How organisations can hold their own

Stability has become almost unheard of in times like these – political and social conflicts are becoming increasingly heated. And this has a massive impact on organisations and their success. Roswitha M. Reisinger talks to Lothar Wenzl, Managing Director of Trainconsulting, about how organisations can hold their own in these volatile times and how ’beautiful’ organisations can be built.

Beautiful organisations, beautiful meetings or beautiful codes – these things create a very positive feeling. But what do they mean?

What is beautiful to you? Expressing this puts us on the right path. Language not only conveys reality, it creates a new reality. And beauty is possible in every detail: How I arrange a room, how I design my products, how I interact with people, how I live, how I make myself available to this world. Do I take care of myself, do I respect others, am I appreciative? All these things are part of beauty.

What is the opposite of a beautiful organisation?

An organisation where people don’t like to work, where they are not taken seriously, where they cannot develop their potential. An organisation where thinking ends at the boundaries of the organisation, the building or the product, and whose survivalis, therefore, at risk. When a living system strives for the best possible survival, when people become the best versions of themselves – that is the goal of life for me. This also applies to organisations and includes the pursuit of social responsibility.

Where are the most effective levers for beautiful, responsible organisations? What provides the greatest leverage?

Not ecological factors, but something more fundamental: Social interaction. In order to encounter ourselves, we need to engage with ourselves in nature, truly interact with each other in the team, feel the people, take them seriously, want to do things together. That would resolve a great amount of conflicts and issues. The seed for this is dialogue between two people. And it needs to be sustainable, all day long: Encounters in the subway, with the team, with my boss, with customers, etc. That’s where we can all make the biggest difference. The huge advantage is that we all have the chance right there in our hands.

Are beautiful organisations and economic success a contradiction? It sounds a bit like that; otherwise all organisations would be beautiful.

Many organisations are not economically sustainable but are struggling to survive. We saw several examples of this last year. Sustainable economic success is not about boosting profits at the expense of everything else and becoming rich or grow as quickly as possible.
If that is the case, everything else becomes fragile, because hardly anyone can think about their social responsibility when they are struggling to survive. It is like neglecting yourself, eating unhealthy food or going to work when you are ill. If I fail to do anything good for myself, then I will not be able to do anything good for those around me either.

So corporate social responsibility means ensuring a balance between giving and taking?

Of course. It’s like in a relationship: Only if the exchange between two people is one between equals and is sustainable in the long term, will the relationship remain healthy. The same applies to organisations – both internally and in their interactions with their environments.
The market regulates a lot. If I treat my employees badly, eventually, no one will apply for a job with me anymore. But the market is not everything, which is why regulation is also needed, at least at the European level. Balance is needed at any level.

All over the world, we are currently experiencing the opposite of equality: The strong are resorting to blackmail, everyone is looking out for themselves, and the focus is on isolation and polarisation. How can we get back to a constructive dialogue?

What is lacking in the world, in large parts of society and in most organisations are grand visions for the future. We need to develop images of a beautiful, ideal, good and better future that we can then pursue together. As long as this is lacking, we have little chance of progress, even in Europe.
Additionally, the underlying structures are flawed: As long as Europe does not abandon the principle of unanimity, we will not make any progress. This is a very simple organisational principle: It will never be possible for 100 percent of the people to agree on everything. The principle of unanimity prevents us from reaching agreements. One thing is certain: We need grand designs, and at the same time, we need structures that enable us to achieve what we . Need.
In a good democracy, we need to seek and find majorities.
I have to convince people, try to understand the other side as well as possible and, on that basis, develop joint plans for how we can successfully move forward into the future. As hard as it seems, this is the way we build and grow social systems.

A wound that has been torn open in recent years is that it is no longer possible to talk to some people. They insist on their points of view, are not receptive to arguments and are unable to move on from certain topics. How can we re-establish dialogue?

