october edition

This month was full of personal exchange, inspiration and learning about how to improve cooperation and conflict at work. Here are the top things I found useful and worth sharing.

What do we really want?

We all want many things. Why?

Most of the time, we don’t really want the thing.

We want the feeling of having it.

We want this moment of not wanting it anymore.

What we want are the moments when we don’t want a thing.

If we want to not want a thing, let’s not want the thing.

Regularly checking why we want certain things can be very helpful in setting priorities and taking decisions in our professional lifes. We often are misguided by desires that aren't really genuine or that simply have the function of filling a void that is created by something else inside of us. Being clear and honest to ourselves about what we really want, and why, is an incredibly important part of any success at work. Whether we are working on our own or as a part of a team, we always view the world through our own thoughts, emotions and needs. Unless we understand those, we won’t see reality clearly.

How to be happy?

Many of us spend a great amount of time thinking about happiness and wellbeing. There are probably millions of books, coaches, consultants and other kinds of "experts" that make money with other people's desire to be happy. But in the end, my impression is that everyone comes to the same realization: Happiness comes from doing, not from thinking. The moments we are happy are those when we don't think, but simply do. The less we think and the more we do, the happier we are. Is there really that much more to think about?

Culture is everywhere

Intercultural competence is becoming more and more relevant in our globalized world where it has become normal to work across cultural and national borders. For some of us, this might be a challenge. But we have always been multicultural from the start. Just take a moment to realize what different cultures you are personally part of! Cultural diversity is and has always been everywhere. So the question cannot be how to get rid of multiculturalism, but how to better deal with it. Much more important than cultural knowledge is our ability to be mentally open for what we don't know. If we want to understand other people and cultures, an empty bag of openness is more useful than a full bag of knowledge.

Cooperations of the month

Together with Jürgen Sutter and his team from ?ko-Institut e.V. and ifeu - Institut für Energie- und Umweltforschung Heidelberg gGmbH , we organized the first stakeholder dialogue of the "AutoRess" project for the Umweltbundesamt - German Environment Agency . The AutoRess project analyzes all vehicle lifecycle phases (resource extraction, vehicle design, vehicle production, use and end-of-life) to reduce the impact of transport on climate protection and resource use. As a moderator, it was once again very insightful to see how professional exchange, personal dialogue and the inclusion of different perspectives contribute to the quality of scientific work.

Furthermore, I had the chance to meet Mark Young and get to know the work of his company Rational Games Inc. As a social business, Rational Games uses playful methods to teach negotiation in order to then support initiatives and individuals that make creative use of games and play to resolve conflict. I truly believe in the power of play and I am very excited about any upcoming games.

I also had the pleasure to foster our cooperation with Gerald Gebhardt and his public engagement team at Arcadis that supports dialogue processes around renewable energy, mobility and urban development projects. I am happy to support the work of his team as a moderator and look forward to our collaboration.

Furthermore, this month was my start as a trainer for group facilitation and workplace communication for F+U Akademie für Wirtschafts- und Sozialmanagement . I have very high respect for the training participants who work in nursing and care professions and provide extremely important service for our society as a whole. Compared to the corporate world, it was interesting to see the different standards of the social sector when it comes to soft skills such as empathy, acceptance and personal trust building.

In the media

This month produced two new episodes of the cooperate culture podcast. With Kalina Hristova-Tréhet , we talked about her work at Eurocatering - her family's own sandwich business and one of the leading Bulgarian companies in the industry. We talked about the meaning of work, genuine professional motivation and overcoming your ego. And we discovered how unexpected life can be - in private and in business. The history of Kalina's family business is one great example of that. You can listen to the full episode on Spotify.

My other conversation was with Ruslan Sharipov , an international lawyer from Russia who worked at the European Court of Human Rights since the start of the war in Ukraine. Even after the expulsion of Russia from the Council of Europe, Ruslan continued working for the Russian section for one and a half years - finding himself in a strange situation where his country of origin is at war with another member of the organization he is working for. We discussed how multicultural cooperation feels, whether he faced discrimination as a Russian and why Americans always seem so happy. And we realized that maybe, people are not that different from each other, after all. You can listen to Ruslan here.

Besides that, I was happy to be invited by Isik Serifsoy to speak at this year's Engage & Grow Global Conference about how insights from mediation can be useful for facilitation processes in groups and teams. Engage & Grow is a facilitation network active in more than 80 countries that focuses on the important impact of employee engagement at the workplace. Thank you Isik for your interest and your willingness to enlarge the field of facilitation towards methods of conflict resolution. It was a pleasure to meet facilitators from all around the world! I believe that facilitators and mediators can learn a lot from each other, and I hope that this trend of knowledge exchange between different professions will continue. In case you are interested, you can watch the presentation on YouTube.

On a personal note

I would like to thank Angela Herberholz for our very nice and interesting discussion we had this month in Paris about the future of international mediation. Angela is an independent international mediator and a board member of the IMI - International Mediation Institute . Amongst her many professional activities, she is also a co-founder of the IMI's Young Mediator's Initiative. It was great to learn about her engagement for young mediators and her advocacy for mediation as an effective and sustainable way to resolve conflicts at work. I am very happy and thankful for your pioneer work to promote the next generations of international mediators - something that, I believe, our current world could use rather well.