Why some organization development and change management practitioners achieve higher impact …

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to share the accumulated learning and insights into what change agents and OD practitioners do to increase their chances of performing change projects that achieve a positive organizational impact. Change agents used here are those roles or positions (external or internal to an organization) whose job is to design, facilitate, consult and/or manage a collaborative organizational improvement or change effort. Design/methodology/approach To address this inquiry, we evaluated 317 individual Organization Development and/or Change Management projects conducted by adult learners serving as change agents enrolled in 12 different Master of Science programs from 2009 to 2020. The author assessed the qualitative differences between projects coded as “high evidence” of having had a positive organizational impact compared to projects coded as “low evidence” of having had a positive organizational impact. Findings Change agents that achieved a positive impact conducted a diagnosis that looked for what was unique; amplified the importance of salient behavior patterns linked to performance; adjusted the scope and pace of a project to align with a client’s capacity to perform a change effort; and employed a results-driven approach. These change agents displayed four noteworthy dimensional skills that formed a multilayered process that influenced the change effort to tip in a positive direction. The paper introduces a nascent taxonomy of consulting effectiveness that acknowledges the dialectic nature of organizational change and emphasizes the importance of choosing interventions that are adaptive and attuned to the client system and circumstances as contrasted with approaches that favored more normative processes. Originality/value This paper provides unique insights that show how the more proficient and adept OD and change management practitioners are at mastering consultative skills, the more agency and utility they’ll have to address a wider range of organizational challenges and the less dependent they’ll be on programmatic approaches that cannot stretch far enough to accommodate the breadth of complex tasks an organization faces.