ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the development of Organisation Development (OD) in healthcare in the UK, from its unlikely origins in the coal industry through early proto-OD projects in the 1960s and early 1970s, before locating the real origins of OD in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) in Sheffield, with the creation of the first internal OD practitioner posts. The growing national interest in OD led, over time, to a form of “colonisation” by the Human Resource function. The notion of a third modernity which challenges OD’s original assumptions is also identified. The National Coal Board (NCB) as a new organisation was required to increase coal production in order to help the UK recover from the debilitating effects of the Second World War. Post-modernism is characterised by a general distrust of grand theories, narratives and ideologies that attempt to put all knowledge into a single framework and so should be abandoned.
