Organizational Consulting: What a Gestalt Approach Can Learn from Off-Off-Broadway Theater

This paper proposes to enlarge the scope of traditional inquiry of Gestalt therapy and Gestalt-oriented organization development through a comparison of contemporary theater and organizational consulting practice. The goal of this paper is to move closer to both worlds and to compare directly the most recent developments in both fields, namely Off-Off-Broadway (OOB) theater with contemporary management consulting or Off-Off-Wall Street (OOW) consulting. Both OOB and OOW show manifestations of postmodernism that have important implications for Gestaltoriented organization development consulting. These manifestations are discussed in the latter part of the paper.