50 Best Thought Leaders in Organisational Development

Every organisation that has ever tried to change and failed has one thing in common: it underestimated the human system. Not the strategy, not the technology, not the structure, but the patterns of behaviour, belief, and relationship that determine whether any change takes root or quietly disappears. This is the domain of organisational development, and it has never mattered more than it does right now.

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 estimates that approximately 60 percent of workers globally will need significant reskilling by 2030. The PwC Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2025, drawing on responses from around 50,000 workers across nearly 50 countries, found that employees are anxious about change, ambivalent about artificial intelligence, and far less confident that leaders are being transparent with them. At the same time, a recent MIT study cited by ATD found that approximately 95 percent of generative AI pilots fail to produce measurable business results, largely because of weak workflow integration and inadequate change management. These are not technology failures.

They are human system failures, and they are exactly what the field of organisational development exists to address.

Organisational development (OD) is the planned, systematic application of behavioural science knowledge and practices to help organisations increase their effectiveness and capacity to change. It draws on psychology, sociology, anthropology, and systems thinking. It works at the level of culture, structure, group dynamics, leadership behaviour, and organisational learning. It is not the same as HR, although the two fields often work closely together.

It is not the same as change management, although OD includes it. OD is fundamentally about helping organisations become more capable of developing themselves, not just more capable of executing a single change initiative.

The people on this list have made that mission their life's work. They represent the full breadth of the field, from the pioneers of appreciative inquiry and psychological safety to the practitioners reshaping organisation design, from the systems thinkers working with complexity to the researchers studying what makes learning organisations actually learn. They span five continents and a range of disciplines. Every person on this list was selected because they are actively contributing to the field right now.

If your organisation is navigating transformation and you are looking for the voices most worth following, this list is the place to start. To explore how these frameworks apply inside your leadership team, book Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and leadership consultant, at jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why Organisational Development Matters

The stakes for getting organisational development right have rarely been higher. Most transformation efforts fail, not because the strategy was wrong, but because the human system was not sufficiently developed to carry the change. Research published in the Harvard Business Review and McKinsey over many years has consistently found that between 60 and 70 percent of large-scale organisational change efforts fail to achieve their intended outcomes, with some estimates placing that figure even higher.

The pattern is consistent. Leaders announce a change. Consultants redesign the structure or the process. And then, often within 18 months, the organisation has reverted to something close to where it started, because the underlying beliefs, relationships, and working patterns were never addressed.

This is precisely the gap that OD is designed to fill.

OD practitioners work with the human dynamics that strategy documents routinely ignore. They ask questions about trust, safety, power, and purpose. They facilitate dialogue that allows conflict to become productive rather than destructive. They design systems that create genuine feedback loops rather than performative listening sessions.

And they build the internal capacity for change that allows an organisation to keep developing beyond any single consultant's engagement.

The field is more relevant in 2026 than at any previous point in recent decades, because the pressures organisations face, including artificial intelligence integration, demographic shifts, climate transition, and geopolitical disruption, are all human system challenges at their core. No amount of technology will substitute for the relational and cultural work that OD practitioners do.

For leadership teams working on the communication and accountability dimensions of culture and team effectiveness, Jonno White works globally with organisations to create the conditions where people can have the honest conversations that matter most. Hire Jonno to facilitate your next leadership team offsite at jonno@consultclarity.org.

How This List Was Compiled

Every person on this list was selected on three criteria. First, they must have made a documented, substantive contribution to the practice or theory of organisational development, whether through published work, original frameworks, training delivered at scale, or active practitioner leadership in the field. Second, they must be actively engaging with and contributing to the OD conversation in 2025 or 2026, not resting on a reputation built in an earlier decade. Third, the list was deliberately built to surface the voices who are genuinely shaping the field right now rather than recycling the small handful of names that appear on every generic leadership list.

The list spans researchers, authors, practitioners, and organisational psychologists from more than 12 countries across five continents. It brings together the people who belong at the top of any directory of serious OD contributors.

Category 1: Psychological Safety and Organisational Learning

These thinkers have established the scientific and practical foundations for understanding how teams and organisations learn, fail well, and create the conditions where people can contribute their best thinking. The connection between psychological safety and organisational performance is now one of the most well-documented relationships in management science. The researchers in this category have done the hard work of grounding that relationship in evidence and then translating it into practice for real organisations navigating real pressures.

1. Amy Edmondson

The Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, Amy Edmondson is the world's foremost authority on psychological safety and organisational learning. Ranked second globally by Thinkers50 in 2025 (and first in both 2021 and 2023), she has built one of the most consequential bodies of evidence in the management sciences on the conditions under which teams learn, innovate, and perform under pressure. Her research spans healthcare, aerospace, construction, and technology, always asking the same fundamental question: what makes it possible for people to speak up?

Her 2023 book Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well was named the Financial Times Book of the Year 2023, extending her foundational work on psychological safety into a comprehensive framework for understanding how individuals, teams, and organisations can embrace intelligent failure as a source of learning. At UNLEASH World 2025, she presented her concept of fearless candour, arguing that the goal is not merely comfort but the ability to be direct and honest in service of better performance. Her ongoing research at Harvard continues to shape OD practice in organisations across every sector.

2. Timothy R. Clark

CEO of LeaderFactor and architect of the 4 Stages of Psychological Safety model, Timothy R. Clark has produced one of the most practically useful frameworks for helping teams understand and build psychological safety in a structured way. His model moves through four progressive stages: inclusion safety, which affirms the need to belong; learner safety, which supports the risk of learning; contributor safety, which supports the risk of contributing; and challenger safety, which supports the risk of speaking up and challenging the status quo.

What distinguishes Clark's work is the sequential logic of the model and the practical facilitation tools his team has developed to assess where teams sit across each stage. His book The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety, published by Berrett-Koehler, has become a standard reference for OD practitioners working on team culture and leadership development. He posts consistently on LinkedIn with applied insights that connect the model to real leadership challenges, and his ongoing work with organisations globally continues to advance the practical application of psychological safety beyond the research literature.

3. Tasha Eurich

Organisational psychologist and CEO of The Eurich Group, Tasha Eurich has built her practice around one of the most foundational yet underinvested capabilities in organisational life: self-awareness. Named the world's foremost self-awareness coach by Marshall Goldsmith, she brings a rigorous research foundation to a topic that is often treated as soft or intuitive. Her New York Times bestselling book Insight investigates the science of self-knowledge and why most people believe they are more self-aware than they actually are, with significant implications for leadership development and organisational culture.

Her research, which has included surveys of thousands of leaders across multiple countries, demonstrates that true self-awareness is both rarer and more consequential for performance than most organisations acknowledge. She posts actively on LinkedIn and continues to consult with global organisations on the leadership and cultural applications of self-awareness. Her practical framework for differentiating internal and external self-awareness continues to give OD practitioners precise language for conversations that were previously difficult to structure.

