About me
Wendy Manders is a coach, facilitator, Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, and change practitioner. She is the author of De Werkplaats (The Workroom), to be published. She works with leaders and teams in organizations where tension exists between direction and space, control and trust.Her work focuses on the interplay between data and dialogue, structure and emotion, leadership and rhythm. She helps organizations navigate the constant movement between formal systems and informal dynamics, without reducing one to the other.Trained as a business economist, Wendy has led and supported complex change initiatives across service organizations and the public sector. While responsible for continuous improvement at Zilveren Kruis, she received the Dutch Kaizen Award, founded by Masaaki Imai. Her experience includes work with national government bodies such as RIVM and DG Toeslagen, as well as large municipalities. In recent years, her focus has increasingly been on healthcare, where pressure on both systems and people is part of everyday reality.Wendy has worked with obeya for nearly a decade. She studied its origins in Japan, deepened her practice of Deep Democracy in Greece, and was strongly influenced by Ubuntu during her time in South Africa. What she brings into organizations, she practices herself: grounded, human-centered, and constantly moving between system and human.
