Our Earthshot Moment: Net Positive OD for the Creation of a World of Full Spectrum Flourishing written by Weatherhead School of Management Char and Chuck Fowler Professor of Business as an Agent of World Benefit David Cooperrider, along with alumna Lindsey Godwin (GRS ’08, organizational behavior), has been chosen to receive the 2023 Outstanding Article of the Year award by the Organization Development Network.
This award annually recognizes an outstanding, substantive, research-grounded article published in OD Review, an academic journal that brings together scholarly and practitioner perspectives to foster greater understanding, improved practice, new research, and innovations for critical issues in the organizational development field.
Cooperrider and Godwin’s article first appeared in the OD Review Special Issue: One Giant Leap: How Organization Development and Change Can Help Organizations, Industries, and World-changing Megacommunities Lead the Net-Positive Earthshot, which was also edited by the pair and published in the spring of 2022.
Earlier this year, it was selected as one of the 18 best OD Review articles of all time to be featured in the OD Review Essentials Volume 1: History & Evolution of Organization Development issue.
The seed for Cooperrider and Godwin’s article was planted the same day the vision for the Fowler Center For Business as an Agent of World Benefit was announced, nearly 20 years ago.
At the time, Godwin was a doctoral student at Weatherhead. Cooperrider, Godwin and a team of Weatherhead students, were invited by the former secretary general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, to facilitate what became the United Nations Summit between business leaders and the United Nations.
“We designed that meeting and facilitated it using our appreciative inquiry methodology and it built the largest business sustainability network in the world of over 16,000 corporations today,” said Cooperrider. “Our article traces all of this and redefines the purpose of the field of organization development.”
The article illustrates how industry-leading stars are fixing the world’s problems instead of creating them and how net-positive organization development is helping to bring their organizations alive in “mirror-flourishing” ways they’ve scarcely imagined.
Cooperrider and Godwin will be presented with the award during a ceremony at the Organization Development Network Summit on June 14 at North Carolina State University.