Rotterdam Change Days 2025: At work in the Ruins

Open Call for Workshops

In line with the classic Berlin Change Days formula, we seek contributions from change practitioners – longstanding members of our community and fresh new friends – that approach questions around, for instance leadership, culture and values, learning, and dynamics in teams by working with the ‘logics of the unimaginable.’

The experimenting is intended to give us a sense of what ‘at work in the ruins’ may begin to look like, within and beyond the organizational playground.

We encourage contributors to venture into unfamiliar territories and avoid repeating already finished work. We hope to be able to set conditions to work experientially and experimentally, ‘on site,’ around inquiries rooted in art, bodywork, mind, our relationship with the natural world, the collective consciousness, the indigenous worldview, spirituality or science.

Below you find brief introductions into these various fields, as an idea of the sorts of questions we are thinking of. But please, feel free to find your own questions and perspectives.

Art

If art is understood not as a way to make the world we live in easier to understand, but as a way to develop in us a taste for the mystery and magic of the complexities of living, how may a facilitator position interventions around painting, theatre, dance, photography, filming, writing in such a way that it draws attention to what is being overlooked and asks the kind of questions that do not require easy answers?

Body

If we think of a room of participants as being more than an assemblage of minds thinking and talking, how may we involve the unique qualities of our voice, the way we move and sense the spaces we occupy to evoke other more processual ways of knowing?

Collective consciousness

If we think of that same room of participants as being more than a collection of individuals, what can we learn from the collective? What is already known without anyone consciously realising? What is unknown? What is ready to be discovered?

Mind

If we assume that we may act from a larger knowing than our cognitive understanding, to access what is possible, how do we account for such larger knowing in our work? How do we work attentively with silence, the in-between, the relational space between humans and the more-than human?

Natural world

If we take seriously the damage that is being inflicted on the natural world, how may we incorporate the endings we may daily witness in the world we inhabit, in the conversations we facilitate in organisations though interacting with nature when we work with groups? What might the material, more-than human world contribute to this conversation?

Indigenous worldview

When we grasp fully that the best expressions of our humanity were not invented by civilization but by cultures that preceded it, that the natural world is not only a set of constraints but of contexts within which we can more fully realize our dreams (Paul Shepard, 1998), what can we learn from the kinship worldview of these cultures? And how may we apply this in our organizations and communities?

Spirituality (-> to be completed)

Learning to deal with endings and humbling conditions, may require rituals and old and new forms of spirituality

Science

If science may offer more than interpreting facts and cannot be supposed to offer unerring claims to the truth, how do you, as a change practioner use psychology, anthropology, neuroscience and so on, to ground the work you do?

Timelines at a glance

Please, send in your workshop proposal by Friday, April 25.
You will receive an answer at the latest on Friday, May 16.
If you send in a proposal, we might contact you for an interview.
At the start of the conference, on Friday, Nov 7 we will have a briefing for all workshop hosts.

Livestream for Open Call

To answer your questions and to set optimal conditions for you to propose a workshop that is experiential and experimental, there will be a livestream on 25 March at [time].

This livestream will start off with a brief experiment by Jouke Kruijer.