Creating spaces for joyful collaboration thus became a priority. It led me to learn agile methods, liberating structures, creative facilitation and the power of play on purpose. I became able to use these methods to create pockets of new experience and reflection for staff and managers.

Today, I enjoy facilitating events for smart participants, who bring their energy and enjoy the work. Of course, if you plan for people with these qualities, those are the ones who tend to show up. Surprise: nobody's grumpy, unhelpful or disheartened by nature.

Meetings that people want to come to are possible.

The quest of understanding the interplay between individuals and social context led me to train as a systemic coach. Systemic, because I work with you in your context. Coach, because I work with and for you in your context - without giving advice you never asked for. I ask questions to help you explore your own disposition towards some change or course of action. Be it a decision, a conflict yet unresolved, or a long-held goal you have not yet reached. In coaching, I try to help by creating resonance with you. My role is to strengthen and support your inner direction, to help you find ways to flourish and self-actualize in balance and connection with your environment.

A lot of change can start with you. You can become and make a living difference.

But no matter how willing an individual person might desire some change in the world, and no matter how much you might be willing to start with change yourself: all too often the environments and organizations we find ourselves in co-determine much of our interactions and communication patterns. Change is always a complex interplay between the individual person and the collective. That's true for companies, teams or families alike.

For a few years, I worked as a change agent and organizational consultant for a large financial institution.

Here, my journey came full circle. The fact that large organizations with industrial cultures and thought-patterns feel lifeless for many of their members will not change even if all the members get individual coaching, or if there's a good meeting every now and then.

I saw how organisations are made. Someone decides the formal structure and the formal constraints, the formal goals. Then people (self)-organize around those constraints and conditions. Often they feel they have no power to change 'the system'. Sometimes, that is even true of those managing the system. CEOs feel market pressures, politicians voter pressures. Metaphorically, the entire organization becomes a new 'living being' of its own. The very act of organizing both shapes the identities of constituting individuals, and creates new identities.

That in turn has major implications for the structure and the qualities of our products and outputs: we live in a world of socio-technical systems. What we want to produce, what we need to create needs to inform how we organize and vice versa.

Together, we can transform systems, co-creating identities fit for purpose.

Predictions are hard, especially about the future. - danish proverb

Here's mine: we'll need a lot of human ingenuity, a lot of collaboration, common and mutual understanding, co-creation and decision making to address our challenges as human civilization.

Yet all ingenuity and cleverness will not overcome the fact that our planet and life on it has physical limits as to what it can regenerate and hence provide. We need to co-create a culture that thrives within these limits.

I believe a just and humane society within planetary boundaries is possible and worth striving for. I even believe that in this society life will feel abundantly rich. But to get there, we need to un-learn the impulse for ever more - be it material wealth, status or power - and re-learn a sense of joyful and grateful sufficiency. My passion is co-creating our regenerative future with you: a future when we stop extracting more from people and planet than we give back. One source of inspiration for my work are therefore the Inner Development Goals.

Let's become stewards and gardeners of lives that matter. All of them.