Glossary — Organizational Development

Action research — producing knowledge about a system by trying to change it, with members as co-researchers.
Adjourning — the disbanding stage of a team; real loss, routinely unmanaged.
Artifacts — the visible layer of culture: layout, rituals, language, tools.
At-risk behavior — a choice that increases risk where the risk is unrecognized or believed justified. Coach, do not punish.
Balancing loop — a feedback loop that resists change and seeks a goal.
Balancing measure — a metric that detects harm exported elsewhere by an improvement.
Barrier point — in ADKAR, the first missing element; where to intervene.
Basic underlying assumptions — the unconscious layer of culture that actually determines behavior.
Chasm — the gap between early adopters and the early majority.
Congruence — fit between organizational components; the basis of the Nadler-Tushman model.
Conway's law — systems mirror the communication structures of the organizations that design them.
Double-loop learning — questioning the governing goals and assumptions, not just correcting the action.
Espoused theory — what people say they believe, as opposed to theory-in-use.
Generative culture — Westrum's performance-oriented type; information flows, failure causes inquiry.
Hygiene factor — a condition whose absence causes dissatisfaction and whose presence does not motivate.
Institutionalization — making a change survive its sponsor.
Inverse Conway maneuver — organizing teams to produce a desired architecture.
Joint optimization — designing the social and technical systems together.
Lagging indicator — confirms an outcome after the fact.
Lateral process — coordination across units without escalation; Galbraith's cheap lever.
Leading indicator — moves early enough to steer by.
Leverage point — a place in a system where a small change produces a large effect.
Motivating potential score — Hackman and Oldham's multiplicative index of work design quality.
Neutral zone — Bridges' middle phase; old gone, new not yet operational.
Normalization of deviance — drift from standard becoming the new normal because nothing bad happened yet.
Presenting problem — the problem as first stated; rarely the real one.
Process consultation — helping the client diagnose and solve their own problem.
Provocative proposition — an appreciative inquiry statement of the ideal, written in the present tense.
Psychological safety — a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.
Quasi-stationary equilibrium — Lewin's model of the status quo as a balance of opposing forces.
Reinforcing loop — a feedback loop that amplifies change.
Requisite variety — only variety can absorb variety (Ashby's law).
Restraining force — something holding the status quo in place; usually cheaper to remove than to overpower.
Safe-to-fail experiment — a small, reversible probe appropriate to complex domains.
Single-loop learning — correcting the action while leaving goals and assumptions unchanged.
Sociotechnical system — the joint social and technical arrangement of work.
Substitution test — would three similar peers in the same situation have done the same thing?
Target condition — in improvement kata, how a process should operate by a near date.
Theory-in-use — what behavior implies a person actually believes.
Transactional factors — structure, systems, practices, climate; changing them produces incremental change.
Transformational factors — mission and strategy, leadership, culture; changing them changes the organization's character.
Triangulation — confirming a finding across multiple independent methods.