Maarten is a certified Participatory Action Researcher and PAR trainer. With over 10 years of project management experience and more than 10 years of research experience, the combination of action, research and the PAR philosophy feels like a warm bath. He enjoys sharing his passion for PAR with researchers, project managers and curious minds who are faced with complex issues.
The cyclical approach of researching, co-creating, experimenting and learning has proven to be very effective in providing solutions to tough dynamics and patterns, and in revealing underlying imposed or hidden structures.
His experience with PAO lies in making a neighbourhood in Rotterdam South safer, where mothers worked together with parties in the neighbourhood to co-create solutions for the safety of their children.
For large projects (over €20 million) within a municipality, solutions were devised to learn how to budget better together. And when dealing with people with misunderstood behaviour, a region will learn to collaborate better across domains and, above all, to offer solutions for people (and organisations) who suffer from their own misunderstood behaviour.
Maarten is highly motivated to integrate PAO into all audit departments in the Netherlands. He has twice participated in the innovation award for internal audit departments with the topics “auditing complexity” and “participatory action audit”. The soft side of change management was already his main focus during his business administration major 25 years ago, and it still is today.
In his spare time, he is a big fan of ball sports, family adventures, reading books and Bob Marley’s song “Redemption Song”.
‘The phrase ‘Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery’ is written in my heart. And PAO is a method that fits perfectly with that!’
Interested in a joint PAO adventure? Feel free to get in touch!