A Participative Approach to Organizational Design: The Case of the Royal Netherlands Air Force

Participative approaches to organizational design are believed to create a situation that has the potential for aligning diverging perspectives, interests, needs and objectives that exist in the group of people taking part in the effort. We strongly support this notion. What we believe is needed is a set of tools that support the process of building shared mental models between stakeholders of a complex problem, and that enhance communication among them. This is especially the case within the complex processes of organizational change, which many private and public companies are currently undergoing. One such set of tools was developed and implemented through a participative and interactive organizational prototyping process we undertook in the case of the reorganization process within the Royal Netherlands Air Force. In this paper we report about this case