Category 2: Organisation Design and Effectiveness

Organisation design is one of the most technical and consequential disciplines within OD, concerned with how to structure organisations so that they can achieve their purpose. The practitioners in this category are actively reshaping how organisations think about structure, roles, operating models, and the relationship between form and function.

4. Amy Kates

A globally recognised advisor to business leaders on modern operating models, Amy Kates spent two decades as co-founder of Kates Kesler Organisation Consulting before its acquisition by Accenture in 2020. She is best known for her work with the Galbraith Star model, which she adapted and extended into a practical system for designing organisations that can execute complex strategies.

Her co-authored books include Bridging Organization Design and Performance, Designing Your Organization, and Leading Organization Design, all standard references for HR and OD practitioners working on design assignments. At the OD Network 2025 Annual Conference, she was a featured contributor to the broader conversation about the future of the OD profession. Her current work focuses on speaking, teaching, and writing, and she serves on various advisory boards advising organisations and practitioners on design thinking applied to complex systems.

5. Naomi Stanford

An organisation design writer, practitioner, and international consultant, Naomi Stanford is one of the most consistently published voices on the practical application of organisation design principles. Her book Organisation Design, published by Kogan Page and now in multiple editions, has been adopted as a practitioner guide in organisations across the UK, Asia, and North America. The book is notable for its clear articulation of organisation design as an ongoing practice rather than a one-time project, and for its integration of systems thinking with practical design tools.

Stanford has worked across public and private sector organisations internationally, consulting on organisation design, development, and change. She writes actively on LinkedIn about the intersection of organisation design with emerging challenges including AI-driven operating model changes. Her practitioner-focused writing continues to be among the most useful available to OD professionals working on design assignments in real organisations.

6. Linda Holbeche

Co-Director of The Holbeche Partnership and Adjunct Professor at Imperial College London Business School, Linda Holbeche is one of the UK's most respected voices at the intersection of OD, HR strategy, and organisational effectiveness. Named one of the Most Influential HR Thinkers by HR Magazine in 2021, she is the co-author of Organisation Development: A Practitioner's Guide for OD and HR with Mee-Yan Cheung-Judge, one of the most comprehensive and widely used OD reference texts available to practitioners.

Her book The Agile Organization, also published by Kogan Page, addresses one of the most pressing design challenges of the current period: how to build organisations that are genuinely adaptive rather than simply labelling their existing processes as agile. She has previously served as Director of Research and Policy at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and Director of Leadership and Consultancy at the Work Foundation, giving her an unusually strong foundation in both the research and practice dimensions of OD.

7. Alexis Gonzales-Black

Partner and Organisation Design Practice Lead at August Public, Alexis Gonzales-Black brings a distinctive perspective to organisation design that draws on her background at IDEO and her experience leading Zappos's transition to the Holacracy self-managing organisation model. Her expertise spans organisation design, change activation, and the application of design thinking principles to how organisations structure themselves for agility and innovation.

Her book The New School Rules: 6 Vital Practices for Thriving and Responsive Schools, published by Corwin Press in 2018, applied organisation design principles specifically to educational institutions, making her one of the rare OD practitioners with deep expertise in both corporate and school system design. She has spoken at SXSW, Culture First, and the Responsive Conference, and was a featured speaker at the ODNE (Organisation Development Network Europe) conference in 2025. Her work at August Public has included redesigning organisational models for some of the world's most respected companies.

Category 3: Appreciative Inquiry and Strengths-Based OD

Appreciative Inquiry transformed the field of OD by shifting the fundamental orientation from problem-solving to strengths amplification. The practitioners and scholars in this category have developed and applied this tradition in organisations, communities, and systems around the world.

8. David Cooperrider

Distinguished University Professor at Case Western Reserve University and co-creator of Appreciative Inquiry (AI), David Cooperrider is one of the most influential figures in the history of the OD field. His founding work on AI, developed initially with his mentor Suresh Srivastva in the 1980s, shifted OD practice away from deficit-based problem-solving toward a strengths-based, generative approach to change. Cooperrider received the OD Network's Lifetime Achievement Award, the highest honour in the field.

He holds the Covia-David L. Cooperrider Professorship in Appreciative Inquiry at the Weatherhead School of Management and is the Honorary Chairman of Champlain College's David L. Cooperrider Center for Appreciative Inquiry. His most recent work includes research on Appreciative-based Strategic Convening as a method for accelerating cooperative capacity in organisations and communities. He was a featured keynote speaker at the OD Network 2025 Annual Conference in Spokane, Washington, speaking on the past, present, and future of OD.

9. Juanita Brown

Co-founder of the World Cafe, Juanita Brown created one of the most widely adopted large-group dialogue processes in the world, a conversational method that uses tables, questions, and collective intelligence to help organisations shift from top-down decision-making to participatory, inclusive approaches to strategy and problem-solving. The World Cafe method is now used in organisations and communities across more than 65 countries, and its underlying principles, that knowledge emerges in conversation and that the wisdom resides in the collective, have influenced a generation of OD practitioners working with whole-system change.

Brown was a keynote speaker at the OD Network 2025 Annual Conference, contributing to the theme of OD's past, present, and future. Her ongoing work centres on conversational leadership and the role that dialogue plays in creating organisations genuinely capable of learning and adapting. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the Society for Organizational Learning, co-founded by Peter Senge.

10. Jacqueline Stavros

Professor at the College of Management at Lawrence Technological University and co-creator of the SOAR framework (Strengths, Opportunities, Aspirations, Results), Jacqueline Stavros has made one of the most practical contributions to the appreciative inquiry tradition by developing a strengths-based approach to strategic planning that directly replaces the deficit orientation of traditional SWOT analysis. The SOAR model has been adopted in organisations across sectors and geographies as a more generative alternative to frameworks that begin with identifying weaknesses.

She is a co-author of Practicing Organization Development: Leading Transformation and Change, published by Jossey-Bass/Wiley alongside William Rothwell and Roland Sullivan, which serves as a standard practitioner reference text in the field. She is also the co-author of Conversations Worth Having with Cheri Torres, which translated the principles of appreciative inquiry into everyday leadership practice. Her active presence on LinkedIn continues to bring the SOAR framework and appreciative practice to new audiences.

Category 4: Systems Thinking and Complexity in OD

The most challenging and underappreciated strand of OD work draws on complexity science, systems thinking, and adaptive methods. These thinkers approach organisations not as machines to be engineered but as living systems to be understood and nurtured.

