Stories & Cases

In leadership circles, the idea still often persists that there is one specific style you need to master to be successful. But just as a high kick is ineffective against a judo throw, a single leadership style doesn't work in every situation either. Research confirms this. Leadership today requires less loyalty to a single doctrine, and more the ability to combine, adapt, and switch approaches. Or, to extend the metaphor: it's no longer a traditional martial art, but a form of MMA, with versatility as its greatest strength.

In a world where leadership is often defined by numbers and targets, StreetwiZe offers a radically different perspective. Over the past year, we have taken no fewer than 106 leaders to places where resilience, adaptability, and creativity are not abstract concepts but daily survival strategies.

In the dynamic realm of social change, leadership and creativity are essential for fostering innovation and sustainable impact. At StreetwiZe, we recognize the importance of these elements in cultivating environments where collaboration and creativity thrive. The recent launch of the Live, Love, Unite toolkit, a collaboration between Mobile School and the Tomorrowland Foundation, exemplifies these values.

We hebben vaak de neiging om demotivatie toe te schrijven aan de slechte omstandigheden. Maar zijn betere omstandigheden een noodzaak om gemotiveerd te raken? In dit artikel zoeken we naar het antwoord.

Learning & Development professionals worden bestookt met slogans ‘Aan de slag met de generatiekloof’ of ‘Overleef de Permacrisis’. Uitspraken die suggereren dat we geconfronteerd worden met unieke vragen. Maar is dat wel zo? En zijn de antwoorden dus anders? In dit artikel komt u dat te weten.

A lot of Business schools, consultants and a bevy of scientists are therefore calling for us to start working on Purpose within organisations. By working towards a 'higher' purpose that transcends operational business objectives, we get better results for society, the organisation and the individual. Not surprisingly, as a founding partner of a Purpose-driven organisation, I subscribe to this. But the naive hope that getting started with Purpose automatically leads to sustainable results, that is what I am wary of. Hence, we dedicate this article to 'Purpose, the ugly, the bad and the good'.

A lot of Business schools, consultants and a bevy of scientists are therefore calling for us to start working on Purpose within organisations. By working towards a 'higher' purpose that transcends operational business objectives, we get better results for society, the organisation and the individual. Not surprisingly, as a founding partner of a Purpose-driven organisation, I subscribe to this. But the naive hope that getting started with Purpose automatically leads to sustainable results, that is what I am wary of. Hence, we dedicate this article to 'Purpose, the ugly, the bad and the good'.

A lot of Business schools, consultants and a bevy of scientists are therefore calling for us to start working on Purpose within organisations. By working towards a 'higher' purpose that transcends operational business objectives, we get better results for society, the organisation and the individual. Not surprisingly, as a founding partner of a Purpose-driven organisation, I subscribe to this. But the naive hope that getting started with Purpose automatically leads to sustainable results, that is what I am wary of. Hence, we dedicate this article to 'Purpose, the ugly, the bad and the good'.

“Often you get a leadership position because you can bring something to a successful conclusion yourself, because you are a good driver. But as a leader, you must dare, and be able, to hand over that wheel to ensure that others become a good driver. And that requires strong self-leadership in the first place.”

These are high days for nostalgia lovers as everything seems to be coming back. Not only is the threat of a new cold war looming, a global oil crisis also seems to be repeating itself. Fortunately, there are also more fun ways to go back in time. For instance, Netflix treats us to the entertaining series Cobra Kai. Inspired by the Karate Kid films of the 1980s, it tells us about the conflict between two rival karate clubs, Cobra Kai and Miyagi dojo. The two founders, Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence, share the goal of empowering young people. However, their views on the approach differ fundamentally.

Who still believes in St. Nicholas?" with this suggestive question my primary school teacher heralded the end of my dreams. While the majority of the class burst into jeers, I had to do my best to suppress my tears. I loved St Nicholas and the fantastic atmosphere that surrounded December 6th.

