Jo Töpfer

If it isn’t fun – it isn’t work

Jo Toepfer has professional experience in many sectors and functions: Hydro Engineering, Musical Therapy, Adult Education, development cooperation and management consulting.
Since the mid 1990s he has worked as a self-employed management consultant focusing on organisational transformation in Eastern Europe. As such he has accumulated a rich body of experience in planning and implementation of organisational and management development processes in a variety of industries and fields with various clients. He is co-founder of boscop and he has significantly shaped the cooperative.
He facilitates groups, organisations and systems in the design of their spaces, structures and processes so that self-organization can easily evolve. Precision, attention to detail, diligence and reliability, coupled with curiosity and humour, characterises his unique consultancy style.

How did I encounter Open Space?

Open Space and the related method I came across during my work in Russia in the 1990s. There it was abundantly clear that you do not get very far in dynamic environments with linear processes of organizational development (diagnosis, setting goals, planning, implementation, evaluation). It needed fundamentally different approaches that incorporate the dynamics of social and economic transformations from the very beginning, as happens in Future Search and Open Space.

What am I passionate about?

I experience passion when I see how people organize themselves at work. If they take responsibility for their concerns and interests and pursue them with passion, and thereby make progress without someone controlling, directing, orchestrating and managing them.