SYNNECTA Blog
SYNNECTA Blog
Pirate Leadership: A Dramatic Appeal for Self-Organization in Business
It is the early 1800s. The British warship HMS Surprise is about to engage the enemy. The crew are all preparing below deck. The portholeopens and the captain climbs down in order to commit his men to the sea battle with the French privateer Acheron: »Right lads...
New Leadership – New Organizations
Criteria for a Successful Transformation (Part 1) Everyone knows that an organization's viability for the future is decided by its ability to react and adapt to fast and fundamental changes to its conditions. Many know how organizations can be modernized, transformed...
Pathfinder 2015 – Leading the Future – Berlin, May 1, 2015
CEOs chose a forward-looking topic, nominated speakers and about a hundred talents each from their own organization to meet in an aeroplane hangar at the former airport Tempelhof in Berlin on Labour Day. It was a successful idea, and there was a passionate host: Gabor...
New Leadership for a New World – A diagnostics instrument on the issue of VUCA
Follow-ups The leadership situation of today and tomorrow is characterized by planning ambiguities, the demand for faster adaptation and abrupt strategy alterations. VUCA is the term that was coined to describe this situation. Is your organization prepared for it?...
New Leadership for a New World – Democratizing Organizations – initial realistic steps
In 2010, Georg Diez wrote in the newspaper SZ Nr. 275: »We are on the brink of this new century, the contours of which we can at least discern. A new green hedonism, a new technology euphoria, a crisis demolishing old hierarchies and enabling new realities, thus...
Positive Mind to Ignite Potential
For some time now, I have been following what may be called a Positive Psychology Cycle for my life. I may be rather late in coming to realize how lives can flourish with the simple Positive Mind notion if only each one of us began to apply and practice its simple...
AIKIDO Leadership
Some time ago, I presented six basic stances for a new kind of sovereignty in organizations on this blog: VUCA-AIKIDO. These stances outline an AIKIDO mindset that can enable employees to face VUCA situations in organizations with greater confidence and to retain...
The Future starts today
The future starts today. It is going to be the way it will be. And yet it was decided yesterday and today whether we will be ready for it, successful and content. Our prediction tools have by now taken on the guise of magical rituals. We are under pressure to perform...
»Trust is an Attitude« – Musical Inspirations on the Culture of Improvisation
Life is a lot like jazz... it's best when you improvise. (George Gershwin) I believe that the ability to improvise is becoming more and more important for individuals, teams and organisations in an increasingly VUCA business world. Where volatility, uncertainty,...
New Leadership for a New World – On the Sustainability of Organizations
New developments everywhere! People are vigorously finding solutions. Possibilities are opening up. Future is emerging. Knowledge is largely accessible. Spiritual awareness is growing. Many breakthroughs happen because people are taking their fate in their own hands...
Cultural difference
An old fable Two frogs fall into a bowl of cream. Its insides are smooth. They cannot climb out. One frog succumbs to his fate, sinks to the bottom and dies. The other frog kicks and kicks with all his might, his will and his stamina. He does so for a long time. And...
Workshop on facilitation skills for employees of the SchLAu Team
SYNNECTA GmbH is a sponsor and cooperating partner of the youth centre anyway e.V. in Cologne. In January 2015, SYNNECTA counsellors Fetiye Sisko and Hanna Göhler visited the youth centre to conduct a workshop on facilitation skills for employees of the SchLAu Team....
Meaningful Clarity: A plea for narration as a management tool (Handling VUCA VI)
The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time. (Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland) Our modern, enlightened world no longer has a place for myths – they have been displaced by facts. Myths are generally ostracised as »false consciousness« and an...
Impressions: A LeadershipJourney
Two days on leadership, VUCA, personal development, work-life balance Donning a blue cape to walk along a fictional catwalk and saying who you are is not quite the behaviour one would expect of managers. This scene took place among the participants of a special...
SYNNECTA and Logistics
You don't have to look far to find instances of the world of VUCA. One of the most immediate examples are production supply processes: logistics. Volatile markets, uncertain conditions, complex production systems and ambiguous parameters for decision-making demand new...
