Most organizations nowadays suffer from power games played at the top and powerlessness at lower levels, from infighting and bureaucracy, from endless meetings and a seemingly never-ending succession of change and cost-cutting programs, which is in harsh contrast to a soulful workplace, for authenticity, community, passion, and purpose. The solution, according to many scholars, lies with more enlightened management. But reality shows that this is not enough. In most cases, the system beats the individual-when managers or leaders go through an inner transformation, they end up leaving their organizations because they no longer feel like putting up with a place that is inhospitable to the deeper longings of their soul.
The system theory (according to Niklas Luhmann) tries to reduce the complexities of modern organizations by understanding the subsystems, how these subsystems work together and seeks to explain and develop hypotheses around characteristics that arise within complex systems that seemingly could not arise in any single system within the whole. Discussing the purpose of leadership, power, paradoxes and phenomena will help to analyze organizational behavior, explore detriments to organizational change and uncover the challenges for organizational development.- Trainer/in: Annika Wolf