This is a big challenge for all of us. Since I started looking at things with more love, I’ve been doing better personally.
For many people, love is too big a word at this point. However, you can at least look at things with trust and respect – at what these people stand for, what drives them, what emotions lie beneath their actions. That is how compassion can grow.
However, in order not to lose ourselves, we also have to set boundaries for ourselves and decide who we surround ourselves with and who we talk to. A saying that guides me is: We will become the tribe we surround ourselves with.
For me, that means taking all opinions seriously, but not following every one. I don’t get involved in every conversation, otherwise I lose my footing. This applies even more to leaders and creators in organisations. If they listened to every whisperer, they wouldn’t stand a chance. Setting these boundaries is tremendously important for authorities of all kinds.

Why is it particularly important for authorities to set these boundaries?

Because people completely underestimate how quickly you become part of an echo chamber. And then you get lost in the complexity because you no longer know or sense who you can trust, or which perspective actually makes more sense. We lose ourselves in complexity.

Then you are no longer capable of making decisions as a manager?

Managers must be able to recognise and manage their emotions in order to be helpful. I have the utmost respect for any one who leads a company under extreme risk, manages the contradictions out there and bears responsibility for thousands of people. At the same time, it is important to criticise and listen to criticism. Generalisations such as ‘politicians are corrupt’ or ‘companies only look out for their own interests’ do not help us. When I generalise, I can no longer create. It is a carte blanche for anyone who wants to slip into the comfortable role of victim.

How can organisations succeed in this volatile world?

It is about finding out what is going on in my ecosystem, in my world, and what we can do about it.
But organisations and institutions, no matter how large or small, also need attractive visions for the future that are conceived collectively and from within the ecosystem: Thinking from the broadest possible perspective – from outside to the inside: From customers, markets and employees to the very heart of the organisation. And then build clever, smart participation processes in which the right representatives come together in different forms and develop and live their vision.

How should decisions be made?

Of course, it must be clear what’s decided by whom and what the decision-making structure looks like. And the decision will certainly not be made unanimously. Once the path and the decision-making structures are clear, I already have eliminated a lot of resistance from the system, because people feel taken seriously and know how and by whom decisions are made. That sounds simple now, but, of course, it is not quite so trivial in practice.

Back to world politics: What will the future hold?

My analyses are based on fundamental trust and confidence, but they are also fuelled by findings from research on collective consciousness. The development we are currently seeing is a counter-movement to extreme dissatisfaction and polarisation in the world, which is intended to ensure – not consciously, but through the collective unconscious – that we get through this crisis more quickly. The faster the conflicts erupt, the faster we can resolve them. The danger, as in any phase of decadence, is that they will end with collateral damage, which can even meanwars. We have seen this many times in human history. We can only hope and do everything we can to prevent this from happening, to ensure that society regulates this through democratic processes. And we have to see it through.

What responsibility do companies have in such churlish times?

I notice that company leaders are publicly pointing out that such behaviour is not acceptable and point out that they are doing things differently. Of course, there are others who play along, who fall to their knees in anticipatory obedience to those in power. There are, however, plenty of others who do not. The important thing is to take a stand now. Even at the risk of losing one or two percentage points in profits. Taking a stand always comes at a price, but above all, it has value. Now we can see who has integrity, who is working for a better world and who is not.
And we can all do that individually: Every encounter can change the world. I can smile at someone in the subway and it will make my day much better. That is a very trivial example, but it is not so trivial after all.

I recently saw an advertisement: A man and his son are sitting next to each other on a bench watching a game of basketball. The boy is fidgeting around, wanting to say something, and finally manages to ask his father, ‘What if I were a girl?’ The father thinks about it and then replies: ‘Then I would be the proudest father of a daughter.’ In times like these, when the LGBT issue is under a lot of pressure, that’s a strong statement. Is that what companies should do?

Absolutely. This is a great example of taking a stand. In the Viennese subways, there are also similar statements such as ’No place for racism’. That’s what I call taking a stand.

Change often triggers intense fears and defensiveness. How can people get through these phases successfully?

