Integralead Intensive: Structuring Teams for Self-Organizing
A full day in person leadership development deep dive for changemakers.
June 20th 2026, 9:30-17:00
“Too much structure kills creativity – let’s just go with the flow!”
“We keep having the same conversations over and over and what I thought were agreements are being broken constantly”
Do these two sentiments sound familiar? Often groups that try to organize in a less hierarchical way experience a tension around how much structure is enough or too much. In this training we’re going to understand the principles behind developing an effective organizational structure and tools for supporting your team to reflect on it’s relationship with structure – so you can be a catalyst for effective and joyful collaboration.
Who is this for?
This training is for you if you recognize yourself in this description:
- You are part of an initiative or organisation for the common good.
- You feel (co-)responsible for the success of your initiative.
- Often you find yourself reducing the complexity of the experience for others by bringing proposals, helping to structure the work, pointing out risks or asking people to uphold agreements.
- When your initiative is not doing well you are one of the people who are likely to lose sleep.
- At the same time you are unsure how much power to claim in your group. Ideally you’d like to work on an eye level with everyone, but it’s not always easy to find ways of doing so that feel good.
- Sometimes you feel under a lot of pressure to bring clarity because you are one of the ones others tend to look to for orientation when the going gets hard.
Leadership is the collective practice of enabling each other to act for a shared purpose in the face of uncertainty.
What you’ll get
The Integralead Intensive is designed for 3 main purposes:
- Provide a space for people like you to take a breath, reflect and learn in a relaxed environment
- Support the forming of peer relationships across initiatives and borders, that you can lean on beyond the duration of this training
- Expose you to useful frameworks around leadership that can inspire your development as someone who takes responsibility for a shared vision.
Topics we’ll cover:
- Leadership as 5 collective practices: telling stories, cultivating relationships, structuring teams, strategizing, facilitating action.
- Scales of Collaboration: what are groups of different sizes good for and what do they need to function well?
- Minimum Viable Structure: How much structure is just enough, but not too much?
- Shared rhythms: How do we settle into a shared rhythm as a team, to reduce scheduling overhead and make sure we spend time on the things that really matter?
If you’ve participated in our online training series “Integralead Essentials” some of these topics may sound familiar. It’s worth joining the in person training anyway – we’ll dive deeper in to each of them during the Intensive. If you haven’t participated in the online training, don’t worry – there’s no pre-requisites to joining.
In our participatory and experiential learning approach our main priority is to meet you and all participants where you’re at and shape the experience together with you. You’ll have a chance to contribute with your own knowledge and experience as well as shape the direction of the training by asking for what you are most interested in.
What PRevious Participants have to say
The team
Jan Horzela is a community organizer with many years of experience in facilitating group processes. In the years 2007-2015 he worked as an educator in Warsaw in a socio-therapeutic youth center for young people at risk of social exclusion. Since 2016, he has focused on creating spaces for social activation and supporting social movements through various projects using art, pedagogy and other approaches. To combine his knowledge in facilitation and political education, he co-founded the Civil Action Network. Over the years he’s found that challenges in groups often arise around questions of power and leadership. That’s why Jan is excited to share his experience in the frame of this training.
Jonas Gröner is a professionally trained and certified leadership coach, community-builder, and facilitator strongly committed to the regenerative paradigm. He’s been working in self-organized contexts from permaculture farms to start-ups, co-ops, and non-profits for the past 10 years and is passionate about supporting people with a vision for a world that works for all life, to find ways of putting that vision into action by cultivating resilient relationships, networks and communities. He sees that the world around us is becoming increasingly uncertain and that great leaders are those who can help others to act in the face of that uncertainty. That’s why he cares about supporting more people to develop these capacities.
Practical Information
We’ll start on Saturday morning at 9:30 and end around 17:00, with a 60min lunch break. Participating partially unfortunately won’t be possible.
The training will be held in English and German.
What it costs
240€ if your organization is paying.
160€ for individual activists.
We recognize that resources are often scarce in passion driven social change projects. That’s why we want to keep this program as financially accessible as possible. If the prices above are inaccessible for you, please reach out to us (jonas.groener@civilactionnet) and we’re happy to figure something out.
FAQ
I can’t participate in the whole Training – can I just come for a portion of it?
Unfortunately it won’t be possible to only partially participate. We really believe in creating a space of inquiry, reflection and transformation together. Those goals require more focus and people coming and leaving throughout the time doesn’t support a transformative process.
I haven’t participated in any Integralead trainings before. Can I still attend?
Absolutely! As long as you recognize yourself in the “Who you are” section further up, this event is for you. We will give our best to create a level playing field at the beginning of the gathering. If you have any doubts, please let us know!
What does leadership have to do with grassroots groups?
In some grassroots communities, leadership has become synonymous with outdated models of hierarchy and exclusion. People may reject concepts like “top-down leadership,” meritocracy and instead champion equality, consensus, and inclusivity. While these values are vital, they can sometimes lead to environments where leadership itself is viewed with suspicion, causing a lack of structure, clarity, and shared purpose that hampers the group’s potential. We understand “leadership” as accepting responsibility for creating conditions that enable others to achieve common goals in the face of uncertainty. We want to support a process of integration past oppressive leadership paradigms and emerge with a clear, grounded and skilled, developmental approach to it. In our experience this perspective on leadership is highly relevant also for grassroots groups.
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