Worley's most recent books include The Agility Factor, Becoming Agile, Management Reset, and Built to Change. He recently co-edited Organizing for Sustainability: Leading through Networks & Partnerships. He also authored Integrated Strategic Change: How OD Builds Competitive Advantage, and with Tom Cummings has co-authored seven editions of Organization Development and Change, the leading textbook on organization development. His articles on strategic change and strategic organization design have appeared in the Sloan Management Review, the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, Organizational Dynamics, and the Journal of Organization Behavior, among others. In 2012, he received the Douglas McGregor Best Paper Award in The Journal of Applied Behavioral Sciences, and in 2011, he received the OD Network's Larry Porter Award and the Emerald Publishing Emerati Literary Award.