OST vs OD

[Ralph Copleman]

Meg and all,

I¹m quite surprised by some of the reactions to this ³provocative² question.

Maybe I¹m out of the mainstream (very probably true) of both OS and OD
practice, but my sense of things is that OD has, in fact, accepted OS as
part of its interventional cabinet.  Not everybody does it, but not
everybody does anything is the widely differentiated OD world.  It seems to
me that when I mention OS to my colleagues, they all know about it and many
acknowledge their own use of it.  Just about all indicate respect for its
contribution.  Almost no one criticizes it (to me, which may be a factor,
since they know I use it a lot.)

I¹m not a big defender of the OD field any more, not since I concluded it
gave up its mission of democratizing and humanizing organizations and
replaced it with near-blind willingness to help execs manipulate people for
the exclusive sake of the financial bottom line.  But I¹m not certain its
wise for we OS folks to tell ourselves that ³OD² people don¹t use OS
strictly out of monetary considerations.

I have not been to an ODN big event in years.  They¹re way too large for me,
but If the ODN used OS at its annual conferences, I might actually go again.
The fact that the national conference is not conducted in OS, however, is
not for me a measure of the field¹s acceptance of open space.  In the end,
whether a certain group accepts it or not doesn¹t matter anyway.

Ralph Copleman
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