This short essay is an attempt to clarify what I see to be a confusion in the
field of consultation and organizational development between formal research
and data driven inquiry on the one hand, and clinical research and client driven
inquiry on the other hand. I do not want to review in this analysis all of the
issues of organization development and consultation that are today
confounding our efforts to think clearly about how to manage change and help
organizations. Rather I want to focus on just one issue on which there is
specific confusion and ambiguity, and "unpack" it in some detail, because I
believe it underlies much of the broader confusion and may explain why so
many planned change efforts do not fulfill their promise