Organizational Development Goes Digital: Applying Simulation to Organizational Change

Organizational change initiatives are challenging for both researchers to understand and for practitioners/organizational leaders to execute. This article takes a conceptual approach to describe organizational simulation technologies as one of many approaches for use in organizational development activities while also providing two examples of how simulations have been applied to real-world scenarios. Scenario 1 involved a process re-engineering effort within a manufacturing organization where a manufacturing process was modeled to explore how numerous factors (e.g. product inputs, organizational structure, manpower allocation) influenced the simulated output. Scenario 2 included an organizational change initiative involving organizational design modifications in a command and control center. Here, two organizational design alternatives were compared and contrasted. Simulation technologies may provide organizational development (OD) professionals with the opportunity to experiment with alternative organizational designs, an inherent strength for generating potential return on investment estimates. Researchers from the Air Force Research Laboratory have used simulation technologies as one element of an overall organizational development strategy within two different projects, albeit as one aspect of a larger change management strategy. This article discusses these applied examples in the context of a conceptual discussion on the merits of simulation as a tool to support organizational change.