The Seven Critical Interventions of Planned Change

Most organizational development literature has some version of the stages or steps of planned change. They go something like: contracting, data gathering, intervention, evaluation, and disengagement. I have problems with this framework. Each stage is an intervention in itself, yet intervention properly comes after data gathering. In addition, evaluation includes data gathering along with some analysis. Further, in real life, the sequence suggested in most literature does not account for various stages overlapping. For example, data gathering often leads to re-contracting – as might any other intervention. This makes the framework both confusing and unwieldy.

I have designed an alternative approach I am calling “Critical Interventions.” This approach acknowledges that all of the stages are interventions. It does not suggest any particular ordering, although the order in which they are offered may have some value.

From the perspective of applied behavioral science, an intervention is an action within a human system that is intended to move that system toward some specific change goal. In organization development terms, our interventions are designed to move the support for a specified goal toward critical mass http://tinyurl.com/supportsystems through engendering collaboration dynamics such as mutual understanding and the willingness to learn from differences.  http://tinyurl.com/learningfromdifferences 

Seven Critical Interventions

• Data Gathering

• Creating Possibility

• Contracting for Collaboration

• Event Planning and Implementation

• Feedback as a Learning Process

• Clear Consequences

• Disengagement

Stayed tuned next week for our explication of “Data Gathering” and what makes it the very first of the “Seven Critical Interventions!”

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Critical Interventions : A New Take on The Stages of Planned Change

This cutting edge article has been moved to http://www.chumans.com/human-systems-resources/critical-interventions.html.

Please read it and send me your feedback.

Michael