That's me - the elaborated version

The value & benefits of applied cultural anthropology for leaders, teams, organizations and societies

 

 

Cultural anthropology offers key competencies for leaders and teams. The core business of cultural anthropology is to observe, listen and understand how we humans live and work together. The same applies to people-centered, transformative leadership today and in the future.

This includes effective, transparent stakeholder communication, identification and commitment and actively shaping the interaction of digitalization processes, measures to protect against the effects of the climate crisis and visible progress in dealing with migration, ageing, diversity, equity and inclusion issues while striving for/maintaining prosperity and well-being for all - in short: New Work.

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The aim of cultural anthropology is to better understand the meanings that people give themselves and the world and the relationships and behaviors that they cultivate through iterative approaches.

In mathematical terms, this process resembles an asymptote or, in humanities terms, a hermeneutic spiral. It's about a step-by-step approach. Agility is therefore already part of every cultural-anthropological process of cognition and creation, whether in the form of meaning, work or product.

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Connecting Worlds for Co-Creating Cultural Change
Through applied cultural anthropology, I embark with people, teams and organizations on their personal journey into co-creation.

I accompany organizations and groups methodically and context-specifically on their collective transformation and help them to better understand themselves and the world and to co-create positive change.

I work with far-sighted and highly talented programmers, engineers and other organizational developers/enterprise architects from industry, research and academia.

Personally, I blossom when I take the people around me out of their worlds and they unleash their creativity and courage to be and really come to reflect, think and act. In doing so, I also give them the true value of applied cultural anthropology for their everyday lives. In this way, the people, students and organizations I work with learn what Participant Observation, the core method of cultural anthropology, is and how they can use it in their own companies for sustainable, agile development.

In this way, the people, students and organizations I work with learn what Participant Observation, the core method of cultural anthropology, is and how they can use it in their own companies for sustainable, agile development.We learn, for example, how to talk to people who have no concept of ownership, future or past and practice how to listen and what an "emic term" actually is and why it helps me and you in everyday project work in the call center just as much as in contract negotiations in Mumbai or on the island of Rügen.

This and corresponding practical exercises will open up a space for participants to explore what is really important to them in life and how they can achieve this together and individually.

AI is changing our lives in disruptive ways. Communication skills and confident handling of AI are therefore key components of the emerging cultures.

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Science, education & culture

I have been working in the field of language and cultural mediation for over 20 years. 

I began my studies of ethnology, political science and public law (international law/ international environmental law) in 2004 with a focus on Australia/Oceania, indigenous rights and international relations in Heidelberg and Tübingen. I then switched to Europe/the Mediterranean and the topics of migration, demographic and social change.

During this time, I worked in museums and refugee initiatives and was in close academic exchange with fellow students and professors from the South Asia Institute Heidelberg, and the Philosophical, Religious Studies, Educational Sciences, Psychological and Historical Institutes in Heidelberg, Tübingen, Luxembourg.

In the research for my dissertation in cultural anthropology at the University of Freiburg, I focused on the topics of migration, ageing, demographic change in Europe and the Mediterranean region. Minority rights and identity formation processes, medical ethnology

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Business, IT & Organizations

I have been working in the interplay between people, organizations and IT since 2013. Digitalization, AI, robotics and their impact on our life together as humans are central elements that shape cultural change today.

With my love for identity and personality issues, legal issues and justice, AI, cybersecurity, data rights and management (eg. indigenous rights to land, resources, medical knowledge vs. global corporate interests etc.) and the question of what digitalization does to us humans in our dealings with each other are the most exciting fields in IT for me.

I was responsible for project, change and communication management in lateral and official leadership roles in local and global IT & business transformation projects, particularly in M&A, automation, outsourcing and Microsoft cloud solutions, the introduction of ERP and non-ERP systems and AI. I have worked in life sciences companies, FinTech, the construction and chemical industries, as well as in SMEs and start-ups.

For me, concepts such as Lean, Agile and NewWork are more than just buzzwords and all-purpose tools. They also need to be filled with life, carefully and in a context-specific way.

During this time, I worked closely with people from India and got to know other global companies and their work cultures. It also brought me to India with other cultural anthropologists and colleagues from IT.

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Artificial intelligence:

I am interested in artificial intelligence from a social and procedural perspective. Since 2023 I have also been working here with the LLM architect and neurolinguist Dr. Alex Judae.

 

People, social issues & society

For me, people in all their diversity, imagination, behavior and ambiguous life realities are at the center.

Key words: intersectionality, sustainable diversity, equity & inclusion management and our relationship to nature, art and technology.

Since 2019, I have been focusing more on academic work and projects in the non-profit sector, such as public health, sustainability, transportation transition and municipal work and environmental protection.

This also brought back the focus on European-African relations and, more recently, African countries' relations with the Americas. In this context, I also visited Ghana for research and networking purposes.

