ODFL: A Movement and Community
OD for Life is a movement that holds organisations as important to ecologically- and socially-healthy systems.
We come from many countries, cultures, and languages, and we hold a wide range of perspectives. Among us are organizational development practitioners, learning and leadership consultants, coaches, and facilitators. What unites us is our shared resonance with this movement and our commitment to supporting it through our work and our care.
As a movement, OD for Life holds the perspective that those of us that work in organisational development can no longer be neutral in how we utilise our skills, ideas, and experience. We are instead guided by the narrative that our organizational development work is choosing to support life’s ability to thrive.
ODFL's History
Andres Roberts and Din van Helden, later joined by Joeri Kabalt, initiated a series of interviews on systems change in the field of Organisational Development in 2019. This initiative was nested within the Bio-Leadership Project.
In 2020 and early 2021, they hosted a series of Inquiry Circles to explore a central question:
How can we shift the story of human progress toward one that cares for all of life, from within the field of OD?
As insights and connections grew, it became clear that the next step was to create a shared space where practitioners could gather, connect, and explore new possibilities through ongoing inquiry and Michelle Holliday joined as a Directing Steward alongside Din.
In May 2022, a group of two dozen people came together in the Dutch countryside for two days of reflection and visioning. That gathering gave rise to the Maniflexo, a living expression of our shared intentions.
To support this work with a neutral, non-commercial foundation and with a core focus on shared learning, OD for Life was formally registered as a foundation later that year.
Want to find out more about how we started and why we care about this movement? Read more here.
ODFL's Purpose
As with everything that’s alive, we consider our movement, and hence its purpose, to be evolving, emergent, and seasonal. We currently phrase our purpose as: to place life at the center of organizations as a means of caring for life on Earth.
Our purpose, therefore, is to invite and encourage life to be at the center of organizations, so that these organizations will then have a transformative impact on all life’s ability to thrive.
We do this through shared inquiry at the (challenging) edges and utilising the core skills of our OD work in a way that is healing and generative for us, for the people and organizations we support, and for the larger systems we’re a part of.
Breaking with the paradigm of OD practitioners being neutral in how we help organizations develop, our community members commit to:
Helping people join together in service of something bigger than themselves.
Enabling ongoing leadership and learning.
Facilitating collaboration and new possibilities.
Equipping people and organizations for meaningful change.
This starts by practicing the above ourselves, together - and gathering in shared inquiry about how to do this.
Often, we feel our purpose and the identity of the movement best comes through during our in-person gatherings. At our May 2024 European gathering in the Dutch countryside, Din van Helden led us in an exercise inspired by the work of Joanna Macy on “connecting to the present to the 7 generations ahead”. Michelle Holliday took notes and then shaped them into a collective poem, reading it the next morning at our closing campfire. These are our words.
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