The Future of Evaluation in Organization Development

Training is a short-term change effort focused on individuals; organization development (OD) is a long-term change effort focused on groups of people or on entire organizations. This chapter offers some predictions about the future of evaluation in OD and invite readers to make their own predictions, plan for addressing the trends, and build competencies essential to evaluating OD interventions. Traditionally, many OD practitioners have come from a background of psychology or organizational behavior. Many organizations today establish their organizational strategic goals by using the balanced scorecard. The classic balanced scorecard components are financial, customer, business operations, and organizational learning and growth. Technology offers many opportunities to collect information, feed it back to stakeholders, reach agreement on desired changes, and monitor implementation. In the future, OD evaluations will rely more heavily on technology-enabled approaches. Traditionally, OD evaluation is associated with finding gaps between desired change targets and actual results.