On a pink skateboard through the tetralemma

The managing director asked us to support the company in the current phase with advice and coaching. When we met, she described the “growing pains” of the organization, which she and the employees also describe as a “family”. In view of the many changes at all levels, the team wanted more guidance on the future direction and identity of the company and on how to work together. Questions about their own identity and its further development were not new to the team. However, the demands on their collaboration have remained constant: family-like, as hierarchy-free and inclusive as possible, making decisions together and maintaining a cordial relationship with one another.

At the same time, the company is growing steadily; in terms of employees, increasing customer diversification and more complex orders. This requires more structured and explicit decision-making processes, more standardized processes and roles, and professional management. Such developments carry the potential for conflict. They harbor contradictions and areas of tension.

We agreed to support Zentralnorden in dealing with these issues over a longer period of time in a structured process. We decided to work with approaches from agile organizational development according to Bernd Oesterreich and Claudia Schroeder, among others.

This form of consultation is based on a gradual, iterative further development of the organization, through continuous practical testing of individual changes, with subsequent benefit assessment and continuation decisions. We shape our joint work based on the principles of “collegial leadership”, which is also described in the literature as “leadership work that is dynamically and and in a decentralized manner distributed among many colleagues instead of centralized leadership by a few exclusive managers”. In this process, we worked with the entire organization and supported it in its further development with the involvement of all employees.
Tensions naturally arose during the consultation process. At Como Consult, we love working with tensions and dilemmas because, in our experience, they are a prerequisite for growth and development. The more dilemmas there are, the more opportunities the organization has for decision-making, movement and change. So how can tensions be balanced and used productively? We like to use the SySt® tetralemma. It is based on the two-thousand-year-old Nagarjuna logic and was originally used in Indian jurisprudence. According to this, the right cannot be awarded only to one or the other party, but also to both or neither of them.

In our work with Zentralnorden, the promotion of tension competence was a key component. To this end, the team went through the four positions of the tetralemma in relation to self-selected tensions and developed ideas on how apparently contradictory issues can be combined or how the question can be answered in a more resourceful way in a different context. The collected ideas were then prioritized and made feasible with concrete steps. The work on the following polarities in particular brought the team of Zentralnorden a good step further in the desired direction: Realizing individual and community values vs. generating income and ensuring the company’s survival, as well as participation and collegial leadership vs. decisiveness and speed.

Following a joint kick-off workshop with all employees, four working groups were established on the topics of corporate strategy, communication culture, leadership and project management. These working groups coordinate their activities in a central steering group. Collaboration in the groups is self-organized and role-based. We support them through coaching, moderation and expert input in regular workshops where we meet with the entire team and support them in the joint learning and development process.