Organizational Development gives readers an understanding of organizational structures and presents a new and easy-to-understand framework which describes the three dimensions of organizational interventions. Interventions in organization often fail. This has been widely acknowledged: many books exist about the topic and many approaches are proposed to guide organizational interventions - but to no avail - so it remains difficult to design and guide them. This is the first book to (1) provide readers with an understanding of organizational structures and why it is both relevant and difficult to change them, and (2) present a model consisting of three underlying dimensions of interventions. The authors describe how this model can be used to design interventions in organizational structures. Containing practical guidelines to show how interventions can be designed and controlled, this book should be considered essential reading for postgraduate students of organizational development, design, and change, and practitioners carrying out organizational development projects.

Organizational Development gives readers an understanding of organizational structures and presents a new and easy-to-understand framework which describes the three dimensions of organizational interventions. Interventions in organization often fail. This has been widely acknowledged: many books exist about the topic and many approaches are proposed to guide organizational interventions - but to no avail - so it remains difficult to design and guide them. This is the first book to (1) provide readers with an understanding of organizational structures and why it is both relevant and difficult to change them, and (2) present a model consisting of three underlying dimensions of interventions. The authors describe how this model can be used to design interventions in organizational structures. Containing practical guidelines to show how interventions can be designed and controlled, this book should be considered essential reading for postgraduate students of organizational development, design, and change, and practitioners carrying out organizational development projects.

to do to ensure survival, and (2) principles for designing organizational structures in such a way that they can realize the required functions adequately. In the course of their elaboration, we will show that these principles are general - i.e., that they hold for all organizations. 1.5 Conceptual Background To describe organizations as social systems conducting experiments and to present principles for designing an infrastructure supporting the "social experiment," we use concepts from (organizational) cybernetics, social systems theory, and Aristotle's ethics. In this book, we hope to show that concepts from these traditions - as introduced by their relevant representatives - can be integrated into a framework supporting our perspective on organizations. To this purpose, we introduce, in each of the following chapters, relevant concepts from an author "belonging" to one of these three traditions and show how these concepts contribute to describing organizations as social experiments (in Part I of the book), to formulating principles for the design of functions and organization structures supporting meaningful survival (Part II), and to formulating principles for the design of organization structures enabling the rich sense of meaningful survival (Part III). Of course, the relevance of cybernetics, social systems theory and Aristotle's ethics can only be understood in full, after they have been treated in more detail - but based on what we said above, it may already be possible to see why these theories have been chosen as conceptual background.