ABSTRACT
Nicholas Sarra is employed by a National Health Service (NHS) Trust in the United Kingdom where his main concern is organizational development (OD). He describes the confusion people experience as they try to work out just what OD means in their context. As a way of doing OD, he suggests that, instead of trying to prepare a plan, those involved in the OD project should start by talking to those who are supposed to be changed by the OD project about what they are doing. He proposes a group visit to the Trust’s forensic psychiatric hospital. As with other writers in this volume, he understands consulting and research to be the same reflective conversational practices. He makes sense of what he is doing by exploring how current patterns of power relations are sustained in processes of gossip, arguing that ways of talking (gossip) form what we do together and this can be changed only by entering into these ways of talking – this is the justification for seeing the visits to the psychiatric hospital as OD activities. For Sarra, change or development in an organization means change in the pattern of power relations.
