The path to inner and outer development | With Jan Artem Henriksson of the IDGs | S3E5 | Inner Green Deal - the human dimension of sustainability.

Description

We are excited to share the inspiring story of Jan Artem Henriksson, Executive Director of the Inner Development Goals. He talks about his Ukrainian roots, the role of inner development in his life and the immense resonance of the Inner Development Goals.

Jan is a man who wears many different hats. Besides co-founding two companies, he is a Stockholm School of Economics Executive Education faculty member and a Senior Fellow with the Flourishing Network, part of Harvard University's Human Flourishing Program.

These days he is perhaps best known as the Executive Director of the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) Initiative. Launched in 2020, the IDGs provide organisations and even countries with an open source inner development framework to support collective efforts to reach the UN's sustainable development goals, the SDGs.

In this episode of the podcast, our new host Tamsin Walker spoke to Jan about the path to his current role, what defines personal inner development and how that can make a difference to and in the world around us.

About the Inner Development Goals
The Inner Development Goals (IDGs) is a non-profit and open-source initiative to promote inner development to accelerate the SDGs. At the core of its work lies a simple communication tool summarising 23 important inner skills and qualities, which was derived through consultation with over 4000 scientists, practitioners and other experts. The IDGs organisation has a strong following, with over 300 hubs around the world and many partners. This includes sustainability professionals, large systemic organisations (e.g. UNDP), and even countries (e.g. Costa Rica). At the Inner Green Deal we collaborate closely and together we developed and delivered the first Global Leadership for Sustainable Development programme based on the IDG framework. More information about the Inner Development Goals can be found here: https://www.innerdevelopmentgoals.org/.

Are you interested to join the IDG's summit taking place on October 11-12 of 2023? We are pleased to share 50 free online tickets! To get your ticket, register here: https://questionpro.com/t/AYFXgZzqcT

About the Inner Green Deal

The Inner Green Deal is a non-profit organisation based in Cologne and Brussels with a growing community around the world. We address the human dimension of sustainability and support leaders, change makers and facilitators to accelerate the green transformation. We offer a range of short and longer programmes cultivating capacities such as collaboration, systems thinking and compassion. In addition to programmes for organisations, we empower facilitators and offer train-the-trainer programmes, access to curricula and digital tools to create cohesive communities of change. Our podcast is hosted and produced by Tamsin Walker. For more information, visit us on LinkedIn, innergreendeal.com or write to info@innergreendeal.com.

