Reinventing Circus Organisations is a project of four European social circus organizations - CIRQUEON from the Czech Republic, Coraggio from Germany, Cirkus Cirkor from Sweden and Cirkus in Beweging from Belgium. The project contains nine international activities aiming to improve the skills of the staff members of the organizations in the field of leadership, management, and communication. The partner organizations joined together in this partnership with their need to change the actual structures of their organization to be able to provide good working space for their staff, the efficient reaching of their goals and treating their clients, students and partners as well as possible. The partners feel that the common hierarchical management of organizations is not suitable for the 21st century anymore, especially while working in the social and youth work and want to adapt themselves to the challenges of this time and challenges yet to come. As a guide to this change, they chose the book Reinventing Organisations by Belgian author Frederic Laloux. In total there are 60 mobilities planned in the project that will be spread between the four organizations equally and will be divided between managers, coordinators, tutors and admin workers. The participants will get a chance to meet their peers from the European social circus community and learn how to improve their skills and through them to change the structure of their organization. The project activities count 4 meetings of management staff, 4 study visits of tutors and admin workers and 1 evaluation meeting combining both groups of participants. The activities will consist of discussions, lectures, sharing of best practices, observing and job shadowing, individual and group work, research and studying of literature. The participants will be encouraged to continue in their progress after the end of the activities as well. The expected result of the project is the change of the organizational structure and leadership and management practices of the four partner organizations resulting in being more successful in reaching their goal of bringing the benefits of social circus practices to as many people as possible. The project will impact not only the four of our organizations and their staff members but also their stakeholders such as students or clients, collaborators, local, regional and national communities. We will share our experience and newly learned know-how with other professionals and organizations in the European social circus community.
The main objective of the project was to further develop the organizational structure of our organizations to be able to provide a good working environment for our employees, students, and associated partners but also for the community surrounding us. We felt that the classical hierarchical management of organizations is no longer suitable for the 21st century, especially when working in the social and youth departments, and we wanted to adapt to the challenges of this time and the challenges yet to come. As part of the formation of the thematic guidelines of the project, which accompanied us for the three years of its duration, we defined four basic frameworks that followed us through individual activities of the project - Organizational Structure, Human Resources, Everyday Life, and Main Organizational Processes. Based on the sharing of experiences and the guidelines offered in the book Reinventing Organizations, we decided to move from horizontal management to management using "self-managing" groups to implement more individual responsibility, and democratic principles, sharing the common goal and improving the efficiency of our everyday workflow.
All the partner organizations participated in various European projects before this one therefore we had a history of collaborating on different projects mainly focused on artistic and pedagogical exchange. During informal meetings we came across some very similar issues that we are facing in our respective organizations – the organizations were growing bigger, hiring new people and we found ourselves in a situation where we felt like the gap between the “hall” (pedagogues, students) and the “office” (management, administration) is getting bigger and we were cautious about losing the common goal and mission of the organization. At that time, we came across the book “Reinventing Organizations” by Belgian author Frederic Laloux. In this book, the author proposes a new organizational structure in which you retreat from a classical hierarchical structure towards self-managing teams to introduce more freedom, democracy, and openness but also personal growth and responsibility. At that point, we had an issue we felt needed to be addressed in our organization and a possible tool, that might help to reach the goal to create a better work environment for employees as well as for our students, clients, and local community.