11. Glenda Eoyang

Founding Executive Director of the Human Systems Dynamics Institute and pioneer in the application of complexity science to human organisations, Glenda Eoyang developed the field of Human Systems Dynamics (HSD) from the ground up, creating a theory and practice for understanding and influencing patterns of change in complex adaptive systems. Her Container-Difference-Exchange (CDE) model provides practitioners with a simple but powerful framework for identifying the conditions that generate patterns in human systems and for taking adaptive action to shift those patterns.

Her book Adaptive Action: Leveraging Uncertainty in Your Organisation, co-authored with Royce Holladay and published by Stanford University Press in 2013, remains one of the definitive texts for OD practitioners working in complex environments. In 2025, HSD Global was created from the HSD Institute to continue nurturing the community and carrying forward the field of study. Eoyang remains active on LinkedIn, sharing applications of the CDE model to current organisational challenges, and continues to facilitate the annual HSD professional cohort programme.

12. Margaret Wheatley

Author of Leadership and the New Science and co-founder of The Berkana Institute, Margaret Wheatley was among the first OD thinkers to draw explicitly on insights from complexity theory, quantum mechanics, and biology to challenge the mechanistic assumptions underlying most organisational management. Her argument, that organisations are living systems governed by principles of self-organisation, emergence, and relationship rather than predictable cause-and-effect chains, has influenced a generation of practitioners and leaders.

Her book Leadership and the New Science, first published in 1992 and updated in subsequent editions, remains one of the most generative texts in the OD canon. She co-founded The Berkana Institute to support life-affirming organisational practices globally, and has spent recent years focusing on what she calls the end of the management paradigm, arguing that communities and human connection must be the foundation of a more humane world. She was a keynote speaker at the OD Network 2025 Annual Conference.

13. David Coghlan

Professor Emeritus and Fellow Emeritus at the Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin, David Coghlan is one of the world's foremost scholars of action research as an OD methodology. He has spent his career developing and applying action research approaches that integrate insider inquiry with rigorous scholarship. His book Doing Action Research in Your Own Organization, now in its fifth edition published by Sage, is one of the most widely used research methodology texts in the OD field.

He has published over 300 articles and book chapters, spanning action research, OD theory, and the scholar-practitioner relationship. His most recent books include The Handbook of Research Methods in Organizational Change (Edward Elgar, 2023) and Collaborative Inquiry for Organization Development and Change (Edward Elgar, 2021). A 2026-published journal article confirms his ongoing active participation in international OD scholarship. His particular contribution is the articulation of how practitioners can conduct rigorous research within their own organisations, creating knowledge that serves both the organisation and the broader field simultaneously.

14. Rune Todnem By

Professor at Northumbria University and a leading international voice on organisational change and leadership, Rune Todnem By has built a substantial body of work on why change management models so often fail and what a more human-centred, leadership-focused approach to change looks like. His research argues that the dominant assumptions underlying most change management practice, particularly the notion that organisations can be changed through top-down control, are fundamentally flawed.

He is co-editor of the Routledge Studies in Organizational Change and Development book series, which has become one of the most important scholarly venues for advancing the integration of change management and OD thinking. His work on the leadership dimensions of sustainable organisational change has been widely cited in both academic and practitioner communities, and his active publication record confirms his ongoing contribution to the field's development.

Category 5: Foundational OD Practice and Consulting Traditions

These practitioners represent the deep roots and living traditions of OD as a practical discipline, carrying forward the values-based, relationship-centred approach to consulting that defines the field at its best.

15. Peter Block

Author, consultant, and partner at Designed Learning, Peter Block is the author of Flawless Consulting, a text so foundational to the OD consulting tradition that it is widely described as the consultant's bible. First published in 1986 and now in its fourth edition, the book articulates a philosophy of consulting rooted in authentic relationship, mutual accountability, and the belief that consultants serve clients best not by solving their problems for them but by helping them develop their own capacity.

His subsequent books, including Stewardship, The Empowered Manager, and Community: The Structure of Belonging, have extended this philosophy into questions of governance, organisational purpose, and the role of community in human flourishing. He appeared on a podcast in early 2026 speaking about the ongoing relevance of the Flawless Consulting philosophy in an age of short-term pressure. He was a keynote speaker at the OD Network 2025 Annual Conference in Spokane, Washington, and continues to run workshops through Designed Learning.

16. Mee-Yan Cheung-Judge

Founder of Quality and Equality Ltd and one of the most influential OD practitioners and educators in the United Kingdom, Mee-Yan Cheung-Judge was voted one of the 25 Most Influential Thinkers in HR by HR Magazine in 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2019. She has delivered OD training programmes across the UK and internationally for more than three decades, and is the co-author of Organisation Development: A Practitioner's Guide for OD and HR, published by Kogan Page in collaboration with Linda Holbeche.

Her distinctive contribution to OD practice is the concept of Use of Self, the recognition that the OD practitioner's own self-awareness, values, and relational intelligence are not peripheral to but central to the effectiveness of OD work. This insight, developed through decades of practice and teaching, has shaped how the UK's OD practitioner community understands the discipline. She has worked across organisations including the BBC and Singapore's public sector agencies, and her ongoing video series on LinkedIn continues to bring OD wisdom to a practitioner audience.

17. Frederick Miller

CEO of The Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group, the oldest OD firm in the world, founded in 1970, and recipient of the OD Network Lifetime Achievement Award, Frederick Miller has spent more than four decades pioneering the integration of inclusion into the theory and practice of OD. He is the co-author of five books, including Where Did You Learn To Behave Like That? and The Inclusion Nudges Guidebook, and has served on the boards of ATD, the OD Network, and Ben and Jerry's, among others.

His firm introduced the concept of inclusion as a core organisational capability long before the term DEI entered mainstream business vocabulary. His work with global organisations has demonstrated that inclusion is not a values add-on to OD practice but a fundamental condition for organisational effectiveness. He was a keynote speaker at the OD Network 2025 Annual Conference in Spokane, Washington.

18. Judith Katz

Executive Vice President of The Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group and a pioneering thought leader in OD with more than 40 years of transformational work in inclusion and strategic change, Judith Katz is the author or co-author of six influential books, including White Awareness: A Handbook for Anti-Racism Training, one of the earliest and most courageous texts on racial equity in organisational life. She developed the Inclusion as the HOW framework, which repositions inclusion not as a standalone initiative but as the operating principle for how organisations pursue all of their goals.

She received the OD Network Lifetime Achievement Award alongside Frederick Miller for her work in transforming how organisations think about inclusion as a practitioner discipline. She contributed to the OD Network 2025 Annual Conference in Spokane. Her ongoing work with The Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group applies these frameworks with global organisations across sectors.

