Rotterdam Change Days

We are excited to announce that the 2025 edition of the Berlin Change Days moves to the Netherlands, as the Rotterdam Change Days 2025!

As we continue to navigate rough waters around the globe and the horizon is rapidly getting rather more gloomy than promising, we strongly believe in building communities at every level. Very close to home or at work, locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. Therefore we are looking forward to reconnecting with our growing community of change makers from around Europe and the world.

You are very welcome in Rotterdam!

Rotterdam Change Days

For the Rotterdam Change Days 2025 we have been inspired by Dougald Hine’s book At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Climate Crises and Other Emergencies. The following passage puts into focus the wider-world context for the conversations we seek to incite during the Rotterdam Change Days.

...to make sense of what is ending, how we can talk about it and what tasks are worth taking on in whatever time it turns out that we have. Something is coming over the horizon: a humbling from which none of us will be spared, that will not be managed or controlled, but will leave us changed.

Dougald Hine has confirmed he will join our Rotterdam Change Days, give a key note and take part in the programme.

During our programme of course we will also connect with the community of change makers in Rotterdam.

Rotterdam Change Days 2025:
At work in the Ruins
November 7 - 9, 2025

The questions we seek to address at the Rotterdam Change Days 2025 are, for instance:

  • What alternative practices may help us open up ways of thinking differently about the multifaceted crises we are facing in organisations and the wider world they are operating in?
  • If change is about endings and beginnings, how may we, for instance, engage with the discomfort of endings?
  • What kinds of endings do we see?
  • And what conditions can we create to dare explore unimaginable beginnings?
  • What openings do we already discern, to start such explorations?
  • If organisations feature as part of the ruins of our times, how might we be able to find pockets of change there?
  • What conversations can we start to build a world that is presently unimaginable.
  • What different maps may we draw, what new orientations may we investigate for those who come after.
Rotterdam Change Days
OUR INVITATION
Rotterdam Change Days
Visuals by Nina Fisser

In this topic that also builds on the theme ‘Islands of Sanity’ of earlier Change Days, we invite participants to engage in conversations that explore what it means to work humbly in the ruins of our times and to experiment with stopping to make sense according to the controlling logic of the world that is ending. 

Not only has Rotterdam risen from the ashes after World War II, currently is also a city with many pockets of change tackling wicked issues and offering glimpses of new possibilities. The Rotterdam Change Days 2025 will take place in a number of these pockets of change.

CALL for CONTRIBUTIONS

In the spirit of the classic Berlin Change Days format, we invite contributions from change practitioners – long standing community members and curious new companions alike – who are ready to explore questions of leadership, culture, learning and group dynamics through the logics of the unimaginable.

We seek workshops that stir the soil – experiments, provocations that give shape to new change practices within and beyond the organisational playground. That move us toward what Hine calls building good ruins

We welcome contributions that take the form of on-site, experimental and experiential inquiries – rooted in art, in the body or in the natural world. Grounded in science or spirituality, in indigenous worldviews, collective knowing, or poetic imagination. That offer a space to listen, to feel, to move – to explore something you don’t yet fully understand. We are inviting contributions that avoid the well-trodden paths, polished off old work and take us to unfamiliar or raw edges where we may engage with what wants to emerge.

Process & Dates

  • Please, send in your workshop proposal by Friday, May 9.
  • The Rotterdam Change Days take place on November 7-9, 2025
Tickets

Join us in Rotterdam!

From 2009 onwards the Berlin Change Days have offered a playground for a growing community of practitioners working in the field of organisational change exploring fresh, radical and audacious change practices.

Will you add your beautiful presence and audacious practice to the Rotterdam Change Days 2025 and to our community? You are very welcome!

Participation fees

  • Early Bird
    540€
    including 4 meals and drinks; excluding VAT and ticket fee
  • Regular
    690€
    including 4 meals and drinks; excluding VAT and ticket fee
  • If you want to apply for a sponsored ticket, please send an email to melanie@berlinchangedays.com

Impressum / Imprint

Rotterdam Change Days
Esther Barfoot

Netherlands

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