PARTNERED WITH THE ISODC

Code of Ethics and Core Values in Global Organization Development

The International Society for Organization Development and Change (ISODC) is an international association with a membership of OD consultants, professors, students, corporations, non-profits, NGOs, and anyone interested in building a worldwide OD network.

In 2018, ISODC launched ISODC China in partnership with the OD consulting firm SynergyWorks. Since then the ISDOC and ISODC China have partnered with GSU to establish OD curriculum from a global perspective. Together, we seek to establish a leading international, collaborative movement promoting and effecting positive growth and change thorough scholarship and practice worldwide.

Code of Ethics & Core Values

In alignment with the ISODC, GSU has adopted the following ISODC Code of Ethics representing the core values in which we teach organization development at GSU. We collectively acknowledge the fundamental importance of the following values both for ourselves and our profession:


  • Quality of life: that people are satisfied with their whole life experience;

  • Health, human potential, empowerment, growth, and excellence: that people are healthy, aware of the fullness of their potential, recognize their power to bring that potential into being, growing into it, living it, and, generally, doing the best they can with it, individually and collectively;

  • Freedom and responsibility: people are free and responsible in choosing how they will live their lives;

  • Justice: that people live lives whose results are fair and right for everyone;

  • Dignity, integrity, worth and fundamental rights of individuals, organizations, communities, societies, and other human systems;

  • All-win attitudes and cooperation: that people care about one another and about working together to achieve results that work for everyone, individually and collectively;

  • Authenticity and openness in relationships;

  • Effectiveness, efficiency, and alignment: that people achieve the maximum of desired results, at minimum cost, in ways that coordinate their individual energies and purposes with those of the system-as-a-whole, the subsystems of which they are parts, and the larger system of which their system is a part;

  • Holistic, systemic view and stakeholder orientation: understanding human behavior;

  • From the perspective of whole system(s) that influence and are influenced by that behavior: recognizing the interests that different people have in the system’s results and valuing those interests fairly and justly;

  • Wide participation: in system affairs, confrontation of issues leading to effective problem solving, and democratic decision making;

  • Encouraging and facilitating others to be able to recognize reality and to have the fortitude and skills to deal with it honestly, fearlessly, and proactively.