Working towards a more conscious society through personal development

It was a pleasure to have the opportunity to present during the IFIS Online Colloquium session on Mach 21st, 2018. Thank you for inviting me.

The purpose of the presentation was, first, to provide a brief overview over the various initiatives I’m involved in. I spoke about the Ekskäret Foundation operating the retreat centre the Ekskäret island outside Stockholm with the purpose of exploring and facilitating the connection between inner, personal development and societal change. I spoke about the Ekskäret Klustret co-working space and the TechFarm co-living space, both located in central Stockholm. Both these spaces aim to be what Robert Kegan calls “deliberately developmental”, that is they aim to hold and facilitate the personal and organisational development of the members. I also mention our similarly Deliberately Developmental Space, a “DDS”, in Berlin: the Co-creation Loft.

Secondly, I got the opportunity to speak about my three recent books: The Market Myth (2016), The World we Create (2017, in Swedish) and The Nordic Secret (2017). The last one co-authored with Lene Andersen and describing how large scale, government supported, personal development projects in all the Nordic countries played an important role more than a hundred years ago in bringing these counters successfully into modernity. The expressed aim of these projects was to support a substantial part of the populations in becoming, again using Robert Kegan’s language, “self-authoring”.

I came off the colloquium with much inspirations and thank you all very much for the fruitful discussion and the interesting dialog!