My Shot

The Broadway musical Hamilton with its inspiring re-telling of the story of the American Revolution is widely credited for reigniting energy into the ideals of American Democracy. Its songs are about history, but they are also about the world today and inspired by the challenges and opportunities of the present.

It was Alexander Hamilton’s revolutionary worldview that inspired Hamilton’s composer Lin-Manuel Miranda to reinterpret the American revolution in the context of today’s world. As a result, the enthusiastic diverse audiences of Hamilton learn that the American Revolution is more than historical facts and dates, and abstract White men wearing wigs.

Inspired by the success of Hamilton, I believe a there is a similar reinterpretation that can be applied to the revolutionary history of Organization Development and the study of Kurt Lewin — how organization development is more than social science theories, techniques, and black and white pictures of corporate life in the 1960s.

There is a whole lot more to organization development than most people know. Its usefulness to organizations struggling to make progress toward significant goals comes from asking better questions and recognizing the profound interconnections between change in a person, change in groups and change in a system. Like democracy, it will always have experimental qualities and it will always be adapting and innovating to meet changing social workplace needs.

For any important social, political, or intellectual movement, sustaining energy and relevance over time, and across successive generations, is a challenge. Does time change the importance of the ideals? Are the approaches still as meaningful today as they once were? Are the principles still intact?

My approach to organization development is not to run away from the past, but to look more deeply at the past in the context of the needs of today’s organizations and offer new interpretations that can be inspiring. This requires qualities of being socially aware, informed, knowing what’s going on in the community, the marketplace, and being an independent thinker. This is following in the tradition of Kurt Lewin, OD’s founding father, and other revolutionary founding fathers like Alexander Hamilton, being intellectually broad-minded, independent, imaginative, willing to take risks, enthusiastic about intellectual adventures, and frequently provocative. OD is My Shot at making a difference in the world.