Organisations as developing communities
I’m exploring Steiner-based approaches to organisational development, including Bernard Lievegoed and related thinkers. My question is how an organisation can develop alongside the people who give it life.
Why this interests me now
I’m drawn to perspectives that help me pay attention to an organisation’s history, relationships, and changing needs. I want to put these ideas into conversation with systems thinking and the practical tensions I have encountered in teams and organisations.
For me, this is a line of inquiry: a way to ask better questions about development, meaning, and responsibility. I’m interested in where these perspectives illuminate a situation, where they need questioning, and what becomes useful when tested against lived experience.
Questions I’m exploring
- What changes when we understand an organisation through its development over time?
- How do individual learning and organisational change support—or constrain—each other?
- Where do purpose, relationships, and economic realities pull in different directions?
- What would make a developmental perspective useful in a real team conversation?
What I’m bringing to it
My work in organisational systems and technology, team leadership, and facilitation gives me practical situations to think with. I’m approaching this study as a practitioner connecting perspectives, rather than claiming a qualification in this tradition.
Reading into the tradition
The NPI archive traces Lievegoed’s organisational development work to Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy and describes an interest in organisations as developing social systems. About the NPI Archives ↗
A related contemporary perspective is IMO’s work on the connection between personal and organisational development, which it explicitly links to Lievegoed and Adriaan Bekman. IMO’s vision and methodology ↗
Follow a connection
Each link opens another part of the story.
- Experience
Antara Methods PLT
A practical context for thinking about organisational systems.
Open card - Practice
Organisations and systems
The systems strand of my practice connects to this inquiry.
Open card - Experience
Onepoint Groupe
Team leadership provides situations to reflect on.
Open card - Learning
Foundations & Applications of Humanities Analytics
A related learning thread connecting people and analytical perspectives.
Open card
Linked from
Other cards that point here.