Your typical conference is an enriching experience loaded with listening and questioning throughout the day, but what happens when you put these seemingly mundane concepts at the core of your workshop? Last week, we did just that at Urban Future 2025, hosting two sessions around practicing active listening as well as diving into the art of asking powerful questions.
Urban Future is one of the biggest conferences that tackles various aspects of urban sustainability and explores how we as individuals and communities can work together to drive change in our surroundings. It brings together a diverse crowd of established and aspiring sustainability experts and practitioners, bridging across different backgrounds and generations.
oikos and Urban Future have a fruitful relationship that goes back to 2022 which further evolved last year when we were given a space for hosting a workshop. Following its success and positive reception, we were once again given the opportunity to be a part of the conference program and this time we went even further by hosting not one but two workshops.
The two workshops were based on our flagship Leadership Program LEAP. It was exciting bringing LEAP elements into a whole new setting – traditionally, we have hosted these spaces for cohorts of young leaders in a specifically tailored program setting and atmosphere, which we adapted to bring the same experience to conference-goers while staying true to the core values of the workshop.
The Active Listening workshop set the stage for oikos as an almost full room of participants turned up. Hosted by current oikos Co-President Michael Winter and his recently elected successor Jule Neumann, who had a lot of fun making 40 conference goers actively and deeply listen to one another.
The participants shared their vastly positive feedback that included testimonials like:
The second workshop Guiding for Change was hosted by current oikos Co-President Patricija Zyzite and oikos Board member Maria Pawlowicz. While the first session was previously tried and tested outside of LEAP settings, Patricija and Maria rose up to the challenge of piloting uncharted territory. The slightly smaller group was more intimate and gave room to the participants to go from listening to asking powerful questions. Participants said about the workshop:
We are extremely happy that we could live up to what @Gerald Babel Suter said at the beginning of the conference “Be like a kid and start now”. We showed up as curious minds and we saw that this curiosity spread across our audiences. We are excited to see the new learned skills being applied to changing cities around Europe and make them more sustainable and regenerative places to live.
Looking back at the conference, we are proud to have been given the opportunity to enrich the experience of the attendees and help them grow as human beings. Now we are looking forward to Urban Future 2026 in Ljubljana where we will be back and offer ever more leadership and inner development.