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Transcription

Speaker #0
It's very, very clear that we need to help people find their own values, their own purpose, in order to navigate this higher complexity we live in.
Speaker #1
Hello, and welcome to this episode of the Inner Green Deal podcast. My name is Tamsin Walker. and I'll be hosting upcoming episodes of the show, talking to inspiring guests about the human dimension of sustainability. In each episode, we explore the link between our personal journey and the impact we have on the world. In this month's episode, I'm talking to Jan Artem Henriksen, social entrepreneur and a global expert on leadership and inner development. He's a man who wears many different hats. Besides co-founding two companies, he's a Stockholm School of Economics Executive Education faculty member and a senior fellow with the Flourishing Network, part of Harvard University's Human Flourishing Program. But these days, he's perhaps best known as the executive director of the Inner Development Goals Initiative. Launched in 2020, the IDGs, as they've become known, provide organizations and even countries with an open-source framework. comprising five dimensions and 23 skills, as a means of supporting collective efforts to reach the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the SDGs. With over 300 self-organized hubs around the world, the initiative is a success. Today, we'll learn about Jan's journey to his current role, what defines personal inner development, and how that can make a difference to and in the world around us.
Speaker #0
Welcome, Jan. It's a pleasure to have you here.
Speaker #1
And I'm just going to dive straight in with the question about connection. As you're probably aware, connection is quite important here at the Inner Green Deal. And that also includes a sense of connection to place. And so I thought I'd just begin by asking you about a place to which you perhaps felt connected growing up, somewhere that holds some special meaning for you. maybe a place in nature, maybe not. Is there such a place for you?
Speaker #0
I actually spent a lot of my teens on an island. I was fishing with my best friend Max. He was half Cuban, half Ukrainian. So a lot of the times I was a nerd, a terrible nerd with very few friends reading and loving math. And when people were drinking and shouting and getting drunk, I was out fishing. It tells a lot, I think, how you do your teen years. And I spent quite some time on a beautiful island, small, small one, in a big lake in a nature reserve. And we usually looked at the weather and we went out fishing and then we slept under open sky. We didn't bring any tent. We made a fire. And for me, it was and still is, I think, some of the most magical connections that I felt both to my friends, like in the quiet. But also connecting to nature. I remember waking up and seeing the birds and the sun slowly rising and being there sleeping just by the fire with a sleeping bag and in many ways vulnerable and connecting me to the larger systems that I still feel.
Speaker #1
Oh, that's a really beautiful picture you painted there. I actually felt like I was almost there. Yeah, it sets a really lovely scene. And so then maybe... Moving on from you sleeping under the Swedish sky as a teenager, a lot of your working life has been about self-development and leadership. Would you say that there was maybe one inciting moment or is there something in your childhood that laid the foundations for the path that you've taken?
Speaker #0
For me, inner development have always been a necessity to keep the relationships and love to the people closest to me and my family. I grew in quite a complex family situation, very loving and wise parents, but also some complexity because I moved from Soviet Union and Ukraine when I was eight to Sweden. Just there you have some of the largest cultural Differences and tensions, Soviet Union, Russia, Ukraine are quite masculine, big power distance, heroes, macho culture. And then you have the Swedish culture that is very low power distance in Hofstede, a researcher on culture, the most feminine country in the world, very conflict avoidant, and the masculine role is very different. And then I've been going and visiting my relatives each month. and wanting to relate to my relatives at my father's side. And I have three brothers in Ukraine still, which of course it's been a rough year and a half, this last year especially. But even throughout my childhood, I've been living with these tensions and different values and worldviews. And I've seen also how some family members can navigate and handle those tensions with compassion, presence and wisdom. And how others have been in conflict and fights or not been able to relate to other relatives at all and had to cut the relationships. And I wanted to learn those ways to be more present in conflict, to be able to communicate in a way that is maybe nonviolent or more wise or mature. So yes, it is very personal. And I think I had to develop in order to. stay in touch with the people that I love.
Speaker #1
And so it sounds like you were born into a situation that required you to develop those skills.
Speaker #0
Yes. And I got huge satisfaction once I understood that this is a skill that I could develop. And I also learned very early, I had quite heavy asthma when I was a kid. And I had a very wise stepfather who kind of read up a little bit and said, look, you're quite young now. I think we can get rid of your asthma if we just... work out and train every day. So I think for four years, we got up six o'clock in the morning, no matter the weather, no matter time of the year. And we were doing physical exercises until seven o'clock in the morning, four or five years in a row. And from being not able to run 25 meters to being one of the best runners in my school.
Speaker #1
Right. So by the sounds of it, that was a pretty key learning for you. And I wonder, as you've continued down the path of inner development, whether there's been one thing, an experience maybe, or a nugget of wisdom that you've come back to time and again?
Speaker #0
You know, I do believe there is a renaissance to healthy anger and healthy guilt. I mean, first of all, if you take guilt from my end, it's always there. I live in a beautiful and safe country, an apartment. I have three brothers who are just as smart, just as hardworking, probably more. In Ukraine, they do everything they can, and they have a very different life and life situation, especially now. And guilt is not always a bad feeling. You know, there is this Kierkegaardian guilt. It's like... It's like a gratitude, a deep gratitude, and wanting, it's what you owe the future. I want to do something to better the lives of people like my brothers, who are in a context that is very hard to influence. And I think inner development right now is available to a very small elite. The many people who are working in practical jobs or other things do not get access. to that magic that can really help us build our lives and transform society. The second part in healthy anger, for me, I worked 10 years in a consultancy and we had many brilliant consultants and we were helping more than 300 companies and build more healthy, sustainable cultures and leadership. And in some of the companies, you know, we could be for three, four or five years helping them create values, leadership principles, purpose. that was going somehow in the right direction. And then a new CEO could come in and throw that all out the window and say, you know, now, new rules. What we're going to do, we're just going to work with speed, efficiency, and quality. That's the only three values that matter. And I got so angry a few times. There were so many good people in the organization that just felt they couldn't do anything. And some of them quit. And some of them felt this helplessness. And then I understood, like, we have to push the norms in general, so that more people understand that leadership development and cultural work is not some nice add-on that you can have as a hobby. It's actually the fundamental building block in a stable democracy and in a healthy organization.
Speaker #1
I'm struck by what you said about having a leader in place who does things one way and then four years later, out goes all the good work. And the helplessness and frustration that that can bring to the fore. Also, what you describe is pretty reflective of the way politics works in many places. short legislative periods and sometimes radically changing values as leaders kind of rotate in and out. And I'd like to talk to you about values, because from everything I've heard you say, it seems to me that they're particularly important to you. You know, and I was thinking about this and thinking, perhaps when I was growing up, people talked a little bit more about values and how then they maybe fell out of fashion. And even the concept of having values in the first place. But I have the sense that it's now perhaps experiencing a bit of a renaissance. Yeah. And I just wondered how you see that.
Speaker #0