Category 6: Human Capital, Talent, and OD

These thinkers work at the intersection of OD and the strategic management of human capital, talent, and the HR function. They have reshaped how organisations think about the relationship between their people systems and their broader organisational effectiveness.

19. Dave Ulrich

Speaker, author, professor, and thought partner on human capability, Dave Ulrich is a University of Michigan professor and senior partner at The RBL Group who is widely described as the father of modern HR. Ranked among the top global management thinkers by Thinkers50 and consistently listed as one of the world's most influential voices in HR and OD, Ulrich has spent four decades developing frameworks that help organisations understand how talent, leadership, organisation capability, and HR practice interact to create value.

His most recent work focuses on what he calls human capability in the agentic age, articulating the formula HI x AI = ROI, where human ingenuity multiplied by artificial intelligence creates organisational return on investment. In 2025, he co-founded the Global HR Leadership Experience (GHRLE), a 100-day immersive programme for HR leaders that ran across April and May 2026. He posts a weekly column on LinkedIn and conducts multiple podcasts, webinars, and workshops globally each week, making him among the most consistently active contributors to the OD and HR thought leadership conversation.

20. Perry Timms

Founder and Chief Energy Officer of People and Transformational HR (PTHR), a self-managed, certified B Corporation based in the United Kingdom, Perry Timms was named the Number 1 Most Influential HR Thinker by HR Magazine in 2022 and inducted into the HR Most Influential Hall of Fame in 2023. He received the WorldBlu Lifetime Achievement Award in 2024 for service to self-managed and freedom-centred work.

His 2025 book The HR Operating Model: Designing a People Function That Supports the Workforce and the Business, published by Kogan Page, offers a comprehensive blueprint for redesigning the HR function around four core pillars: people experience, data and analytics, agility and product management, and technology integration. He posts actively on LinkedIn and continues to push for a vision of HR and OD as a transformational, systemic force for organisational and societal change rather than a compliance and administration function.

21. William Rothwell

President of Rothwell and Associates and Professor of Workforce Education and Development at Pennsylvania State University, William Rothwell is among the most prolific contributors to OD scholarship in the world. He has authored, co-authored, edited, or co-edited more than 300 books, book chapters, and articles on topics spanning OD, talent development, leadership, and human performance improvement.

His co-authored text Practicing Organization Development: Leading Transformation and Change, published by Jossey-Bass/Wiley alongside Jacqueline Stavros and Roland Sullivan, is the field's standard practitioner reference. He holds certifications including SPHR, SHRM-SCP, CPLP Fellow, and RODC, and received ASTD's Distinguished Contribution to Workplace Learning and Performance award in 2012. He published a new book with a 2026 copyright date in December 2025, continuing an extraordinary record of sustained scholarly output that directly serves the practitioner community.

22. Liz Wiseman

CEO of the Wiseman Group, a leadership research and development firm headquartered in Silicon Valley, Liz Wiseman is the New York Times bestselling author of Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, a book that introduced one of the most widely applied frameworks in contemporary leadership and OD practice. Ranked by Thinkers50 in 2025, she was also named the closing keynote speaker at the Association for Talent Development's 2026 International Conference and Exposition in Los Angeles.

Her research on multiplier and diminisher leadership styles, drawn from analysis of more than 200 leaders, has given OD practitioners precise language for conversations about how leaders either expand or suppress the intelligence of the people around them. Her subsequent books Impact Players and Rookie Smarts have extended this framework into questions of individual contribution and career development. She is a former executive at Oracle Corporation and a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review and Fortune.

Category 7: Change Management and Transformation

These practitioners have developed and applied OD frameworks specifically aimed at helping organisations navigate large-scale change with rigour, humanity, and genuine attention to the human system dimensions that most change efforts ignore.

23. W. Warner Burke

The Edward Lee Thorndike Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, W. Warner Burke is one of the foundational scholars of the OD field. He is co-developer of the Burke-Litwin Change Model, one of the most widely applied frameworks for diagnosing and planning large-scale organisational change, which distinguishes between transformational and transactional change factors and maps the causal relationships between organisational elements.

Burke has authored, co-authored, or edited more than 20 books and 200 articles in organisational psychology, change, and leadership. He received NASA's Public Service Medal, the Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner Award from the Academy of Management, and the Distinguished Professional Contributions Award from the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology. His long-running engagement with the OD Network, including his service as the organisation's executive director, has made him one of the most connected and respected figures across the scholar-practitioner community that defines the field.

24. Julie Hodges

Professor of Organisational Change at Durham University Business School and recognised among Thinkers50's top 10 thought leaders in change management, Julie Hodges brings two decades of global business experience as a consultant, coach, and facilitator to her academic role. She holds credentials including PHEA, ICMCI, FME, CMBE, and CMCE, and has authored multiple books on organisational change, leadership development, and people-centred transformation.

Her mission, as she describes it, is to help individuals, groups, and businesses understand and adapt to the complex and dynamic changes in their environments. Her 2025 posts have addressed the specific leadership challenges facing UK higher education institutions, demonstrating the applied, practitioner-facing orientation that makes her work accessible to leaders rather than only academics. She posts regularly on LinkedIn with insights on people-centric change and navigating institutional complexity.

25. Bob Stilger

Founder of New Stories in 2000, author of AfterNow: When We Cannot See the Future, Where Do We Begin?, and a long-time co-leader of The Berkana Institute, Bob Stilger has spent his career helping communities and organisations find their own capacity for resilience and regeneration, particularly in the aftermath of disruption. He was instrumental in introducing the Art of Hosting approach to Japan following the 2011 Fukushima disaster, working with communities navigating both physical and social rebuilding.

At the OD Network 2025 Annual Conference, Stilger was a keynote speaker contributing to the conversation about OD's role in social and community transformation. His current work through New Stories focuses on creating narratives for social and environmental justice, with a particular focus on how communities can move beyond grief and disruption toward regenerative futures. His doctorate in Learning and Change from the California Institute of Integral Studies underpins a deeply interdisciplinary approach to community and organisational resilience.

26. Paul Gibbons

Polymath, futurist, and bestselling author of eight books, Paul Gibbons is one of the most intellectually rigorous voices in the change management and OD space. He founded Future Considerations in 2001, which became one of Europe's most highly regarded leadership consulting firms. His book The Science of Organizational Change was named one of the top ten organisational change books of all time, and his 2024 co-edited collection The Future of Change Management (co-edited with Tricia Kennedy, with a foreword by Dave Ulrich) brings together leading practitioners on the frontiers of change practice.

His most recent work Adopting AI was named one of the 2025 AI Books of the Year, and his Great Collisions series maps the five converging forces defining the economy of the mid-2020s. A former IBM partner and business school professor who has advised Microsoft, Google, and Shell, Gibbons holds degrees in biochemistry, philosophy, and psychology and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He was named a Top-30 Global Guru in organisational culture and has keynoted on five continents.

