A new architecture of Organisational Development

We are the OD Bootstrappers, an Action Research group made up of Organisational Development practitioners from the NHS. We came together to explore the future of OD practice in the NHS and soon discovered that it felt like wandering in fog.  On this adventure we uncovered some new and interesting insights about the practice of OD in the NHS.

OD Bootstrappers at our meeting in June 2018

If you’ve found this page, it’s likely you might be an OD practitioner yourself. Hi there! You are exactly the person we wanted to reach. Or, you might be someone who works in HR or transformation or change management – welcome friends. We hope that you’ll find our work useful as a tool for reflection, sensemaking, planning and action.

Our work, like our research, is emergent. We’ve been working on this since summer 2016 and keep making new discoveries all the time. We were keen to get something out there to share with the wider community, but just to let you know the thinking and materials we present here are ‘Version 1.0’ in their evolution. They’re newborn ideas and need to be nurtured. A small group of kind colleagues helped us to test the draft material (thank you) and we hope that you’ll give us even more feedback that will help us to refine and develop our thinking further.

The New Architecture of OD document was the first in a number of our resources we released. We wrote an article about this phase of work which was published in the Summer 2018 edition of OD Practitioner Journal. You can read a case study from Bootstrapper Sarah Morgan, describing her experience of testing the model before we released it.

The NHS is a complex system, often tricky to navigate. Read Bootstrapper Lisa’s blog about working in complexity and how she used her work as an OD Bootrapper to make sense of it.

We’ve added some thoughts on the positive core of our OD practice, and what it might take to be an OD practitioner of the future. We’d love to hear your thoughts on both of these. If you’d like some further reading, check out our list here.

Please enjoy our story so far and do stay in touch. You can give feedback on our work here and we would love to hear from you. We are all on this journey together.

OD Bootstrappers

September 2018