It has been great to be a part of the Social Justice in Organizational Change Anthology and to end the summer with another chapter in it, co-authored with Dorie Ellzey Blesoff and reviewed by Sarah Owusu, Liza Jager and Matt Minahan.
Gilpin-Jackson, Y., & Blesoff, D. E. (2024). Traveling Toward the Transformation of Organization Development and Change with Possibility and Courage. In K. S. Scott (Ed.), Social Justice in Organizational Change: An Inclusive Anthology. https://doi.org/10.21428/3ce64483.9271b072
This chapter gave Dorie and I an opportunity to consider the possibility of Transformation for Organization Development and Change (ODC) scholarship and practice, through the lens of my Grey Zone Change Framework. It was an opportunity to ask what would be needed to transition, learn, develop together and embrace the possibility and courage required for the journey. It is overall, a call to communities of action:
This is a call to all of us to see anti-oppressive ODC as a possible new way.
This is a call to make conscious the unconscious biases and mental models that have undergirded dominant norms and practices, both in the telling of human history and in the personal narratives we live by.
This is a call to push against what we’ve been told is impossible, or improbable, or not worth struggling toward, to have the courage to stay committed to our collective vision and show, in our minds, bodies and spirits, what is possible for humans to accomplish with each other and in partnership with the Earth.
This is a call to have courage to take action…and persevere through the difficult dynamics of navigating through the Grey Zone of Change to keep moving toward that desired future. Resmaa Menakem said it so well:
“At its best, activism is a form of healing. It is about what we do and how we show up in the world. It is about learning and expressing regard, compassion, and love.” (Menakem, 2017, p. 244)
As is true of all complex systems transformations, this call is as much personal as it is systemic. As we note in the chapter, we are aware, as co-authors, that we are also a part of the context, knowledge systems and structures that we have been raised within as scholars and practitioners in Organizational Development and Change. Here is an excerpt of my reflection on the process of working on this chapter with Dorie. I hope it inspires you to join the project and take on the calls to action to move towards the possibilities for positive change and transformation that this era of interregnum is ushering humanity toward.
Being a part of this project and writing this chapter was itself a journey through the Grey Zone for me. In engaging with this amazing community of scholars and practitioners, I was confronted with an uncomfortable truth–Though I have spoken to inherent colonial biases and the related inequities I have experienced within aspects of ODC in various forums, I had to-date not engaged in a systemic, equity-centered critique of the field that has been my professional home for over 20 years. In fact, it became clear to me that this is a task I have actively avoided, because of my own competing commitments to the many friends, colleagues and teachers who have been my mentors and sponsors directly as well as indirectly through their writings in my career journey. A critique of this field in any way, feels in many ways like a critique of them and my African heritage sensitivities says to question their work is to disrespect the elders who have gone before me, and signals a lack of gratitude. This, in spite of my full cognitive understanding that a critique of systems is not a critique of individuals who are shaped by and within the social constructions of those systems. It also occurred to me in reflection that even my African sensitivities hold ingrained gendered and/or ageist and/or patriarchal assumptions about who and how “voice” is used to contribute to knowledge creation and wisdom in “acceptable” ways. This journey has therefore been one of transformative learning and to an extent, liberatory for me. In moving past my discomforts and engaging in the dialogues with my co-author Dorie Ellzey Blesoff that resulted in this chapter, I crossed the threshold in my own development as a scholar and practitioner, in the ability to hold dialectic thinking. ODC can and has served advancements in human organizing AND can and has contributed to persistent inequities inherent in the legacies of some of its founding assumptions. I can offer critiques from my lived experience and scholarly practice AND continue to respect the elders and founders of ODC. This work is by no means an exhaustive critique, but it has opened the doorway for me to leave the comforts of the “safe” and “acceptable” frames which I have used to-date to avoid this deeper work. For example, in spite of direct lived experience of being the only Black person in a T-group and experiencing the impact of group dynamics being analyzed without attention to the racial dynamics and intersectionalities that were equally at play in the process, I still did not explicitly, until very recently, engage in my work and teaching of group dynamics with an equity-centered lens. This is a disservice to myself and those I have engaged as it has severed the possible contributions that my unique and divergent perspective from the norms might have brought to those contexts. I am grateful to now be more fully open and conscious of the choices I make in my work and scholarship. I am grateful for the gift of working with an open heart with my co-author who is likewise on her own decolonization journey as we integrated and critiqued the transition model that has been so foundational to both of us while recognizing and naming our own biases in the process.