Organisational development has not previously been a conscious focus of our work. On our website, for example, the term doesn’t even appear. Yet we’ve been doing it for a very long time; we just haven’t called it that. One reason for this could be that we don’t follow a particular school of thought or approach, but instead constantly combine different methods and approaches in new ways, enabling us to create tailor-made solutions for the internal development of teams, units or entire organisations.

At its core, organisational development is about helping individuals, teams and organisations to work together more effectively, to define strategic goals and achieve them more effectively, and to introduce new ideas and approaches – in short, to implement necessary changes.

The exciting thing about organisational development projects is that we can learn a great deal ourselves, as we immerse ourselves in the reality of other organisations and working environments. In doing so, we repeatedly notice that the same questions are asked time and again and similar challenges are encountered, whether in government institutions, universities, businesses, NGOs or churches. However, the methods and approaches used to address these questions can vary, depending on the timeframe, the scope of the assignment and the specific requirements of the clients. Here, we are aided by the versatility of our methods and approaches, some of which we apply in entirely different contexts and fields of work.

For example, we have facilitated several team-building days for a department at the Hertie School in Berlin. We are otherwise familiar with the Hertie School through our seminars and training courses on topics such as negotiation, advocacy, leadership and conflict management. In this instance, however, the aim was for the teams to set aside ample time to strengthen their cohesion, tackle current projects and challenges, and practise their skills in dealing with difficult situations.

We therefore put together a tailor-made programme, which we were largely able to draw from the training content we usually convey through fictional scenarios and ‘what if?’ exercises: various leadership approaches, team roles and team phases, constructive feedback, productive conflict resolution, and the question of how change can be shaped collectively within the team. But here, the focus was not on hypothetical exercises, but rather on the practical question of how the team could strengthen its cohesion, what they could learn from the experience, and what changes they actually needed to make.

A project almost on our own doorstep was of a completely different nature: supporting the merger of two Protestant parishes in North Neukölln. Here, the focus was less on training content and more on facilitating a conflict-ridden process between two groups that had been merged against their will. We held extensive preliminary discussions, facilitated a two-day retreat and drew on our team’s expertise in systemic counselling and large-group methods. It was fascinating that, here too, we quickly found ourselves returning to the fundamentals of our conflict and negotiation training: active listening, identifying the interest behind a position, and the willingness to move away from maximum demands.

The team day we organised for Welt:Stadt:Quartier was a different affair altogether. The aim there was to jointly set priorities, projects and plans for the coming period. We combined this with a substantive section on the threats to democracy and the question of what these developments mean for the target groups and the organisation’s own work. A strategy workshop and thematic discussion in one, in other words, ranging from an exchange of ideas and the gathering of initial concepts to the prioritisation of specific projects.

But our favourite method, the simulation game, can also be used very effectively in organisational development: For the Ministry of Social Affairs in Baden-Württemberg, for example, we developed a simulation game that enabled staff from various authorities to experience the importance of a cross-departmental perspective on health policy – the so-called ‘Health in All Policies’ approach. And a project with the Lower Saxony State Health Association focused on improving cooperation at local authority level in the area of so-called ‘prevention chains’ to combat child poverty.

In both cases, the safe space provided by the simulation game allowed participants to practise what is often difficult in day-to-day administrative work: thinking beyond the boundaries of their own department, putting themselves in others’ shoes and thereby gaining a better understanding of their perspectives. In such cases, the simulation game becomes a method of systemic learning and can illustrate important change processes and, in the best-case scenario, increase acceptance.

And what links all these projects? Each one incorporates the diverse range of methods offered by planpolitik and approaches we draw from other fields: training content from our seminars, facilitation and large-group methods, systemic consulting approaches, and the simulation game as a method for understanding change processes. Perhaps it is precisely this diversity that is our hallmark in the field of organisational development.

In any case, we are delighted by the wide range of very different organisational units that we have been able to support in the past, using our interactive methods to help them initiate and implement change processes. If your organisation is also facing change and you would like consultancy that responds to your needs with methodological flexibility and a wide variety of approaches, please do get in touch! And when we get round to it, we’ll soon be revamping our website and giving our organisational development services a more prominent feature.