Dear readers, you could actually keep quoting Adrienne Marée Brown. Today it is: „What we pay attention to, grows“ - what we focus our attention on grows. This Pleasure Principle states that the positive view is a self-reinforcing force: advances in trust build trust; focussing on what succeeds strengthens success. The principle also implies that we [...]

Cultivating trust is one of the basic tasks of social development. Whether as self-confidence, as trust in relevant others, as structural trust or as deeply rooted basic trust and trust in God - without confidence in a sustainable network, social action remains groundless. According to Charles Feldman, trust is the decision „to submit something that is important to you to the behaviour of another [...]".

My first encounter with the Viable System Model (VSM) came about when I was looking for the most cryptic diagram possible for a Power Point karaoke. What Stafford Beer put down on paper at the end of the 1970s is a fascinating imposition at first glance: very suitable for karaoke, but definitely too bulky for shirt-sleeved OE practice. [...]

„What we practice on a small scale sets the pattern for the whole system“ - adrienne maree brown, emergent strategy / fractals The beauty of small things What strikes me in check-ins and conversations these days is the gap between the big picture and the small things of everyday life. It's a painful balancing act: we feel that [...]

Dear readers, You are welcome! It's been a winding road, but now it's here, the new SOCIUS website! It's more than just a website that highlights what we do: it's a manifesto of our approach, an open media centre with hundreds of specialist articles, videos and podcasts, a shop with books and creative tools [...].

We don't have a map of the terrain ahead of us - but we can equip our ship to make the most of the wind and currents. Strategic roadmapping - I apologise for the drama - has had its day. Even its forward-looking relative, backcasting, looks increasingly dusty in the face of today's complexity and dynamics. Both methods rely [...]

Dear readers, I have the book „Tiny Experiments“ on my bedside table. It invites me to throw the big goals overboard and instead build small experimental set-ups that illuminate the way forward step by step. Not an entirely new idea, but good advice nonetheless: the tension between long-term orientation and immediate action is always [...]

The path from hierarchical to shared leadership runs through rugged terrain. Where founders and long-standing leaders relinquish the central control of „their“ organisation (voluntarily or involuntarily), the desire for a post-heroic culture is often expressed at the sight of the abandoned executive chair. No one is supposed to follow in the footsteps of the old central figure, no one is supposed to take over the leadership [...].

Dear readers, „Books are food“ - when Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood was still the scene of subcultural awakening in the 1990s, this quote was emblazoned on the wall of a building on what is now Danziger Strasse. Back then, Berlin was considered poor and sexy, the latter mainly due to its bubbling cultural landscape. Even today, empty coffers characterise the city's profile, only the significance of the [...]

Organisational culture is a dazzling creature that divides opinion. On the one hand, there is the conviction that culture can hardly be changed, if at all. From this perspective, we have to accept it like the climate zone in which we live (and where this is unsatisfactory, the good old Hamburg wisdom „There is no such thing as bad weather, [...]" comes into play).

Strategy discussions in organisations that we support are increasingly characterised by tensions. Where there is a struggle for the „right“ impact approach, discussions become passionate and spirited: it has often long been clear what we are against, but what are we actually for? And what exactly does it take to achieve this? While impact orientation in the 2010s was primarily a concept [...]

For organisational development, borrowings from other disciplines are the salt in the sensemaking soup: whether it is the navigation between map and terrain in nautics, the secret of creative flow in art, the interaction of self-healing and treatment in medicine or the development of operating systems and apps in software engineering - with every image [...].

Jazz is fascinating in many respects: as a counterpart to the symphonic corset of composed scores and the pursuit of standardised precision, it is a symbol of the emergent flow of joint development. The dazzling jazz metaphor has inspired works by Karl Weick, Mary Jo Hatch and others and has had a lasting impact on the rationalist management discourse of the last century. Currently [...]

The digital transformation is not only changing the way school leaders understand their role, but is also challenging old ways of thinking. Headteacher Nicole Stockmann and organisational consultant Andreas Knoth talk about how the culture of digitality is shaping their thinking - and what a contemporary mindset might look like. What attitude is currently being used in the school system to [...]

Self-organisation is a practice rather than a structural model. And while models can simply be adopted, the path to mastering a practice is the practice itself: Studies assume 10,000 hours to achieve excellence in a field (Malcom Gladwell 2009: Outliers). For example, to become an „excellent“ pianist, I have to practice every day for 10 years [...].

Crises - even the terrible and painful ones - bring forth something new. In the organisational world, this is reflected in structural arrangements that are both a framework and an expression of development. Two types of such transformative structures are „bubbles“ and „foams“ (a more in-depth look at these phenomena brought to the stage by Peter Sloterdijk can be found here). While in the [...]

Transformation is long-term, far-reaching and process-based, which in this combination is already a certain imposition: if everything is a process, a constant change, a constant flow of creative destruction and renewal, we run the risk of losing our bearings. As if the world were not already dynamic, complex and crisis-ridden enough, we as protagonists of social transformation are also undertaking [...]

  Projects are not just concepts, plans and tick boxes behind milestones: every goal formulation is based on a balancing act between one's own and external demands; every plan contains the breathtaking leap into the unplannable; fantasies of failure and heroism lurk beneath every responsible role. To the extent that projects become personal, they have the potential to become a playing field for personal development [...].

Complexity did not just come into the world yesterday: Social systems are, by definition, multi-layered and dynamic, i.e. complex. However, the borderline experience between dynamism and chaos in the coronavirus universe is currently making what contemporary management discourse calls the „VUCA world“ (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) very tangible. The experience of uncertainty triggers contradictory [...]