Workshops
&
Momentum
Unorthodox, beyond reassurance
Don't know what you are looking for, but do know that something needs to be found?
Then this is the moment to add an outsider-insider to your team, project, department, programme or board, for a while. Someone who sees what has become invisible from within, and brings movement where things have stalled.
Where others get nervous about the pile-up of too's too big, too complex, too sensitive, too many interests, too unclear
my eyes start to shine, my mouth starts to smile, and my brain lights up.
An outsider-insider is not an advisor who arrives from outside with a report, and not a colleague who no longer sees the pattern because he is part of it. It is someone who joins for a while, with the eyes of a biologist and a systems thinker, and who asks the questions that are no longer asked inside.
For sixteen years I did this at the City of Rotterdam, from the engineering department to corporate strategy; now I do it for any organisation that dares.
What it is about, in three questions:
What must a city, an organisation, a team or a person never lose?
Who steers the ship when a storm comes up?
Do you have enough variety on board to face a polycrisis?
How we can work
What happens when you invite me, for whom, what do I bring and what do we want to achieve: that is what we settle in an exploratory conversation. My involvement can take different forms. Three examples:
Polycrisis Atelier
THREE HALF-DAYS IN THREE WEEKS · 2 TO 10 PARTICIPANTS · IN A BUILDING THAT IS ITSELF IN TRANSITION
The world around your organisation fills up, more and more often, with several crises at once. How does your organisation handle the tangle of crises? Give yourself and your team the widening and deepening you need to deal with growing complexity.
What you take home: the polycrisis map of your own organisation, a shared language, and a first answer to the question of who steers the ship when three storms rise at the same time.
For boards, management teams, programme teams and crisis organisations.
Developed and delivered in Rotterdam, in a building awaiting demolition on the Beijerlandselaan. The participants were the city's chief executive, the executive board and the directors, and after that a wide variety of teams from every part of the organisation.
Now for any organisation that dares.
What is learned here, spreads on.
Studio Awkwardness
THREE HALF-DAYS IN THREE WEEKS · TWO TO TEN PARTICIPANTS · IN A BUILDING THAT IS ITSELF IN TRANSITION
What does change do to you, and what does your organisation do to whoever brings it up? How much variety does your team, your organisation, have for changing contexts? Where do the awkwardness, the stomach-ache and the friction come from?
What you take home: a view of your own capacities in large changes, the pattern by which your organisation handles discomfort, and a set of ways to make awkwardness productive instead of managing it away.
For leaders and teams who notice that change in their organisation keeps breaking down in the same way.
Grown out of the Polycrisis Atelier, developed and delivered in Rotterdam.
Studio Awkwardness is a format in its own right. It can be done on its own.
For any team or organisation that wants to raise its variety.
What happens here, stays here.
The outsider-insider
THREE MONTHS · ONE DAY OR HALF-DAY A WEEK
My version of what others would call "advice". Advice has no force if it generates no momentum.
You make me a temporary member of your team, programme or board meeting, with a jointly formulated assignment.
I join in, ask the questions that are no longer asked inside, bring new methods and help set in motion the movement the group itself chooses.
What you take home: a team or organisation that looks differently. Together we discuss how to anchor it and take it further. You can have a report, but that is not the main goal.
The outsider-insider is a format in its own right. It also combines well with the Polycrisis Atelier and Studio Awkwardness.
For programmes and teams stuck in their own pattern.
What moves here, keeps moving.
What I draw on
Vital systems · resilience · polycrisis · ecologising · systems thinking · innovation (see the repertoire on the keynotes & masterclasses page)
Background: two master's degrees (Biology; Environmental Business Administration), ongoing research on the city as a living, self-regulating system; co-author of Rotterdam's first and second Resilience Strategy; co-founder and designer of the Vital Systems programme (now being implemented in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Utrecht and Nijmegen), co-creator of the Polycrisis Atelier and Studio Discomfort.
"In his very own way he put the necessary approach to vital systems on the map. An approach that is now being followed in several other cities."
— Linda Molenaar, former corporate director at the City of Rotterdam, now Deputy Ombudsman at the Dutch National Ombudsman
"The polycrisis session
with the city's chief executive: epic."
— Marije ten Kate, chief urban planner, City of Rotterdam