​​​Hi, this is Volker here. Making a long story short: I am suffering from a developmental trauma, which along the way enabled me to build safe structures, help team leaders and team members to connect with themselves and others, and unleash their potential together. 

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​How it all began.

We are all children of our time. My time was to grow up in the 70ties an 80ties on a farm in rural Schleswig-Holstein in a line of men that bring up boys like me (playful, intelligent, challenging) through humiliation. Till today it is sometimes difficult for me to articulate myself, because I was not understood, and not allowed to take space for explanations. Success in school and football, where I actually allowed myself to fight and win, at least for 90min, were my escape from feeling not okay or guilty.

Irrepressible however was my curiosity. I wanted to find out how live and everything works. 

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Studies and first work.

It was horrible to study in a way: so many others there, me, the village boy without self esteem. I remember my heart racing in front of the bord announcing our marks. I was curious to understand how everything works in organizations, so I liked to study business, particularly organizational theory and controlling. Then... McKinsey said, I was smart, but they could not let me to their clients. Somehow I made it into a smaller version, founded by ex-McKinseys, consulting firm for controlling. Later I had nightmares of working there for more than a decade. The good thing was it made me think more about culture as something relevant, while seeing the KPI, BI systems and management fashions of that time that we were building for corporates were good but far from great.

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Anthropology

With a grant from the federal ministry of education in my pocket, and the question of "The transferability of western management techniques to companies in Poland" in my head I made it to the remarkable place of Frankfurt Oder at the German Polish border. Not only Poland was calling me. As I found all the interesting books with a professor of cultural anthropology, I was able and thrilled to switch from business into anthropology. Particularly the work of Niklas Luhmann pulled me in. I still have an erotic relationship with Luhmann's social system theory and cybernetic classics like Gothard Günther. 

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Theory was my first love, and it probably will also be my last.

There is nothing more practical than a good theory. For traumatized people theory is great, because you can take hold. The downside is, you are busy theorizing while live is growing it's golden trees, as Goethe puts it. I am not the scientific theorist though, I never liked the politics in science and the opinions many scientists seem to hide within their scientific truths.  I am more of a practical theorist, that tries to look into the world. Answering questions and trying to make sense while traveling the world and experiencing it. That brought me deeply into psychology, and physics as the missing parts of Luhmanns almost grand theory. Also, I was deeply interested in spirituality and healing. I started out with Buddhist meditation but pretty soon went on the Sufi Dervish path, that was magically calling me, and my ego too. Back then I liked that the Sufis although mystics still had a God to call (a trace of my Christian although not very dogmatic upbringing). I still love the wisdom and stories, the honorable heritage or Rumi, Shams and the others. May God save their secrets. My worldview is still in line with Sufism. The Sufi practices and cult (as much an as any cult) however as I have tasted them are not very strong and not good. There are stronger practices in Shamanism, in the Osho line of wisdom, in Buddhism, particularly in Vipassana meditation, or energy oriented yoga and tantra, and of course in Western Psychology. Particularly the mindbody or dreambody oriented psychology of Arnold Mindell caught my attention, which is next to others like the work of Robert Kegan, Will Schutz and many others are deeply reflected in Groof.

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Startups 

My first startup was the neighborhood network Polly & Bob, two neighbors that have found out its worth it to spend time together. Here I wanted to use the digital to bring us together in the neighborhood turning it into something we call home. My idea was to create a global net of neighborhood enthusiasts that make their neighborhoods more lively and lovely. I learned community is not an easy thing, especially with some abc-holes in it. It failed out of many reasons. I was not able to build a team, the time was not ready for paid social networks that were owned by its users, etc. etc.

My second startup was about another daring question I had: what is love and how (in this world) can we have fulfilling love relationships? I was in a terrible love relationship, on off, forth and back, a tragedy, that made me dive into relationship psychology. It was only then that I understood that I was traumatized, and my nervous system is fooling me, imprisoning me while operating to keep me safe. With two well-respected and experienced couple therapists from California I built an app that helps trigger-couples to train their autonomous nervous system. The vision was to build the Elephant School, a school of Love & Relationships where I also invented courses for couples and helping daters to go through the path. Even though I had thousands of downloads and could help some couples, I even attract an investor I left it as I felt I was too big of an imposter as I couldn't get into a loving relationship myself.  ​

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Groof

So here I am back, the org-nerd that I am, into organizational development and teaming applying everything I learned about me, the world, culture, psychology, social systems, agile coaching, scrum mastering, and consulting that paid my bills along the way. Steve Jobs once said, "The dots connect at the end." Let's see! My aim with Groof is to build a non-creepy Org AI, that helps organizations to thrive and people to live fulfilling work lives. We, working together, are too often caught in proemial structures of mind, which are the structures in which our communication operates and to which our thinking is structurally coupled to. That is why Groof is working on culture and habits (social system) and at the same time on psychological structures in body-mind systems (a nicer word: us humans), to get hold of the proemial structures and liberate us through awareness. This is not a manifest to take everything easy, it is a manifest and a call to feel, and from there to tap into the energy, the aliveness that is driving us, the flame how Nietzsche called it, and grow over ourselves in a team that thrives. AI is a big hope to help us to recoqnize what we are as humans in our caughtness and imprisonment in language. We can turn AI into a helper and liberator of all of us, because it can detect morphograms of communication that we can not see, and help us to get over it. Therefore we have to show that our Org AI is more productive then surveillance related AI systems that are popping up now.