FOREWORD

In the first edition of this book, we were writing this foreword from Bethel, Maine, the original site of the NTL Institute. Today, we are writing from our home in the San Francisco Bay Area community of Emeryville. Our use of Gould Academy and the Founders House in Bethel is now part of our history and NTL’s. And our history as part of the Adult Education Division of the National Education Association has drifted into history as NTL’s focus has expanded from small group and community development to organization development.

National is the word that seems to represent the tentative or conservative nature of the original group and a reluctance to assert that the methods and practices might somehow reach around the globe. There had always been broad interest in the work of international colleagues, even though the membership and programs focused in the main on domestic audiences. Training, by contrast, was a strong word that came from the work of Ronald Lippitt in his counterinsurgency training in Indochina during World War II. It was descriptive of the positive outcome of the process of learning by doing through skill exercises that involved feedback and reflection. Laboratory captured the essence of the work of Kurt Lewin, Lee Bradford, Ron Lippitt, and Ken Benne, the four founders of NTL, who articulated the need for action research through experiential learning.

Groups, however, were the one thing the founders were sure about. Small group process was the major focus in the early years of NTL: group dynamics, group development, and group research. Basic skill training groups (the name was soon shortened to T-groups) were viewed as the center of the learning laboratory. Learning objectives focused on the link between individual contributions in the dynamics of the group and the processes of the larger community; groups became the building blocks in applying democratic principles of participation in decision making and the world of action. Groups were seen as having the same critical elements for members working in a variety of settings: community, industry, education, and volunteer organizations. Specifically, distributed power, influence, and leadership were key elements in managing groups and organizations in the aftermath of World War II.

All of the key words in the original name find their way into the chapters of this book and represent the base from which our particular branch of organization development has evolved.

The role of the founders of NTL was critical in grounding all of these ideas and skills in an action research format. They outlined and evolved a process of reflective learning that changed adult education in general and constituted the base for the future of training and organization development. They brought their experience in role playing, simulations, and skill practice in cross-cultural scenarios together with the creative techniques for wide participation in the precursors of Future Search and Whole System Change. They combined the educational philosophy of John Dewey with a concern for ethics and democratic values, which was a compass that is still used to assess the values and ethics of planned change. The wide participation of all levels and functions in organization change led to the evolution of organizational culture change methodologies.

Democratic process was the key to all of these pioneers who conceived of the early programs in Bethel. This place was chosen because it met the requirements of Lewin for a cultural island: an island devoted to research and laboratory training; an island that looked and felt a lot like Brigadoon; an island hard to get to and even harder to leave; an island where people could explore new ideas for changing their own behavior and their visions of change outside of the constraints of their everyday environments.

As NTL members working with group development began to realize that groups were microcosms of organizations, they began to realize that the work being focused in improving the functioning of groups could be expanded to include the improved processes of organizations. Thus, in the 1960s, NTL added organization development to its programs and research studies; changed its name to the NTL Institute; and became a separate organization, leaving the protective umbrella of the Adult Education Division of the National Education Association. A new era had begun, in which organization development would blossom and flourish and gradually distinguish itself from the focus on individual and group development.

We were fortunate to be early second-generation members of NTL. Edie arrived in Bethel in 1950 and Charlie showed up in 1957 as a research assistant. We met when Charlie participated in a T-group in which Edie was co-training, and our relationship with each other and Bethel has continued to this day. Our combined hundred-plus summers in Bethel and twenty-five years as faculty with the American University/NTL Master’s Program in OD have spanned much of the history of the field of organization development as we know it. Our exposure to many of the pioneers in the field has given us a perspective that we want to share on the occasion of publication of this notable and important book connecting group development, participative leadership, experiential learning, and organization development.

Six decades ago, seeds were planted here in Bethel that became significant roots for the field of organization development. Those roots included not only well-known theorists and practitioners but also those people who have extended leadership to the organizations that embraced, expanded, and shaped the current state of the field of organization development. Among them are the Organization Development Network (ODN); the Organization Development Institute (ODI); and significant divisions of many other professional organizations: the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), the Academy of Management (AOM), and the many universities that developed OD master’s and doctoral programs.

The taproot of OD that influenced the formation of NTL, and virtually all of the chapters in this book, goes back to Kurt Lewin. His work charted the way for much of what is widely shared by the many practitioners of our field. It also laid the groundwork for the differences and some of the uniqueness that characterize each scholar-practitioner’s approach to our work. Philosophically and pragmatically, Lewin and his colleagues contributed the conception of individuals and their social relationships existing within a field of forces rather than the Aristotelian and Newtonian conceptions of simple cause and effect. This was an adaptation that Lewin made from field theory in physics. It served to open up the possibilities of action research and intervention in creating planned social change at all levels of systems. Lewin’s basic formula of B = f [P,E] was shorthand for “behavior is a function of personal characteristics and the environment.” This highlighted the importance of understanding how creating changes in the environment of a relationship, a group, or an organization could be an extremely powerful force in determining an individual’s behavior, the outcome of group processes, and larger systems dynamics.

As a pioneer social psychologist, Lewin came to the United States in reaction to Hitler’s persecution of Jews. His work was at the heart of the interdisciplinary movement in the pursuit of meaningful social change. World War II also heightened the deep hunger for structures and processes that would give hope to the idea of world peace. Shortly after the armistice, Lewin’s Research Center for Group Dynamics was established at MIT and then moved to the University of Michigan following his death in early 1947. Rensis Likert brought leadership to the Survey Research Center and the umbrella organization, called the Institute for Social Research. Meanwhile, in other developments on the group process front, sociodrama and sociometry were flourishing under Jacob and Zerka Moreno, and the Tavistock Institute in London was exploring the relevance of psychoanalytic theory to group process and social change. Revolutionary ideas were simultaneously being explored in the fields of adult education, leadership, psychiatry, management, and community development.

Experiential learning was in the spirit of many of these innovations, as was the use of systematic data gathering as part of action research and the field of strategic planning. Social scientists who had been active in the war effort in both the military and the civilian sectors were fired up with the opportunity to reinvent democracy, put a new take on social justice, and experiment with applying scientific methods to human affairs, especially individual development and social relationships that form the backbone for exercising leadership in small groups, organizations, and communities. The concept of feedback, informed by the work of Norbert Weiner and colleagues in the field of cybernetics, became an integral part of the exercise of leadership and the processes of the management of change. The implications of new technology were additional challenges to the understanding of process management in successful task achievement. The foundations of sociotechnical systems work flowed out of the wartime experiences of Bion and others in the Tavistock Institute in London. All of this work is still relevant to the issues that have arisen in the approaches to improved efficiency and effectiveness promised in change management strategies.

The critical values underlying that work still inform the world of organization development. It is the expression of those values that you see...