System Thinking at a departmental retreat of the City of Leipzig on the topic of recruiting and retaining skilled workers

System Thinking at a departmental retreat of the City of Leipzig on the topic of recruiting and retaining skilled workers
Saxony (Germany)
The Department VII - Youth, School and Democracy of the City of Leipzig was newly founded. Within this framework, the process for systematic change management was in place, which included the development of a common vision, the derivation of strategic goals and the selection of measures.

In September 2022, a retreat was held with almost 60 participants to discuss how to improve the recruitment and retention of skilled workers. The System Thinking and System Dynamics method was used as an approach to address this issue. This approach is suitable for tackling challenges in complex and dynamic systems, taking into account their adaptive nature.

In addition to content-related methodological inputs, exercises were carried out in smaller groups in order to get to know the process of working with the method and to gain initial insights. First, trends and behaviour over time were outlined. These helped to identify essential starting points for common understanding in the chosen topic of the retreat. Afterwards, these topics were used as variables to sketch system diagrams to document the common understanding.

For documentation purposes, the participants' sketches of trends and system diagrams were digitised. In addition, a first analysis of a system diagram was made to show the possibilities of the method and to give first insights.