Category 8: Inclusion, Equity, and Belonging in OD

These practitioners have developed and applied OD approaches specifically aimed at building organisations that are genuinely inclusive, equitable, and able to draw on the full capability of every person within them.

27. Ola Lagunju

Founder of New Chapter Consulting, Ola Lagunju is a facilitator, consultant, speaker, and social scientist specialising in human culture change, inclusion, and systemic inquiry. She discovered the power of systemic thinking and conversation during 20 years in the corporate world, where she held senior roles including Head of Learning and Organisational Development for a large global retail organisation. Since founding New Chapter Consulting in 2013, she has worked with organisations and individuals across a broad range of sectors, applying appreciative inquiry, systems thinking, and dialogue-based methods to help organisations build genuinely inclusive cultures.

Her work has been featured in collaboration with Mee-Yan Cheung-Judge's Quality and Equality video series on LinkedIn, where she has addressed how to start the inclusion conversation in organisations that are only beginning to take equity seriously. Her approach is notable for its combination of corporate credibility, systemic rigour, and genuine warmth in facilitation.

28. Zanette Johnson

Co-Director of New Stories and a learning scientist, neuroscientist, dancer, and dharma practitioner, Zanette Johnson designs transformative experiences for teams and leaders that combine embodied learning, values alignment, and evidence-based neuroscience. She has spent two decades working with Indigenous learning communities and organisations navigating complex systems change.

At the OD Network 2025 Annual Conference in Spokane, she was a keynote contributor to the theme of OD's role in restoring humanity to organisations and communities facing disruption. Her work activates teams and leaders in co-creating the habits and patterns needed to turn aspirational commitments into sustainable organisational reality, with a particular focus on the embodied and relational dimensions that purely cognitive OD interventions often miss.

29. Gary Muszynski

Founder and CEO of Orchestrating Excellence, Gary Muszynski has spent more than 27 years developing and applying OD approaches that integrate music, rhythm, and collaborative experience to build team cohesion, cultural alignment, and leadership capacity. He has worked with more than 100,000 professionals across four continents, drawing on a philosophy that positions rhythm and collective musical experience as a uniquely accessible and powerful entry point into the team dynamics conversations that OD practitioners seek to facilitate.

He was a keynote speaker at the OD Network 2025 Annual Conference in Spokane, contributing to the conversation about embodied and experiential approaches to organisational development. His work challenges the assumption that OD interventions must operate primarily at the cognitive level, and his track record of sustained engagement with global organisations demonstrates the breadth of contexts in which his approach has been applied.

30. Omar Morales

An OD practitioner with 20 years of experience across Fortune 50 companies in CPG, media, and technology sectors, Omar Morales serves as a Global Head of Organisational Development. His experience spans both corporate practice and independent consulting, giving him a perspective on OD that is anchored in the reality of large-scale implementation rather than purely theoretical frameworks.

He was a speaker at the OD Network 2025 Annual Conference, contributing to the community's conversation about the integration of OD practice with data-driven approaches to workforce design and cultural change. His work at the intersection of large-system OD, talent development, and cultural transformation positions him as a practitioner applying established OD methods to the complex realities of global enterprises.

Category 9: OD in Asia and the Pacific

OD has a growing and increasingly distinctive tradition in Asia and the Pacific region. These practitioners are building and advancing that tradition in ways that reflect the specific cultural and organisational contexts of their communities.

31. Jeffrey SY Ong

A highly experienced executive coach, organisational development expert, and leadership mentor with more than 35 years of experience in business transformation and leadership development, Jeffrey SY Ong is an EMCC-accredited Senior Practitioner based in Singapore whose career spans leadership roles in the Republic of Singapore Air Force, Motorola, Singapore Tourism Board, Nokia, British Telecom, and United Overseas Bank.

He is an adjunct faculty member at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (NUS), Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS), and the Roffey Park Institute, and supports nonprofits including the Royal Institute of Strategic Studies (Bhutan) and the Cerebral Palsy Alliance Singapore. He was a speaker at the Roffey Park OD Conference 2025 and is deeply embedded in both the Singapore OD community and the global Human Systems Dynamics practitioner network.

32. Widy Dinarti

Co-Founder of DiverseCircle and an organisational development strategist, leadership coach, and learning facilitator, Widy Dinarti works at the intersection of leadership, emotional intelligence, and systems change across Asia-Pacific, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Indian Ocean region. She brings a genuinely global, grounded perspective to her OD work, having lived and worked across three continents.

She co-founded DiverseCircle as a collaborative platform dedicated to advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and conscious leadership through co-designed solutions and multi-stakeholder partnerships. Her work is grounded in systems thinking and focuses on cultivating collective awareness and leadership capacity to enable sustainable change across organisations, communities, and ecosystems.

33. Karen Cvitkovich

Founding Director of The Aditi Collection Ltd, a network of organisational practitioners working at the intersection of academia and practice, Karen Cvitkovich has a career spanning more than 35 years across commercial and public sectors, as well as academic and political arenas, in the UK and internationally. She is a behavioural scientist and strategist particularly valued for her ability to help clients unlock their emerging potential and build sustainable strategic capability.

She has authored books on multicultural effectiveness including Leading International Teams and Globalisation: The Internal Dynamic. She was a keynote presenter at the Roffey Park OD Conference 2025, focused on purpose-driven transformation. Her blend of academic depth, cross-cultural experience, and pragmatic consulting practice makes her a distinctive voice in the international OD community.

Category 10: OD in Africa and the Global South

OD has an increasingly vibrant presence across Africa and the Global South, and these practitioners are building the field in ways that reflect the specific contexts and needs of their communities.

34. Alan Hosking

Publisher and editor of HR Future magazine in South Africa, Alan Hosking has spent decades building a platform that keeps HR and OD professionals in southern Africa connected to both local practice and global thinking. He is a sought-after speaker and facilitator on leadership, purpose, and human capacity, with a particular interest in the leadership challenges specific to African organisational contexts.

His consistent output through HR Future, one of the longest-running HR publications in the African market, has positioned him as one of the most sustained voices connecting the South African OD and HR community to developments in the global field. He is active on LinkedIn and regularly posts on leadership effectiveness and the future of work in an African context.

35. Steph Clarke

Futurist and Facilitator at 28 Thursdays, based in Melbourne, Australia, Steph Clarke works at the intersection of systems thinking, organisational learning, and futures literacy. Originally from the UK and now calling Melbourne home since 2014, she has built a practice around helping organisations and teams have better conversations about what is changing and how to prepare for it, with a particular focus on designing learning experiences that generate genuine insight rather than mere information transfer.