The thing is, just 50 years ago, where our parents grew up, you could still live much more in your bubble. And you could have one value system and just be socialized into that and not question that too much. So you don't think so much about your values. And if I just ask your listeners to, for a moment, reflect how many connections do you have today on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on social media, and how spread out over the world and throughout different worldviews and values they are versus how it was just 10 years ago or how it was for your parents. You know, it's a huge difference. It's one of the biggest transformations culturally we've gone through. So we're exposed. to all these different values and worldviews, it's very, very clear that we need to help people find their own values, their own purpose in order to navigate this higher complexity we live in. So here, I do think that personal values is really, really important and working with them. And I do also think why this non-for-profit, open-source organization, inner development goals that I work for now, I think we also need to change. the notion that personal development is all about mindfulness and sitting with our legs crossed and meditating.
Speaker #1
Right, because I guess mindfulness and meditation are to a degree at least synonymous. So can you explain where your thoughts go on this?
Speaker #0
We don't have to get everybody into meditation. You can work on the being dimension or the being dimension of your own life just by reflecting on personal values.
Speaker #1
Sorry, can I just interject there? Because there are a couple of other things I'd like to ask you around values.
Speaker #0
Sure, of course, I'd love to do that.
Speaker #1
One is how having really clear values can help at an individual, but also at a systemic level. But then I also wanted to ask if you'd be willing to share with me and with people listening, what your top values are, say, perhaps your top three, and whether they ever change.
Speaker #0
I've spent 10 years working with reading up on Values Research. and helping people find their values. So one of the models that we've been using is dividing values into three different buckets. You could say more foundational values. They are usually set more in childhood and they do not change as often. Then there are more values tied to your self-fulfillment. What do you think is fun? What is self-actualizing for you? And these change naturally throughout our life. And we say, you know, something happened. I need to reevaluate. And then there are values that are beyond yourself, like equality or sustainability. You know, it matters for me, but it's not about me. It's about the larger system. There are around 500 value words in each language. Many of them are quite close to each other. And when we try to group it in some kind of meta-analysis, we found around 130. One of those values for me is to welcome people. And meaning is one of my core values. And I'm really grateful to the power of confusion.
Speaker #1
Grateful to the power of confusion. You're gonna have to explain that one to me.
Speaker #0
I was deeply confused in my 20s. And I started arranging parties and running a club. And then I started running one of the biggest clubs in Stockholm every Thursday. And I remember one evening walking around this club and I'm like, Like, oh my God, this feels so meaningless. I felt like people were zombying around it. And I sat in this toilet in this club with all the music around me and all these things written on the toilets, you know, that you see. And I was looking around, searching for meaning, four o'clock in the morning in the nightclub. And like... What am I doing? Deeply confused. And I just came to the realization I have no clue who I am. And I just need to stop this. And then I started reading and philosophy, psychology. I found meditation and so on. It threw me out into another developmental journey. And since I question a lot what I do. Is there any real value here? Are we adding anything that is of value?
Speaker #1
I actually thought you were going to say that you'd... seen an enlightening little slogan amongst the graffiti on the toilet wall.
Speaker #0
Nothing. It was so depressing.
Speaker #1
Yeah, you clearly didn't need graffiti wisdom at that moment anyway. If you'd managed to recognize this sense of emptiness, then something else was kicking in for you there, right? Another value, maybe. Do you have a third that you'd like to share?
Speaker #0
I think the third I would like to start talking about what I'm most passionate about now. which is system thinking or systemic change, and which is where the IDG lies. Because as I said, like in that pain of realizing that what you do and healthy systems can be thrown out overnight with the change of the CEO. And for me, for years, I had this question. So if we do want to create healthy organizations that are somewhat bigger, you know, like not only small organizations, the world consists of very many large organizations that have a lot of power, and they do a lot of lobbying that is many times negative. How would it look like if we created something that would create healthy systems in the long term, and also like a good lobbyist, you know, like actually an organization that does healthy lobbying towards governments, or big organizations and put it in policies and structures. So So for years, I was obsessed with system thinking. I was representing Peter Senge's SOL, Society for Organizational Learning in Sweden. And I was reading up a lot on how do you change systems and how do you transform systems that are not just organizations, but what are the structures holding the organizations, what are the paradigms, narratives, and so on. And of course, it's been very helpful to work with. the Oak Island Foundation that is all about systemic change. I'm still at the board at the Oak Island Foundation. We own an island in Stockholm Archipelago. And there we had the pleasure to invite some of the top thought leaders from around the world, from Harvard, from MIT, from London University, many other places around the world. Now I'm speaking also mostly about Western countries, but yes, still we have the Western bias that I will tell a little bit. more about how we're working on. And we realized that we can actually, if we want to create this positive systemic change, we need to get more people into working with inner development at scale. So what we did a few years ago is we talked with all these thought leaders and said, would you be willing to help us? co-create a framework that is global, where your frameworks and models, we put them aside and we say, what is human development and what human development do we need to reach the sustainable development goals? So we created a one-question survey in collaboration with Stockholm School of Economics, Karolinska Institute, Centre for Sustainability and Oak Island Foundation, with many researchers from there, but also collaborators all around the world. And we asked more than a thousand experts, scientists, thought leaders, HR and sustainability experts, the same question. What skills, capabilities, capacities do we need to build, and both in us individually, but also collectively in our cultures, to increase our chances of reaching the sustainable development goals? One question, but a very big and complex question.
Speaker #1
Yeah, I'd say that sounds like quite a big question.
Speaker #0
And you could add up to 10 qualities, capabilities, or skills. And then we could see that we could put all these answers into five dimensions of human development, which is being, thinking, relating, collaborating, and acting. And in each of the dimensions, we could find four to five skills. Of course, under being, yes, you will find presence. And like we said, you can... Develop that with meditation. Openness, like having an open mindset, but also being open to other cultures, other values. But also like very, very... cognitive skills, like in the thinking dimension, there is critical thinking, there is complexity awareness, and you can develop all these skills. It's not intelligence or IQ is really hard to develop, but all these 23 skills that you found, for each of them, there are scientists who spend their life in researching how to develop that skill. And in the first phase of the initiative, we basically co-created this IDG, Inner Development Goals Framework. Of course, we're playing with the words SDGs, IDGs. So we say this is the inner skills, transformational skills you need to reach the SDGs. Because more and more scientists are very clear that, yes, the problems are external. But if we are to address them, we will not succeed if we don't work with our inner realities, both individual and collective. This is where we need to start with big companies. and governments. And of course, like some of the early adopters were companies in Sweden, like Ikea or Spotify. But then we got Google, we got Novartis, we got huge companies stepping on board and saying, we will apply this framework and we will take it out to all our hundreds of thousands of employees as a stable framework that is non-changing in between our different values and leadership principles, which was one of my dreams when I was feeling that pain and anger. Maybe after a year or so, I got a letter from the minister in charge of the sustainable development goals in Costa Rica. Her name was Maria Pilar. And she wrote, look, we found your framework. We think this is really interesting. Costa Rica is one of the few countries that are moving in the right direction on many of the SDGs. You know, they're protecting more of their oceans, more of their land. Of course, we went there, we created an alliance, we started working. The president was speaking about the IDG initiative and how he envisioned that this would be integrated throughout the public sector. And we have started to working deeply with Costa Rica. But what happened also is other governments started opening up. Rwanda, Albania, UK is coming in and so on. But one of the most hopeful things when we talk about systemic change, and this is back to my value, right? Like, how do you put good practices into policy? How do you really make this systemic? Some of the academic, from my side, heroes, they've done so much good work, but their good thoughts are usually not applied when we work with change or policy development. And this needs to change. We need to close the gap. between what scientists know and good thought leaders say, this is the way we actually create healthy systems and what we're doing in government and business. And I think there is hope because there is this progressive alliances of companies, of owners, of CEOs coming together, and there are progressive governments starting to experiment with policy development.
