Stories & cases

Every year, B Lab recognizes the top-performing B Corps creating the greatest impact through their businesses. Honorees are recognized for having the highest environmental, community, customer, worker and overall impact by earning a score in the top 10% on the B Impact Assessment.

Today is Valentine’s Day, the commercial feast of love. Now, everyone who at this moment is in one, or several, romantic relationships, will fully agree with me that upholding it sometimes requires resilience and flexibility. Some of us succeed wonderfully, others not. In the first 50 years of marriage a little less than one in two marriages end in divorce. The divorce rate, the relationship between marriages and the resulting number of divorces, is 408 in 1,000 marriages.

You may have missed it, but I live in Eke. This metropolis is characterised by the presence of a Makro and nowadays you’ll even hear its name on the national traffic news because of the long traffic jams on the N60. Talk about progress. Like every municipality, Eke has a church with a decreasing number of members, a chips shop where you can also find vegetarian vegetable rolls besides the traditional minced-meat hot dog, and a few cafes. The nearby container park would complete this idyllic picture, but for the fact that it is almost exclusively accessible during office hours. Luckily we also have a lot of ‘glass-recycling containers' in our region so that the locals can discretely get rid of the numerous empty bottles on a clear Sunday morning.

In the previous article we ended with the proposition that if an organisation wants to work with agility or resilience, it must first of all work with the current and desired culture. It is important here that the focus is on challenging the prevailing assumptions so that the capacity of the system to cope with changes increases systematically. We also stated that 4 assumptions that characterise a culture are important: questions about people (1), questions about relationships (2), questions about the environment (3) and questions about the world (4). In this article we will take a closer look at assumptions about people.

“The stories of street children put everyday events in perspective” quotes Stefaan Deneef from Coca Cola European Partners in Ghent. Together with his colleagues Nicolas Vaninbroukx and Steven Vanderstraeten, he mentions their StreetwiZe programme.

"Every generation blames the one before" is the opening sentence of "The Living Years", a beautiful song by Mike & The Mechanics from 1989 that achieved number 1 in Australia, Canada and the United States. The phrase remains relevant twenty years later. Just as our children want to do things differently and, according to them, better than their parents, so do new organisations, with their working methods, believe that progress is being made through these applications. But is that really so?

A meagre 2% of change projects go as initially planned. Embedding enduring changes and leaving behind dogged habits and adopting new habits repeatedly seems to be very hard indeed. Literature offers a wide variety of methods to help cope with changes and this (rather light) review offers easy-going and to the point insights to the world-famous ‘Switch’, courtesy of the Heath brothers. It is one of the reference works mentioned in the StreetwiZe workshop Leading Change.

"The way StreetwiZe organises their workshops forces employees to step out of their daily routine. After a year collaborating with StreetwiZe, our people take initiative, responsibility and ownership." Ward Dejaegher from AHOVOKS reflects on a year-long StreetwiZe experience.

As a young woman should I not have been busy doing more pleasant things? It’s the ’90s, somewhere in Antwerp. At home I had just announced the title of my thesis and my mother expressed concerns that she had been feeling for some time.

A heroic quote, courtesy of Michael Jordan. But what could you do about it if you’re one of those poor souls who seem to only live through the first part of the sentence? What if you’re in one of those periods when you only seem to be successful in failing?

Why did I choose to become a coach at StreetwiZe? Very simple, because in StreetwiZe, I see my interest for social entrepreneurship and my sense of exclusion and injustice reflected. And also because I dare to dream about what is and about what could be. My favourite quote? ‘Bigger is not better, better is better, and if it’s better, bigger will take care of itself’.

Nowadays, raising religion as a discussion topic at a party doesn’t exactly seem to be the most effective means of winning the hearts, let alone the souls, of your company. We see churches emptying all over Europe and the influence of the Catholic doctrine on its members rapidly waning. Since religion has disappeared, we as human beings are, of course, diligently looking for alternative explanations for the questions and difficulties of life such as insecurity, injustice and suffering.

Some things in life are certain. First: my body will mercilessly remind me that I can no longer spend nights drinking copious amounts of alcohol while twisting and turning myself in demanding ways that are supposed to be recognisable as dancing. In other words: I’m getting older. Second: I am not only being confronted with this new reality by the rueful looks of my kids. Today, every social media channel is harassing me constantly with notifications of birthdays and anniversaries and other such tragic events. Last week I received, on LinkedIn, the ominous message that I should celebrate my work anniversary: 10 years at StreetwiZe.

Hans Lamberts is StreetwiZe Partner but over the last two years he also became Master Trainer for Mobile School. Early this summer he took off to Thessaloniki, to kick-start a new mobile school.

“What I really appreciate about the StreetwiZe-training is the way in which our coaches, Hans and Eric, take our context as a starting point and totally empathise with it. Our employees can immediately apply what they learn,” says Mieke Pareyn, HRTeam Leader at Scania Parts Logistics in Opglabbeek.

“The purpose of StreetwiZe • Mobile School and our purpose are the same: to actively support people and organisations in their growth”, say CEO Peter Verschelden and Project Lead Sally Strijbos of Moore Stephens Belgium, an accountancy and consulting company. Funnily enough, the link between StreetwiZe and Moore Stephens Belgium started with a competition.