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As a cultural anthropologist, I am strongly influenced by post-colonialism and constructivism and am also familiar with the ideas of Carl Jung, which have been further developed by various parties. Clifford Geertz, Arjun Appadurai, Edward Said, Homi K. Bhaba, Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, Pierre Bourdieu, Bruno Latour, Jürgen Bolten, Klaus P. Hansen, Friedemann Schulz von Thun and others influenced my studies, research, training and teaching in my 20s. In recent years, I have been working with people from public health and cultural anthropology, such as Michael Wilson (Turku/Heidelberg), Moris Samen (Frankfurt), Rama Srinivasan (IIT India), Daniel Fiaveh (Cape Coast), Edgar Akonor (Cape Coast), Yasemin Karakaşoğlu (Bremen) and Margret Jäger from the Applied Anthropology Network (AAN) of the European Association for Social Anthropology (EASA), among others.

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Internal and external work = relationship work = work on (corporate) culture

My approaches to inner work and organizational change are also theoretically and methodologically influenced by various historical and contemporary philosophical and psychological schools such as Neoplatonism, European Romanticism, approaches from Buddhism, the "Dreamtime" of the Australian Aboriginal people, findings from brain research and neuroscience as well as current meditation and systemic coaching practices.

From a management perspective, Edgar Schein, John Kotter, Otto Scharmer and Frederick Laloux should be mentioned here.

 

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Inner work and external work = relationship work = work on (corporate) culture

My approaches to inner work and organizational change are also theoretically and methodologically influenced by various historical and contemporary philosophical and psychological schools such as Neoplatonism, European Romanticism, approaches from Buddhism, the "Dreamtime" of the Australian Aboriginal people, findings from brain research and neuroscience as well as current meditation and systemic coaching practices.

From a management perspective, Edgar Schein, John Kotter, Otto Scharmer, Frederick Laloux, Joseph Jaworski, Patrick Lenconi, Stephen Covey and Eric Berne's transactional analysis should be mentioned here.

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How I work

Use of flowing creativity & synchronicity in connection with others = co-creation:  

Jung's and Jaworski's synchronicity - or, as the Neoplatonists would say, the in-oneness-of-opposites is the magical moment when we share in the divine principle, our creativity, imagination and power to create and get into flow for ourselves alone, as partners or co-creatively in a team and organization and even society as a whole. This state of flow must be achieved and the foundations for achieving this state must be created so that we remain constantly in the flow of movement and train and cultivate it. 

As many of us have experienced in life, not everything is in our hands alone. Ultimately, it always requires an act of providence, which we can approach with humility and gratitude.

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The basics of reliable cooperation

And yet, our efforts in everyday life are rewarded and we can make them as pleasant as possible for ourselves through very simple handouts:

No matter in which area we work or lead teams. In addition to the interpersonal dimension, professional project and change management with fit-for-purpose methods, tools, processes, IT systems, tidy and organized document management are the key to a secure structure and a secure framework in which teams and organizations operate, do their work and train to stay in flow.

I am particularly fascinated by the ever-changing relationship dynamics and behaviors of our species.Real encounters and experiences, and the constant movement between the states of Belonging & Becoming inspire us and enable processes of change and development.

I offer individuals and groups a space for exchange and reflection in which they can explore themselves, understand themselves better and develop their potential. And I will show you how to use approaches from cultural anthropology for strategic organizational transformation projects and for yourself and your everyday life in order to successfully shape sustainable change with and for everyone involved.

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In order to co-creatively shape cultural change together with others and support social and cultural projects worldwide, I founded the non-profit company igdra space in 2022 and maintain a constantly growing network of coaches, change leaders, scientists, IT specialists and committed people worldwide.

 

I have many years of experience in organizing and moderating large workshop formats, conference contributions, trade fairs, exhibitions, podcasts and other communication and information formats in various areas.

 

Workshops, seminars, lectures on applied cultural anthropology, change management, communication, migration and cultural change

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Personal development for adults, children and young people

Team training on communication and collaboration

Personnel, team, leadership & organizational development

Applied cultural anthropology incl. training in self-expression, self-efficacy and storytelling

MapsTell Guide(d) Tours through the world of differences

Project management & change management consulting in strategy, conception and operations 

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Training and further education

• PSM I, PSPO I, Scaled Agility Collaboration Coach

• Python

• MapsTell Guide Coaching & Trainer Certificate

• Transparent Communication & Traumainformed Leadership Certificates in Pocket Project

• Adaptation & Change Manager Microsoft

• PROSCI

• PRINCE2 Foundation

• GPM IPMA Level D Project Manager

• Trainer for Intercultural Communication

• ​ interculture.de - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena

• Dozentin für Deutsch als Fremdsprache - Goethe Institut

• Albert-Ludwig-Universität Freiburg, PhD.

• Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, M.A.