SYNNECTA Blog
SYNNECTA Blog
Empathy – once again
There is a lot of talk about empathy as a leadership trait. Empathy is thus primarily located in the process of communication between people. However, empathy has another, essential dimension, which also places it at the center of strategy development. We are now...
Culture and strategy. Do we have to choose one over the other?
Black and white. Good and evil. Anima and animus. Emotional and rational. Social and personal. Is life made of dualities? Strategy and culture are one of these dualities we often encounter business-wise. Are we talking about opposing forces? Dichotomies seem to give...
Deep Patterns: double justifications
The need for self-justification is one of our deepest individual and collectively shared beliefs. It calls upon a higher instance: a judge to whom we have to justify ourselves. In our individual lives, that role is often given to our parents. Casting a wider arch …
Collective Leadership
Shifting the Meaning of Leadership Roles: Thinking Leadership from the Employee Perspective – 1. How does the meaning come to be shifted? The Western world has some specific cultural patterns. One of these calls out to us already from the Story of Creation …
We need new value processes
Almost all companies have, now quite some time ago, dealt with their values, often writing them down and distributing them throughout the company. A significant source was often the memory of the founders' »philosophy« and their words, often late words. The values...
Collective Mindset & the Dynamics of Social Systems
Group dynamics are at the root of all work with social systems. There is a myriad of methods to use in trainings and workshops in order to cover these dynamics. They are effective as long as the issues at hand remain in the foreground and in everybody’s joint focus....
Simply not good enough: The perpetual message of insufficiency
When Arnold Gehlen described humans as insufficient creatures, he furnished this label with a positive interpretation. The human ability to design our life world grows out of the physical insufficiency of humankind, essentially establishing a dominance within it and...
Mindset: Limits and Opportunities
The concept of mindset and tenets has proved useful in the coaching context. It effectively supports cognitive flexibility and brings coachees into contact with a wider range of tools to actively meet the challenges delivered in their life and work settings. It is...
Virtual OD by SYNNECTA – Go digital!
The digital world is a great source of new potential for organizations to foster a cultural change that is more democratic and more tuned into the future in order to address the challenges of an increasingly complex and dynamic world. In future, culture will be even...
TheQuestBySynnecta – What are we for?
People in organizations expect a credible answer to this question in order to be able to establish a context for their work that delivers a sense of both purpose and meaning. Reacting to such challenges, companies position themselves with a company purpose. Until now,...
WE, the Company – the Dynamics of Shaping Identities
It is a well-known challenge: how can an organization gain and maintain a recognizable identity that gives direction to the conduct of its entire team? The history of large companies is usually shaped by mergers. Surprisingly, we often find deep-rooted and dominant...
Some Thoughts about Mindset: a trending term
How we see the world, and what we know about it, is shaped by what has gone before: it is conditional. The notion that our perception and understanding creates an image of the world has long been doubted. At least since the time of Kant, we have known that perception...
Spectrum of Balance – A cultural model for organizations
The cultural model »Spectrum of Balance« was developed by SYNNECTA in co-creation with partners at other companies. It gives culture a language and thus people in organizations a basis for reflection and discussion. The model is descriptive and not normative. It is...
Empathy is a skill, not a potential
No empathy without scenic competence. We do not feel into another being nor is our feeling a kind of sense aimed to perceive the emotional situation of another being. Empathy is a skill; we learn it in our life. We understand another’s (persons or groups) feelings...
The Rich Conversations Model – A short guide to establishing and deepening online interaction
How can we find novel ways to pair physical distancing with social connection at work? (Katrijn van Oudheusden) Introduction: The Need As seven strangers attempt to scrutinize each other’s faces over a limited internet bandwidth, it becomes clear once again how...
Something is missing – Experiences with non-analogue workshops
Time brings us the chance to have increased experiences with non-analogue workshops using different digital tools. We see the value in this form of collaborative working whenever we have to exchange facts and figures, whenever we have to inform and to get feedback. It...
The Return of the Crowd
The phenomenon of the crowd became the focus of theoretical thinking in the beginning of the last century. Beginning from Gustave Le Bon’s theories, Elias Canetti, Hermann Broch and Sigmund Freud were among those who addressed this new fact in politics and society....
Why diversity is a driver of innovation
Use the variety of perspectives in your company to become more creative How do we become more innovative? This question is becoming increasingly urgent for many companies to keep up with the competition. Without innovation, time is running out for many companies. The...
Crisis Communication III
Few remarks on the announcement of the bad news It is an event that captures the attention of the managers involved. Although it is only one step in a longer process, it is the central event because it sets the tone for the whole following process: the official first...
Crisis Communication II
The dilemma of local leadership or A deep conflict of loyalties There's the decision. Costs have to be reduced, a reduction in staff is pending, perhaps the closure of a site or the sale of part of the company. The local management has the task of implementing the...
Crisis Communication I
Transparency makes credible - the need for honest leadership It is a classic starting situation: A general manager, a plant manager, a divisional manager is informed that significant redundancies are imminent in his area, that a site is to be closed or an entire...
How you successfully manage the digital transformation with the seven fundamental processes
In the last blog article we explained why the digital transformation is not just yet another change – and how you can master it. It has become clear that the digital transformation represents a fundamental change. And it demonstrated how a holistic approach can...
Why the digital transformation is not just yet another change – and how you can master it
Digital transformation is a fundamental change that can only be fully understood with a holistic model approach. The seven essential elements of an organization and their interrelationships can be well understood using the example of the digital transformation of a...
Mindset – our basic thesis
Basic Thesis Each person acts from an individual mindset [as part of the personality]. Human communities act from a collective mindset [as part of culture]. What is a Mindset? A mindset comprises personal or collective dominant attitudes and thought patterns, as well...
ExEdService Pack – a useful database for your Leadership development
You are searching for an experienced speaker? Dr. Rüdiger Müngersdorff is listed at EdEx. Leadership development made easy: An ExEdService Pack that not only provides an excellent overview, but also direct access to more than 100 trainers from the best business...
SYNNECTA‘s position in the dynamics of New Work and Company Designs
A Beginning There’s so much to say. A lot about: New Organization, New Work, New Mindset. Five years ago, a brief speech would have sufficed. Now, there’s so much more to talk about: there are too many facets, too much variance. Let us highlight only a few of the...
Agile leadership: factors of success
The last years have seen radical change to the environment in which businesses have had to operate for success. The field is increasingly grasped by VUCA – volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Digitalization, globalization and growth of networking...
Mental Change? Agile organizations need new »identities«
On the agile triangle (methods, structure, culture), one of the most difficult aspect remains that of cultural change; that is neither new nor surprising. What we call culture is a combination of many factors that cannot be grasped by causal thought and are therefore...
Agile organizations and their growing pains
The group was silent. They stayed silent, even as the inviting manger tried to send an optimistic and constructive message. Questions were ignored or answered with vague and irrelevant responses. Although the conversation livened up a little in smaller groups, it...
Five Stars
Together with the following endorsement of one of our trainings we were asked, what is the difference between a good leadership-training and a five-star training? The answer is relatively simply – don't elaborate on one of the uncountable leadership theories but give...