WORKSHOP
Off-Site IBB
Shaping new Path
Dezember 2023 & September 2025
Explore fearless
New teams share a familiar problem: everyone is sitting in the same room, but not yet in the same boat. When the team at Investitionsbank Berlin was newly formed, what was missing was not competence it was a shared language. Who are we? What do we want? And what does that have to do with the IBB as an institution?
The proposal did not come from above. It came from within. A mid-sized team, two offsites, and the conviction that strategic alignment is not a PowerPoint topic.
Design, facilitation, moderation, entertainment all in one pair of hands. Every offsite followed a thread that was not accidental it was composed.
Planning an offsite feels like cycling. You don't just jump on and pedal. You read the route. Where is the climb? Where can you freewheel? When do you shift down so you actually make it to the top? Creative methods set the tone: perspective shifts, playful moments that ease the mind out of its usual mode before it notices what is happening. A team that folds a paper plane together one hand, no talking learns more about collaboration than in many an annual review.
That mode opened the space for the content work: strategic alignment, role clarity within the IBB, personal and collective goals and the critical question of where these overlap. A values compass emerged not through voting, but through genuine engagement. Method and content were never two things. They were the same.
Empathize Holistic
Systems do not change through resolutions. They change when the people within them start talking to each other differently. The most lasting results of these offsites appeared in no presentation: structural changes were initiated, personal interests were connected to the IBB as a space for meaningful work. Some team members spoke openly for the first time about what was truly on their minds fears, frustrations, unspoken expectations. Not because it was required, but because the space allowed it.
Building that kind of space is not a facilitation task. It is design work. That the manager afterwards offered to have further workshops designed within the IBB was the most honest form of feedback.