Speaker #1
You spoke there also about how growth and learning is available to us in our makeup as human beings. And I'm curious to understand, so if someone comes to inner development, let's say completely fresh faced, can you give a sense of what might be a really good starting point? How do you break it down into practical approach for people coming in with no experience or perhaps even with a dose of skepticism?
Speaker #0
So when we started the initiative again, It's such a huge complexity, you know, connecting the inner to the outer. It's just enormous. And always when it's very complex, what I learned from my colleagues from McKinsey, make it into three steps. Whatever it is, if it's highly complex, try to make three steps out of it. So we did this with the initiative to start with. Now we have more steps. The first step was to say, okay, inner development is so complex. It's so hard to get. Could we just simplify it? In the same way we did with SDGs, it's so complex. You know, the outer system, it's incredibly complex, but we managed to get them down to 17 boxes. It's not perfect. And there are, of course, many sub goals, but it's a way to sense make. Then if we look at inner development, we managed to simplify it. It's not perfect. Our model is very simplistic in some sense, you know, five dimensions and 23 skills. That's not how inner development works. But it's a way to point towards something for somebody who's totally new and say, look, this is some of the skills and some of the human dimensions that we need to grow and develop. And then there are different frameworks and methods to do that. In our second phase of the initiative, we started looking at what are some of the methods that we could show in each of the five dimensions, where there is some science, or there is at least a method that is explicit, and a community of practice. So we tried in the second phase to gather different methods. I think we got more than 500 or 600 suggestions from 4,000 people. So within... pointing to a few things you could do. But this is just the beginning of the phase two. We are reworking that now and trying to make it digital and to make it more simple.
Speaker #1
Okay, so but what does that entail? Or maybe you can just explain what's going to be different this time around.
Speaker #0
As I said, we had many biases that are very Western when we created the IDG framework, we try to be a global framework. That's our aspiration. This is our vision. But Honestly, looking on those 5,000 people that have been part in co-creating the IDG framework and the toolkit, many of them are Westerners. I mean, because we're initiated in Sweden, we have many universities in the Nordics, in Europe, in the US that we've been collaborating with. We have voices from all over the globe and all regions, but there are not as many. And of course, there might be ways that we frame the... skills or formulate ourselves that is where we have blind spots. So what we have done now in phase three is we have initiated a second survey where we basically will redo phase one and two, but do it globally. On the 19th of September, we are having our global launch of a one question survey. Again, a very simple, but very big question. that we will try to reach 2 million people with in the coming six months. We'll be in 70 languages, and we'll be launching in more than 100 countries. And there is one question saying, what qualities, abilities, or skills do we need to develop to build a sustainable future for people and planet? And of course, there is a little bit of framing around the SDGs before saying like, look, we have these 17 UN goals. We're not making progress. We want your help in reflecting and answering one question. So we're starting this project and we're looking for collaborators. So this is also a shout out. If you are either an organization that have employees all over the world or just in countries outside of the Nordics where we're very strong. Help us just by including this one question, either in your conference or in your newsletter or in any way you can. Or if you're an academic or academic institution, please help us analyze this data. We will be doing this the coming six months. This is one of the biggest things that's happening. Of course, we're doing a huge summit in Stockholm. So we're welcoming you to co-create with us, either come to Stockholm or be part with us digitally. and helping us update the IDG framework so it becomes truly global.
Speaker #1
Okay, so you have a lot going on. And I'd also like to take a moment just to talk about the climate crisis. I'm curious to know how the five dimensions of the inner development goals, the IDGs, could play into fostering a sense of hope and maybe even agency, or how they could... to remove some of the helplessness that people often feel around the state of the environment and the climate?
Speaker #0
It's a very important question that you're asking. Just to take one simple example, and again, from one of our partner companies, when I'm speaking with one of the top managers, and I asked them, what is the biggest value for you with IDGs? And she says, it's the narrative shift. And I said, what do you mean? She says, like, if you're into climate change, and if you're working in a big system as I'm doing, and I'm trying to have a positive effect, and it's really difficult, especially for companies that are producing anything. And of course, many people want to feel that they're contributing in a positive direction, but not all hundreds of thousands of employees we have can work with carbon offset or other things that are directly tied to the sustainability agenda. And what she told me, she says, but when I get especially young talents, they get it instantly. They understand that like, oh my God, with this framework, it's a different narrative. Even if I'm not working directly related to the climate change issues, I feel that I can work on myself. I can become more curious or compassionate, or I can become better at complexity awareness. And by doing so, of course, I will affect the people around me, including my manager. And in that sense, I'm affecting the culture. and I'm building the skills not only for myself, but in the organization that I am collectively, in order to have better skills to take the right decisions when it comes to climate change, when it comes to complex problems. And that narrative shift, I think senior managers, they see that the IDGs as a framework can give people more hope and more agency in feeling I'm doing at least what I can. And that I think is really important because I don't believe that it helps us that we are walking around with guilt that is not healthy, that is just draining us, that we are not contributing or that we are having climate anxiety and so on. I think we need more hope and we need more climate action.
Speaker #1
Okay, so I have one final question for you, Jan, and that's this. If there were a single skill that you wish... everybody in the world had, what would it be?
Speaker #0
It's such a difficult question. I think it's so contextual, what is needed. But because of that, because of that me answering in this way, I would say complexity awareness. Like whatever issue you take, if you go deep enough, everything is intertwined with everything. The last thing I would like to add. is that the biggest misunderstanding with inner development and inner development goals is that inner equals individual. If you look at the science and research, very rarely people grow individually. It's all about the context. It's all about the system you are embedded in. It's all about growing together. And this is why organizations and institutions are so important, because this, we... we grow in our community of practice. Of course, there are individual components and things we can do, but inner does not mean individual. We need to grow individually and collectively. This is my last point.
Speaker #1
Well, Jan, thank you very much for coming today and for sharing all your thoughts with me and the listeners. It's been a pleasure to have you here and to get to know a little bit more about the inner development goals. and how they can be used. And yeah, I wish you all the very best with the upcoming survey and with the summit.
Speaker #0
Thanks for having me. And thanks for your really curious questions and your presence. I hope that people are open to co-create with us and that we continue on this journey.
Speaker #1
And on that note, thank you very much for joining me today. If you'd like to know more about the inner development goals, you can check out the show notes for a link. to the initiative's website, where you'll also find information about the IDG summit in October and more about the survey. For other episodes of the Inner Green Deal podcast, feel free to subscribe. Thank you for listening, and until the next time, goodbye.

