Hello, I’m Jörg Stroisch and I’ve been a journalist for over 20 years. And for some years now, I have also been positioning myself as a so-called agile coach. I am an agile journalist, so to speak. I am very interested in innovation and transformation topics. And this is therefore my podcast on these topics. I often look at the topic from a methodological or process perspective. That’s why I find it all the more exciting to be talking to Barbara Steinrück, someone who uses this kind of training. The Bergisches Land Food Council is specifically committed to rethinking nutrition and the use of natural resources, and does so from a voluntary perspective. from the perspective of a non-profit organisation. Here there will be on 21. March 2025, a so-called future workshop. Of course you can also take part. In this podcast, association chairwoman Barbara explains what her expectations are.
Please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or Instagram. A remark: The voice overs and my own off-text is spoken by AI.
Why Barbara wants to organise a future workshop
The impetus for this was the observation and also our own feeling that when we talk about sustainable agriculture and sustainable nutrition, which are both directly linked, we often get stuck in a report about current problems and remain stuck in them. I feel that a lot of energy is channelled into this form of problem reporting, but it doesn’t actually lead to solutions, so it doesn’t unleash any creativity. And getting to know the presenter of Katharina Walkow from Minden a few years ago gave us the chance to think the other way round. In concrete terms, this emerges from transformation design and system development, based on future workshop approaches dating back to the 1960s.
And the core idea is simply to imagine a temporal horizon. We are now in the year 2039. The simple reason for this is that the Minden Future Workshop was launched for the first time in 2014. They said: Where will we be in 25 years? And that’s how the number 2039 came about. So it has no other background than the fact that this format was launched in 2014 and has been carried out on various occasions since then and we now only have 15 years or almost 14 years until we reach the year 2039. That is a period of time that, well, on the one hand still feels very far away, but on the other hand is not so far away.
Why the Future Workshop works with visions
We imagine that we have arrived in the year 2039 and find a world that enables a good life on a healing earth. So we have developed this vision, a vision of what a living environment on a healing earth should look like for people, where everyone has enough to eat, where it is peaceful and where we get on well with each other. And in our case, the way there starts in 2025 with the initial question: What should be there when what we perceive as a problem today, what we no longer want today, has disappeared? In other words, to answer the vision question. We have mastered the major challenges of the past. We have made significant progress that can no longer be reversed and we have also overcome obstacles. And in this special moderation process, it is then a matter of considering together what our vision should look like and then breaking it down step by step for the individual people, for individual subject areas. In March 2025, when our future workshop is over, what was our first step that I took back then? So I always look back in retrospect from the position of 2039 and have a very concrete first step in the event that I take, that we take together to get there. The second, exciting and perhaps also special thing about this format is that, contrary to perhaps the usual custom of only celebrating successes once they have been realised, we are actually celebrating the fact that we have reached this successful present in 2039 and are living there. So we start with a celebration and meet in the Ommerborn monastery in the large hall and celebrate together with food, drink and music. What is important to us when celebrating. From the vantage point of 2039, it’s a bit like realising that we have succeeded in achieving this kind of Bom Viwir, the good life for all, on a peaceful and healing earth.
What topics the future workshop should focus on
It is also not just about food issues or the living conditions that we dream of and that we can then imagine in this solution trance. Of course, there are many things that have a fundamentally positive influence on life. In other words, how do we live, how do we handle money, what kind of society do we live in, what energy sources do we use? What kind of infrastructure, what kind of mobility, what kind of toilets, how do we cook all these things? Because none of these areas is isolated, but one influences the other. And in the food sector in particular, we have many points of contact in nutrition and agriculture. For example, if we can also produce soil ourselves using pyrolysis ovens, this can have an impact on soil fertility, to name just one example. That is this holistic view. And I see this as an opportunity to experience this format, because it has been reported that it is a very encouraging and resilience-promoting format.
So there is a lot there and it is also very important to emphasise this in order to show that we are already on the way. We can show this to the public and we can inspire and infect each other with this enthusiasm. And that’s where this approach of assuming a positive future meshes with what we can already do today. I can’t anticipate the actual result because I don’t know how people will cook together in the actual situation. And expect the whole process to be very exciting. And that we all go home at the end and say: we couldn’t have spent a better time at Ommerborn Monastery than with these people and on these topics. So that we can go out there recharged and say: I couldn’t have experienced the beginning of spring 2025 much better than with these people and these topics and in this place, nor would I have wanted to in the end. And then we can spend the rest of the year focussing our energies on bringing about the solution we have found.