Deep democracy – creating future innovation
The past two years have been a difficult time for everyone. The COVID-19 crisis has affected all business areas and poses enormous challenges for emerging projects and companies. But while this is true for GIZ International Services too, we can safely say that the organization and leadership team have known how to deal with this acute crisis situation.
Together with the management team at GIZ InS, we asked: How can we use this time of upheaval and strain, to reinvent ourselves as well as our work and business habits, strengthen personal resilience and institutional knowledge, promote peer learning and enable empathic team play?
In order to gain a better understanding of the crisis and its effects on all employees, we suggested to choose the methodical approach of deep democracy. In order to foster an open, safe and authentic space for all individual stories, experiences, voices and opinions.
80 participants from 20 countries, 27 different functions across different hierarchy levels from Belgium, Chad, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Gambia, Germany, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan, Philippines, Rwanda, Serbia, Turkey, Ukraine and West Africa met in 8 deep democracy sessions in French, Spanish, English and German with trained moderation, a facilitation guideline and three topics to explore collectively.
As the participants of the deep democracy sessions were able to experience and practice ´deep listening´, which is a crucial baseline for learning, the format opened a space, both of information, enabling individuals to formulate what is felt, describing the new, empathizing and identifying with colleagues, as well as relating and forging understanding with other and possibly differing points of view.
Susanne Scheerer and Jan Bathel worked in a train the trainer format, with moderators from GIZ InS, in preparation for all 8 deep democracy sessions. The following anonymized analysis and evaluation of what “we have heard and felt” pursued three goals:
1. Capture diversity: The process should reflect as many voices, perspectives and opinions as possible.
2. Identify learning fields: The reflection of the deep democracy sessions resulted in an analysis that allowed us to identify all learning fields, emergent topics and prompts of action for HR and leadership development.
3. Recommendation: Development of derived recommendation portfolios for the meeting of the strategy board.
The results were transferred to a leadership development program that started in November 2021.
"Working on our leadership development program with ignore gravity and in particular with Susanne Scheerer and Jan Bathel has allowed us to learn a lot about the effects of Covid and our strengths as a leadership community at all levels. We look forward to the next steps ." – Carsten Schmitz-Hoffmann, managing director GIZ International Services
Within the leadership development program we focus on a deeply personal, feedback-intense, transformative learning experience within the whole leadership community.
We look forward to taking the next step in 2022 with GIZ International Services Leadership Community…
Let’s ignore gravity together!