Description

About the Inner Green Deal

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

Speaker #0
It's very, very clear that we need to help people find their own values, their own purpose, in order to navigate this higher complexity we live in.
Speaker #1
Hello, and welcome to this episode of the Inner Green Deal podcast. My name is Tamsin Walker. and I'll be hosting upcoming episodes of the show, talking to inspiring guests about the human dimension of sustainability. In each episode, we explore the link between our personal journey and the impact we have on the world. In this month's episode, I'm talking to Jan Artem Henriksen, social entrepreneur and a global expert on leadership and inner development. He's a man who wears many different hats. Besides co-founding two companies, he's a Stockholm School of Economics Executive Education faculty member and a senior fellow with the Flourishing Network, part of Harvard University's Human Flourishing Program. But these days, he's perhaps best known as the executive director of the Inner Development Goals Initiative. Launched in 2020, the IDGs, as they've become known, provide organizations and even countries with an open-source framework. comprising five dimensions and 23 skills, as a means of supporting collective efforts to reach the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the SDGs. With over 300 self-organized hubs around the world, the initiative is a success. Today, we'll learn about Jan's journey to his current role, what defines personal inner development, and how that can make a difference to and in the world around us.
Speaker #0
Welcome, Jan. It's a pleasure to have you here.
Speaker #1
And I'm just going to dive straight in with the question about connection. As you're probably aware, connection is quite important here at the Inner Green Deal. And that also includes a sense of connection to place. And so I thought I'd just begin by asking you about a place to which you perhaps felt connected growing up, somewhere that holds some special meaning for you. maybe a place in nature, maybe not. Is there such a place for you?
Speaker #0
I actually spent a lot of my teens on an island. I was fishing with my best friend Max. He was half Cuban, half Ukrainian. So a lot of the times I was a nerd, a terrible nerd with very few friends reading and loving math. And when people were drinking and shouting and getting drunk, I was out fishing. It tells a lot, I think, how you do your teen years. And I spent quite some time on a beautiful island, small, small one, in a big lake in a nature reserve. And we usually looked at the weather and we went out fishing and then we slept under open sky. We didn't bring any tent. We made a fire. And for me, it was and still is, I think, some of the most magical connections that I felt both to my friends, like in the quiet. But also connecting to nature. I remember waking up and seeing the birds and the sun slowly rising and being there sleeping just by the fire with a sleeping bag and in many ways vulnerable and connecting me to the larger systems that I still feel.
Speaker #1
Oh, that's a really beautiful picture you painted there. I actually felt like I was almost there. Yeah, it sets a really lovely scene. And so then maybe... Moving on from you sleeping under the Swedish sky as a teenager, a lot of your working life has been about self-development and leadership. Would you say that there was maybe one inciting moment or is there something in your childhood that laid the foundations for the path that you've taken?
Speaker #0
For me, inner development have always been a necessity to keep the relationships and love to the people closest to me and my family. I grew in quite a complex family situation, very loving and wise parents, but also some complexity because I moved from Soviet Union and Ukraine when I was eight to Sweden. Just there you have some of the largest cultural Differences and tensions, Soviet Union, Russia, Ukraine are quite masculine, big power distance, heroes, macho culture. And then you have the Swedish culture that is very low power distance in Hofstede, a researcher on culture, the most feminine country in the world, very conflict avoidant, and the masculine role is very different. And then I've been going and visiting my relatives each month. and wanting to relate to my relatives at my father's side. And I have three brothers in Ukraine still, which of course it's been a rough year and a half, this last year especially. But even throughout my childhood, I've been living with these tensions and different values and worldviews. And I've seen also how some family members can navigate and handle those tensions with compassion, presence and wisdom. And how others have been in conflict and fights or not been able to relate to other relatives at all and had to cut the relationships. And I wanted to learn those ways to be more present in conflict, to be able to communicate in a way that is maybe nonviolent or more wise or mature. So yes, it is very personal. And I think I had to develop in order to. stay in touch with the people that I love.
Speaker #1
And so it sounds like you were born into a situation that required you to develop those skills.
Speaker #0
Yes. And I got huge satisfaction once I understood that this is a skill that I could develop. And I also learned very early, I had quite heavy asthma when I was a kid. And I had a very wise stepfather who kind of read up a little bit and said, look, you're quite young now. I think we can get rid of your asthma if we just... work out and train every day. So I think for four years, we got up six o'clock in the morning, no matter the weather, no matter time of the year. And we were doing physical exercises until seven o'clock in the morning, four or five years in a row. And from being not able to run 25 meters to being one of the best runners in my school.
Speaker #1
Right. So by the sounds of it, that was a pretty key learning for you. And I wonder, as you've continued down the path of inner development, whether there's been one thing, an experience maybe, or a nugget of wisdom that you've come back to time and again?
Speaker #0
You know, I do believe there is a renaissance to healthy anger and healthy guilt. I mean, first of all, if you take guilt from my end, it's always there. I live in a beautiful and safe country, an apartment. I have three brothers who are just as smart, just as hardworking, probably more. In Ukraine, they do everything they can, and they have a very different life and life situation, especially now. And guilt is not always a bad feeling. You know, there is this Kierkegaardian guilt. It's like... It's like a gratitude, a deep gratitude, and wanting, it's what you owe the future. I want to do something to better the lives of people like my brothers, who are in a context that is very hard to influence. And I think inner development right now is available to a very small elite. The many people who are working in practical jobs or other things do not get access. to that magic that can really help us build our lives and transform society. The second part in healthy anger, for me, I worked 10 years in a consultancy and we had many brilliant consultants and we were helping more than 300 companies and build more healthy, sustainable cultures and leadership. And in some of the companies, you know, we could be for three, four or five years helping them create values, leadership principles, purpose. that was going somehow in the right direction. And then a new CEO could come in and throw that all out the window and say, you know, now, new rules. What we're going to do, we're just going to work with speed, efficiency, and quality. That's the only three values that matter. And I got so angry a few times. There were so many good people in the organization that just felt they couldn't do anything. And some of them quit. And some of them felt this helplessness. And then I understood, like, we have to push the norms in general, so that more people understand that leadership development and cultural work is not some nice add-on that you can have as a hobby. It's actually the fundamental building block in a stable democracy and in a healthy organization.