I was born in February 1974 as youngest of 2 children. Until I was 6, I lived in Schaarbeek where my father worked in the family business, but I spent most of my youth in Tervuren. My parents built a house there, in a quiet street with a lot of young and mostly international families. Every available moment we gathered with the kids of the neighbourhood. Moreover, my grandparents lived nearby. They had greenhouses and a huge vegetable garden. We were allowed almost anything there! It was a fantastic and carefree period.

How can you bring alive one culture in a large local governmental structure? By people-to-people dialogues, by inspiring and by showing the positive side of change, step by step. StreetwiZe developed a cultural change trajectory for 10,000 employees of the City of Ghent and its Public Centre of Social Welfare (OCMW). City Secretary Mieke Hullebroeck and HR-project leader Kristof Cazaerck relate…

She is sitting on the couch and she’s crying her eyes out. When I ask what happened, she says she heard that she got kicked out of the squad; a group of classmates who always hang out together during recess. “Otherwise you are ‘lonly’,” she adds. ‘Lonly’. That’s how she pronounces it. Later, when she shows me her Messenger, I notice that’s how she writes it, too. ‘Lonely’ it is indeed: even at her age loneliness is the most terrible thing that can happen to you.

Previous articles showed that a positive focus is essential in jointly tackling problems we are confronted with as individuals, organisations and society. We also saw that we best view these different worlds as one whole; one cannot exist without the other. This series of articles calls for investing in six different dimensions and thus contributing to more positive focus and well-being. In this last article, we will focus on the last two dimensions: autonomy and positive relationships.

When you’re a kid, people tend to ask what you want to become when you grow up. I systematically answered: “I will make this world a better place!”. Even if, over the years, my childish naivety became healthy idealism, I am still motivated by making a difference. That difference does not have to be on a global scale, on the contrary. Making a difference, however small and every day again, is what makes me tick!

In our series on positive focus, we look at current insights into personal and social well-being. Last time the first two elements were discussed; the importance of self-acceptance and the setting of life goals. In this article, we go deeper into the ability to shape our environment as a prerequisite for a positive focus. The pursuit of development also contributes to this, and thus personal growth is also covered.

If you would ask my peers to describe me in a few words, you would quite often hear the word ‘latecomer’. That’s not because of bad will, far from it, but rather from my own peculiar notion of the concept of ‘time’ which points to another, strong underlying desire: the desire to live life to the fullest and therefore to fill up even the smallest gaps in my agenda. In combination with the ‘natural born enthusiast’ that I am, this leads to a wide array of commitments for which the wish to say ‘yes’ is often much greater than the rational, conservative ‘no’. I love it, but it means that I’m always on the run (often not only in a manner of speaking). I end up eating my homemade sandwiches on the train and when I go for a ‘quick run around the block’ I (sub)consciously forget to include shower time. As a result, I am sometimes late for meetings with friends and I hope they forgive me.

In the previous article, we presented positive focus as a non-negotiable condition to collectively solve problems that we are confronted with as individuals, as organisations and as a society. We discussed the importance of seeing the different worlds we evolve in, both professionally and privately, as one. This resulted from the observation that positive focus goes hand in hand with the pursuit of well-being. In this second article, we focus on the six dimensions of personal well-being and zoom in on two of them; self-acceptance and purpose in life. At StreetwiZe • Mobile School we attach a lot of importance to evidence-based working, and we elaborate the meaning of a concept before asking ourselves how we will go about it. In management theory, there is a tendency to reinvent the wheel and abandon indicators used in other disciplines such as individual and social psychology. Starting from the irrational assumption that each era has its own unique challenges we tend to invent new models and biased labels. That is a pity as, when speaking about essential concepts such as positivity and well-being, we would do better to focus on what we already know rather than on what we assume.

“In the temping business, changes occur at a fast pace with many ups and downs. As an agent, you’re constantly at the forefront of those changes and at the same time you can’t lose sight of the human aspect. During the ups, and certainly the downs, you have to be forward-looking. We need our street skills on a daily basis,” says Jan Verbeke and Véronique Van de Peer from the temping agency Synergie Belgium. They have three keywords for the StreetwiZe trainings: innovative, inspiring and eye-opening.

It feels as if cynicism has been elevated to an art of living in Flanders. Constantly expressing criticism and raising potential problems are not unfamiliar to us. Nevertheless, this widespread attitude is not completely harmless. Individuals, society and organisations are under permanent pressure and approaching situations with a cynical attitude just doesn’t do the trick anymore. We have to focus on the positive side. This article investigates the importance of a positive focus and how to bring it about sustainably.

"I learnt a lot about empathy and I have realised how lucky I am,” says Konrad Przemek. Konrad is Country Commercial Manager at Vandemoortele. The group of Vandemoortele leaders has just finished its StreetwiZe expedition at Campus Ruiselede of community institution De Zande. De Zande hosts youngsters who have committed a crime or who suffer from a complex or difficult family situation. The expedition members have to complete a challenging assignment: develop a new educational game with the youngsters that fits their living environment and that can be used on the mobile school afterwards.

StreetwiZe is officially certified as a B Corporation and joins the global movement of businesses that contribute to a sustainable and responsible society. Businesses with a social and/or ecological impact, who take responsibility, are transparent and contribute to the economy of the future, can receive the certificate. StreetwiZe is only the fourth Belgian B Corp.