Serious blogging, as opposed to the random ramblings of blogs from my past...wow! Is this what it means to be
an adult? As your new Guest Analyst for this Organization Development (OD) area of interest, my goal is to give you content you can use right away. It may be in the form of tips, an item learned through research, or a point of note that you want me to share with your peers.

This is a wonderful opportunity to establish and nurture a relationship with you as an addendum to my articles - past and future. A tip for getting familiar with my writing style is to note that my tongue frequently resides in my cheek, especially in the more-personable blog writing venue. I write articles to come across as knowledgeable and professional; blog entries to inform and entertain. Being aware of the delicate nature of interpreting words on the screen without benefit of seeing facial expressions in person, to an international readership, I make a concerted effort to minimize the off-the-wall style. Here´s to wishing me success in this effort.

The OD area offers great topical variety. Since "organization development" is subject to broad interpretation, I went to the informative, reliable, expert, user-entry online encyclopedia called Wikipedia to find out how OD is defined. (Reader aside: This is the first of many failures at my concerted effort to keep tongue out of cheek. If you are unfamiliar with Wikipedia, let me be the first to tell you that "reliable" and "expert" are loose terms when it comes
to this online resource. "Informative" is correct - especially in that it is a user-entry resource, meaning anyone can provide information they think they know.)

Back to OD topics. According to the entry I read, OD includes:
-       Diversity management
-       Group process
-       Knowledge management
-       Managing change
-       Meetings
-       Organizational culture, learning, and performance
-       Process improvement
-       Storytelling
-       Strategic and succession planning
-       Systems
-       Team building
-       T-groups
-       Quality
That is quite a selection from which to make writing choices. I purposely omitted topics from this list that
fall under the purview of other HR.com Areas of Interest.

Second note about my writing style: I ride a motorcycle. How does that relate to writing, you ask?  Many of my analogies and metaphors relate to motorcycling. Don´t worry. You do not need to be familiar with the motorcycle world to understand them (the analogies, that is, not the motorcycles).

Back to OD again. Whew! Tired of bouncing back-and-forth yet?

OD is about the group ride rather than solo ride. Have you ever seen a group of motorcyclists riding the road?  They are a powerful entity. A single biker may catch your attention, especially if their motorcycle is loud.
Two or three bikers may be interesting to watch riding together. A group, rumbling or whining by, evokes a physical reaction of some sort - positive or negative depending on your feelings about motorcycles - and you actually feel something when you see them. Powerful!  

The tie-back to HR is that OD is about the organization and its people as a system, rather than solo individuals. According to the Organization Development Network (ODN), "OD is a field directed at interventions in the processes of human systems (formal and informal groups, organizations, communities, and societies) in order to increase their effectiveness and health using a variety of disciplines, principally applied behavioral sciences." My best effort is to address issues that involve and affect these systems, effectively using the most powerful resource within the systems - the human resource.

Your comments and questions will help me make this happen. As the cliché goes (or is it a bumper sticker?), without "U", it´s just "YO_R"s. Happy New Year.
Sylvia