Gervase Roy Bushe: Progressing Ideas and Practices to Make the World a Better Place

Gervase R. Bushe, for four decades and counting, has explored, challenged, and evolved the field of organizational change. His passion and conviction flow from a desire for more organizations to become places where people have opportunities to make free and informed choices so that they are engaged to give their very best in the work they do. This thread is evident throughout every strand of his work, each manifested as a contribution to create collective, participative engagement methods for organizational change. His work to build useful, relevant change theory and practice spans the disciplines of organizational design, appreciative inquiry, leadership, and organization development (OD). With a rich lineage in personal and organizational development, Bushe’s influences span the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and wider system domains. This eclectic, integrated understanding – in theory and in practice – appears throughout his work, and the complementarity between these builds over time. The two latest examples are the widely used Clear Leadership method and program; and his paradigm shifting work to frame the emerging new threads of OD with the term now becoming known as Dialogic OD. As well as these recent integrated contributions, Bushe has also made incisive contributions within particular areas, perhaps the best known being his work from the earliest days of appreciative inquiry to help define, test, refine, and amplify its power and effectiveness as a method. Tracking and fanning, synergenesis, amplification, generativity, and generative images are all ideas born out of this work, and they have returned over time in Bushe’s work on leadership and Dialogic OD. Less well known but highly regarded in academic circles is his early work on parallel learning structures. Bushe’s strong grounding in both experiential laboratory education such as T-groups and the action research tradition, have influenced his work consistently, giving a clearly recognizable trademark to his contributions, perhaps best summed up as human, accessible, highly practical and progressive.