Speaker #1
I'm struck by what you said about having a leader in place who does things one way and then four years later, out goes all the good work. And the helplessness and frustration that that can bring to the fore. Also, what you describe is pretty reflective of the way politics works in many places. short legislative periods and sometimes radically changing values as leaders kind of rotate in and out. And I'd like to talk to you about values, because from everything I've heard you say, it seems to me that they're particularly important to you. You know, and I was thinking about this and thinking, perhaps when I was growing up, people talked a little bit more about values and how then they maybe fell out of fashion. And even the concept of having values in the first place. But I have the sense that it's now perhaps experiencing a bit of a renaissance. Yeah. And I just wondered how you see that.
Speaker #0
The thing is, just 50 years ago, where our parents grew up, you could still live much more in your bubble. And you could have one value system and just be socialized into that and not question that too much. So you don't think so much about your values. And if I just ask your listeners to, for a moment, reflect how many connections do you have today on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on social media, and how spread out over the world and throughout different worldviews and values they are versus how it was just 10 years ago or how it was for your parents. You know, it's a huge difference. It's one of the biggest transformations culturally we've gone through. So we're exposed. to all these different values and worldviews, it's very, very clear that we need to help people find their own values, their own purpose in order to navigate this higher complexity we live in. So here, I do think that personal values is really, really important and working with them. And I do also think why this non-for-profit, open-source organization, inner development goals that I work for now, I think we also need to change. the notion that personal development is all about mindfulness and sitting with our legs crossed and meditating.
Speaker #1
Right, because I guess mindfulness and meditation are to a degree at least synonymous. So can you explain where your thoughts go on this?
Speaker #0
We don't have to get everybody into meditation. You can work on the being dimension or the being dimension of your own life just by reflecting on personal values.
Speaker #1
Sorry, can I just interject there? Because there are a couple of other things I'd like to ask you around values.
Speaker #0
Sure, of course, I'd love to do that.
Speaker #1
One is how having really clear values can help at an individual, but also at a systemic level. But then I also wanted to ask if you'd be willing to share with me and with people listening, what your top values are, say, perhaps your top three, and whether they ever change.
Speaker #0
I've spent 10 years working with reading up on Values Research. and helping people find their values. So one of the models that we've been using is dividing values into three different buckets. You could say more foundational values. They are usually set more in childhood and they do not change as often. Then there are more values tied to your self-fulfillment. What do you think is fun? What is self-actualizing for you? And these change naturally throughout our life. And we say, you know, something happened. I need to reevaluate. And then there are values that are beyond yourself, like equality or sustainability. You know, it matters for me, but it's not about me. It's about the larger system. There are around 500 value words in each language. Many of them are quite close to each other. And when we try to group it in some kind of meta-analysis, we found around 130. One of those values for me is to welcome people. And meaning is one of my core values. And I'm really grateful to the power of confusion.
Speaker #1
Grateful to the power of confusion. You're gonna have to explain that one to me.
Speaker #0
I was deeply confused in my 20s. And I started arranging parties and running a club. And then I started running one of the biggest clubs in Stockholm every Thursday. And I remember one evening walking around this club and I'm like, Like, oh my God, this feels so meaningless. I felt like people were zombying around it. And I sat in this toilet in this club with all the music around me and all these things written on the toilets, you know, that you see. And I was looking around, searching for meaning, four o'clock in the morning in the nightclub. And like... What am I doing? Deeply confused. And I just came to the realization I have no clue who I am. And I just need to stop this. And then I started reading and philosophy, psychology. I found meditation and so on. It threw me out into another developmental journey. And since I question a lot what I do. Is there any real value here? Are we adding anything that is of value?
Speaker #1
I actually thought you were going to say that you'd... seen an enlightening little slogan amongst the graffiti on the toilet wall.
Speaker #0
Nothing. It was so depressing.
Speaker #1
Yeah, you clearly didn't need graffiti wisdom at that moment anyway. If you'd managed to recognize this sense of emptiness, then something else was kicking in for you there, right? Another value, maybe. Do you have a third that you'd like to share?
Speaker #0
