Rotterdam Change Days 2025: At work in the Ruins

Call for Contributions – A Call to Reimagine Change

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

This means starting from where we are – tasks that acknowledge our entanglements with the multi-perspective troubles we are in: 

  • Salvage the good that we may take along from the world that is ending.
  • Mourn the good that cannot be taken with us.
  • Notice the things that were never as good as we told ourselves they were.
  • Notice dropped threads that may be picked up again – forgotten skills, overlooked wisdoms, practices that once fell out of fashion, but now glimmer with relevance.


These tasks – quiet, strange, or surprisingly familiar – might offer ways of living and working in the ruins of our times.

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.

Below we suggest some fields of knowledge from which we think contributions may emerge.

INTRODUCTIONS
Art
If art cultivates our capacity to sit with mystery and appreciate the complexity of living, how might you design a workshop — using painting, theatre, dance, photography, film, or writing — that invites participants to attend to what is often overlooked? Can art help us reveal chunks of reality that we otherwise find difficult to tell stories about?
Body
What if a room of participants was more than an assemblage of thinking minds? How might we involve the intelligences of movement, voice, posture, and physical presence to access more embodied and process-based ways of knowing?
Collective consciousness
If we assume that we may act from a larger knowing than our individual, cognitive understanding, how can we access this knowing? How do we for instance work attentively with silence, the in-between, the relational space between humans and the more-than human to access our collective consciousnesses?
Natural world
If we consider the damage that is being inflicted on the natural world, how can we bring its sensuous voice into the conversations we host? How may we allow nature — rivers, trees, birdsong, soil — to become part of the dialogue? What wisdom might it offer?
Indigenous worldview
What if we consider that the roots of our humanity lie in cultures that preceed our present ones? What can we learn from ways of being that centre kinship, land, nature, ritual, storytelling, and craft? How might these inform our work in organisations and communities today?
Spirituality
How might old traditions and newly emerging spiritual awarenesses help us navigate loss, uncertainty, and transformation? What practices invite us to deal with our humbling conditions, our endings? How may we step beyond the limiting confines of our white, predominantly male-oriented, western identities and reconnect us with something deeper?
Science
If science no longer offers all the answers, how do we hold it with both respect and curiosity? How do we work with psychology, anthropology, neuroscience—and more—as change practitioners, while also questioning their limits and the logics they rest on?
PROCESS & DATES
Rotterdam Change Days

Practicalities and your role as workshop host

  • Consider a workshop duration of 60 or 90 minutes, in-person only, no virtual/hybrid. 
  • The Rotterdam Change Days are about community, learning and experimenting together. Workshop hosts participate in the entire event. 
  • Selected workshop hosts will receive 30 percent reduction on the ticket fee.

Timelines at a glance

  • Please, send in your workshop proposal by Friday, May 9.
  • If you send in a proposal, we might contact you for clarifications. 
  • You will receive an answer at the latest on Friday, May 30.
  • Prior to the start of the conference, on Friday, Nov 7, there will be a briefing for all workshop hosts.

Impressum / Imprint

Rotterdam Change Days
Esther Barfoot

Netherlands

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