Inappropriate Defenses Against the Monitoring of Organization Development Practice

Abstract

Many organization development practitioners resist public inquiry into the reasoning behind and validity of their assumptions, methods, and outcomes. Based on personal experience, the author presents three patterns of defenses used by practitioners uncomfortable with discussions of their perceptions, strategies, and behavior. In the first pattern, the practitioner accuses someone seeking to address these issues of being inappropriately rational and insufficiently respectful of intuition. In the second pattern, the practitioner inhibits discussion by charging that rational dialogue and confrontation are inappropriate whenever they cause distress or interfere with one's personal learning style. In the third pattern, the practitioner withdraws from the interaction and accuses those questioning the practitioner's work of being judgmental and punishing. The author concludes that these defenses endanger the credibility of organization development, and that its practitioners must make their conclusions, methods, and claims explicit and test them using logical processes separate from their own experiences and biases.