My Mission
Driving a Paradigm Shift
Future World-Making is Everybody’s Business

My life journey has taken me to different places and encounters with people in many countries. I would not do professionally what I do today without learning from so many of them – no matter if they tried to improve vocational skills in their community, designed cross-sector initiatives for sustainable value chains or dealt with global actions against climate change. The world is full of people who want to make a difference. I learned that everybody’s contribution to making this world more sustainable counts. It matters what we do and how we think.

Every personal leadership journey is a process of unearthing our true nature, a growing self-expression that responds to what needs doing in the world. The core themes – the healing of fragmentation in the world and the regeneration of a sense of aliveness – have persistently presented themselves to me as a call to action, no matter which form it took. This passion for people and their capacities could not be silenced, not even in the most demanding of careers. I attempted to understand people and the world by studying psychology and political science. Disappointed with the limitations of traditionally fragmented Western science, I gained from feminist studies and my work in Africa, from implementing leadership development for multinationals and accompanying institutional change management. I discovered that the most obvious fact – that we co-create our world in a constant relational interaction – often goes unnoticed. Everything hangs together. Our world is the most fascinating interconnected place and the only home we have so far. Taking care of it and of each other is the most obvious logical consequence.

 

At the core of our leadership journey is our contribution to the collective evolutionary process.

Petra Kuenkel; Mind and Heart

As an academic, I acknowledge the progress we make towards understanding how humankind can become a responsible actor in the era of the Anthropocene. But I also challenge the lifelessness and the cold mechanics of so much of our science. The human heart needs to be brought back into science. As a transformative change practitioner I am fascinated by collaborative practices that work and that enhance people’s capacities to shape their future collectively. I have experienced that the intention of making a difference for the world is latent in so many people and just needs to be revived. The approaches and models I have developed aim at enhancing aliveness – in people, processes and systems. They are deeply inspired by a long tradition of systems scientists and also anchored in a long-standing practice of multi-stakeholder collaborative change.

The new paradigm is about creating systems that bring out the best in each of us.

Grace Lee Boggs

My mission is to encourage as many people as possible to take up the world’s challenges and turn them into opportunities for creating a world that works for 100% of humanity and the planet as a whole.

At the core of my contribution to this world is helping people to understand what gives life to systems and how this understanding can improve their strategies to implement transformative change for sustainability. This, indeed, is a new worldview and requires a paradigm shift towards stewarding systems aliveness with care and heart.

Mind and Heart
Mapping Your Personal Journey Towards Leadership for Sustainability

The book shows how leaders can use life and leadership experience to make a more meaningful contribution to the world. It leads us into the inner world of leadership that we often tend to deny: the intuitive insight that at the core of our leadership journey is our contribution to the collective evolutionary process.

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My Expertise