In June 2026, I met with Paul Tolchinsky – as I’m privileged to do each month – to discuss our shared interest in Organization Design and Organization Development. This month, I took the opportunity to record our discussion.
Paul Tolchinsky is a true luminary in the fields of Organization Design, Organization Development, and Whole-Scale Change. Beyond his professional contributions, Paul has been a generous mentor to countless practitioners, including myself. This interview is to honor Paul and share his wisdom, warmth, and insights with the broader OD Practitioner Community.
We discuss:
How Paul and I first met and connected.
A Storied Career: How his perspectives evolved over decades of hands-on practice.
Major Influences: The thinkers, experiences, and moments that shaped his development.
The OD Differentiators: What truly separates the best OD practitioners from the crowd.
Why Paul has dedicated so much of his life to generously mentoring the next generation of practitioners.
If Paul has impacted your career, mentored you, or inspired your work, please leave a comment below to share your story and help us celebrate him!
In 2024, we worked to strengthen our brand awareness and to better communicate our points of differentiation to current and potential clients. We wanted to approach this in the same way we would advise our clients, including a practical diagnostic to learn from our clients’ experience with our services and delivery. By doing this, we aimed to grow awareness and support for inbound opportunity flow, optimize our brand’s messaging, communicate our differentiated value proposition, and ultimately be the easiest partner to work with and refer. Here, we’re sharing our process, what we learned through the process, and to exemplify how we work – applied to our services.
The Work:
We started by reaching out to select customers we have completed projects with and asked if they would be willing to provide feedback on their experience working with us. After they agreed, we sent a short request with some prompting questions (shared below) and requested either a reply or a short call to discuss their responses.
Re: Work Arts Feedback Request
Hi <Client>,
Thank you for agreeing to provide some feedback on your experiences with us. We’re entering year five of our advisory practice and are working on refining the marketing and promotion of my advisory and design services. Your insights are incredibly valuable to me.
I’m interested in learning about your experience working with us and what has been most impactful for you. Specifically, I’d love to hear your thoughts on:
What would you say are the most impactful results we’ve achieved?
What differentiates our approach from other advisors/designers you’ve worked with?
How would you describe our services to a friend or colleague who might be looking for similar assistance?
Are there any areas where you feel I could improve or expand my offerings?
Your feedback will help me better understand your needs and tailor my services to provide even greater value to clients. Please share your thoughts in a quick email reply or, if you prefer, we can schedule a brief call to discuss.
Best,<Signature>
After receiving the group of responses, we reviewed them for themes and created a series of case studies and testimonials.
The Results:
These cases and testimonials will share the experience and view of our customers through a series of posts that both illustrate our body of work and honor the privacy of our clients.
We also fed the responses into Gemini AI, asking for it to draft a summary of the testimonial themes. With the help of Gemini, we created the following summary:
Since completing this work, we have been leveraging what we learned from this project to deploy learnings across our Work Arts social media feeds, our website, service summaries, and proposal templates, and we plan to make this process a part of our ongoing account management process.
In August, Brandon Curry of Work Arts moderated a conversation for the HR M&A Roundtable about the role of organization design in M&A, with organization designers Molly Maymar and Lorraine Damerau, from Kates Kesler. They shared their experiences helping clients navigate org design challenges in M&A contexts and facilitated an interactive round table discussion.
Key Topics:
What is Organization Design
The important role org design plays in a successful M&A
Designing the integrative layer of an organization
Best practices for engaging stakeholders from real-life examples
We Sign Tomorrow? Inside a Tech Acquisition | A Paddle Documentary
In February, I met the team at Paddle to explore contributing to their acquisition of – and integration with – ProfitWell. It’s not common to be able to share much about the work we do in due diligence, organization design, and integration. This is an exception.
The team at Paddle (inclusive of ProfitWell) is amazing. I am very proud to work closely with the team, of the work that’s being done, and of the organization that’s developing! In their efforts to be the most helpful brand in SaaS, they filmed the journey to share their experiences as an insider’s view of a tech acquisition.
This Work Arts interview highlights my June discussion with Julian Chender, talking all things Organization Design & Development. We discuss where we’ve come from, where we are going, as well as the foundation of social science and management/business science that shape what we know as organization development.
Julian shares some backstory on the historical foundations of the recent ODReview published article, OD in Times of Disruption, he co-authored with Corrie Voss, MOD, Ed.D. With enduring social science, we continue to appreciate and apply the work of original thinkers like Kurt Lewin, Edgar Schein and Jay R. Galbraith, from the early work in the OD field. On the management/business side, we continue to evolve as organizations face new challenges, leading to the need for both scale and agility. Finally, Julian shares insights on what he is learning as a part of the Fellowship Program at Kates Kesler.
Julian Chender is an Organization Development and Design practitioner and scholar. He oversaw Leadership Development at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease during the global Ebola and Zika outbreaks and then at Veldhoen + Company helped organizations align their culture, technology and physical space to meet strategic goals. He is now a Fellow at Kates Kesler Organization Consulting, part of Accenture, where he consults on large organization design projects. Julian is Founder of the OD Salon and was the 2020 recipient of the OD Network’s Emerging Practitioner Award.
Arts We Like is a series of posts spotlighting great thinkers, ideas, products and partners that we share to help enable remarkable performance through more effective and engaged organizations. Contact Us about how to deploy these solutions as a part of a broader HR Strategy or engagements to develop your organization, capabilities and talent.
