Assessing Planned Change

In order for planned organizational change to advance in both theory and practice, there must be a concomitant advancement in the willingness and ability of change agents to assess the change process effectively. This paper explores the current OD assessment milieu and proposes a model to help clarify assessment. Each feature of the model is defined, and charac-teristic problems are discussed in light of current methods and theory. As a means of summary, guidelines are proposed to enhance the assessability of potential change activities. In the last decade and a half, we have seen the inception and rapid growth of organization development (OD) as a method of planned organizational change until today it constitutes a large percentage of the planned-change efforts in organizations. As the use ofOD concepts has grown, so has the need for more knowledge of change dynamics through methodologically sound and rigorous planned-change as-sessments rather than the anecdotal data that has constituted the larger part of the theory base of change dynamics. If planned-change pro-grams are to move out of their current intuitive, &dquo;artsy&dquo; stage, system-atic assessment research must be undertaken. Assessment research plays a very special role-unlike any other type of organizational research-for the systems in which it is per-formed, as well as for the development of general theory. Often, these two demands are contradictory, and one must be compromised for the other. In either case, however, important contributions can be made by using the assessment process. The purpose of this paper is to examine the important issues in OD assessment research and give suggestions for improving the quality o