Bart Cambré

Introduction: Temporary organizations: A challenge and opportunity for our thinking about organizations

Between 2004 and 2005 the highway around the City of Antwerp was renovated. This highway links, among others, the Dutch harbor of Rotterdam and the so-called Randstad area of the Netherlands – an urban area including the cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague – with the Belgian harbor of Antwerp and the southern part of Europe. 250 000 vehicles use this highway daily. Consequently, the renovation was a tremendous logistic operation and the challenge was to avoid paralyzing traffi c. The undertaking involved ten different companies, public agencies and associations concerned with safety and traffi c. Due to this complexity, it was predicted by many that this ‘big maintenance’, as it was called, would lead to an enormous amount of irritation and would last much longer than originally planned. But the outcomes turned out to be very diff erent from these expectations. The renovation resulted in very little irritation and was fi nished two weeks before the deadline. A number of innovations – specifi c measures taken to produce a smooth traffi c circulation during renovation – have been kept in place, as they proved to have great benefi ts for traffi c circulation and safety. On 30 August 2005 the completion of the ‘big maintenance’ was a major item on the Belgian news. Apart from proudly presenting pictures of the fi nished product, the newscaster also showed another remarkable photo: a six-foottall construction worker falling into the arms of a co-worker from another company involved in the operation, crying because they had to separate since their successful collaboration had come to an end.