I think the third I would like to start talking about what I'm most passionate about now. which is system thinking or systemic change, and which is where the IDG lies. Because as I said, like in that pain of realizing that what you do and healthy systems can be thrown out overnight with the change of the CEO. And for me, for years, I had this question. So if we do want to create healthy organizations that are somewhat bigger, you know, like not only small organizations, the world consists of very many large organizations that have a lot of power, and they do a lot of lobbying that is many times negative. How would it look like if we created something that would create healthy systems in the long term, and also like a good lobbyist, you know, like actually an organization that does healthy lobbying towards governments, or big organizations and put it in policies and structures. So So for years, I was obsessed with system thinking. I was representing Peter Senge's SOL, Society for Organizational Learning in Sweden. And I was reading up a lot on how do you change systems and how do you transform systems that are not just organizations, but what are the structures holding the organizations, what are the paradigms, narratives, and so on. And of course, it's been very helpful to work with. the Oak Island Foundation that is all about systemic change. I'm still at the board at the Oak Island Foundation. We own an island in Stockholm Archipelago. And there we had the pleasure to invite some of the top thought leaders from around the world, from Harvard, from MIT, from London University, many other places around the world. Now I'm speaking also mostly about Western countries, but yes, still we have the Western bias that I will tell a little bit. more about how we're working on. And we realized that we can actually, if we want to create this positive systemic change, we need to get more people into working with inner development at scale. So what we did a few years ago is we talked with all these thought leaders and said, would you be willing to help us? co-create a framework that is global, where your frameworks and models, we put them aside and we say, what is human development and what human development do we need to reach the sustainable development goals? So we created a one-question survey in collaboration with Stockholm School of Economics, Karolinska Institute, Centre for Sustainability and Oak Island Foundation, with many researchers from there, but also collaborators all around the world. And we asked more than a thousand experts, scientists, thought leaders, HR and sustainability experts, the same question. What skills, capabilities, capacities do we need to build, and both in us individually, but also collectively in our cultures, to increase our chances of reaching the sustainable development goals? One question, but a very big and complex question.
Speaker #1
Yeah, I'd say that sounds like quite a big question.
Speaker #0
And you could add up to 10 qualities, capabilities, or skills. And then we could see that we could put all these answers into five dimensions of human development, which is being, thinking, relating, collaborating, and acting. And in each of the dimensions, we could find four to five skills. Of course, under being, yes, you will find presence. And like we said, you can... Develop that with meditation. Openness, like having an open mindset, but also being open to other cultures, other values. But also like very, very... cognitive skills, like in the thinking dimension, there is critical thinking, there is complexity awareness, and you can develop all these skills. It's not intelligence or IQ is really hard to develop, but all these 23 skills that you found, for each of them, there are scientists who spend their life in researching how to develop that skill. And in the first phase of the initiative, we basically co-created this IDG, Inner Development Goals Framework. Of course, we're playing with the words SDGs, IDGs. So we say this is the inner skills, transformational skills you need to reach the SDGs. Because more and more scientists are very clear that, yes, the problems are external. But if we are to address them, we will not succeed if we don't work with our inner realities, both individual and collective. This is where we need to start with big companies. and governments. And of course, like some of the early adopters were companies in Sweden, like Ikea or Spotify. But then we got Google, we got Novartis, we got huge companies stepping on board and saying, we will apply this framework and we will take it out to all our hundreds of thousands of employees as a stable framework that is non-changing in between our different values and leadership principles, which was one of my dreams when I was feeling that pain and anger. Maybe after a year or so, I got a letter from the minister in charge of the sustainable development goals in Costa Rica. Her name was Maria Pilar. And she wrote, look, we found your framework. We think this is really interesting. Costa Rica is one of the few countries that are moving in the right direction on many of the SDGs. You know, they're protecting more of their oceans, more of their land. Of course, we went there, we created an alliance, we started working. The president was speaking about the IDG initiative and how he envisioned that this would be integrated throughout the public sector. And we have started to working deeply with Costa Rica. But what happened also is other governments started opening up. Rwanda, Albania, UK is coming in and so on. But one of the most hopeful things when we talk about systemic change, and this is back to my value, right? Like, how do you put good practices into policy? How do you really make this systemic? Some of the academic, from my side, heroes, they've done so much good work, but their good thoughts are usually not applied when we work with change or policy development. And this needs to change. We need to close the gap. between what scientists know and good thought leaders say, this is the way we actually create healthy systems and what we're doing in government and business. And I think there is hope because there is this progressive alliances of companies, of owners, of CEOs coming together, and there are progressive governments starting to experiment with policy development.
Speaker #1
You spoke there also about how growth and learning is available to us in our makeup as human beings. And I'm curious to understand, so if someone comes to inner development, let's say completely fresh faced, can you give a sense of what might be a really good starting point? How do you break it down into practical approach for people coming in with no experience or perhaps even with a dose of skepticism?
Speaker #0
So when we started the initiative again, It's such a huge complexity, you know, connecting the inner to the outer. It's just enormous. And always when it's very complex, what I learned from my colleagues from McKinsey, make it into three steps. Whatever it is, if it's highly complex, try to make three steps out of it. So we did this with the initiative to start with. Now we have more steps. The first step was to say, okay, inner development is so complex. It's so hard to get. Could we just simplify it? In the same way we did with SDGs, it's so complex. You know, the outer system, it's incredibly complex, but we managed to get them down to 17 boxes. It's not perfect. And there are, of course, many sub goals, but it's a way to sense make. Then if we look at inner development, we managed to simplify it. It's not perfect. Our model is very simplistic in some sense, you know, five dimensions and 23 skills. That's not how inner development works. But it's a way to point towards something for somebody who's totally new and say, look, this is some of the skills and some of the human dimensions that we need to grow and develop. And then there are different frameworks and methods to do that. In our second phase of the initiative, we started looking at what are some of the methods that we could show in each of the five dimensions, where there is some science, or there is at least a method that is explicit, and a community of practice. So we tried in the second phase to gather different methods. I think we got more than 500 or 600 suggestions from 4,000 people. So within... pointing to a few things you could do. But this is just the beginning of the phase two. We are reworking that now and trying to make it digital and to make it more simple.