The gloom that accompanies the Covid quarantine is something we try to escape within our family by finding some entertainment in shared television time. Last week, ‘Horrible Bosses’ was broadcast, a successful dark comedy about bad leadership. The film grossed 209 million, which is exceptional for a comedy and perhaps illustrates the appeal of the theme of bad leadership.

This month we celebrate B Corp Month! It is an annual, month-long campaign to celebrate B Corporations worldwide. Since 2016, StreetwiZe is officially certified as a B Corporation and joined the global movement of businesses that contribute to a sustainable and responsible society. Businesses with a social and/or ecological impact, who take responsibility, are transparent and contribute to the economy of the future, can receive the certificate. We were the fourth Belgian B Corporation. Now, in 2021, the Belgian community counts +15 certified companies.

“In the temping business, changes occur at a fast pace with many ups and downs. As an agent, you’re constantly at the forefront of those changes and at the same time you can’t lose sight of the human aspect. During the ups, and certainly the downs, you have to be forward-looking. We need our street skills on a daily basis,” says Jan Verbeke and Véronique Van de Peer from the temping agency Synergie Belgium. They have three keywords for the StreetwiZe trainings: innovative, inspiring and eye-opening.

StreetwiZe coached the newly-composed employment agency SD Worx Staffing Solutions towards a shared company culture and a clear identity. All 480 employees were on board. “We wanted to avoid the ivory tower by all means”, HR-director Hanna Zijlstra says.

It's 1988 and Bloodsport, the action film starring Jean-Claude Van Damme in his first major role, is a box office hit. Meanwhile, in a typical teenager’s room, an obese snot-nosed brat tries to recreate a scene from that film after his karate lesson. In the specific scene, JCVD takes out a villain by combining a full straddle position with a strategically (= vital parts) placed stroke. Unfortunately, our teenage boy discovers in a rather painful way that his physical abilities have limits and in the process tears muscle. Well, that obese and injured boy was me.

I don't know about you, dear reader, but I suffer from a serious form of indecision when it comes to spending gift vouchers. The absolute horror in this context takes the form of the ‘Fnac voucher’.

The attentive reader of these columns now knows that I am not shy about sharing personal experiences. This week, you may add one more thing to the list of limitations, specifically my inability to connect with small children. I therefore try to avoid babies, toddlers and small children as much as possible. Show me a puppy and I let out yells that pass for sweet and endearing.

It will come as no surprise that a drastically reduced agenda is one of the reasons why you are delighted each week with the profound message from Arnoud and myself; two old-timers in the making with an aversion to adulthood. There is also no need to point out that this crisis has formed a financial crater around us. Fortunately, its depth is matched by our enduring optimism. Nevertheless, we too have had to suppress the urge to launch headlong into new initiatives.

Burgundian life and the Doolaege family belong together. An abundance of cookbooks adorn the bookcases of my brother and both my uncles. They successfully translate this theory into culinary practice and are therefore welcome guests on various cooking courses. However, my dearest mum is at an elevated height in the gastronomic firmament. If Auguste Escoffier was alive, he would promptly appoint her as his successor.

In this streaming era, are you experiencing those endless notifications about copyrights when you start up a DVD or Blu-Ray in the presence of a gang of impatient toddlers? I do, and it is not uncommon for me to suppress the urge to crush my media player with a demolition hammer… and afterwards have a ritual burning. We owe the origin of these meaningless messages to the rise of illegal music downloads.

How do you make yourself attractive to young talent and give those new employees a boost at the same time? Laura Antonacci explains how StreetwiZe helps AG's young IT talent to (re)discover their soft skills.

The Doolaege family have a shared passion, Heavy Metal. It is not uncommon for us to exuberantly sing along to the angry tunes of groups such as Rammstein or Judas Priest, meanwhile plaguing the eardrums of our poor neighbors. Now there are reprobrates who dismiss our favorite music genre as a niche phenomenon. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The name James L. Brooks may not immediately ring a bell. However, he is one of the makers of the Simpsons and of excellent films such as "As Good As It Gets". In the latter, Jack Nicholson portrays Melvin Udall, a writer plagued by obsessions. One of his quotes from the movie is "People who talk in metaphors oughta shampoo my crotch". So, with all my metaphors in this series of articles, I know what to do.

