Large Group Interventions

Fundamentals

Large group interventions (LGIs) are a group of organization development (OD) methods for participative change in organizations and communities. These interventions bring representatives of the whole system together to discuss important issues and search for common ground to make decisions. The fundamental premise of these methods is that if you want people in organizations or communities to support a change initiative, you need to involve them in the discussion and decisions about the change—that is, to give people “voice.” When this happens, the theory is that they will be more likely to support and sustain the change. In this entry, we briefly describe the history and role of LGIs in OD practice and then present the methods organized by the outcomes they seek to achieve.

LGIs are catalysts in a change process that usually begins with a representative planning committee working with an internal or external OD consultant to manage the change process, including planning event(s) and implementation.

The label “large group” was coined because when the thinking about these methods developed in the 1980s, most organizational change events were managed by experienced facilitators. When Kathy Dannemiller worked with 500 Ford managers in one room, she went against prevailing practice. She managed the large group by creating many small “microcosm” groups. These self-managed groups were composed of about eight people each from a different part of the organization sitting around 5-foot round tables. As they engaged each other in discussions from their diverse perspectives, the whole system began to get to know and understand itself. To allow what was discussed in these small groups to be heard and reacted to by all present, she then used processes such as flip chart reports and sticky dot voting on important issues to make visual the perspectives in the room.