Designing Delivery Units A holographic perspective for the design of the Task Force Logistics within The Netherlands’ Ministry of Defence
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2020-12-21
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en
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Abstract
Within the Dutch Ministry of Defence, the Task Force Logistics has been tasked to deal with the lack of strategic guidance for the logistics theatre. The team that has been assembled to be a part of the Task Force is dealing with wicked problems on a day to day basis and seems to operate under the direct guidance from its commander. The question arises whether the Task Force has the best structural design in place in order to be as efficient as possible from a Delivery Unit point of view. For that, a diagnosis based on former successful Delivery Unit literature is conducted, combined with Morgan’s holographic structure metaphor for organizational design. After conducting semi-structured interviews to extract data on the matter, it becomes clear that the Task Force has experimentally been going forward (= proefondervindelijk voorwaarts gaan) regarding its structure, based on its commander’s vision rather than following a sound approach for similar Delivery Units. It seems that the Task Force has little redundancy of functions and requisite variety, has a poor score on minimum critical specifications and lacks double loop learning. Based on the collected data and on holographic principles literature, a (re)design ‘compass’ is presented for the Task Force and other Delivery Units in order to enable structural change towards achieving a true holographically sound structural design.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen