When Elenor’s professional journey led her into the context of organizations and businesses, some 25 years ago, she engaged in it from her vocational background of social work and social systems theory (in Germany and the USA, where a scholarship enabled her to finish a Master of Social Work). She understood from this professional perspective that successful change requires inner-personal and interpersonal work as well as contextual change of structures, processes and regulation. Building her craft, she engaged in extensive and ongoing training while practicing as an organizational consultant, trainer and coach, leading and guiding ever more complex transformations. She draws from experience with a broad range of industries, business sizes and frameworks (from TQM, BPR, communication, project and change management frameworks to Scrum, Kanban, Design Thinking, etc.) and has worked with teams on all hierarchical levels, as well as entire organizations. 

Elenor’s fascination with a systemic perspective on stuckness in transformational processes has then led her to explore frameworks of self-organization and distributed authority, like Holacracy. She repeatedly experienced how great initiatives led by skilled managers and personally invested teams got stuck, visionary objectives watered down and all involved parties, despite their best efforts, spiraled into conflict, frustration and disengagement. Driven by curiosity and a growing unease with the gap between humanity’s capacity for sensemaking and collective agency on one side and global challenges on the other, Elenor set out to explore and prototype new forms of collaboration and personal development.

Her current work involves Holacracy coaching, as well as social-emotional and cognitive development in personal and interpersonal settings whilst building Xpreneurs, a For-Purpose Enterprise in the German-speaking market with partners from Switzerland and Germany and engaging in a global ecosystem of self-organization and adult development coaches. She also acts as trainer and assessor for Holacracy certified coaches. As a mother to three children and two grown-up stepdaughters, she is deeply committed to (and humbly challenged by) developing an authentic and mindful family life in a time of digital addiction and excessive resource exploitation. She enjoys being out in the mountains with kids and friends or alone, thinking challenging questions, cooking, building friendships with refugees, painting, singing, laughing and illuminated landscapes, amongst many other beautiful things.