Her doctoral research on the Australian Veteran Reintegration System, which she shared publicly in late 2025, sharpened her view that most complex organisational problems are not a lack of care or effort but a lack of shared direction, clear accountability, and connected ways of working across systems. She holds a Professional Certificate in Foresight from the University of Houston and posts actively on LinkedIn with applied systems thinking insights for practitioners navigating complexity in 2026.

Category 11: OD Research, Scholarship, and Knowledge Development

These individuals are advancing the theoretical and research foundations of the OD field, ensuring it remains grounded in evidence and continues to develop as a rigorous discipline.

36. Carol Gorelick

Faculty member for the Doctorate in Organisation Development and Change programme at Bowling Green State University and co-founder of ABC Connects, a US and South African nonprofit that led school-based community learning initiatives, Carol Gorelick brings a rare combination of systems thinking, community development, and organisational scholarship to her work. Her practice is grounded in the scholar-practitioner tradition that defines the OD field at its best, integrating academic rigour with genuine community engagement.

She was a keynote contributor at the OD Network 2025 Annual Conference in Spokane, presenting on OD's role in community transformation and the development of the next generation of scholar-practitioners. Her ongoing work at Bowling Green State University develops OD practitioners who can operate at the intersection of formal organisations and the broader communities those organisations serve.

37. Jasmine Kirby

An organisational psychologist with a PhD and more than 20 years of experience leading global change initiatives, Jasmine Kirby has worked at the intersection of organisational psychology, culture change, and leadership development across sectors and geographies. Her practice combines rigorous psychological grounding with a deep commitment to building organisations that are genuinely more effective and more humane.

She was a speaker at the OD Network 2025 Annual Conference in Spokane, contributing to the community's conversation about evidence-based practice in OD. Her work demonstrates the kind of integration between scholarly rigour and applied practice that the OD field needs to remain relevant and credible in the face of increasing pressure to produce measurable outcomes.

38. Dr. Shalini Lal

Founder of Infinity OD and Unqbe, Shalini Lal holds a PhD from UCLA and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. She is the author of The Secret Life of Organizations, published by Hachette India, which explores the informal dynamics, hidden power structures, and unspoken rules that shape what organisations actually do versus what they say they do. She is also the host of the Future of Work Show on LinkedIn.

Her earlier career included a faculty position at Management Development Institute, Gurgaon, and she has since built a practice focused on the organisational dimensions of the future of work in the Indian context and beyond. She was a speaker at the SHRM India conference in 2025, and her writing on the informal and cultural dimensions of organisational life brings a perspective that is underrepresented in the English-language OD canon.

39. Paul O'Beirne

Principal at ORCA HR Solutions and a practitioner with more than 25 years of experience in OD leadership at Microsoft, Paul O'Beirne brings a rare combination of deep corporate OD practice and independent consulting expertise. His 25-year tenure leading OD work inside Microsoft gave him hands-on experience with the specific challenges of building and sustaining OD capability inside one of the world's most complex technology organisations.

He was a speaker at the Global OD Competency Framework launch event in 2025, contributing to the community's work of defining what it means to be a competent OD practitioner in the current environment. His current practice through ORCA HR Solutions focuses on applying the lessons of large-system OD to organisations navigating transformation at scale.

40. Sharon Varney

Director of the Henley Forum for Organisational Learning and Knowledge Strategies at Henley Business School and a specialist in organisational complexity and change leadership, Sharon Varney has built her practice around the intersection of complexity science and OD. Her doctoral research at the University of Reading explored the complex dynamics of organisational change and the role of change leaders within it, earning a Highly Commended Award from the Leadership and Organisation Development Journal.

She previously held senior roles in global oil and gas and international banking, where she led learning and communications functions. She teaches the Leadership of Complexity and Change module on the Henley MA Leadership programme, and posts actively on LinkedIn with insights on how leaders can develop the capacity to work effectively in genuinely complex environments. Her March 2026 posts include a booking announcement for the Complexity and Management Conference.

41. Christophe Foulon

Founder of CPF Coaching and a practitioner at the intersection of organisational development, leadership coaching, and the future of work, Christophe Foulon was ranked among the Thinkers360 Top 50 Thought Leaders in the Future of Work for 2025, placing 21st globally. Based in France, he brings a European continental perspective to the OD conversation that complements the Anglo-American traditions that dominate most OD literature.

His practice focuses on helping organisations navigate cultural transformation, leadership transitions, and the human dimensions of digital change. He is active on LinkedIn and contributes regularly to the international thought leadership conversation on the future of organisations, leadership, and work. His cross-cultural experience working with organisations across Europe positions him as a practitioner who understands the specific cultural dynamics that shape how OD interventions land in different national contexts.

42. Ewa Kacewicz

Organisational Development and Operating Model Strategist at Microsoft and holder of a PhD in social and organisational psychology, Ewa Kacewicz brings a rigorous, data-driven perspective to OD practice at enterprise scale. Her work at Microsoft spans AI operating model maturity, enterprise transformation, and workforce design, applying systems-thinking approaches that bridge strategy, culture, and human behaviour at one of the world's largest and most complex organisations.

Her earlier consulting experience at Bain, Oracle, and Dell gives her an unusually broad foundation across advisory, technology, and operations contexts. She was a speaker at the OD Network 2025 Annual Conference, contributing to the conversation about how OD practice evolves in the context of AI-enabled organisations. Her perspective, connecting the theoretical rigour of organisational psychology with the practical demands of transformation inside a technology enterprise, is one of the more distinctive combinations available in the current OD field.

Category 12: OD Practice and Community Builders

These individuals have made their most distinctive contribution not only through their own practice but through the communities, platforms, and shared knowledge they have built to advance the OD field as a whole.

43. Cara Wilson

Partner at Designed Learning and an OD practitioner with more than 20 years of experience across healthcare and technology organisations on three continents, Cara Wilson works at the intersection of leadership development, community building, and systemic change. Her practice at Designed Learning, the organisation founded by Peter Block, applies the Flawless Consulting philosophy and the Leader as Convener framework to complex organisational challenges.

She was a speaker at the OD Network 2025 Annual Conference in Spokane, contributing to the conversation about how OD practitioners can build the kind of community and relational infrastructure that sustains change over time. Her cross-sector experience, spanning healthcare organisations, technology companies, and public sector organisations, gives her a perspective on the universals and specifics of OD practice across very different organisational cultures.

44. Betsy Jordyn

OD consultant and host of the Consulting Matters podcast, Betsy Jordyn has built one of the most consistent and practically useful platforms for OD practitioners navigating the business dimensions of independent consulting practice. Her podcast addresses the full spectrum of challenges facing OD consultants, from the technical dimensions of designing and delivering OD interventions to the business and relational dimensions of building a sustainable consulting practice.

