Merging People and Organizational Development

Once a year, master's students from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Munich come to TWIST for a weekend block seminar. Both sides benefit from this. The students bring fresh know-how in the form of the latest research approaches from work and organizational psychology and try to convert these into handy tools and practice units for training, coaching, and peer consulting. In this way, they help our company to stay up to date theoretically—because with busy schedules, it is difficult to keep an eye on current research at all times. Conversely, TWIST helps young professionals to gain a foothold in practice more quickly. Dr. Claudia Harss, TWIST owner with over 30 years of consulting experience under her belt, and an accompanying TWIST consultant provide feedback on how to make the exercises and tools practical. They report on how things work in consulting practice with different companies, assignments, and participant groups. The students are allowed to try out their ideas, and at the end of the course, they can moderate simple collegial consulting units. The common thread in all this practical work is an approach that TWIST has been practicing and continuously developing since 2005, which replaces traditional training designs in strategic personnel development (PD). PD and OD (organizational development) flow together in this approach. Participants' personal responsibility for their personal development, as well as learning and rethinking in emotionally charged and currently challenging everyday situations, are central to this approach—a PD and OD approach that is ideally suited to acting and leading in agile organizations.