Beijing, China. A report on the annual meeting of the Institute for Human and Organizational Development (Institut für Mensch- und Organisationsentwicklung).
From April 20 to 25, 2026, Beijing served as the venue for the annual meeting of around 50 people whose daily practice centers on human and organizational development grounded in an anthroposophical foundation. With the aim of revitalizing the developmental impulses of Rudolf Steiner and Bernard Lievegoed, Adriaan Bekman founded the Institut für Mensch-und Organisationsentwicklung (IMO) in 2005 when he was a consultant at the NPI. Today, the Institute comprises nearly 60 independent consultants working across eleven countries for more than 400 institutions and companies. The annual meeting is one of the highlights of the IMO calendar. It serves as a forum for exchanging experiences, collaborative research and professional development, as well as joint activities.
This year, particular emphasis was placed on delving into themes related to the anthroposophical understanding of the human being, the development of the soul, and the “Saturn Path” as described by Steiner, with the goal of deriving concrete, forward-looking approaches for organizational development. According to Steiner, the Age of the Consciousness Soul calls for something more than merely the continuous improvement of existing organizational structures and processes. As Bernard Lievegoed writes in his book Man on the Threshold: “The Consciousness Soul stands amidst this great field of tension (Saturn–Moon), and it must be capable of enduring it. A prerequisite for this, however, is a central sphere—an intermediary realm—whose forces are capable of spanning the arc from one cosmic midnight to the next. Put differently: a scope of such consciousness is possessed only by a great initiate. As long as we have not yet attained this, we remain dependent on external assistance—assistance, however, not from hierarchical beings (which would only render us unfree and dependent), but rather from social institutions that foster the healthy unfolding of the Consciousness Soul in its threefold nature.” (Transl.)
In this spirit, working on deeper questions of social development and developing approaches that do not come across as didactic but rather as encouraging to both individuals and organizations, constitutes an essential element of the IMO’s annual gatherings. The development of self-managing teams within Brazilian companies serves as a prime example in this regard, as do new approaches to leadership and organizational development at Dutch Waldorf schools, the systemic-evolutionary approach in Italian companies, and the developmental paths of private educational institutions in Beijing. The next gathering of the IMO development community will take place in Padua in 2027.
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Translation Paula Boslau
Image IMO
