Surfacing and working with diversity is an important aspect of our practice at I-P-K – we believe that diversity is a force that should be made visible and thereby amplified rather than oppressed in the hope of enforcing a streamlined collective identity. Hand in hand with this also comes the realization that searching for common [...]

The desire for a meeting to create innovative responses is huge – very often we hear: “we must come up with new, innovative ideas and responses to our questions and problems! Can you make it happen?”. That’s an excellent question: can we intentionally be innovative at a particular moment? We often experience that people in [...]

We’ve been wondering lately how we could further improve our practice in the Emergence Phase of group processes, thereby also capatilising on this central moment in a change process for improved impact. When designing the sequence of work steps of any change process, we usually follow an overall “Divergence – Emergence – Convergence” pattern. This [...]

Several clients recently asked me to explain how exactly our approach would be different from more conventional approaches to change events, workshops and facilitation. How can I simply describe what we do and what we don’t do? Interestingly one of them send me notes from a preparatory discussion around an event we were about to [...]

An interesting article, well worth reading! If we understand a company (or any other institution/organisation or even a project for that matter!) not as a machine, but an organic “being” (system) such as a city, what can we learn from that? Read yourself: Communication Nation: The connected company.

Time and again we get workshop and conference agendas, which are not much more but a line-up of presentations and lectures. We then try to demonstrate (and convince people) that there is another way of designing these events. What we keep hearing is that (and I quote from an e-mail of a senior manager of [...]

Adrian Gnägi from the Swiss Development Cooperation (SDC) has written an interesting blog article on “What is wrong with Managing for Development Results?”, reflecting an essay of Andrew Natsios, former head of USAID. The article deals with “«Obsessive Measurement Disorder» (OMD), … an intellectual dysfunction rooted in the notion that counting everything in government programs [...]

I have come across this interesting article in “The New Yorker” on what science – and thus we – can really know, how we perceive and deal with reality: The Decline Effect and the Scientific Method: newyorker.com. Some of it may not really be surprising if you look at it from a complexity perspective – [...]

Interesting ideas – and large-group events (such as OpenSpaceTechnology) could and do contribute to create instances of such “liquid networks” that have an impact in the moment but also beyond.

Listen to an interview that the International Training Centre of the ILO (ITC-ILO) did with Marc Steinlin from I-P-K on how seemingly “modern” knowledge sharing methods actually rely on ancient wisdoms as practiced by indigenous peoples all over the world. The interview explores the question whether these methods are really so progressive or whether they [...]