“When I only heard Thai during training….”

We take this principle into account with different settings and methodical forms in the design of our learning processes. Movendo development programs are based in particular on the understanding that imparting theoretical content and tools alone does not reliably initiate learning effects. Rather, participants need stimuli and, in a positive sense, irritations that encourage them to develop insights through individual reflection and personal involvement. Our experience shows that personal development processes can be initiated and supported very quickly and efficiently in this way. And even more:

In our experience, consistently systemic leadership training offers an approach that can be adapted to any culture.
I would like to briefly describe a training experience that impressively underpins this: for the past four years, I have been supporting the development of around 60 managers at a production company in Thailand – with a program that follows our systemic approach to training and a systemic understanding of leadership. The project has been very successful and sustainable, and the feedback from participants has been extremely positive. For this reason, a follow-up workshop was recently requested to work specifically on participants’ questions and cases. The models from leadership development were to serve as a framework and help to avoid thinking only in old patterns when working on cases. Accordingly, I developed a design that specifically takes these requirements into account: Based on a short reflection submitted in advance by the participants on their respective cases, I selected suitable methods for working on the participants’ cases. These were presented in the workshop, the core models from leadership development were briefly repeated and displayed in the room. After a brief discussion, the group came to the conclusion that they could work better on the cases in their native Thai language. This meant that I could and had to consistently focus my role on navigating through the respective method, while the participants worked animatedly on the case content and thus developed diverse and also surprising approaches to solutions for the case presenter.

In fact, from this point onwards, I was completely disconnected from the content of the workshop.
It was impossible to follow the course of the discussion and think up ideas for intervention. At first I felt a little left alone. And how is it possible to steer the process of the discussion and the workshop without linguistic understanding? Well, by observing the participants, I was able to derive hypotheses about the course of the discussion and support the process. By intervening very carefully and explaining my observations in detail, I was able to do this very well and the participants were able to incorporate this into their own case work.

Even today, I am still absolutely thrilled and fascinated by how profitable and effective this almost ideal systemic workshop was for the participants. In addition to the enthusiastic feedback from the participants, the fact that there is now a self-organized case workshop for managers every quarter also speaks for the lasting success of our development design. So when we repeatedly emphasize that we, as systemic trainers and consultants, are responsible for a successful process design and that our participants, as experts in their system, are responsible for the content, then in my view the effectiveness of our approach was fully and ideally experienced in the context of this workshop.