This can be achieved when people develop confidence. We see it as our job to support people and organisations in such a way that positive evolution and change can succeed. We never learned to work on our communication and attitude. Neither at school nor at most universities. We have the tools to make change happen. That is what drives me. The basis for this is a deep trust in people and in their self-efficacy. My basic attitude is characterized by a belief in love and the resilience of living systems.

Love is usually associated with private life rather than business. How do the two go together?

Love is the greatest force that helps us understand everything in the world and how to deal with it. Love means learning to deal with the greatest beauty, the greatest ugliness, the biggest problems, but also with successes, and finding meaning in them. I believe that everything that happens in our lives, everything we do, has meaning. Ultimately, this is probably also the counterpoint to the prevailing ’meaning crisis’. We can find meaning, yet it’s an active process. Ultimately, this means learning to deal with the complexity of our world. We can all be creators. And we must be – for ourselves, for the world and, of course, for organisations.

How can I control my fears so that they do not hold me back?

It starts with recognising your own traumas or triggers and working on them. Because they hold us back in our growth. This applies not only to people, but also to organisations. If we fail to build a framework that enables the best possible cooperation, this slows down the internal growth of the company, but also of society. Organisations of all kinds are the pioneers of social change because many people are organised in them. Organisations are powerful levers when it comes to achieving social relevance and bearing social responsibility. It’s our privileg to work with and guide them.

What advice would you give to companies that want to continue operating sustainably so that they can remain competitive?

We need a grand vision for the future, a strategy for getting there and the (social) change process that goes with it. It is important to trust the process t, even when difficulties occur. This is primarily about managing contradictions and constantly questioning your own convictions, beliefs, principles and fundamental values: What is valuable to us, to the outside world, to the markets, to our customers – and what is not?
Be pragmatic: Perhaps we cannot incorporate a sustainability feature into our products after all because we would no longer be competitive. Or I will have to produce in Asia after all because otherwise my business model will no longer work.
These are the real problems and challenges that managers have to solve and overcome today. It’s neither 0 nor 1, neither black nor white. The beauty lies in grappling with these issues – and making this struggle transparent.
That is okay! This is no reason to regard an organisation as ugly or reprehensible; decisions like these are necessary to ensure survival.

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How can you escape the trap of ‘either/or’?

I would like to answer with a story: A father goes shopping with his child. The boy wants to go left and get an ice cream, but the father wants to go home because he has work to do. This is a conflict. Now one of them could try to convince the other. But the best question is: What do we do now? What do we need now? Maybe get an ice cream first and then go home, or create understanding for one of the two sides. Anything is better than falling into the ‘either/or’ trap. Foster the we.
At the organisational level, you could talk to customers and ask them how they would feel about a ten percent price increase. Or you could talk to your suppliers. There are always options, but ultimately you need to make a decision that focuses on us rather than you or me. Compromises have to be found all the time.
When conflicts of values arise, for example, it is important to address them proactively – in the appropriate forum, of course. For example: ’We have a real problem. We have our sustainability strategy, and it’s not working at the moment because it costs so much that we can no longer maintain our prices.’ Then it is a matter of discussing things on on equal footing.

You have a very positive outlook on the world and on entrepreneurship. What can you pass on to others?

There are a few phrases that guide me, which I try to live by as best I can every day:

• The more I lead myself, the less I am led by others.
• The more aware I am of my emotions and patterns, the more opportunities I have to shape my emotions, thoughts and actions.
• The more intensively I learn, the happier I will be. I let myself be  trained and ask for support. No one can grow without an outside perspective, without support, without teachers – I call that the tribe.
• Always start with yourself: This is a personal credo that I am deeply convinced of and have experienced in my own personal development: You cannot demand anything from others that you do not practise yourself. This applies, above all, to consultants, who in any case are at risk of acting super smart and not wanting to take responsibility. I don’t think this applies to us, but this danger is always there. When I talk about trust, I also have to be able to trust myself and others. If I do not start with myself, I will not be able to convey that and take other people with me on this journey.