OD&D Network: Focus on organisational absurdity

About this event

Organisational development & design (OD&D) network

This national community is for CIPD members with a passion for organisation development & design (OD&D), bringing together HR professionals and specialists at every stage of their career.

It provides a dedicated space to connect with peers across the UK, share insights, and explore solutions to common OD&D challenges. Whether you work internally or in a consultancy role, the network is for those who influence how organisations develop, adapt, and thrive in a changing world.

Members gain access to a trusted network where best practice is shared, emerging trends are discussed, and the evolving nature of OD&D is explored. There are also opportunities to contribute to CIPD research and policy development, ensuring members play a part in shaping the future of practice across the profession

About this session:

The meeting where everyone appears to agree, but leaves with a different understanding. The same issue that returns to the agenda again and again. The strategy that looks coherent on paper, but never quite connects with how work actually happens. The polite silence when everyone knows something important is being avoided.

These moments can be funny. They can also be deeply frustrating. But they may also be useful signals.

In this CIPD session, we will be joined by Charleen Johnson, founder of InSpark Group and author of the 2026 Workplace Absurdities Report, to explore how absurdity shows up in organisational life and what it may be trying to tell us.

Charleen’s work invites us to look beneath the surface of workplace contradictions, mixed messages and strange recurring patterns. Rather than treating absurdity as simply irrational or dysfunctional, we will consider what function it may be serving, what it reveals about the wider system and what it may be costing people and organisations.

Together, we will explore questions such as:

🔹 What does organisational absurdity look and feel like in practice?

🔹 How do contradictions, workarounds and performance theatre show up at work?

🔹 What might absurdity be signalling about power, anxiety, avoidance or misalignment?

🔹 How can practitioners respond without simply blaming individuals?

🔹 What does this mean for OD, HR, change and leadership practice?

This will be an interactive and reflective session for OD practitioners, HR and People professionals, leaders, consultants and anyone interested in making sense of the contradictions and complexities of organisational life.

You will leave with a richer way of noticing the absurdities that show up in your own work, practical questions for exploring what may sit beneath them and ideas for how to respond with more curiosity, courage and care.

About Charleen Johnson

People and organisations are losing their bearings as they navigate growing complexity. Charleen Johnson sees the absurdity that shows up there - the gap between what we say and what we do - as a signal worth reading, rather than a glitch to fix. She calls the pattern functional absurdity: the meeting where everyone nods, nothing changes and somehow that counts as progress.

Charleen is the founder of InSpark Group and lead researcher of the Organisational Absurdity Research Programme. Through her Field Paper series, she explores orientation capacity, the ability of a system to stay in contact with what is actually happening, and what it takes for organisations to find their bearings again.

She writes about this work for a broader audience through The Age of Absurdity, which she is building in public on Substack and GitHub. She brings more than twenty years of practitioner experience across Canada, the United States and New Zealand, with work spanning public, private and global organisations.

That practitioner background grounds her research. It also means her conversations with OD practitioners tend to land somewhere uncomfortable: not just what our frameworks help us see, but what they let us avoid.

Key Information

Network membership eligibility

Important: These events are exclusively for CIPD members who have successfully joined the relevant People Professional Network. Our network events are designed as member-only spaces where professionals can connect with peers, share experiences and discuss challenges in a trusted environment.

To register for this event, you will need a network member access code.

All approved network members receive this code:

• In their network welcome email.

• In subsequent communications relating to the network.

• In invitations to network events.

You will be asked to enter this code on Eventbrite to access tickets for this session.

If you cannot locate your code, please contact operationsdelivery@cipd.co.uk before registering.

Not yet a network member?

If you are a CIPD member but have not yet joined the network, you'll need to apply before registering for this event.

You can apply to join the network here: networkapplication.co.uk

Once your application has been approved, you'll receive a welcome email containing your network access code, which you'll need to register for future network events.

Please note that event registration cannot be completed without a valid network member access code.

Participating in the session

This is a member discussion session, not a webinar.

Our People Professional Network events are designed to help network members connect, collaborate and learn from one another through active participation and peer-to-peer discussion.

Throughout the session, attendees will participate in breakout room discussions with fellow network members, sharing experiences, challenges, ideas and practical solutions.

To get the most from the session, please come prepared to contribute to conversations and engage with your peers. You do not need to be an expert; the value comes from members learning together.

Joining instructions

You'll receive your joining instructions again before the event, along with a reminder shortly before the session starts.

Guest speakers

Some events may include external speakers. Any views or opinions expressed are those of the speaker and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CIPD.

Participating in the session

We encourage attendees to make the most of the discussion by using the chat, Q&A and other interactive features during the event. We ask that attendees participate directly and do not use AI bots or automated tools during the session as these will be removed.

Joining the event

To help us start on time and ensure a smooth check-in process, please join a few minutes before the scheduled start time. Where possible, use the name you registered with on Eventbrite.

Accessibility and reasonable adjustments

If you require any reasonable adjustments to support your participation, please contact us and we'll do our best to accommodate your needs.