A short work month for me, as I was still on holiday during the first two weeks.

We began in Groningen, working with a team of researchers, building structures to help them coordinate and work efficiently and effectively. I spent an extra day in the city, meeting with an HR executive of the university, discussing organisational development and consulting for university teams.

Travelling back to Dresden, I reconnected with former Structure & Process Partners Annette Mehlhoop (who now works at Bremer Baumwollbörse) and Lynoure Braakman (who works with neuland – Büro für Informatik) in Oldenburg and Bremen.

I spent a week in Dresden catching up on communication, processing a good number of new leads that had come in and running an exploratory call with a potential new client. I prepared a workshop process for our new client in Switzerland who we will see next week. This was the most stressful week.

It was easy to come back into work mode after the holidays. I very much enjoyed being back and mostly did not feel stressed, despite a solid communication backlog that had built up.

Seeing our clients in Groningen again, 5 months after our first workshop there (time flies!) was thrilling: they are developing fast, picking up our impulses and building their own ways of collaborating from them. Malwina and I explored new personal coaching formats and new interventions in group situations and learnt fast from our mistakes. :)

I was glad to reach out to colleagues to make new connections and reinforce old ones, building capacity for new work. I was happy to see new inflowing business at healthy levels.

We function as a three-person team at the moment, and while this sometimes gets bumpy (because there is no redundancy), it’s still effective and has all the advantages of being able to synchronize and adapt quickly.

May is starting off busy, with joining reinblau at their quarterly team retreat in Bochum and running an initial workshop with SBB in Bern. Then, there is plenty of empty time in the calendar which I hope to use for development work on our consulting offer (making it easier to grasp and use) and launch at least one new seminar.

If you would like to join me in conversations on our seminar program – if you want to learn something from us, or want to offer something yourself – do get in touch and I’ll invite you to a phone or Skype call!

Some reading that touched me this month:

• A letter from Bill and Melinda Gates, answering “the ten toughest questions” they receive about their work. I enjoyed the clarity, honesty and pragmatism in the response.
• “Cost of Delay. What does it mean?”, a 2017 article by Jim Hayden gives a helpful thinking framework for making decisions on how to prioritise different pieces of work. It directly inspired our internal prioritisations and our work in Groningen.
• In Reflecting on four years of unhurried conversations, Johnnie Moore shares his insights from working with a circle-like conversation structure. I loved hearing another story of how simplicity often works and leads into depth and meaningful connection. An encouragement to use Circle even more.

Plenty more readings are captured on our company tumblelog.