■ Research Paper Organizational Design and Firm-Wide Collaboration: Retrospective Appreciation of a Change-Led Consulting Intervention in India within a Systems Thinking Paradigm Rajneesh Chowdhury * Aon Hewitt - Consulting, New Delhi, India This paper offers a retrospective appreciation of an organization design intervention of a Public Relations firm in India that was undertaken, keeping in mind productive collaboration within geographically spread out teams to support the organization’s fast paced growth. It intends to highlight key insights from systems thinking that were used in designing and leading the intervention, and articulate the messages that surfaced during and at the end of the intervention. First, the Public Relations field is introduced in short, then the organization in focus is discussed, leading to a discussion of the need that arose for which the intervention was mandated, then the key concepts and implementation agenda are talked about, and it finally concludes with a retrospective appreciation of the nature of collaboration in the context, from a systems viewpoint. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Keywords systems thinking; organization design; collaboration; change management; public relations INTRODUCTION This paper emanates from the author ’s intent to share with the wider academic and practitioner community the application of creative systems thinking and approaches in a real life consulting intervention. Through a retrospective appreciation of an organization design intervention of a Public Relations (PR) firm in India, this paper also assesses the impact of the intervention from a critical systems perspective to highlight learning for consultant practitioners. At the very outset, it is to be noted that although systems methodologies were not used in the exercise in the purist form, the systems paradigm was applied to inform the context under consideration to facilitate creativity, inclusiveness and holism in intent and form. * Correspondence to: Rajneesh Chowdhury, Aon Hewitt - Consulting, New Delhi, India. E-mail: rajneesh.chowdhury@aonhewitt.com; rajneeshchowdhury@ gmail.com Received 21 May 2011 Accepted 28 October 2011 Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Systems Research and Behavioral Science Syst. Res. (2011) Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/sres.1139