Abigail Hopewell

I’ve been reading back over some notes I made from a talk I attended almost 12 years ago now. It was the first time I was introduced to the late, great, Dr Mee-Yan Cheung Judge. Mee-Yan was a globally respected Organisation Development (OD) Practitioner, who passed away in 2022.

I was introduced to her through the NHS Do OD Community. Put simply, she was inspiring and provocative in all the right ways. Over the years I attended several of her lectures, and every time she spoke I learned something new and felt invigorated to do “the work”.

I miss Mee-Yan’s wisdom, insight, challenge and humour. For anyone involved in change management/leadership and OD practice, I highly recommend you seek out her work. A good place to start is her book Organisation Development: A Practitioner’s Guide for OD and HR.

Here’s a sample of my written notes from that first lecture I attended, which are helpful reminders for me to this day (and to my future self when I read back on this one day…):

• Systems theory is the fundamental platform for OD
• Lifelong learning a key value for OD practitioners
• Do OD work is doing life work
• Transformare is Latin = “change shape”
• Our job is to create conditions for the system to reveal itself to itself
• Respect the capability and readiness of the system