Being a trainer is often mentioned in the same breath as being a coach or a speaker. For me, that's different. I'm not a trainer, and I probably wouldn't even be good at it. And yet this year I felt drawn to the Petersberger Trainertage.
Okay, the location alone is worth the trip. I have never, really never, had a view like that from a hotel room. If I had simply sat at the window all day and looked into the distance, that would have been worth it all the way through.
But of course there was so much more: great talks and good encounters with old acquaintances and new people.
Stephanie Borgert, for example. I've been following her with interest for quite a while, and this was the first time I saw her speak live.
Her talk was called "Die diskursive Organisation: Wie Veränderung gelingt, wenn Geplapper endet und gemeinsames Denken beginnt" (roughly: The discursive organization: how change succeeds when chatter ends and shared thinking begins).
Stephanie talked a lot about how organizations start to develop through real discussions. Organizations are made of communication. But mostly we talk about practical matters, and rarely about the beliefs and norms behind them. For her, that conversation is what decides whether change succeeds. When change projects fail, it is often because this discourse was missing.
That takes a way of thinking that doesn't just take things apart to see how they work, but looks at how the parts interact and asks why it works the way it does.
All in all, PTT24 was a successful weekend for me, even though I'm not a trainer. I'm happy about every new impulse, and here, too, I got plenty of them.