Speaker #1
Okay, so but what does that entail? Or maybe you can just explain what's going to be different this time around.
Speaker #0
As I said, we had many biases that are very Western when we created the IDG framework, we try to be a global framework. That's our aspiration. This is our vision. But Honestly, looking on those 5,000 people that have been part in co-creating the IDG framework and the toolkit, many of them are Westerners. I mean, because we're initiated in Sweden, we have many universities in the Nordics, in Europe, in the US that we've been collaborating with. We have voices from all over the globe and all regions, but there are not as many. And of course, there might be ways that we frame the... skills or formulate ourselves that is where we have blind spots. So what we have done now in phase three is we have initiated a second survey where we basically will redo phase one and two, but do it globally. On the 19th of September, we are having our global launch of a one question survey. Again, a very simple, but very big question. that we will try to reach 2 million people with in the coming six months. We'll be in 70 languages, and we'll be launching in more than 100 countries. And there is one question saying, what qualities, abilities, or skills do we need to develop to build a sustainable future for people and planet? And of course, there is a little bit of framing around the SDGs before saying like, look, we have these 17 UN goals. We're not making progress. We want your help in reflecting and answering one question. So we're starting this project and we're looking for collaborators. So this is also a shout out. If you are either an organization that have employees all over the world or just in countries outside of the Nordics where we're very strong. Help us just by including this one question, either in your conference or in your newsletter or in any way you can. Or if you're an academic or academic institution, please help us analyze this data. We will be doing this the coming six months. This is one of the biggest things that's happening. Of course, we're doing a huge summit in Stockholm. So we're welcoming you to co-create with us, either come to Stockholm or be part with us digitally. and helping us update the IDG framework so it becomes truly global.
Speaker #1
Okay, so you have a lot going on. And I'd also like to take a moment just to talk about the climate crisis. I'm curious to know how the five dimensions of the inner development goals, the IDGs, could play into fostering a sense of hope and maybe even agency, or how they could... to remove some of the helplessness that people often feel around the state of the environment and the climate?
Speaker #0
It's a very important question that you're asking. Just to take one simple example, and again, from one of our partner companies, when I'm speaking with one of the top managers, and I asked them, what is the biggest value for you with IDGs? And she says, it's the narrative shift. And I said, what do you mean? She says, like, if you're into climate change, and if you're working in a big system as I'm doing, and I'm trying to have a positive effect, and it's really difficult, especially for companies that are producing anything. And of course, many people want to feel that they're contributing in a positive direction, but not all hundreds of thousands of employees we have can work with carbon offset or other things that are directly tied to the sustainability agenda. And what she told me, she says, but when I get especially young talents, they get it instantly. They understand that like, oh my God, with this framework, it's a different narrative. Even if I'm not working directly related to the climate change issues, I feel that I can work on myself. I can become more curious or compassionate, or I can become better at complexity awareness. And by doing so, of course, I will affect the people around me, including my manager. And in that sense, I'm affecting the culture. and I'm building the skills not only for myself, but in the organization that I am collectively, in order to have better skills to take the right decisions when it comes to climate change, when it comes to complex problems. And that narrative shift, I think senior managers, they see that the IDGs as a framework can give people more hope and more agency in feeling I'm doing at least what I can. And that I think is really important because I don't believe that it helps us that we are walking around with guilt that is not healthy, that is just draining us, that we are not contributing or that we are having climate anxiety and so on. I think we need more hope and we need more climate action.
Speaker #1
Okay, so I have one final question for you, Jan, and that's this. If there were a single skill that you wish... everybody in the world had, what would it be?
Speaker #0
It's such a difficult question. I think it's so contextual, what is needed. But because of that, because of that me answering in this way, I would say complexity awareness. Like whatever issue you take, if you go deep enough, everything is intertwined with everything. The last thing I would like to add. is that the biggest misunderstanding with inner development and inner development goals is that inner equals individual. If you look at the science and research, very rarely people grow individually. It's all about the context. It's all about the system you are embedded in. It's all about growing together. And this is why organizations and institutions are so important, because this, we... we grow in our community of practice. Of course, there are individual components and things we can do, but inner does not mean individual. We need to grow individually and collectively. This is my last point.
Speaker #1
Well, Jan, thank you very much for coming today and for sharing all your thoughts with me and the listeners. It's been a pleasure to have you here and to get to know a little bit more about the inner development goals. and how they can be used. And yeah, I wish you all the very best with the upcoming survey and with the summit.
Speaker #0
Thanks for having me. And thanks for your really curious questions and your presence. I hope that people are open to co-create with us and that we continue on this journey.
Speaker #1
And on that note, thank you very much for joining me today. If you'd like to know more about the inner development goals, you can check out the show notes for a link. to the initiative's website, where you'll also find information about the IDG summit in October and more about the survey. For other episodes of the Inner Green Deal podcast, feel free to subscribe. Thank you for listening, and until the next time, goodbye.

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