Introduction

Organization development (OD) is protean and in-process, which defies a complete picture of "what OD is," but a baker's dozen of thought pieces do their best with a challenging assignment. Consider only the work in organizations which most observers label OD, and that effort in "developmental administration" variously called "institution-building," "capacity building," "community development," and so on. Only have the commonalities sufficiently surfaced to encourage what could have been usefully happening all along—cooperation and collaboration in doing what massively and obviously requires doing. Focusing on what happens between people provides very useful input for efficient and effective living as well as working. The focus on OD as interaction-only or as interaction-initially gets support from the power of directing attention to process issues, but owes most of its currency to the fact that in the earliest days the only basic OD learning approaches were interaction-centered.