The ambitions for Stad & Esch are high. The mission is to prepare pupils optimally for the challenges the 21st century offers them, knowing that this century is already well on its way, and successful people require more than just a diploma. This will be a future in which technological, social and demographic developments will be moving so fast it will be hard to keep up. The underlying vision helps to make the mission happen and consists of four basic principles: Passion as the fuel for talent generation, creativity as the key to success, making the personal approach standard, and room for bravery. This led to a co-created identity of Stad & Esch, which is the heart of everything, and manifests itself through culture, symbolism, communication, and of course education. To build these four topics of identity and bring them to life, four core teams were created within the organization with the combined management team of the four locations as the leading coalition. To help them accomplish this, we have held occasional but frequent acceleration sessions on one of the topics with a diverse group of participants: Staff, management, students, and external experts. In these sessions, we create the Stad & Esch future together.

The past two days we spent working on Culture. Organizational culture is defined as a pattern of shared basic assumptions invented, discovered, or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration that have worked well enough to be considered valid and therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think and feel in relation to those problems. It has also been defined as the specific collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organization and that control the way they interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organization or organizational culture is a set of shared mental assumptions that guide interpretation and action in organizations by defining appropriate behavior for various situations. In short, it’s the way how we want to work together based on our values and beliefs. These are described in the identity passport that has been co-created with the Stad & Esch organization.

In playful ways and workshops we researched what the current culture is and what the culture we want to have would be like, determined what the gap is and collectively searched for ideas to close it. All the results were harvested as input for the culture core team to work on. A second acceleration session follows in the beginning of next year.

Deeply enjoying working on this project with Roel, Ellen and Jaap of A2Q and of course the staff and students of Stad & Esch.