Seminar Offerings: Starting the year 2021 with confidence! | Coach for Innovation and Collaboration Methods Andrea Schmitt: Strengthen your organization take it to a higher level of innovation.

A crazy year is drawing to an end ... and chances are that the New Year is going to start in a similar crazy way. We – who, as performance-driven species, dearly would like to control everything – have been and are still being put to the test. We had to scrap all our plans: business travels, seminars, conventions, trade fairs and, last but not least, holiday trips had to be canceled. Our creativity and willingness to adapt was badly needed. For most of us – at least in Germany – the crisis was largely limited to this kind of first world problems. Now here’s hoping that the second hard lockdown, which becomes effective as of today, will prevent anything worse from happening and that it has been imposed just in time to prevent more severe crises in hospitals...

When I look back on 2020 in terms of my coaching activities, I realize that I tried and learned many things in short time:

Never would I have imagined that we would be able to work together online in such a productive way. And that was thanks to all the digital whiteboards out there, such as Mural, Miro or Stormboard.
Never before have I been able to support a customer in the transformation to agile working as closely – even including all dailies – as I did this year. Everybody, and I mean everybody, was working from home and we would gather together for a 15-minute meeting with a snap of your finger.
I launched this newsletter in May, and together with my LinkedIn posts I have become a tad more digital (so now I know how to spell “Social Media” – well, I am still not using Twitter or Instagram, but I just might have left that for 2021!).
Despite all social distancing measures, I participated in two multi-day on-site training courses. Above all, the systemic approach of Collegial Leadership has had a lasting effect on my way of working.
In November, I brushed up on my Kanban knowledge as part of a 4-day online training at Kanban University. In that context, I realized what a challenge online trainings may be for participants. I hope this experience helps me to be a bit more easygoing with my participants...
I also offered my own training formats such as “Agile Working according to Scrum” and “Brief Introduction to Collegial Leadership” as online trainings. My impression was that these formats also worked well as webinars, but surely only the participants themselves can make a judgment regarding this.
And last but not least, I fulfilled one of my heart’s desires in 2021. As a freelancer working on my own I sometimes saw myself as a lone fighter. Thanks to my colleague Vanessa Giese, I have set out to change this next year at least in some areas of my work: Vanessa, who is on a similar mission, and I will offer a new series of seminars (both online and on-site). More on that below...

I am very much convinced that all of my readers also have their personal list of things that they did anew and/or differently in this very special year. All you have to do is to look closely, and you will see all of the benefits that we were working towards during the year despite – or simply because of – these new circumstances.

Going into 2021, we all certainly yearn for more predictability and more of our “old normal” we had been so familiar with before 2020. I gladly go along with that, although I still have the faint, yet naive hope that not everything will be as it was before the pandemic. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could conserve a little bit from that new form of “less”? If we – the mass consumers, the movers and shakers, the big travelers – would keep an eye on consumed resources? I am quite sure that online formats will coexist alongside on-site events – and I myself will bear that in mind. They are easy to access, yet they can open up new horizons and enable the sharing of ideas. That said, I am certainly looking forward to once again meet with new or familiar people in real life.

This brings me back to introducing the new series of seminars which I will be holding together with Vanessa. There will be three online trainings in the first quarter, and in early summer we will even endeavor to hold on-site trainings. With this seminar series, Vanessa and I will combine our diverse backgrounds in terms of education, experience and personalities in 2021. Participants and customers will be given new stimulus, practical advice and case studies from hands-on experience:

Now, finally, I am looking forward to my own personal business lockdown, where I am going to further strengthen my confidence in a great year 2021 and recharge my batteries by candlelight, enjoying cookies. I will try to digest only good news during my little break, such as the election of a new U.S. president who is going to resume international dialog, the approval of a vaccine by the EMA, a consensus on more rigorous climate targets, the commitment to the rule of law in all EU countries, and possibly a trade agreement with the UK, which I had been holding dear until the Brexit decision.

In this sense, I wish you a Merry Christmas and a New Year 2021 full of confidence!

This text first appeared in my newsletter 'Innovation on Wednesday'. It is published every other Wednesday. For subscription click here