Conference – Beyond the surface – exploring the deep work of OD – 25 July 2025
Pre-conference event – 24 July 2025
In a world of constant change, the field of Organisation Development (OD) is more important than ever. At its core, OD focuses on people, culture, and systems in a multitude of ways, helping organisations not just be more efficient, but more humane, adaptive, and purpose-driven. It requires OD practitioners to pause, reflect, and engage with the underlying forces shaping an organisation, rather than just reacting to surface-level challenges. Going deep is part of the terrain…
To do this work well, we also must pause, reflect, and refine our own practice – just as we help organisations do. Are we engaging in the deep work of OD within ourselves? How do we ensure our work remains intentional, impactful, and deeply human? How do we show up in our own practice? Let’s go beyond the surface together.
ODA’s Conference 2025
Join us at ODA’s Conference 2025 as we explore the profound and often unseen deep work of OD. Take this opportunity to connect with fellow OD professionals, share experiences, and cultivate the depth of thinking needed to navigate our work with clarity and purpose.
We’ve brought together talented speakers for an experiential day of exploration, challenge, reflection and inspiration as we consider the deep work of OD:
Keynote
Why are organisations addicted to quick fix, simple solutions, or Silver Bullets? Why don’t we talk about this? How might we all be complicit? Does OD help or hinder? Join Steve Hearsum, Founder, Edge + Stretch, consultant and author, UK.
Parallel sessions:
With AI transforming the workplace at an unprecedented pace, how will the role and work of OD evolve? And as OD professionals, can we navigate this shift with curiosity, agility, and purpose?
Join Tiffany Gray, Founder, BRAWT Company.
Is inclusion an illusion and a bubble that is about to burst? Do current practices address what it is like to be on the periphery and always being on the outside? What really needs to shift to ensure people are not being othered and left out?
Join Pirooz Jafari, Founder, Track C Consulting
Culture continues to eat strategy for breakfast! So, what does it really take to align culture with strategy to realise an organisation’s vision? What deep work is needed here and how can OD professionals support this critical work? How do we learn from case studies and each other and apply best practices to ensure an organisation’s aspired culture becomes an enduring lived experience that underpins its success?
Join Dr Melinda Norris, Senior Leadership & Culture Consultant, Pillar Leaders.
More to be announced soon!
| Date | Friday, 25th July 2025 |
| Time | 9 am – 5.15 pm
· 9 am check-in · 9.30 am – 5.15 pm conference 5.30 pm post-conference drinks and canapes (at An Di, 5A/854 Collins Street Docklands) |
| Venue | Community Hub at The Dock |
| Getting there | Tram: Route 48 and Route 11 (stop D18). This stop is within the ‘Free tram zone’ connecting Southern Cross Station and the city.
Train: Southern Cross station is ~500 meters walk to the Hub. Car: There are a limited number of metered parking spaces in the area, primarily along Bourke and Collins streets. There is limited parking at The Dock, so public transport is recommended |
| Ticket Price | Early bird discount extended till 14 May
ODA member – $395 early bird ($495 full price) |
We are absolutely thrilled to announce that El Camino is a proud sponsor of the 2025 ODA Conference: Beyond the Surface – Exploring the Deep Work of OD! 
Salient Consultancy brings a wealth of expertise in using the ‘systems leadership’ approach to support leaders in their work of transformation and organisational effectiveness. They will soon be launching Salient Coaching which will deliver further services to leaders, students, and those exploring career futures and change. This aligns perfectly with our conference’s focus on the deep, impactful work within organisation development. Their generous support as a Gold Sponsor is instrumental in helping us bring this insightful event to life.Partner with us as a sponsor today!
Learn more
ODA’s Pre-conference Event
What happens when the fragility of the leader meets that of the practitioner?
In this workshop, we will explore how we collude with others and delude ourselves to manage our own anxiety and shame.
The field of Organisation Development, and indeed many others, encourages us to be critically reflective. ‘Self as instrument’ started out as a radical invitation to use one’s own experience of self as the primary sense making lens, an invitation to treat everything as data in the here and now in service of forming hypotheses and devising invitations in response to messy reality. Yet this is set in the context of client-helper relationships where the overarching need for clients is to find someone onto whom their projections of ‘expert’ and ‘expertise’ are validated. This requires those of us working with clients to be aware (enough) of our own ego ideals, the intoxicating effect of projections that feed our narcissism and the lurking shadow of shame.
What is little acknowledged, or discussed, is what happens when the fragility of the client or leader meets that of the practitioner. What do we do when our shame – whether related to our work identities and roles or more archaic – is evoked? Do we really embrace ‘self as instrument’ and do our work, or collude by keeping the inquiry relatively superficial? It is all well and good gathering in communities of practice to reflect, and the question arises as to how deep we are really prepared to go.
Join Steve Hearsum, author of a new book on how unconscious processes driven by shame and anxiety fuel collusive behaviours that maintain the market for quick fix/’Silver Bullet’ solutions. In this workshop, Steve will host a conversation and inquiry that explores how we may be part of the problem, both colluding with clients, each other and ourselves. Come prepared to engage in useful discomfort in service of your own and collective learning; and bring your sense of humour, because even in the darkest moments absurdity lurks.
Steve Hearsum is a consultant, coach and supervisor, and the author of ‘No Silver Bullet: bursting the bubble of the organisational quick fix’, which looks at how leaders and organisations unconsciously collude with the purveyors of quick fix, Silver Bullet solutions for complex challenges.
He is a trustee of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, former co-Chair of the OD Network Europe and is on faculty for the Masters in People & OD at the University of Chichester. He lives in Brighton, in the UK, with his wife, daughter and fluffy hound.
| Date | Thursday, 24th July 2025 |
| Time | 9.30 am – 4.30 pm
· 9.30 am check-in · 10 am – 4.30 pm workshop |
| Venue | Community Hub at The Dock |
| Ticket Price | Early bird extended till 14 May
ODA member – $595 early bird ($695 full price) |