Henry Mintzberg made this argument in the organization development literature fifteen years ago. The data has finally caught up with it.
There is a line that gets quoted at conferences without much thought about what it would actually cost to act on it: you should never send a changed person back to an unchanged organization.
CoachingOurselves co-founder Henry Mintzberg opened a 2011 paper in OD Practitioner, the journal of the organization development field, by quoting it and then adding the uncomfortable second half:
“It has been said that you should never send a changed person back to an unchanged organization. In management development programs, we always do.”
We still do. Most leadership development still works by extraction: identify a promising manager, remove them from the place where the work happens, develop them somewhere else, and return them — alone — to colleagues who did not go, did not hear it, and have no particular reason to change how anything gets done on Monday.
Why this stopped being a philosophical objection
For a long time you could run that model and get away with it, because the organization the manager came back to was more or less the organization they had left.
That is no longer a safe assumption. In a Gartner survey of 473 HR leaders in July 2024, 74% said their managers are not equipped to lead change, and 73% said their employees were already fatigued by it. McLean & Company’s 2026 HR Trends report found 70% of organizations struggling to manage change at all, and named the finding plainly: a growing gap between organizational change and leadership capacity.
Read those numbers next to each other and the picture is specific. Organizations are asking managers to be the mechanism by which change actually happens — and roughly three out of four of those managers are, by their own HR leaders’ assessment, not ready for the job.
You cannot close that with a course. Not because courses are bad, but because of the arithmetic: sending managers away one at a time, in cohorts a fraction the size of the management population, at a cost per head that limits you to the people you have already decided are worth the investment. By the time the last cohort finishes, the change has moved on.
What Mintzberg proposed instead
The argument in the paper is not that classroom development is worthless. It is that it is aimed at the wrong unit.
“Needed instead is learning that is community-focused, connected to the collective experiences in the workplace, so that we can develop better organizations in the process of developing better managers, rather than just hoping that this will happen as a consequence of having developed them.”
That last clause is the whole thing. Most leadership development is built on a hope: that if you improve enough individuals, the organization will improve as a by-product. Sometimes it does. Often the individual returns, discovers that nothing around them has moved, and quietly reverts — or leaves.
The alternative is to stop treating the individual as the unit of development and start treating the group as one.
Where CoachingOurselves actually came from
The paper tells the origin story, and it is smaller than people expect.
An engineering manager at a high-technology company in Montreal — Phil LeNir, who would go on to co-found CoachingOurselves with Mintzberg — had new managers who were struggling. He had no training budget and no support from corporate. So he brought his managers together informally over lunch, for about ninety minutes every second week, and had them reflect together on their own experience, using conceptual material from the management literature as a starting point.
It ran for two years. Then something happened that is easy to skip past: members of that original group formed groups of their own, and those teams drove changes in their own workplaces.
That is the difference between management development and organization development, and it happened by accident before anyone designed for it. Mintzberg’s summary in the paper: while other programs brought the workplace into the classroom, “CoachingOurselves rooted this kind of management and organization development in the workplace.”
The group is a piece of the organization
Four to six managers meet for ninety minutes. No instructor, no preparation. They read a section of a guidebook together, reflect on it individually against their own situation, then talk — as peers, about live problems. They leave with commitments and check in on them the following month.
What makes that an organizational intervention rather than a training session is who is in the room. These are not strangers assembled for a workshop. They are colleagues who will still be dealing with each other next week, and the week after. When six of them reach a shared conclusion about how something gets handled here, the conclusion does not have to be transferred back to the organization. It is already in it.
Run several groups across a function and the conversations converge. Run them across levels and the organization starts talking to itself about the change rather than being talked at about it.
What it looks like when organizations do this
The pattern shows up clearly in customers who came to us for what looked like leadership development and were in fact doing organization development.
McGill University ran Reflection Cafés for more than 1,700 managers and supervisors, with topics chosen — in their Director of Organizational Development’s words — “appropriate to readiness, participant profiles, and emergent needs in the face of important culture change.”
UNI Coopération Financière regrouped seventeen separate credit unions into one organization. The programme ran through the integration: “CoachingOurselves created a synergy among participants, which was invaluable during our restructuring process.”
Intelerad, growing fast enough to have created silos, deliberately mixed its groups across divisions, with the stated objective of improving “agility, collaboration and sense of community in the organization.”
None of those is a story about individuals being improved and returned. They are stories about groups of colleagues changing something between them.
Where this does not work
Two honest limits.
It does nothing for a change that is purely technical, where no one’s behaviour has to alter. A system migration with no consequence for how people work together does not need this.
And it goes badly when leadership is not prepared to hear what comes out. Putting managers in a room to talk honestly about a change generates candid views about that change. If the only acceptable output is agreement, do not start — you will spend credibility you cannot get back.
The closing argument, from 2011
Mintzberg finished the paper by borrowing from Margaret Mead, and it holds up:
“Isn’t it time that we got past the lone wolf view of development, that a changed individual will magically change an organization?… Send a changed manager back to a small group of thoughtful, committed colleagues and watch how an organization can be changed too.”
Fifteen years later, with three-quarters of managers reported as unready to lead the change they are being handed, the lone wolf model is not just philosophically shaky. It is arithmetically unable to keep up.
Read the original paper: Henry Mintzberg, “From Management Development to Organization Development with IMpact,” OD Practitioner Vol. 43 No. 3, 2011. Or see how organizations use peer groups for culture and change work.