Facilitation Playground: The Unexamined Organization — Mapping the Sources of Burnout
🎨 Playground: Practice facilitation, active learning, and workshop design. Host a session, try new methods, and get community feedback. Courage over perfection! ✨ Participation: Highly interactive, cameras on, breakouts, whiteboards.
Most wellbeing programs ask people to cope: manage your stress, breathe better, sleep more. Helpful? Sure. But do they ever ask why stress exists in the first place?
This workshop starts from a different question:
What if stress and burnout are not individual problems, but outcomes of how work itself is organized?
Inspired by Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society, participants will explore how organizational culture, rhythms of work, expectations of performance, and subtle ethical pressures shape everyday working life.
Through guided reflection and collaborative visual mapping, participants will examine how guilt, overwork, and exhaustion can be produced silently by systems, even in well-intentioned organizations.
Rather than offering solutions, this session provides a mirror: a way to reflect and to surface patterns that often remain invisible. Participants will leave with clearer insight into how wellbeing is shaped by leadership choices, organizational design, and cultural norms and why treating individuals alone is rarely enough.
🎁 What you'll leave with
Reframe burnout
Learn to see stress and burnout not only as individual issues, but as outcomes of how work is designed and culturally reinforced.Name the invisible
Gain language to describe guilt, overwork, positivity pressure, and self-exploitation at the organizational level.See the system at work
Uncover how narratives, rhythms, roles, and performance norms quietly shape behavior and exhaustion.Question before fixing
Leave with a set of systemic questions to pause, challenge assumptions, and examine organizational dynamics before jumping to solutions.
🗣 About our host:
Eleni Baltatzi is an L&D strategist and facilitator with 15+ years of experience.
She creates reflective learning spaces that help teams question assumptions, rethink how they work, and experiment with change. She is currently exploring the intersection of organizational learning and philosophy, with a focus on how big philosophical ideas can be translated into organizational practice.
She holds an MSc in Business Education and is completing a BSc in Philosophy.