On January 27, we had the pleasure of welcoming Kristin Stein as a guest lecturer in the course Intercultural Management and Communication at TUHH. Kristin shared valuable insights from her professional experience working in HR development and recruiting within a large corporate setting, offering students a practical perspective on intercultural collaboration in everyday organizational life. Kristin structured her guest lecture around a real-life organizational transformation: the closure of two departments, one in Germany and one in Italy, which were merged into a single location in Hamburg. Initially planned with the support of a consulting company, the new site eventually brought together more than 30 nationalities, mainly technicians and engineers from around the world. As the only HR professional on site for four years, Kristin found herself at the center of this complex intercultural environment. She openly reflected on her initial assumption that intercultural training would be sufficient to bring people together. An assumption that quickly proved too simplistic in practice. Using concrete case studies, Kristin invited students to analyze intercultural misunderstandings from individual, organizational, and cultural perspectives. One example focused on feedback practices, while another highlighted how a simple “yes” can carry very different meanings across cultures, leading to missed deadlines and frustration on all sides. Together with the students, she explored alternative approaches to leadership, communication, task delegation, and prioritization, emphasizing the importance of perspective-taking, clarity, and adaptation rather than rigid enforcement of one’s own norms. In a third case, Kristin contrasted German and Italian meeting cultures, illustrating how formal agreements, informal discussions, and social interactions can coexist, and clash, within the same organization. Through individual reflection, pair discussions, and group work, students developed possible interventions on three levels: the individual, leadership and HR, and the organizational system. The session concluded with key learnings drawn from working with more than 30 nationalities, including making expectations explicit, translating rather than judging, reducing ambiguity through routines, separating intent from impact, and building psychological safety across differences. Kristin’s guest lecture offered an engaging, practice-oriented complement to the course and encouraged students to critically reflect on intercultural dynamics in organizations. Thank you very much, Kristin, for sharing your experiences and insights with us!

On January 20, we were very pleased to welcome Jan Köster once again as a guest lecturer at our institute. As in the previous year, Jan joined the course Intercultural Management and Communication at the Technische Universität Hamburg, and we were delighted that he took the time to return and share his expertise with our students. Jan began the guest lecture in a very personal and transparent way by talking about his own stressful morning, using it as an entry point into the realities of modern working life. From there, he guided the students through key questions of organizational culture and transformation. In the first part of the session, he introduced a Cynefin framework inspired by Dave Snowden, which differentiates between simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic problems, as well as the often overlooked “unclear space” that emerges when the wrong tools are applied to the wrong type of problem. Building on this, Jan discussed agile methods and the important distinction between working in the system and working on the system, complemented by the Plan–Do–Check–Act cycle. Using vivid, cross-generational examples—from his grandfather’s experiences with telephones and digital money, to his father’s constant availability and its health consequences, to today’s shifts toward new work methods, AI, and future technologies—Jan illustrated how ways of working and organizing have continuously evolved. Concepts such as VUCA (Volarity, Uncertainty, Conplexity, Ambiguity) and BANI (brittle, anxious, non-linear, incomprehensible) provided frameworks for understanding today’s uncertain environments. He emphasized that many organizations fail to see their real problem: the loss of knowledge workers and the urgent need to shift toward continuous learning, self-reflection, resilience, and developing organizations as learning systems. Once again, he complemented the course perfectly, enriching it with clear insights, thought-provoking impulses, and practical perspectives on the challenges and processes of organizational culture transformation. It was another inspiring morning, and we very much hope to welcome Jan back again in the future.