The Story Behind Zusammenarbeit mit System
Why isn’t there a book about the Coverdale method?
That question stayed with me for many years. Entire libraries have been written about management, leadership, project work, and collaboration. At Coverdale, too, there has always been a wealth of knowledge: historical manuscripts, training materials, models, tools, and, above all, the experience of generations of consultants, trainers, and participants.
What was missing was a book that brought these ideas together into one coherent picture and showed how we understand and apply the systematic approach today.
The fact that this book has only now come into being has a great deal to do with Coverdale’s unique history. For decades, our knowledge was passed from person to person: through training programs, consulting processes, projects, and everyday collaboration. People experienced the approach, tried it out, reflected on it, and applied it in their own working environments. That is how it remained alive.
At the same time, I increasingly wanted to describe the thinking behind the approach in a way that would make it accessible beyond the training room.
That desire eventually became Zusammenarbeit mit System. But the story behind the book actually begins much earlier – at a Welsh steel company in the 1950s.
Where It All Began
In 1955, Ralph Coverdale was working for the Steel Company of Wales. Employees with excellent technical expertise were promoted into management positions and suddenly expected to plan, take responsibility, involve others, and achieve results together. They needed capabilities that did not automatically develop from technical expertise alone.
Together with Bernard Babington-Smith, his former tutor at the University of Oxford, Ralph began exploring new approaches to management development. In 1958, he developed one of his first training programs under the title “Getting things done together with other people.”
That one sentence already captures much of what Coverdale still stands for today: people bringing together their different capabilities in a way that produces a shared result.
The early training programs were highly practical learning environments. Participants worked in small groups on specific tasks. Individual members observed what happened while the group was working. Afterwards, the group reflected together: What helped us move forward? How did we communicate, make decisions, and plan? What do we want to deliberately keep or change when we tackle the next task?
In doing so, Ralph Coverdale and Bernard Babington-Smith connected two perspectives that remain essential today: the task and the process.
The insights gained from this work gradually developed into a systematic sequence: clarify the task, agree on objectives, gather relevant information, determine what needs to be done, plan, take action, and then review both the results and the way people worked together.
By 1965, this thinking had been formulated as “a systematic approach to getting things done.”
Footsteps or Honey
Among the historical documents, I came across a question from Bernard Babington-Smith that stayed with me throughout the writing process: Is what we pass on more like honey or more like footsteps?
Honey can be put into jars, stored, and shipped. Footsteps are created as someone walks a path. Anyone who wants to follow them has to walk that path themselves.
For many years, Coverdale was primarily about “footsteps.”
New trainers learned from experienced colleagues. They observed training programs, took responsibility for their first sessions, received feedback, and gradually developed their own competence. Models and training materials supported them, but their full meaning became clear through practical application and shared reflection.
This way of passing on knowledge preserved the experiential nature of our work. At the same time, much of that knowledge remained closely connected to individual people.
After Ralph Coverdale’s early death in 1975, his thinking lived on through colleagues, training designs, internal documents, and our work with clients. Perhaps that is why the book needed so many years to mature. It had to make the honey accessible without losing sight of the footsteps.
My Own Years at Coverdale
When I joined Coverdale in 2001, I, too, learned the approach through people and shared experiences.
Christine Peutsch-Jeannet was an important mentor during my first years. She gave me guidance and helped make many elements of the Coverdale approach tangible in practice.
Mike De Luca, then CEO of Coverdale in the UK, had an equally strong influence on me. Whenever I planned an activity simply because I had seen colleagues use it, Mike would consistently ask me: “What is the purpose of your intervention? What are you trying to achieve?”
Those questions changed the way I looked at our work.
What should be different for the participants at the end? How does an exercise contribute to the overall objective? What kind of experience is it intended to create?
I began to look beyond the visible methods and understand the thinking and logic behind them.
Since then, I have used the systematic approach in hundreds of training programs, projects, and consulting processes. Over those 25 years, the world of work has changed fundamentally. Today, people work in matrix, project, and network organizations. They work internationally, in hybrid settings, and across numerous organizational boundaries and interfaces.
And yet the original Coverdale idea has remained remarkably relevant. The framework is reliable, while its application remains flexible.
Over the years, I have also come to understand more clearly that its full impact emerges when the systematic approach is combined with lived values and strong interpersonal skills – listening, changing perspectives, dealing constructively with conflict, and being willing to share responsibility.
Taking the Step Toward a Book
The question of a book kept coming up.
Clients wanted something they could refer back to after a training program. Participants wanted to share the approach with their colleagues. New colleagues needed a common frame of reference.
About a year ago, I finally decided that it was time to take on the challenge.
I started with the historical material: letters, handwritten notes, lecture manuscripts, and early training documents. Alongside these, I placed my own experience from 25 years of practice.
What belongs to the timeless core of the approach? What has evolved over time? And how do you describe something that, for decades, was primarily learned through experience?
These questions also led to the creation of the four people who guide readers through the book: Alex, the CEO of a growing company; Hannah, a department head leading a transformation; Ben, a project manager navigating complex initiatives without formal authority; and Sofia, an independent expert managing multiple assignments at the same time.
Their stories show how the same way of thinking can be applied effectively in very different working environments.
The writing process itself also became a Coverdale process.
Early chapters generated questions; feedback led to new versions. My husband, Klaus Fischer, patiently read draft after draft and helped me sharpen my thinking. I discussed terminology, applications, and different perspectives with colleagues from Austria, the UK, France, and Germany.
In this way, what started as a personal project became a shared Coverdale product.
From Book Pages Back to Footsteps
Zusammenarbeit mit System therefore describes more than a collection of individual tools.
The book follows a way of thinking: from clarifying a task to defining shared objectives, gathering information, making decisions, and planning – all the way through implementation and reflection.
Above all, it is an invitation to put the ideas into practice.
Impact happens when readers take one of the questions and use it, develop a Target with their team, clarify an assignment, or deliberately reflect together after completing a project.
That is when book pages turn back into footsteps.
Perhaps, after more than 60 years, this brings the story full circle. A systematic approach emerged from observing people at work. For decades, it was passed on through working and learning together. Now, the book can become the starting point for new experiences.
Because collaboration is created anew every day. And we can shape it deliberately.
Birgit Fischer-Sitzwohl has been a consultant and trainer with Coverdale since 2001 and Managing Partner of Coverdale Austria since 2007. Her book Zusammenarbeit mit System. Strategien und Tools für klare Ziele und effiziente Teamarbeit was published by Schäffer-Poeschel in 2026.
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