Two days in Hamburg for Kreissparkasse Diepholz

Kreissparkasse Diepholz wanted to open its entire leadership level to the future – not with an impulse talk in its own building, but outside, at companies going through that change themselves.

FUTURE CANDY organised the whole trip: selecting and approaching the hosts, scheduling, shuttles, hotel, catering and the framing content of a kick-off and closing workshop. From a longlist of Hamburg companies – from Airbus through Beiersdorf to FC St. Pauli – a programme was curated that is deliberately outside the sector: a savings bank learns more from a newsroom and a logistics AI start-up than from the next bank.

The contact on the client side was Claus Nordsieck, member of the board and responsible for transformation. The group was accompanied by Nick Sohnemann and Kira Weisgerber.

The stated aim of the trip: hands-on insights into innovative business models and current future topics from different industries. Not as theory, but as best cases – how companies deal with constant change and bring their employees along.

A leadership team takes four things away from a trip like this: an opened mindset, exchange with people who otherwise never appear in the calendar, many start-ups and corporates at once in a short time – and the transfer to its own business model, captured in writing in the closing workshop.

Because the whole group travelled together – board members and division heads side by side – something else emerged that an in-house workshop rarely achieves: a shared frame of reference. Anyone who has seen the same eight companies over two days discusses their own strategy differently afterwards.

The format behind it – curated visits, a fixed workshop frame, everything organised – is the same one we use to travel to China, Silicon Valley or Heilbronn: our innovation journeys.