50 Jahre Zukunft des Organisierens

What does an organization sound like? The laughter coming from the kitchenette, the cracking connection in the zoom call or the funny anecdote from the last town hall meeting immediately come to mind. But what does an organization’s

past sound like? What are the voices of its history? Voices and expressions alone can tell us a lot if we listen to the years 1972, 1992 or 2022.

Between workshops and corridor gossip: the history of Metaplan can be experienced in an unusual sound space thanks to the Berlin artists’ collective Fünfzehn. The wonderful sound collage they have created from archive material and current Metaplan sources takes you back more than 50 years. Various elements were woven together – original material from workshops, such as the Siemens conference with more than 700 executives from the 1970s, intermixed with the in-house anniversary zoom call, at which all Metaplanners toasted the 50th anniversary on April 1, 2022. In honor of this, the Berlin musician Johannes Stickel (aka Popstickel) composed a Metaplan rap especially for the occasion. You can also hear Metaplan colleagues reading from the annals in the archives. In the 1990s, for example, Niklas Luhmann announced his visit to Quickborn to present his theses on membership and organization as a social system. An announcement that created great expectations. One more question: where do people listen best? Probably not when senior

management makes a company-wide announcement. People may listen, but they don’t necessarily pay attention. We found a place where we think our guests and workshop participants have the time and space to listen – in the restrooms. Not necessarily a silent place, so why not listen to something different here? In Japan, it is commonplace and acceptable to underline the most human of sounds with other sounds, for example music; here, it is sound excerpts from Metaplan’s history that can be heard.