Abstract Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine deliberation in the context of organizational change and introduce an organizational jury as a change facilitator. Design/methodology/approach - The research is based on an empirical study of four organizational juries that were organized by a non-profit organization in Finland. The main data of the study consist of a survey that the juries' participants filled in. The data are triangulated with observations of jury meetings and relevant documents including pre-jury information package, jury presentations and juries' proposals. In the analysis, the paper adopts deliberative democracy criteria to assess the inclusiveness, authenticity and consequentiality of the deliberative process. Findings-The research findings suggest that the juries increased the inclusiveness of decision making and the quality of deliberation about the changes among the employees. The results indicate that juries facilitated the change process by providing a means for information sharing and building a shared understanding among the stakeholders. The main weakness of the juries was their low consequentiality. Originality/value - Deliberative jury method provides a participative way to build and preserve socially shared meanings in an organizational change context. However, the studies on the use of deliberative forums in the organizational context are still scarce. Thus, the study provides an important addition to the existing research literature. Keywords Case study, Organizational change, Deliberation, Democratic leadership, Organizational jury Paper type Case study Introduction Organization is a form of life that emerges in the communicative activities that together construct organizational identity (Taylor and Van Every, 2000). Therefore, any proposed change may be seen as a threat and a challenge to the existing perceptions that are built into an organization's social practices and norms (O'Neill and Jabri, 2007). This increases the importance of communication as a means of legitimizing perceptions of reality within an organizational setting. Communication plays a central role in motivating and sharing future goals and visions for the employees. However, simply "communicating" with employees does not easily alter perceptions (O'Neill and Jabri, 2007). In practice, in many change efforts to increase participation, the stress is placed upon achieving consensus through utilizing rhetorics of persuasion (Jabri et al., 2008), or even manipulation (Raelin, 2011a). Instead, change interventions should be aimed at creating shared meaning and understanding through genuine dialog, where the terms of change are articulated, explained and questioned (Jabri et al., 2008, p. 680). This paper argues that the most genuine form of democratic dialog is represented in deliberation. It can be considered as the most representative communication mode of democratic leadership, because it relies on the critical reflection as the means to involve the responsible parties in decision making without privileging particular stakeholders over the others, because of their status or authority (Raelin, 2012b). Deliberation refers to a form of communication, where participants deliberate with each other and try to reach a reasoned agreement (Gutmann and Thompson, 1996). It gives attention to common interests and allows participants to transform their preferences through public and rational discussion (Cohen, 1997). Compared to other forms of communications, such as dialog and debate, deliberation is more oriented toward consensus and social co-construction (Bone et al., 2006). There are different ways to promote democratic deliberation in the organizational change context. One is to establish special sites, where the members of the organization have an equal opportunity to take part in the deliberations and present solutions to problems (Gustavsen, 1992). In the change context, deliberative sites provide the employees with a chance to get information about the organizational change, deliberate about the change with each other and reach an agreement on solutions that are based on common interests. Incorporating deliberative aspects in an organizational change context can lead to more democratic change processes, where the employees have an influence on shaping the outcome of the change process. This paper focuses on one deliberative method called organizational jury that adopts some features of the citizens' jury method and applies them in an organizational context (Vartiainen et al., 2013; Lindell, 2014). The paper studies four organizational juries that were organized by a Finnish non-profit organization (NPO). The paper adopts the criteria of deliberative democracy to study whether the juries managed to fulfill three core factors of a deliberative process: inclusiveness, the authenticity of deliberation and the consequentiality of the deliberative process. The results of the analysis will show how inclusive and deliberative the juries were and how they impacted the change process. The paper will focus both on direct and indirect influences of the jury process to the organizational change process. The structure of the paper is as follows: first, the paper presents contributions from the distributed leadership framework and discusses the limits of the framework in relation to democratic leadership. Second, the paper highlights literature sources from deliberative democracy theory and discusses how these theoretical contemplations could be merged with the democratic leadership framework. The paper presents an organization jury method as a deliberative site, where the change-related issues can be discussed and various interests counterbalanced. In the final section, the paper introduces its research data and presents the main results of the data analysis. The paper concludes by discussing the implications for research and practice and sets stepping stones for future research. Conclusion The results of the study confirm the assumption that a deliberative method, such as organizational jury, can have a positive influence on an organizational change process. An organizational jury provides a stage where the members of the organization can take part in decision making in a meaningful way. The deliberative process facilitates the change process and organizational development more generally both directly and indirectly. During the deliberation, the participants can express their views on various issues and problems and provide management with solutions and ideas that may have a direct impact on the outcome of the change process. In addition, the deliberative process can give the members of the organization a better understanding about change-related issues and build a shared understanding about organizational goals and values more generally. This has the potential to increase the organizational members' commitment to the proposed changes (see O'Neill and Jabri, 2007). The results demonstrate that the weaknesses of the jury process influence the participants' perceptions on the jury process and its outcomes. These limitations can undermine the outcomes of the jury process and question the jury's legitimacy altogether. Therefore, the practitioners need to take into consideration the needs of the current situations to evaluate whether the jury method is suited for the situations or not. The jury is a very demanding method requiring a lot of time and effort from both employees and the organizers. Especially, reaching an agreement on practical issues may be demanding and time-consuming, making the jury method a challenging method for solving these issues. This indicates that the jury process may be best suited in situations where the members of the organization are deciding on more abstract issues, such as setting goals and values of the organization. In these cases, the jury method can provide a means for creating common value basis and culture to the whole organization. Since the data were collected in a single organization, there are some reservations to be made in relation to generalization of the results. It is expected that deliberative methods are best suited to environments that already share democratic and deliberative values (Felicetti, 2018). Such deliberative sensitive environments include NPOs, cooperatives and social enterprises, which are created to further social purposes in a financially sustainable way (Doherty et al., 2014). In addition, there are innovative environments that acknowledge the benefits of shared leadership and utilize it in order to pursue both ethical goals and business goals. In these environments, deliberative processes would help organizations in furthering social well-being, while still creating profit for their shareholders. Finally, the study has some limitations that need to be stressed. First, the method of the study is mostly descriptive. A more detailed evaluation of deliberative process would have given a better insight of argumentative process through which the change occurred (see Bchtiger et al., 2010). Second, the study did not include pre- and post-surveys to the participants. This means that the study relies on the subjective accounts given by the respondents themselves and the changes in the participants' attitudes could not be studied thoroughly. Thus, the study did not take into consideration how the entry positions of the participants affected the jury process (see Bobbio, 2010). Third, since the study focused on the jury process, the actual impact of the organizational juries was not grasped in the study. Future studies should make a broader coverage of the outcomes by investigating how the jury process relates to other decision-making forums, how the jury's proposals are taken into account during the change process and how much the jury's proposals actually influence the upcoming changes.