Interventions catalog — Organizational Development

An OD intervention is a planned activity intended to improve organizational effectiveness. Cummings and Worley's four-family taxonomy is the standard organizing scheme.

Rule: choose the family that matches the diagnosis. A human process intervention will not fix a structural constraint, and a restructure will not fix distrust.

Evidence: Not an empirical model — a taxonomy. The four-family classification is an organizing convention. Evidence varies enormously between the interventions inside it: work design and goal setting are strongly supported, survey feedback and structured debriefs are well supported, and most team-building and values programs are not. Check the individual file before assuming a family's reputation transfers to a specific intervention.

Use when: you have a diagnosis and need to choose what to actually do; when a sponsor has proposed an intervention and you want to check it against what the diagnosis says.

Do not use when: you do not yet have a diagnosis. Choosing from this catalog first is the intervention-first failure that this repository warns about throughout. Run od-process-cycle stages one to four before opening this file.

1. Human process interventions

Target: relationships, communication, group dynamics.

Process consultation. See process-consultation.
Team building and team chartering.
Third-party conflict resolution and mediation.
Coaching and mentoring.
Group facilitation and dialogue.
After action reviews. See after-action-review.
Large-group methods: open-space-technology, world-cafe, future-search, appreciative-inquiry.

Use when the diagnosis says: low trust, unresolved conflict, poor meeting quality, silence in the face of risk, unclear team purpose.

2. Technostructural interventions

Target: structure, workflow, technology, division of labor.

Structural redesign: functional, divisional, matrix, network, product-aligned.
Work design and job enrichment. See job-characteristics-model.
Team boundary design. See team-topologies.
Process improvement: lean, six sigma, value stream mapping, theory of constraints, queueing analysis.
Downsizing and reengineering — high risk, frequently misused.
Sociotechnical redesign. See sociotechnical-systems.

Use when the diagnosis says: handoff delays, unclear decision rights, work that requires constant cross-boundary coordination, a visible bottleneck.

3. Human resource management interventions

Target: attracting, developing, retaining, and rewarding people.

Goal setting, performance management, and feedback systems.
Reward and recognition redesign.
Career frameworks and progression ladders. See maturity-models.
Talent development, succession planning, leadership development.
Wellness, workload, and burnout interventions.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

Use when the diagnosis says: the system rewards the opposite of what it asks for, people cannot see a future here, or capability gaps are real rather than motivational.

4. Strategic interventions

Target: the organization's relationship with its environment.

Mission, vision, and values work.
Culture change programs. See schein-model-of-organizational-culture.
Merger and acquisition integration.
Organization learning and knowledge management. See learning-organization.
Transorganizational: alliances, networks, joint ventures.
Digital and AI transformation.

Use when the diagnosis says: the environment has changed and the organization has not, or identity and direction are genuinely contested.

Selecting an intervention

Diagnosis says	Family	Typical first move
People will not raise problems	Human process	Leader behavior change, then AAR practice
Work waits in queues	Technostructural	Map the flow, attack the constraint
Two units fight over the same decision	Technostructural	Clarify decision rights, not team building
Great people, bad results	Technostructural or HRM	Check work design and incentives before skills
Stated values contradict lived behavior	Strategic + leadership	Change what is rewarded and tolerated
Skills genuinely missing	HRM	Targeted capability build with practice, not a course
Everything feels urgent, nothing finishes	Technostructural	Limit work in progress; portfolio triage

Dosage and sequencing

Start where credibility is cheapest to earn: a visible, small, fast win that the sponsor did not have to force.
Do not run more than one major intervention per group at a time.
Sequence structural clarity before cultural work when decision rights are genuinely ambiguous; people cannot be candid about a game whose rules are undefined.
Sequence trust work before structural work when the last three restructures failed; nobody will engage honestly otherwise.

Examples by audience

Health care: a ward reporting rising medication errors gets a human process intervention in most organizations — communication training. The diagnosis usually calls for a technostructural one: protect the drug round from interruption. Training the people while leaving the interruption rate unchanged addresses the wrong family entirely.
Software: "we need more engineers" proposes an HRM intervention for what is nearly always a technostructural problem — a queue, a shared pipeline, an approval gate. Adding people to a constrained system increases contention on the constraint. See systems-thinking.
Executive: strategic interventions are the family executives reach for first, because they are the family executives control directly — a new vision, a values relaunch, a restructure. They are also the slowest to show effect and the easiest to launch without a diagnosis. Ask which family the diagnosis actually points to before choosing.

Limitations

The four families are an organizing convention, not a validated taxonomy, and real interventions frequently span two of them.
Evidence varies enormously within each family; a family's reputation does not transfer to a specific intervention inside it.
The catalog says nothing about sequencing or dosage on its own. See the guidance above, and od-process-cycle.