INKOVEMA Podcast „Well through time“

#70 – Beginnings of coaching

Where is the suction tension for mediation to become an established instrument of organisational development?

In conversation with Dr Wolfgang Looss

Well through time. The podcast about mediation, conflict coaching and organisational consulting.

Dr Wolfgang Looss, Co-founder of the German coaching scene; studied and gained a doctorate in business administration and worked for 15 years as a founding partner of the "Beratungssozietät Lanzenberger Dr Looss Stadelmann Barz" in Darmstadt, Berlin and Munich. Today he runs selected projects in his own practice. Dr Looss is an honorary member of the German Coaching Association (DBVC) and part of the association's executive committee.

Contents:

Today we are looking at the development of coaching, which should serve as a basis for comparison with the development of mediation. There is said to be disappointment, frustration and a lack of understanding about the development of mediation. Especially when you look at the amount of conflict in society.

At the end of last year, we looked at problems relating to the lack of demand for mediation using marketing. This is certainly a challenge for mediators, but there is a risk that we will personalise the causes of this customer reluctance too much.

That's why I want to approach the problem differently today.

The working hypothesis should be that the programme of mediation can be realised in several decades at best. And that the speed at which it is being developed is already in order. As an alternative to a centuries-old, tried and tested court procedure, it seems downright presumptuous to want it to be used en masse in just a few years or a decade or two. Or to believe that we are entitled to it.

I would therefore like to look at the history of coaching today as a comparison. Coaching, generally understood as counselling without advice, has also grown in Germany – in the course of a counselling boom since the 1980s and is now considered established everywhere.

But how did this come about in Germany? And was it foreseeable?
That's why I invited one of the early pioneers of coaching to the podcast studio...who can give me and us first-hand information about this, so to speak.

Dr Wolfgang Looss, a business economist by training, has been consulting and coaching in all sectors and organisational sizes for decades. ...In 1991, he introduced the German-speaking public to coaching as a form of counselling for the first time in his book "Unter vier Augen" (In private) and has been regarded as a formative figure in this form of counselling ever since.

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