ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one of the most frequently used organizational development technologies: the use of retreats as a means of bringing about intended change in organizations. It examines the distinctions between the organizational development tradition and the group relations training tradition as a means of providing a deeper understanding of the dynamics under review. A major problem for organizational development practitioners is that with suppressed authority relations, it becomes very difficult to connect a retreat to a set of subsequent actions. A retreat may provide insight and some awareness, but it often fails to stimulate action. Action is linked deeply to how one comes to be authorized, and by whom, to accomplish a goal. The goal of an interpretation is to show how individual experience in all its manifestations bears some linkage, some relationship, to the experience of the group as a whole.
