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Philosophy

 

Too much of the way “our world works” is taken as the default. We forget that “how things are done” was determined by someone in the past: A person or a group of people with limited knowledge, specific to their time in history, and their own microscopic agenda. And a lot of the default does not (yet) serve us as wholesome human beings.

Now, we know more: About how the human body supports productivity and creativity. About how we connect to each other and about the absolute necessity to find solutions that balance the needs of humans and the planet.

So what if every new process, product or service we created actively contributed to a new, better way the world works?

How? For this we need new ways of doing things: Repeating the old will only get us so far away from the old results. Luckily, the same aspects that make the present challenges so complex, are levers to use for solving them. New, interactive tools connect us globally, even more so since a lot of us went remote.

The key is to bring them to life with methods that start from us being humans, cleverly designed to provide the right conditions for us think, act, collaborate. Then going further, facilitating us to stretch, enabling and empowering us to grow even more, tackling the wicked problems of our times and shape a future that is aligned with what we believe in.

wHAT DO WE NEED?

To get closer to the vision sketched above, we need you to succeed. You’ve read this far, so you also want to work towards such a positive future and therefore I really want you to succeed.

In this day and age, wanting a sustainable future does not equal having to be a poor idealist. On the contrary! There are a lot of ways for both new sustainable business models, bringing economic success. And there are also new methods for innovating wherever your sphere of action currently is, using your values as fuel for your success in that position. And the more successful, influential values-driven people we have, the more we can achieve.

What do we need to realize this potential?

We want to create new solutions, so what we need is innovation. But what does that mean? Simply put, innovation is nothing more and nothing less than new ideas + execution, so that the new ideas come into effect.

Let’s get more concrete: The specific type of ideas we need, are ideas based on the new paradigm, coming from our values and our vision of a desirable future world. Therefore we need to know how to develop such ideas. These ideas also need to work for the type of challenges we’re working with. For example: They need to incorporate the interconnected nature of sustainability challenges, having (at least) a social, ecological and economic dimension. Or the fact that we’re mostly dealing with incomplete knowledge and operating an a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment. There are a lot of creativity and innovation methods, but which ones work best for this application? And maybe we need new ones, to face these new types of problems.

Let’s turn towards the other part of innovation: Executing on your ideas. The goal is to bring them to into the market or to implement them so that what you are selling or how you are creating it is improved.

Recently, also the way we are executing our ideas, i.e. the way we are working, has changed. Due to Covid-19, a lot of work has moved into the online space. But also: if we’re aiming to work on relevant challenges, we need to connect people with very specific knowledge and skills. These might very well be distributed globally.

So how can people best co-create remotely? (I use the word co-create, instead of collaborate or work, to focus on the creation or making of something together, instead of passively sitting in meetings or similar). New tools are continuously being developed and again, I think that it is the combination of the right tools and formats which will bring the best results, depending on your unique goals. Also, remote culture and leadership need to be actively shaped.

This is a lot. Some of you will be further along the road than others. At every step of the way there some things we can implement right away and some that need to grow with time and be applied again and again. 

I have made it my goal to develop methods (e.g. tools, workshop formats) to support both the idea generation and the remote co-creation part of this process. Because I am a nerd for workshop facilitation, I love to take research-based new knowledge combine it with interactive online tools and apply it to wholesome human beings and a concrete case they are working on. You will find much of my learnings from this in the Articles section of this website.

The challenges we are facing are new, and the type of solutions we are looking for are new too. New, and hard, but very much worth tackling. What I want to emphasise is that because of this, we also need new methods. If the old ones are failing us, that makes sense. It is not our fault to need a different type of leadership in a remote work context, to feel disconnected from your team even though you spend a lot of time in video calls or to not come up with the greates ideas while sitting an a zoom meeting. That makes a lot of sense. And we can definitely find out how to make it better.  

I’d love to be your partner on this journey.

Your Facilitator & Coach

Johanna Kleinen develops tools to empower teams to co-create remotely, to foster engagement in the digital world through new formats and to facilitate innovation fueled by our values as well as the drive to shape a sustainable future.

After studying physics, she went into innovation consulting before wanting  turning to research. As part of the Research Campus initiative of the German Ministry of Education and Research, she spent the last 3 years studyings Open Innovation methods and how to innovate for sustainability with Mercedes-Benz AG at ARENA2036, a Research Campus dedicated to mobility and production.