She is active on LinkedIn and continues to produce content that makes OD principles and practices accessible to practitioners who are building their own consulting businesses. Her contribution to the field is distinctive because it addresses a dimension of OD practice that the academic literature and conference circuits rarely address: the practical reality of building a viable business doing OD work.

45. Ann Herrmann-Nehdi

Chief Thought Leader and Chair of the Board at Herrmann, the originator of Whole Brain Thinking and the HBDI assessment, Ann Herrmann-Nehdi has spent more than 35 years developing the practical applications of cognitive diversity to human and organisational development and improvement. She transitioned from her CEO role in early 2025 to focus on thought leadership, content creation, and working with Herrmann's strategic partners and clients, continuing the organisation's more than 40 years of research now spanning a database of more than 3 million thinkers from around the globe.

Her TEDx talks on the neuroscience of thinking and her ongoing research on cognitive diversity as an organisational capability have positioned Herrmann's work as a distinctive contribution to OD practice. The Whole Brain framework, which maps how individuals and teams think across analytical, practical, relational, and experimental modes, gives practitioners a concrete and research-grounded tool for building the cognitive diversity that high-performing teams require.

46. Jen Freeman

An OD practitioner and member of the International Organisation Development Association (IODA) based in Australia, Jen Freeman contributes to the growing regional OD community in the Asia-Pacific while remaining connected to the global OD network. She was a co-facilitator of the IODA Climate Resilience series in 2026, a global programme bringing together OD practitioners to develop and share approaches for helping organisations navigate the organisational dimensions of climate transition.

Her involvement in the IODA Climate Resilience series reflects the growing interest among OD practitioners in the intersection of organisational development and environmental sustainability, an area where the field's skills in managing complex system change and building adaptive capacity are directly relevant. She brings an Australian and Asia-Pacific practitioner perspective to these global conversations.

47. Royce Holladay

Co-author of Adaptive Action: Leveraging Uncertainty in Your Organisation, published by Stanford University Press in 2013 alongside Glenda Eoyang, and co-founder of the Human Systems Dynamics Institute, Royce Holladay has spent her career developing and applying the Human Systems Dynamics framework to the specific challenges facing practitioners in complex and uncertain environments.

Her particular contribution is the practical articulation of how HSD principles translate into intervention design, facilitation, and evaluation for OD practitioners working at the sharp end of complex change. The Adaptive Action framework she developed with Eoyang, built around the three questions of What? So What? and Now What?, has given thousands of practitioners a reliable structure for navigating ambiguity without falling into either paralysis or premature closure.

48. Yolanda Lau

A future of work strategist, Forbes contributor, and OD practitioner based in Canada, Yolanda Lau works at the intersection of workforce design, organisational development, and the broader societal shifts reshaping how and why people work. Her contributions to Forbes on the future of work bring OD-informed thinking to a business leadership audience that does not always encounter the field's frameworks in accessible form.

She contributes to conversations about remote work, talent strategy, and the organisational implications of AI-driven transformation from a perspective that integrates OD principles with strategic workforce planning. Her work is notable for its accessibility: she translates complex organisational dynamics into the kind of practical insight that business leaders can act on without a specialist background in OD.

49. Lakshmidevi Vasudevan

An OD practitioner and member of the International Organisation Development Association (IODA), Lakshmidevi Vasudevan is embedded in the global OD community through her work on some of the most pressing issues facing the field. She was co-leader of the IODA Climate Resilience series in 2026, a programme specifically designed to develop OD practitioner capacity to help organisations navigate the human system dimensions of climate transition and environmental sustainability.

Her work reflects the important contribution that practitioners based in India and Southeast Asia are making to the global OD conversation, bringing contextual knowledge of organisational and societal dynamics in the Global South to a field that has historically been dominated by North American and European perspectives. Her engagement with IODA positions her at the intersection of global OD community building and applied practice.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Several names came up repeatedly during the research for this list that deserve acknowledgement, even though they ultimately did not make the final 49. Edgar Schein, whose concepts of process consultation, psychological safety (which he named before Amy Edmondson popularised it), and organisational culture remain foundational to the entire field, passed away in January 2023. His work is present in virtually every entry on this list, even when his name is not. His absence from the numbered list is a matter of circumstance, not of significance.

David Sibbet, pioneer of visual facilitation and founder of The Grove Consultants International, and Nancy Kline, creator of the Thinking Environment methodology, are both foundational voices whose contributions to OD practice are immense. Brene Brown, Adam Grant, and Simon Sinek appear on almost every list like this, and for good reason given their contribution to the broader conversation. The list was deliberately built to surface voices who belong at the top of the OD conversation specifically, rather than to repeat names you will have already encountered many times.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Working with OD

The single most expensive mistake organisations make with OD is treating it as a one-time intervention rather than an ongoing practice. A leadership team debrief, a culture assessment, or even a well-facilitated offsite can create genuine movement in the right direction. But the conditions that make organisations healthy, the psychological safety, the honest dialogue, the alignment between stated values and actual behaviour, require sustained attention. One workshop does not build a culture.

It can begin the conversation, but only if someone is responsible for continuing it.

A closely related mistake is confusing OD with change management. Change management, properly understood, is a set of techniques for helping people navigate specific transitions: a system implementation, a restructuring, a merger. OD is something broader and more foundational. It is concerned with the underlying conditions of organisational health that make all change more likely to succeed.

Organisations that invest in change management programmes while neglecting OD infrastructure are addressing the symptom rather than the condition.

Many organisations also make the mistake of implementing OD frameworks without investing in practitioner development. Appreciative Inquiry, the World Cafe, the Burke-Litwin model, and the 4 Stages of Psychological Safety are all sophisticated frameworks that require skilled facilitation to land well. Reading the book is not the same as being able to apply the framework. The people on this list have, in many cases, dedicated decades to developing that practical wisdom.

When organisations try to shortcut the practitioner development process, they typically get superficial results.

A fourth mistake is treating psychological safety as a soft objective rather than a strategic imperative. The research, led above all by Amy Edmondson, is unambiguous: teams with high psychological safety learn faster, make fewer catastrophic errors, and outperform teams where people are afraid to speak up. And yet many organisations continue to treat safety as a nice-to-have, something addressed in team building events rather than embedded into how meetings are run, how decisions are made, and how leaders respond to mistakes.

Finally, many organisations confuse geographic or demographic diversity with the kind of inclusive practice that OD brings to bear. Having diverse people in the room is not the same as having a room where diverse perspectives are genuinely heard, integrated, and acted upon. Inclusion as an organisational discipline, as Frederick Miller and Judith Katz have articulated it across four decades of work, requires the same systematic, evidence-based approach that any other dimension of OD demands. Representation without inclusion is decoration.