Long before social distancing started, food and wine with friends were an important part of my leisure activities. Being in each other's company, philosophizing and watching the sun go down; I thoroughly enjoyed that. I share this with Hannibal Lecter, one of the most talked-about figures in the history of the thriller.

Judging by the Facebook messages in my network, I notice two developments to which my humble person also participates in. First of all, an exponential growth in the consumption of aperitifs during weekdays. Secondly, compulsively looking for some distraction in the form of yet another Netflix show. "The Walking Dead" is a series in which the starting point fits seamlessly with these turbulent times and with this article. For the reader who is doomed, at this stage of life, to look at the Plop gnome, I will provide a brief summary for convenience sake.

When I had the film ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ projected onto my youthful retina in 1982 as an eight-year-old brat, my decision was made. I was going to be the new Indiana Jones. Armed with a self-designed whip, made from a combination of a stick and three meters of electrical cord, and an old hat, I fearlessly took on the embodiment of evil in the form of my brother.

“The StreetwiZe workshops always arrived at the right time in our organisational change. That made a world of difference.“ Priya Mouttou, HR-manager at Amadeus Benelux explains how StreetwiZe facilitated the transition to a matrix organisation as well as an international talent community.

"We wanted to clarify who we are as a school and where we want to go. The goal was to build a clear platform from which we can make renewed school together." Teachers Eva Lamon and Kenneth Labiau talk about StreetwiZe coaching on their way to creating a new mission and vision for their school.

Nothing can be done without hope and confidence. We wish you a lot of optimism in 2020!

Following “Warmste Week” and our #DuwMee campaign, we are already publishing the preface to our latest article series on resilience and agility.

Every year, B Lab recognizes the top-performing B Corps creating the greatest impact through their businesses. Honorees are recognized for having the highest environmental, community, customer, worker and overall impact by earning a score in the top 10% on the B Impact Assessment.

Today is Valentine’s Day, the commercial feast of love. Now, everyone who at this moment is in one, or several, romantic relationships, will fully agree with me that upholding it sometimes requires resilience and flexibility. Some of us succeed wonderfully, others not. In the first 50 years of marriage a little less than one in two marriages end in divorce. The divorce rate, the relationship between marriages and the resulting number of divorces, is 408 in 1,000 marriages.

You may have missed it, but I live in Eke. This metropolis is characterised by the presence of a Makro and nowadays you’ll even hear its name on the national traffic news because of the long traffic jams on the N60. Talk about progress. Like every municipality, Eke has a church with a decreasing number of members, a chips shop where you can also find vegetarian vegetable rolls besides the traditional minced-meat hot dog, and a few cafes. The nearby container park would complete this idyllic picture, but for the fact that it is almost exclusively accessible during office hours. Luckily we also have a lot of ‘glass-recycling containers' in our region so that the locals can discretely get rid of the numerous empty bottles on a clear Sunday morning.

In the previous article we ended with the proposition that if an organisation wants to work with agility or resilience, it must first of all work with the current and desired culture. It is important here that the focus is on challenging the prevailing assumptions so that the capacity of the system to cope with changes increases systematically. We also stated that 4 assumptions that characterise a culture are important: questions about people (1), questions about relationships (2), questions about the environment (3) and questions about the world (4). In this article we will take a closer look at assumptions about people.

“The stories of street children put everyday events in perspective” quotes Stefaan Deneef from Coca Cola European Partners in Ghent. Together with his colleagues Nicolas Vaninbroukx and Steven Vanderstraeten, he mentions their StreetwiZe programme.

"Every generation blames the one before" is the opening sentence of "The Living Years", a beautiful song by Mike & The Mechanics from 1989 that achieved number 1 in Australia, Canada and the United States. The phrase remains relevant twenty years later. Just as our children want to do things differently and, according to them, better than their parents, so do new organisations, with their working methods, believe that progress is being made through these applications. But is that really so?

