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Keith Ray, Ph.D. - Fielding Graduate University. Santa Barbara, CA, US

Keith Ray, Ph.D.

Program Director, Organization Development & Leadership | Fielding Graduate University

Santa Barbara, CA, UNITED STATES

Dialogic Organization Development scholar-practitioner bringing the craft of change alive for change agents and leaders.

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Master's in OD&L Faculty intro Dr  Keith Ray

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Biography

Dr. Keith Ray is the Program Director for Fielding Graduate University’s Master of Arts in Organization Development and Leadership and Managing Partner of Act Too Consulting, Inc. He brings over 25 years of experience in organization development and leadership to the director role, building a successful organization development practice that cultivated leadership and change with government and commercial clients.

As a scholar-practitioner, Keith has combined his research interests and OD practice by creating customized cohort-based leadership development programs, studying leadership development impacts within organizations, and conducting studies using social network analysis and narrative methods. Keith has partnered closely with clients to understand how organizational change and leadership occur in the day-to-day communicative actions. Theories of social constructionism and complexity inform his practice and his writings. Keith has authored book chapters on Dialogic Process Consultation and Dialogic Leadership Development and several articles on the same subjects.

Industry Expertise (3)

Research

Education/Learning

Writing and Editing

Areas of Expertise (4)

Organization Culture

Complexity Theory

Dialogic Organization Development

Change Leadership

Education (3)

Fielding Graduate University: PhD, Human and Organizational Systems 2009

Fielding Graduate University: MA, Human and Organizational Systems 2006

University of Nebraska-Lincoln: BA, Physics 1987

Affiliations (3)

  • International Coach Federation
  • Academy of Management
  • Organization Development Network

Media Appearances (1)

Dr. Keith Ray Named New Program Director for 1-Year Master’s in Organization Development and Leadership

Fielding News  online

2021-07-15

Dr. Keith Ray brings more than 25 years of experience in organization development and leadership to the director role, building a successful organization development practice that cultivated leadership and change with government and commercial clients. Keith earned his doctorate in Human and Organization Systems from Fielding in 2009. His research investigated how and why people invoke the concept of culture in organizational settings.

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Event Appearances (3)

Perspectives on Dialogic OD & Stories from the Field

University of San Francisco Guest Lecture  San Francisco, CA

Dialogic Organization Development: Opening Up the Governance of Change

Academy of Management Annual Meeting  Vancouver, BC

Working Live: Dialogic Process Consultation

First International Conference on Dialogic Organization Development  Vancouver, BC

Research Focus (4)

Community Health Needs Assessment

A mixed methods approach to determine the health needs of a rural hospital, 2013 & 2016.

Impact of Leadership Development on Culture Change

A narrative approach to understanding how a leadership development program was affecting collaboration in a large diverse engineering organization, 2012.

Impact on Collaborative Tool Usage Due to Covid-19 and Work From Home Requirements

A Social Network Analysis of online collaborative tool data for a large diverse engineering organization, 2020.

Networks of Collaboration

An organizational network analysis to understand and intervene on collaboration networks in an engineering firm, 2013.

Articles (3)

Developing leadership as well as leaders

The dialogical challenge of leadership development

2019 New narratives of leadership are forming along with new ways of conceptualizing what leadership is and how it is created. These ways of looking at leadership can profoundly affect the way one might approach leadership development and research in leadership development.

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Dialogic Process Consultation

Dialogic organization development: The theory and practice of transformational change

2015 Fade in... dining room of CEO’s house at 9 am Six people are sitting around the dining-room table. Two flip charts are set up. Two cats are lying lazily on the windowsill.

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War and the Culture of Culture

Current Anthropology

2011 In the documentary Human Terrain: War Becomes Academic, the filmmakers trace two collateral arcs. One is about the Human Terrain System (HTS) project that is led by the US Army. This project embeds social scientists with combat troops in Afghanistan and Iraq to obtain sociocultural data on local populations that can be used in military decision making.

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