Lead with purpose.
Shape what’s next.

Supporting teams & leaders to navigate complexity, unlock innovation potential, and build resilience through a systemic, human-centered approach.

Rebecca Könitzer

Hi, I am Rebecca

I believe organizations and leaders need to fundamentally rethink how they design for resilience, unlock potential and understand the systems. This goes beyond simply driving results. It means approaching strategy with a systemic lens, fostering work environments where teams can innovate, grow new capabilities and truly thrive, while empowering leaders to navigate complexity.

Over the past 13 years, I’ve worked as a strategist, designer, and systemic coach with global corporations, startups, governments, entrepreneurs, and intrapreneurs. As former Design Director at IDEO, my approach blends strategic depth, human-centered design and proven coaching methods.

I work with organizations to enable more adaptability, collaborate with teams for more resilience and empower individuals through training, coaching and mentoring.

Organizations
I worked with:

From social enterprises to global brands, I’ve worked with organizations committed to innovation, transformation, and meaningful change — both independently and in my previous roles.

Selected collaborations include:

IDEO

-

Visa Foundation

-

UnternehmerTUM

-

iF Design

-

IKEA

-

Munich Re

-

H&M

-

Nike

-

Novartis

-

Ashoka

-

Werk1

-

IDEO - Visa Foundation - UnternehmerTUM - iF Design - IKEA - Munich Re - H&M - Nike - Novartis - Ashoka - Werk1 -

Working Together

Empowering organizations, teams, and leaders to navigate uncertainty, innovate and unlock potential, through tailored human-centered consulting, coaching, and training.

In today's fast-evolving world, traditional strategies often fall short. I collaborate with organizations to embrace agile, experiment-driven approaches to confidently navigate market shifts, unlock new opportunities, and lead through disruption.

Adaptive
Organizations

In a dynamic landscape of hybrid work and constant transformation, many teams struggle to maintain their rhythm and effectiveness. I help teams develop essential adaptability, strengthen collaboration, and foster resilience, so they can confidently navigate uncertainty, unlock their collective strengths, and drive better outcomes.

Resilient
Teams

Empowered
Individuals

To truly shape what's next, organizations need leadership at every level, where decision-making and action are directly interlinked. I support leaders cultivate essential capabilities like effective communication, creative-problem solving, constructive conflict resolution, applying impactful coaching methods, and develop a strong self-leadership.

Work Examples

Most of my portfolio is confidential, however if you'd like to talk or find out more about my work, let’s connect.

  • Innovation Strategy

    Building an internal innovation organization to expand capabilities and accelerate outputs

    For an international Global Fashion Retailer I co-led program where we built a team of makers, explorers, and sustainability champions who use collaboration, creativity and strategic thinking to make strategy tangible and unleash customer-centric way of working inside the Group.

    This team delivered successfully 5 beacon projects, brought 3 of them to scaling and continued to define new areas of strategic importance for innovation.

  • Future-Ready Leadership

    Embedding creative leadership and human-centered design into public sector practices

    I co-led a program that designed and delivered a transformational learning program to establish the new role of Chief Design Officers within the U.A.E. government. Till today it is a established program to enable Dubai’s vision for a future-ready city.

    "This experience changed my life as a woman, a mother and as a leader. I took of my director's head and it unlocked the human in me." - Participant

  • future of work

    Guiding decisions for future ways of working in a post-pandemic reality

    Initiated by fundamental shifts to the work culture and reality caused by the global pandemic in 2020, the market leader for story-driven casual games saw the opportunity to redefine their future of work.

    I led this project, where we delivered a Northstar with guiding principles, a playbook with an experimentation plan for the next 6 months to test, learn and adjust as well as a selection of “quick wins” to support the employees in daily work life while conditions are shifting.

  • Gaining strategic alignment and accerlerated decision making for a new offering

    I designed and facilitated an interactive workshop that guided participants through defining their strategic 'Where to Play, How to Win' framework, establishing core values, co-creating a concrete learning framework, mapping customer journeys, and reviewing first prototypes. 

    This process led to clear alignment, identified key success factors, and surfaced potential risks, enabling the client to move forward with confidence and a unified vision for their academy.

  • Empower Teams

    Creating the conditions to enable design teams to do their best work

    As a member of the Regional Leadership Team for IDEO Europe, I was responsible to empower design teams to do the best design work, continually improve, and achieve outstanding impact and business results.

    We implemented and trained for retrospectives, we implemented formats for critique sessions, we defined learning-loops and how to operationalize them and we defined standard team interventions and rituals for higher collaboration, creativity and effectiveness.

  • leadership

    Empowering leadership development through resilience

    The Leadership Talent Academy (UnternehmerTUM) Alumni wanted to come together for a 'reflect & retreat' to continue empowering each other's leadership development with the focus on resilience.

    I crafted and led a comprehensive day program that enabled participants to deeply understand the dynamics of their body, brain, behavior, and emotions under stress. They acquired concrete self-regulation methods, collaboratively tackled current obstacles, and strategized on strengthening their resilience over time.

  • Coaching social entrepreneurs to drive change and build an impact driven startup

    Ashoka identifies and supports the world's leading social entrepreneurs, learns from the patterns in their innovations, and mobilizes a global community.

    As a dedicated coach within the Ashoka Support Network, I provide tailored systemic coaching to social entrepreneurs. Coaching sessions aim to equipped social entrepreneurs to lead their impact-driven missions with more clarity, strong purpose, and sustained energy. We work on enhancing strategic focus, cultivating stronger self-leadership, and developing robust resilience to make critical decisions. This support is vital for transforming innovative ideas into scalable, sustainable solutions.

What People Are Saying

  • “Rebecca led my team and me through a strategy workshop for a newly developed offering. She is an outstanding facilitator with an intuitive sense of when to hold space and when to provide structure. Her deep expertise in leadership, strategy, and organizational development was a huge asset. All stakeholders were impressed by how confidently and calmly she navigated us through the day. I look forward to working with her again!”

    Vanessa M., Lead

  • “Coaching with Rebecca was a powerful and important experience for me. With carefully chosen methods and a holistic, solution-focused approach, she helped me bring more clarity and calm into my work situations. Rebecca supported me in initiating a process that feels right — giving me a clearer view of my themes and goals, and enabling me to act in a more needs-oriented way. What I appreciate most is the atmosphere she creates — in every session, I walked away with valuable insights and felt energized and strengthened. I’m already looking forward to working with her on another topic.”

    Sophia S., Founder

  • “Rebecca guided us through a team-building initiative with clarity and calm. She created an environment where everyone felt safe to contribute, while keeping our goals in focus. Her empathy, paired with a deep understanding of organizational dynamics and business models, helped us align and structure ourselves more effectively as a team.”

    Vanessa, Lead

  • “Rebecca led our trainings on workshop design and facilitation as well as communication and conflict — and we were absolutely thrilled! Her preparation, professionalism, and ability to tailor the content to our needs made all the difference.”

    Nina L., HR Lead

Contact

Let’s explore how we can collaborate. You can use the form or write an email:

rebecca@futureforwardleadership.eu

I can’t wait to hear from you!