Practice
Ingredients for wiser action
Every group I work with is trying to reach an action wiser than any one person in the room could find alone. My work is to co-host the conditions for that: a space where a field can think together, where an ending can be honoured, where a new way of seeing can arrive. What follows is a handful of ingredients, each shown through a process I was trusted to hold.
Barcamp DATIpilot community
Stepping into the chaordic space
What fulfils me most is hosting spaces where the new and the unfamiliar are welcome — where there's room for what's alive and urgent, the things we would never think to put on an agenda and yet most need to gather around. At the barcamp with the DATIpilot community I felt again what becomes possible when that room is made: someone offers a session, and a co-creative momentum opens. Paths appear that no one could have asked for in advance — the very things a planned agenda tends to meet with a reflexive "that won't work, because…" It doesn't happen by chance, and it can't be forced. What it needs is a minimal, well-judged structure — a few principles, one law, a handful of guiding questions — enough hold to invite freedom and responsibility at once. The barcamp format (sometimes called Open Space) is made for exactly this: it makes room for the emergent, the living thing we don't yet know, and lets chaos be not a disturbance but creative energy that hasn't yet found its form.
Art of Hosting & Harvesting, Leipzig
Hosting belonging across difference
For four days, a school Aula on the top floor of a Plattenbau in Leipzig-Grünau became a practice arena for hosting and harvesting conversations that matter. I had carried this training east on purpose — the Art of Hosting is rarely offered in East Germany, and I wanted to bring it to a place I also carry in my own biography. We gathered around a single calling question: how do we shape our togetherness in uncertain times, and live our differences as a source of connection? Over those days we practised belonging not as consensus but as a craft — hearing one another without rushing to judge, holding tension without smoothing it, laying our differences side by side like objects in the centre of a circle, where they don't have to merge in order to belong. The place hosted with us, and the team held a container like a fine, strong web you only notice from certain angles. What I carry from it is small and whole: the same wide street can be one person's home and another's sense of being lost — and that difference, named and honoured, is precisely what can connect them.
European Commission:
A harvest for 800 people
How do you tap a shared intelligence in a room of eight hundred? At a European Commission conference on the future of farming and the agri-food sector, I shaped the harvesting for exactly that room. With a twelve-person team, we practised a different kind of listening — not transcribing what was said, but attuning to what was trying to emerge beneath it: the patterns, the outliers, and the absences, what was spoken into the room in tone and urgency as much as in content. A few of us distilled essences, and those threads became a visual harvest, offered back to the group through the day so it could see itself more clearly. Harvesting at this scale doesn't dissolve complexity — it makes it inhabitable, giving eight hundred people shared images and language to hold what none of them could hold alone. Collective listening, so that wiser action can come forward from within the room itself.
Listening below the surface
Planes & Murmurations
Midwifing a metaphor shift
At a foundation's multi-day digital off-site, the CEO kept describing the team's journey as a plane — for three days, that was the picture. Then a team member offered a different image: a murmuration, starlings turning as one with no one in charge. I drew the two side by side, and the shift became visible — from machine to living movement. The CEO embraced the new metaphor, and it stayed.
I hadn't handed it to anyone; my part was to catch what the group had surfaced and give it a form it could see. When a team's picture of itself changes, how it meets and decides and trusts changes with it.
ARLINA — Tending the Well
Not everything I host has a settled shape yet — and Tending the Well lives right at that edge. For four days on the Oder, at the German–Polish border, a small circle of community weavers, activists and artists entered a shared field of eco-somatics, ritual and nature-rooted imagination. We gathered around a question worth staying with: how do we make embodied space for collective grief and communal joy — how do we keep weaving, even as the fabric frays? We let ourselves be guided by more-than-human hosts: the migrating geese and cranes, the River Oder still grieving its losses, the parched soil, the trees as holders of memory. The practice takes the body as anchor, grief as a doorway, and joy as a radical resource — a slow turning from extraction toward reciprocity, from fragmentation toward remembering that we are an ecosystem. This is where my practice reaches: if you're drawn to work that doesn't yet have a fixed form, this is the door.
Grief as a doorway, joy as a radical resource
Arising Quo
Co-inquiry & collective sensing journey
Arising Quo was a philanthropic initiative rethinking wealth redistribution as a regenerative force: funded partners each working, in their own way, at the edge of possible futures. '
As the initiative closed a learning cycle, I designed and co-hosted with Christa Cocciole and Vanessa Reid a collective sensemaking journey with those partners: not an evaluation, but a way to harvest what the field had learned and turn it toward what comes next.
We developed meta-harvesting questions with the team, held three online learning circles, and gathered sixteen partners from all ten organisations. The insight surfaced from the group itself, and often as images: "a nest, a place, a home", "new and very old roots", "this is not linear". Distilled into documentation, it fed straight into the team's own strategy.
Co-inquiry like this makes a funder part of the sensemaking rather than its audience, and lets a field's collective intelligence point the way forward.
The initiative has since closed; its explorations live on as an archive.
Advocate Europe
What if hope were a muscle?
Harvesting a closing from the inside
For five years I was programme lead at Advocate Europe — an idea challenge and incubator that backed civic projects from more than forty-five countries (2014–2019). When it came time to close, I co-conceived and co-wrote our harvest publication, Change Starts With Us, more an act of harvesting than an impact report. It gathered the changemakers' stories in their own voices, and opened the "backstage" of how we had designed the programme, including what we would do differently. The whole endeavour was carried by a question rather than a claim: what if hope were a muscle? My part was the concept side — discerning which learning actually mattered, and giving it a form that outlasts the programme itself.
More threads & projects
Participatory strategy for a large German youth organisation (2026) — Co-hosting a participatory strategic-development process, with the organisation's young people shaping the direction.
Berufsorientierungskurs für Frauen (2025/26) — Vocational Education Course for women*: accompanying women* as they find their direction and next step (back) into working life, as process guide and coach
Team resilience (2025) — Resilience workshops for a team inside an acute change process in a foundation in the cultural sector: steadiness, orientation and self-regulation when the ground keeps moving.
ARLINA · Innerer Kompass (2025) — A place-based ritual retreat for people at a threshold, finding their inner compass and their next contribution through vision work, body and stillness.
DSEE “Veränderungen gestalten” (2023) — A digital series helping volunteers and association leaders steer change and stay resilient through crisis.