A meagre 2% of change projects go as initially planned. Embedding enduring changes and leaving behind dogged habits and adopting new habits repeatedly seems to be very hard indeed. Literature offers a wide variety of methods to help cope with changes and this (rather light) review offers easy-going and to the point insights to the world-famous ‘Switch’, courtesy of the Heath brothers. It is one of the reference works mentioned in the StreetwiZe workshop Leading Change.

"The way StreetwiZe organises their workshops forces employees to step out of their daily routine. After a year collaborating with StreetwiZe, our people take initiative, responsibility and ownership." Ward Dejaegher from AHOVOKS reflects on a year-long StreetwiZe experience.

A heroic quote, courtesy of Michael Jordan. But what could you do about it if you’re one of those poor souls who seem to only live through the first part of the sentence? What if you’re in one of those periods when you only seem to be successful in failing?

Why did I choose to become a coach at StreetwiZe? Very simple, because in StreetwiZe, I see my interest for social entrepreneurship and my sense of exclusion and injustice reflected. And also because I dare to dream about what is and about what could be. My favourite quote? ‘Bigger is not better, better is better, and if it’s better, bigger will take care of itself’.

Nowadays, raising religion as a discussion topic at a party doesn’t exactly seem to be the most effective means of winning the hearts, let alone the souls, of your company. We see churches emptying all over Europe and the influence of the Catholic doctrine on its members rapidly waning. Since religion has disappeared, we as human beings are, of course, diligently looking for alternative explanations for the questions and difficulties of life such as insecurity, injustice and suffering.

Some things in life are certain. First: my body will mercilessly remind me that I can no longer spend nights drinking copious amounts of alcohol while twisting and turning myself in demanding ways that are supposed to be recognisable as dancing. In other words: I’m getting older. Second: I am not only being confronted with this new reality by the rueful looks of my kids. Today, every social media channel is harassing me constantly with notifications of birthdays and anniversaries and other such tragic events. Last week I received, on LinkedIn, the ominous message that I should celebrate my work anniversary: 10 years at StreetwiZe.

Hans Lamberts is StreetwiZe Partner but over the last two years he also became Master Trainer for Mobile School. Early this summer he took off to Thessaloniki, to kick-start a new mobile school.

“What I really appreciate about the StreetwiZe-training is the way in which our coaches, Hans and Eric, take our context as a starting point and totally empathise with it. Our employees can immediately apply what they learn,” says Mieke Pareyn, HRTeam Leader at Scania Parts Logistics in Opglabbeek.

“The purpose of StreetwiZe • Mobile School and our purpose are the same: to actively support people and organisations in their growth”, say CEO Peter Verschelden and Project Lead Sally Strijbos of Moore Stephens Belgium, an accountancy and consulting company. Funnily enough, the link between StreetwiZe and Moore Stephens Belgium started with a competition.

I was born in February 1974 as youngest of 2 children. Until I was 6, I lived in Schaarbeek where my father worked in the family business, but I spent most of my youth in Tervuren. My parents built a house there, in a quiet street with a lot of young and mostly international families. Every available moment we gathered with the kids of the neighbourhood. Moreover, my grandparents lived nearby. They had greenhouses and a huge vegetable garden. We were allowed almost anything there! It was a fantastic and carefree period.

How can you bring alive one culture in a large local governmental structure? By people-to-people dialogues, by inspiring and by showing the positive side of change, step by step. StreetwiZe developed a cultural change trajectory for 10,000 employees of the City of Ghent and its Public Centre of Social Welfare (OCMW). City Secretary Mieke Hullebroeck and HR-project leader Kristof Cazaerck relate…

She is sitting on the couch and she’s crying her eyes out. When I ask what happened, she says she heard that she got kicked out of the squad; a group of classmates who always hang out together during recess. “Otherwise you are ‘lonly’,” she adds. ‘Lonly’. That’s how she pronounces it. Later, when she shows me her Messenger, I notice that’s how she writes it, too. ‘Lonely’ it is indeed: even at her age loneliness is the most terrible thing that can happen to you.rijft ze het ook, zie ik als ze me even later een berichtje op Messenger laat zien. ‘Lonely’, dus, juist: ook op haar leeftijd is eenzaamheid al het ergste dat je kan overkomen.

