About this archive

The NPI archives gather the work of the founders and consultants of the former Nederlands Pedagogisch Instituut (NPI – Institute for organisational development), founded in 1954 by Bernard Lievegoed. In the spirit of the collective thinking of those founders, everything here is freely available to everyone.

After the NPI ended its activities, the Cloverleaf Foundation kept the archives alive and accessible, and has now handed their hosting over to the Association for Social Development (ASD). On behalf of the ASD community, we warmly thank the board of the Cloverleaf Foundation for entrusting us with this collection, which we will preserve and cherish.

For feedback to the Association for Social Development (ASD), please get in touch. Membership, organisation and legal details are on the imprint page.

Bernard Lievegoed and the NPI

The NPI was founded in 1954 by Bernard Lievegoed (1905–1992), a Dutch psychiatrist and social reformer who became one of the founding figures of organisational development in the Netherlands. Alongside curative education and biography work, Lievegoed developed methods for guiding organisations through phases of growth, applying the same developmental thinking he brought to individuals and social institutions to companies and organisations. Many of the documents in this archive were written or taught by Lievegoed himself, including Managing the Developing Organisation, still one of his best-known works on organisational development.

Lievegoed's thinking, and the NPI's approach to organisational development more broadly, grew out of anthroposophy, the spiritual and social philosophy founded by Rudolf Steiner. A recurring reference point in the archive is Steiner's idea of the threefold social order (social threefolding), which distinguishes cultural, political-legal and economic life as three relatively independent spheres of society. The NPI's consultants applied this threefold view of the social organism to companies and institutions, treating them as living systems with their own cultural, legal and economic dimensions in need of balance – see, for example, Threefolding as a way for development and education in the social reality.