Implementation Guide: Getting Started with OD

The first step in any serious OD engagement is diagnosis, not prescription. Before any intervention is designed, the organisation needs a clear understanding of what is actually happening in the human system, not what the leader believes is happening or what the last engagement survey suggested. This means conversations, observations, and the kind of honest inquiry that OD practitioners are trained to conduct. It means asking the people who do the work what they experience, not just what they think the leadership team wants to hear.

The second step is to identify what level of the system the intervention needs to address. Some challenges are primarily at the individual level: a leader who has not yet developed the self-awareness to recognise how their behaviour is affecting their team. Some are at the team level: a group that has not established the norms of honest dialogue necessary to work through conflict productively. Some are at the organisational level: a culture in which certain voices are structurally marginalised, or a structure that creates incentives for siloed behaviour.

The intervention needs to match the level of the challenge.

The third step is to invest in the right practitioner. The people on this list are not the only qualified OD practitioners in the world, but they represent the kind of depth and breadth of knowledge that genuinely effective OD work requires. Whether you work with an external practitioner or develop internal capability, the quality of the practitioner matters enormously. OD is not a process that can be reduced to a tool or a template.

It requires genuine relational intelligence, rigorous conceptual grounding, and the kind of adaptive expertise that only comes from sustained experience.

The fourth step is to create the conditions for honest evaluation. The most common reason OD efforts fail to sustain their impact is that no one is tracking whether the change has taken hold. This does not require sophisticated measurement infrastructure. It requires the leadership team to commit to honest reflection at regular intervals, to ask the questions that the culture would rather avoid, and to respond to what they hear with genuine curiosity rather than defensiveness.

For organisations ready to begin, bring Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out, in to facilitate your leadership team's first honest conversation about what is actually happening in your organisation. Jonno works globally, and organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected. Email jonno@consultclarity.org. His book Step Up or Step Out is available at https://www.amazon.com.au/Step-Up-Out-Difficult-Conflict/dp/B097X7B5LD.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is organisational development and how is it different from HR?

Organisational development is the planned, systematic application of behavioural science to help organisations increase their effectiveness and capacity to change. HR manages the employee lifecycle, from hiring and onboarding to performance management and offboarding. OD works on the conditions that determine whether people can contribute their best within that lifecycle: the culture, the team dynamics, the leadership behaviour, the quality of dialogue, and the psychological safety that makes honest contribution possible. The two disciplines overlap significantly and are most effective when they work closely together, but they are not the same thing.

Who are the leading voices in organisational development right now?

The 49 people on this list represent the full breadth of the field in 2026, from the psychological safety research of Amy Edmondson and Timothy R. Clark to the organisation design work of Amy Kates and Naomi Stanford, from the appreciative inquiry tradition of David Cooperrider to the systems thinking frameworks of Glenda Eoyang and David Coghlan. The field is wide and deep, and the voices worth following depend significantly on which dimension of OD is most relevant to your organisation's current challenges.

What makes a great OD practitioner?

Research and practice converge on a few core capabilities. Technical competence, which means a solid grounding in the theories, frameworks, and methods of the field. Relational intelligence, which means the ability to build trust quickly, facilitate difficult conversations, and help people say things they have not been able to say before. Systemic thinking, which means the ability to see the organisation as a whole and to understand how changes in one part affect other parts.

And what Mee-Yan Cheung-Judge calls Use of Self, which means a high degree of self-awareness about how the practitioner's own values, assumptions, and reactions are shaping the work.

What are the key OD trends for 2025 and 2026?

Four trends are shaping the OD field most significantly. First, the integration of AI into the practice of OD itself, including how practitioners gather data, support leaders, and design interventions. Second, the growing recognition of psychological safety as a strategic imperative rather than a soft aspiration, driven in large part by Amy Edmondson's continuing research and popularisation. Third, the expansion of OD's geographic base, with increasingly vibrant practitioner communities developing in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Fourth, the growing intersection of OD and sustainability, as organisations begin to grapple with the human system dimensions of climate transition.

Can I hire someone to facilitate OD-related workshops and offsites?

Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast (230+ episodes, 150+ countries), works with leadership teams to address the communication, conflict, and team dynamics dimensions of organisational effectiveness. He facilitates Working Genius workshops, DISC-based communication training, executive team offsites, and keynote engagements globally. To explore what is possible for your team, email jonno@consultclarity.org. International travel is often more affordable than organisations expect.

How was this list compiled?

Every person on this list was selected on three criteria: a documented, substantive contribution to OD theory or practice; active engagement with the OD conversation in 2025 or 2026; and genuine, current contribution to the field rather than legacy reputation alone. The list spans more than 12 countries across five continents and deliberately brings together voices from across the full breadth of OD practice, from foundational scholarship to frontline facilitation.

Is OD only relevant to large organisations?

OD frameworks and principles apply to organisations of every size, but the way they are implemented needs to be proportionate to the organisation's complexity and resources. A small nonprofit and a multinational corporation both benefit from honest dialogue, clear values, psychological safety, and genuine feedback loops. The specific tools and frameworks may differ, but the underlying principles of effective OD practice are universal. Many of the most impactful OD interventions in the world have happened in organisations of fewer than 100 people.

Final Thoughts

The people on this list represent something important: the evidence that human systems can be understood, that organisations can develop their capacity to work more effectively and more honestly, and that the work of helping organisations become more capable is itself a discipline worthy of serious study and practice.

If you are a leader navigating transformation, the most valuable thing this list can do is point you toward the voices who have thought most deeply about the specific challenges you are facing. Whether your organisation needs to build psychological safety, redesign its operating model, develop more inclusive practices, or build its capacity for strategic change, there is expertise on this list that is directly relevant to your situation.

If you are an OD practitioner, the list is a reminder of the breadth and depth of the community you are part of, a community that spans continents, disciplines, and decades of accumulated wisdom.

For leadership teams that want to turn these frameworks into practice inside their own organisations, Jonno White, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, works globally with schools, corporates, and nonprofits to create the conditions where people can have the conversations that matter. Hire Jonno for your next leadership offsite, workshop, or keynote at jonno@consultclarity.org.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements.

Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Next Read

If you found this list useful, you might also enjoy the companion post on the 50 Best Thought Leaders in People and Culture globally, which covers the broader People and Culture space including talent strategy, employee experience, and workforce design. Many of the voices in that list work closely with OD practitioners, and the two fields are increasingly integrated in organisations that are serious about building the kind of culture where people can do their best work.

Keep reading: https://www.consultclarity.org/post/50-best-thought-leaders-in-people-and-culture-2026