RegioExpA 

Thematic background of the project

For companies the ability to adapt to challenges such as digital transformation, new work, the COVID pandemic and energy transition is a key success factor. The growing global networking of global politics, business and culture as well as the use of digital technologies but also changing values and expectations of employees are leading to dynamic and complex interrelationships that need to be taken into account in change interventions. Previous change approaches have focused strongly on sequential and plannable procedures that do not take the complex character of change sufficiently into account. Experimental approaches are described as a good way of dealing with uncertainty and complexity, as they enable an approach to a locally optimal procedure through the iterative and open-ended approach. In the practice of organisational development and organisational change, this procedure is only dealt with theoretically and implicitly. The project aims to transfer the idea of the experimental procedure for organisational development and change into a methodology that is concretely manageable for practitioners as well as into appropriate formats.

The project

Over a project period of 24 months, three companies from Baden-Württemberg are being supported with the format of experimental spaces.

The aim is to adapt the process model of experimental organisational development (OD) to practice, to test and evaluate it. In particular, the design of interventions for experimental spaces will be developed and published (e.g. in the form of guidelines, case studies, workshops). In the project, the existing initial procedure model is first adapted to the situation of the companies and the specific topic to be developed in the experimental spaces is determined (e.g. cooperation, self-organisation). A literature research on the contents of the experimental spaces is conducted and the method of experimental OD is initially further developed in a theory-based manner. The experimental spaces are supported by the HSRT and the respective procedures are transferred into an experimental design. In the organisations the developed procedures are then conducted, tested and evaluated.

The result is a scalable method description of the experimental OD that can be applied by other companies. On the one hand, the participating companies benefit from the sustainable effects in the respectively addressed thematic fields and, on the other hand, from a future-oriented strengthening of their ability to change.