Life, Work and Play in a VUCA world: SOPHIA 2014
SOPHIA 2014 brought together SYNNECTA consultants and trainers with participants from the worlds of business, academia and culture in the loft style, autumnally warm atmosphere of the Cologne Kunstsalon with a view across the colourful rooftops of the south of the...
SYNNECTA in India: An invitation to the 2ndNational Summit on Learning & Development
Bangalore, 27 degrees Celsius, hustle and bustle on the busy streets, the sun is shining on an urban soundscape. We, the participants of the conference, notice none of this. Air-conditioning has cooled the windowless conference rooms down to a temperature of sixteen...
Learning Logistics in the Land of Smiles
The SYNNECTA Qualification Offensive goes to China An innovative, dialogue-oriented logistics training... in China. Is that possible? There are plenty of stereotypes about learning in China, including positive ones. However, they certainly do not include interaction...
The inauguration of our new offices in June 2014
Good conversations ensued, very lively and inspiring ones. They addressed such topics as the cultural understanding of the Asian continent, diverse in itself as it is, for once as seen from the viewpoint of our Asian colleagues. Or the subject of sexual...
VUCA-AIKIDO: Six stances for new sovereignty in business (Handling VUCA V)
If your heart is large enough to embrace your adversaries, you can see right through them and avoid their attacks (Ueshiba Morihei, Founder of Aikido) In previous contributions to the series »Handling VUCA«, I sketched out what VUCA means to then go on to present...
The Many as Many: the potential of multitude for businesses (Handling VUCA IV)
This blog has looked at VUCA in the business world from a strategic and an organizational point of view; VUCA also influences team work in business. The high degree of complexity in globalized organizations is causing an increasing dissolution of the units necessary...
Growing organism v. rigid machine: VUCA resilient organizations (Handling VUCA III)
Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! (...) Don't be one of multiple, be multiplicities! (...) Be quick, even while standing still! (...) Don't bring out the General in you! The psychiatrist Félix Guattari and the philosopher Gilles Deleuze formed this imperative in...
Trust? – »Of course, but you have to earn it!«
On the path to slowness In business and in private, our world is dominated by diversity, indecision and fast changes. It is increasingly rare to find reliable constancy. This situation is well described by the keyword VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity,...
21st Century Leadership: 1st TrendLab in Shanghai, China
»The word of VUCA sounds very VUCA, while the world of VUCA is really VUCA.« That is a very interesting comment shared by one of the participants in the first TrendLab in Shanghai on February 28th, 2014. Initiated by SYNNECTA, invited by AHK (German Chamber of...
Letting it run without letting go: Strategies in the world of VUCA (Handling VUCA II)
The wisest warrior need not ever battle. (Sun Tzu) When we accompany international project or team work we often encounter a European image of China that is rather unflattering to our Asian project partner. This image depicts the Chinese as unpredictable, imprecise...
New Blog Series: Handling VUCA
There is a new acronym creeping into discussions on contemporary organization and personnel development: VUCA. This acronym has its roots in military history: It became a keyword that was used from the mid-1990s onwards in US-American elite military academies in order...
Responsibility?
There hasn't been much change yet. We Europeans send our employees to, say, Asia, in order to teach and we invite employees from other countries to us in order to learn. Quite apart from the problems these traces of the colonial era bring into our relationships, I...
New office in Cologne
Movement in Cologne City: SYNNECTA inaugurates the new office Although the word »real estate« may not appear as something moving in the first place: A new property needs a lot of activity before it is inaugurated – and is also able to set some things in motion....
Friendship
A retrospection on a gathering of organizations in Amsterdam Is there such thing as friendship between organizations? Or isn't the interaction in business context more about cooperation, networking – or even competition and rivalry? These are not the only factors....
IN-WASTE-MENT: a provocation
»I love the one whose soul wastes itself, who does not want gratitude and does not give back: Because he is always giving and does not want to preserve himself.« Friedrich Nietzsche has his controversial figure Zarathustra say these words, and thus creates a person...