'We can be as true to other people, as we are to ourselves’ ... the more we discover our story, the more diverse parts we integrate, the more authentic and congruent we become. When we reveal our inner fire, we touch other people and spread warmth into our surrounding.

After a bachelor in mathematics, I studied International Management in Paris, Oxford and Berlin. Working 13 years in international leadership and brandmanagement responsabilities , I started to explore Archetyping and Storytelling in Brand Building processes and have deepened my psychological curiosity by studying process work for Facilitation, Leadership and Coaching with the Deep Democracy Institute, San Francisco (US). 

My professional practice today as a facilitator and coach combines storytelling and narrative work with process oriented psychology. In this field of transformational storytelling I am also teaching at institutes like the HFF (Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen), ZSFB (Zentrum für Systemische Forschung und Beratung) and  Iana (Institut für Narrationsforschung). Further I initiated and hosted the Beyond Storytelling conference, the BST Partner network and a new co-creative training formate The Storygarage."

Privately, I am a passionate dancer and proud mother of three boys. ‚Such a dreamer, this child!’ that is what my family said, when I was young. Still true, I am a dreamer. Dreaming and sensitive listening are my main sources of inspiration, whereas my passion is to help dreams to become true .... like Walt Disney expressed so nicely: ,If you can dream it, you can do it’.

Supporting organizations, communities and teams in times of transformation to respond to their challenges is at the heart of my consulting and facilitation practice. Depending on the project, I support my clients with tailor made interventions, develop and implement holistic change and communication architectures or serve as a sparring partner and coach.

  Trained as an organizational psychologist, systemic consultant and facilitator I work internationally with profit and not-for–profit clients to ignite, facilitate and sustain change in their organizations and teams. I design and facilitate all kinds of meetings, processes and projects – from small and personal team building workshops to events with large groups and long-term transformation projects across all sectors and industries.

At the Centre for systemic consulting and reasearch, the university of Trier and other institutions, I lecture on systemic consulting, narrative practices and change management.

Together with others I initiated the BEYOND STORYTELLING network and community. In 2017 I edited the book "Beyond Storytelling – Narrative Ansätze und die Arbeit mit Geschichten in Organisationen"  published at Springer-Gabler. Since then. continue I continue to write on working with stories in organizations and organizational transformation and development. 

Anna works as Leadership Coach, Process Facilitator, Systemic Mediator and Organization Development Consultant across a broad range of industries. She supports leaders and teams in development, transforming crisis into breakthroughs, and unleashing creative processes.

She is a psychologist and economist with vast experience in team and executive coaching, culturally diverse groups facilitation and conflict mediation.

She assists leaders in growing over their edges to embrace new emerging possibilities and to use their power consciously in pursuit of their personal and organizational goals. As a team coach, she supports teams in boosting their performance and resilience through transforming diversity and tension into agile collaboration.

Drawing from her experience as an advisor to the Minister of Finance, University teacher, and researcher she helps her clients to integrate scientifically proved methods into practice of organizational reality.

As one of her clients described her ‘Anna creates a huge space of safety and challenge, supported by a foundation of authenticity and professional mastery. Her powers of observation and her repertoire of alternatives is extraordinary. She is a prototype of presence, effectiveness, and impact.’ 

 

„Storytelling“ is often associated with Content-Marketing and with advertising strategies, that build an emotional bridge to the customer. Leaders seek for narrative tricks to improve their persuasive power and companies are on a quest for their brand story.

But these aspects are just a very small part of the enormous possibilities that Storytelling offers to organizations! Storytelling as an umbrella term for narrative methods is a very powerful approach to organizations that face change processes.

Narrative methods work with the emotions, with the hidden value systems of the employees, and with the official and the secret corporate cultures. They heave tacit knowledge treasures of experts and they make gaps visible between prescribed and really lived norms and beliefs.

Working with the narrative approach means to listen to the messages beyond the words and to give words to the so far wordless assets of the organization and their members.

Having studied Psychology and systemic consulting, I specialized from the 90ies on at heaving hidden knowledge of organizations with narrative methods. I accompany them, when Leaving Experts urge the organization to prevent the loss of critical knowledge. I help them to find, to transfer and to preserve the experiences, Lessons Learned and Best Practices of project teams or whole business units. I find words, stories and metaphors for change, when mergers, new leaders or new strategies challenge the familiar norms and believes in the organizational culture.

“The shortest distance to the other is once around the world.”

Corporate culture starts with the people and the stories they tell. Because a word can open a world, how we speak, what we speak and the stories we tell define and become who we are. Seeing ourselves as human becomings the journey of telling and re-telling our stories does not have an end destination where we can rest forever in the bliss of having arrived; instead, the journey is about negotiating our identities in the multiplicity of stories that we call our lives.

After studying Philosophy, Sociology and Literature, founding two companies in the fields of communication and extensive travels in China and the Americas, I became a trainer for holistic learning and – through my encounters with David Denborough, Karl Tomm, David Epston, Chené Swart and Gunther Schmidt – finally a systemic coach with a narrative bias. Ready to use my communication experience to foster innovation and cultural transformation.

Narrative Work with People and/in Organizations goes far beyond the storytelling hype. It is about learning to avoid ways of speaking and listening that unintentionally express disrespect for others. We want to focus on ways of producing ourselves differently. It is a lifestyle and political project as much as coaching. We have learned to focus on personal deficits in ways that speak of failure rather than accomplishment, that produce social hierarchies (experts who often appear to know more about people´s lives than they do themselves), and that erode our sense of communal interdependence and common purpose.

Machines produce sameness. Human systems like organizations create diversity. The narrative approach helps to co-construct unity in diversity. An ambitious project. My heart feels young and curious. My life is about learning. Imagine if your organization would encourage this principle instead of pivoting on routines. Feel invited to follow me on Twitter @almblitz or WordPress http://almblitz.wordpress.com or contact me via e-mail wolfgang.tonninger@almblitz.com