December 29, 2023 | Leave a comment

Wealth as Ideology

The fading out of the German social market economy The German social market economy (Alfred Müller-Armack, Ludwig Erhard) is based on the premise that the economically strong show solidarity with the economically weak and disadvantaged. The social market economy is thus based on a social contract that guarantees social peace in our democracy and constitutional state. This model worked very well in the post-WWII decades, as Germany’s reconstruction was, above all, a joint effort, supported…
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September 18, 2023 | 1 Comment

Climate change: How are we failing to collectively change our behavior?

My field is learning design – applied educational science. There are many valid explanations to the above question, ranging from lobbyism, the disempowerment of individual consumers versus producers, to group egoism, to the defense of privilege, and many more. From the perspective of conventional learning processes, our underlying model of expectations looks like this: (1) We rationally explain to a person the consequences of ‘continuing as is’. (2) The person is ideally insightful, understands everything…
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August 10, 2023 | Leave a comment

How to Make Psychological Safety Robust

A Sobering Moment in a House of Cards It was a sobering moment. During a workshop with German school principals based on Timothy R. Clark’s four-stage model of psychological safety, we arrived at the level of challengers’ safety. We discussed a situation in which a sophisticated and innovative proposal by a highly motivated team of school principals was shot down fairly badly by the local school board. What were the effects on the four levels…
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July 12, 2023 | Leave a comment

Turning 60.

They have always been eventful times. My fun-loving aunt’s birthday card says, ‘Age is like wine, it has to be a good vintage.’ Mine is 63.In August 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King gave his famous speech ‘I Have a Dream’. It was also the year JFK visited Berlin and was shot. George Harrison encouraged Decca Records to sign a new band he had discovered, The Rolling Stones. Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman…
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May 12, 2023 | 1 Comment

The Usefulness of AI for Modelling Human Learning Processes

Initially, I was quite enthusiastic when GPT was able to generate new workshop structures for me within seconds, given the appropriate prompt. My students were also highly successful in creating prompts for generating creative learning methods that could be used in the classroom. Funky, cool stuff, although – since GPT is a black box – we’ll never know how the idea was generated or if it actually works in practice. However, when it came to…
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April 23, 2023 | Leave a comment

Pragmatism, Constructivism and Beyond: Empathic-Organizational Co-Creation

The term Empathic-organisational co-creation is a working term that I have chosen for my field because it best describes the inner attitude and self-conception of learning designers and learning & development coaches concerning our daily work. The concept of an empathic-organisational design of social spaces refers to two fundamental competencies of our work that are inseparable from each other: (a) the competence of empowering people and (b) the competence of system design. The Pragmatic Component:…
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September 28, 2022 | Leave a comment

Evening Musings

Process, Goal, Method, Motivation, Context… quite often I get bored when simple semantics fail to describe the phenomena that drive our world. While we are easily distracted by monocausal comfort, the more intriguing drivers of history hide in plain sight.  We start a good story by reaching out to others: Come on board. Be with us! We believe that people should reach their full potential. Let’s call this intrinsic belief the Montessori Light Cones, based on…
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July 3, 2022 | 2 Comments

When the world we are trying to save is disintegrating in front of our very eyes: From American Taliban to Russian Z-Fascism

This is my first English blog article for a long time. So, my friends, where shall we start? Taking a deep breath as too much has happened The world at large seems to have turned into a dystopian nightmare. From George Floyd to Covid, from Covid to the Russian-Ukrainian war, from the war to the ill decisions of the American Supreme Court that tear America apart, with the grim prospect of worldwide hunger lurking due…
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May 2, 2022 | Leave a comment

PBL Tutorial Group Videos with Prof. Howard Barrows

These must be the origins of great coaching when it comes to collaborative problem-solving. I converted files from a fairly old video CD (lifted from VHS), which shows how Prof. Howard Barrows coaches a tutorial group through the Problem-Based Learning Process (PBL) in medical education. It is some historical footage and a real gem that I feel shouldn’t get lost. His book ‘The Tutorial Process’ (Revised Edition, 1992) makes for an insightful supplemental reading. If,…
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February 24, 2022 | 1 Comment

Europe’s Darkest Day

My heart sank today. The naivety of German diplomacy and media over the past years has been frightening. Putin has always been a stone-cold (ex-KGB) sociopathic murderer, and war criminal (Syria) who had been presented in Germany for decades as a reliable business partner – or a disappointed autocrat who traumatically suffered from NATOs expansion after 1991. However, with the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war, Germany’s ‘special status’ in diplomacy has been proven to be…
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