Increasingly, it is apparent that healthy organizations are those that can continually and flexibly respond to a world full of rapidly changing circumstances. That means not simply “reorganising” to meet today’s challenges but rather fostering a culture within which people continually adapt solutions and respond creatively to new conditions and discoveries.

That idea of adapting solutions and responding creatively is design in its essence.

As designers, we came to the practice of organisational change largely through the intuitive application of our design process to organisational development challenges variously brought to us by our clients. Recently, we have been made aware of an existing body of literature that sits at the intersection of design and organisational development and refers to prototyping as a tool for organisational change. Neely D. Gardner, for example, advocates for the use of prototypes to “test . . . assumptions before the change is implemented. This prototype should not be a simulation of the change but an actual implementation of the critical parts of this change”

1. Changing Organisation by Design
2. Rapid Prototyping in the Old Literature
3. Design Approaches to Prototyping
4. How Does Prototyping Support Organisational Change?
5. Helping Organisations Learn How to Prototype
6. Implications