Organization Development for Social Change: - Movement Strategy ...

development. This organization seems to be hitting a familiar choice-point for community groups: stayingsmall and “scrappy” with a lot of heart and limited impact, or growing in size and “professionalism” in orderto exert more influence and gain more victories on community issues.While it might seem at first glance that OD could really help CO navigate this tension, often this is not soobvious to organizers. OD’s primary context is organizations, not communities, movements, or society as awhole. As a result, the framework of many OD practitioners will likely seem too narrow to help answer theset of questions facing CO groups, for example: How does the organization’s mission advance an overallmovement strategy? Additionally, OD works from a humanistic orientation that primarily values the humandignity, meaning, and growth of individuals. This outlook can seem initially alienating to many organizerswho spend a good portion of their lives devoted to building collective power and community structures. Inreality, OD takes this humanistic frame and applies it to collective group processes in order to encouragemore healthy organizations, a concern that is shared by both organizers and OD practitioners. OD even aimsto increase democracy in organizational life, however it pays more attention to individual needs within grouplife than CO does. In this way, OD can actually offer CO an important competency that it lacks by helpingorganizers attend to individual needs in the collective and find a balance that will increase organizationalsuccess. 1On the other hand, OD lacks the attention to power relationships and community leadership that CO valuesdeeply. As the vignette above points out, the commitment to hiring constituents onto staff is not simply anissue of organizational stage of development (as OD might frame it). This commitment also reflects theorganization’s broader political goals of increasing community leadership, as well as being genuinelyaccountable to its constituents. There is an inherent imbalance of power when an outsider with moreexpertise works in a community organization. Often the notion of “expertise” places more value oneducational attainment and access to elite power structures than the valuable lived experience and know-howthat community members bring. Ultimately, the community should “own” the organization and use it as avehicle to solve community problems themselves, in a way that increases their voice and builds their collectivepower.Applying Power Analysis methods to OD could help the organization move through this conundrum. PAcan help groups understand and then re-constitute dynamics of power on both institutional and interpersonallevels. PA can offer OD a framework for understanding how power is structured in society, and then how itplays out in organizations. 2 In this instance, an OD facilitator might lead the organization through a processthat clarifies individual assumptions about power, and addresses the seeming contradiction between buildingcommunity leadership on the one hand and building a more powerful organization on the other. OD couldalso offer the understanding that each person subjectively constructs their own meaning and that, whether ornot that meaning is immediately transparent to another, it has intrinsic value. 3 In other words, OD couldminimize the binary thinking that is often characteristic of PA, for example, the idea that there is only one“correct” understanding of how societal power is structured. If OD operates from the assumption thateveryone has a claim on some aspect of the truth, then it can open up the space for the organization to step1 Sinclair, Zak. Organization Development Success in Grassroots Social Change Organizations: How Change Happens, MAdiss. JFK University, 2003.2 Sinclair, Zak, Susan Lubeck, and Lisa Russ, eds. Unpublished manuscript. Four Approaches to Transformation in SocialJustice Work. For more on this see: Power Analysis chapter by Pia Infante and Zak Sinclair. Oakland: Movement StrategyCenter, 2006.3 Ibid. For more on this see: Organization Development chapter by Susan Lubeck and Ernest Mark. Oakland: MovementStrategy Center, 2006.©2006, Zak Sinclair and Movement Strategy Center Page 7