Previous articles showed that a positive focus is essential in jointly tackling problems we are confronted with as individuals, organisations and society. We also saw that we best view these different worlds as one whole; one cannot exist without the other. This series of articles calls for investing in six different dimensions and thus contributing to more positive focus and well-being. In this last article, we will focus on the last two dimensions: autonomy and positive relationships.

In our series on positive focus, we look at current insights into personal and social well-being. Last time the first two elements were discussed; the importance of self-acceptance and the setting of life goals. In this article, we go deeper into the ability to shape our environment as a prerequisite for a positive focus. The pursuit of development also contributes to this, and thus personal growth is also covered.

If you would ask my peers to describe me in a few words, you would quite often hear the word ‘latecomer’. That’s not because of bad will, far from it, but rather from my own peculiar notion of the concept of ‘time’ which points to another, strong underlying desire: the desire to live life to the fullest and therefore to fill up even the smallest gaps in my agenda. In combination with the ‘natural born enthusiast’ that I am, this leads to a wide array of commitments for which the wish to say ‘yes’ is often much greater than the rational, conservative ‘no’. I love it, but it means that I’m always on the run (often not only in a manner of speaking). I end up eating my homemade sandwiches on the train and when I go for a ‘quick run around the block’ I (sub)consciously forget to include shower time. As a result, I am sometimes late for meetings with friends and I hope they forgive me.

“In the temping business, changes occur at a fast pace with many ups and downs. As an agent, you’re constantly at the forefront of those changes and at the same time you can’t lose sight of the human aspect. During the ups, and certainly the downs, you have to be forward-looking. We need our street skills on a daily basis,” says Jan Verbeke and Véronique Van de Peer from the temping agency Synergie Belgium. They have three keywords for the StreetwiZe trainings: innovative, inspiring and eye-opening.

In the previous article, we presented positive focus as a non-negotiable condition to collectively solve problems that we are confronted with as individuals, as organisations and as a society. We discussed the importance of seeing the different worlds we evolve in, both professionally and privately, as one. This resulted from the observation that positive focus goes hand in hand with the pursuit of well-being. In this second article, we focus on the six dimensions of personal well-being and zoom in on two of them; self-acceptance and purpose in life. At StreetwiZe • Mobile School we attach a lot of importance to evidence-based working, and we elaborate the meaning of a concept before asking ourselves how we will go about it. In management theory, there is a tendency to reinvent the wheel and abandon indicators used in other disciplines such as individual and social psychology. Starting from the irrational assumption that each era has its own unique challenges we tend to invent new models and biased labels. That is a pity as, when speaking about essential concepts such as positivity and well-being, we would do better to focus on what we already know rather than on what we assume.

It feels as if cynicism has been elevated to an art of living in Flanders. Constantly expressing criticism and raising potential problems are not unfamiliar to us. Nevertheless, this widespread attitude is not completely harmless. Individuals, society and organisations are under permanent pressure and approaching situations with a cynical attitude just doesn’t do the trick anymore. We have to focus on the positive side. This article investigates the importance of a positive focus and how to bring it about sustainably.

"I learnt a lot about empathy and I have realised how lucky I am,” says Konrad Przemek. Konrad is Country Commercial Manager at Vandemoortele. The group of Vandemoortele leaders has just finished its StreetwiZe expedition at Campus Ruiselede of community institution De Zande. De Zande hosts youngsters who have committed a crime or who suffer from a complex or difficult family situation. The expedition members have to complete a challenging assignment: develop a new educational game with the youngsters that fits their living environment and that can be used on the mobile school afterwards.

StreetwiZe is officially certified as a B Corporation and joins the global movement of businesses that contribute to a sustainable and responsible society. Businesses with a social and/or ecological impact, who take responsibility, are transparent and contribute to the economy of the future, can receive the certificate. StreetwiZe is only the fourth Belgian B Corp.