Bushe, Gervase Roy: 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 better choices and be engaged in giving their very best in the work they do. This thread is evident throughout his work, with every strand contributing to collective, participative engagement methods for organizational thriving. 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 intrapersonal, interpersonal, and wider system domains. An eclectic, integrated understanding in theory and in practice appears throughout his work, and the complementarity between parts has built over time. Recent examples are the widely used Clear Leadership program; and his paradigm shifting work to frame new emerging threads of OD with the term now known as Dialogic OD. 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 test, refine, and amplify its power and effectiveness as a method. Tracking and fanning, synergenesis, amplification, generative images, generative leadership, and generative change 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 has influenced his work consistently, giving a clearly recognizable trademark to his contributions, perhaps best summed up as human, accessible, highly practical, and progressive.