Hello & Welcome!

In 2008, together with a group of friends, social entrepreneurs and thinkers, I founded the Ekskäret Foundation in Sweden. The foundation grew from a conviction that societal transformation cannot be understood solely in terms of external systems and institutions. Human development matters too – individually and collectively.

This was the beginning of what became almost two decades of experimentation with places, communities, organisations and initiatives concerned with the relationship between inner development and societal change.

One of our first major projects was Ekskäret Island in the Stockholm archipelago. Since opening in 2011, the island has become a place for retreats, learning, contemplation and conversations about personal and societal development. A few years later we created Ekskäret Klustret, a co-working and meeting space in central Stockholm, which brought together people working across social innovation, sustainability and cultural change.

Behind these initiatives was a simple hypothesis: places matter. When people with different experiences and perspectives are given the conditions to meet, learn and think together, unexpected possibilities can emerge. Physical and, later, digital spaces could become environments for experimentation – places in which new relationships, ideas and initiatives might take form.

Over the years this work expanded into a wider ecology of projects.

I helped initiate or co-found ventures including K9 Co-living in Stockholm, Perspectiva in London, the Co-creation Loft in Berlin, the digital non-profit 29k, and Emerge, which began as a series of gatherings and conversations exploring new approaches to culture, consciousness and societal transformation.

I also became one of the initiators of the Inner Development Goals, an international initiative exploring the inner capacities needed to engage more effectively with the complex challenges facing humanity.

Some of these initiatives have grown into independent organisations; others were experiments appropriate to a particular moment. What connects them for me is more important than any individual project. They have all been ways of exploring a recurring question: what conditions help people, organisations and societies become more capable of meeting complexity and participating constructively in change?

Today, this exploration continues through Emerge Institute and Emerge Lakefront in Stockholm, as well as through my writing and involvement in the Inner Development Goals and the Ekskäret Foundation.

Over time, my understanding of the challenge has also deepened. I still believe that inner development is an essential dimension of societal transformation – but it is not sufficient on its own. Human development, culture, institutions, technology, economics and our deeper assumptions about reality are interwoven.

What began for me as an effort to help “co-create a more conscious society” has therefore become a broader inquiry into how we might participate more consciously and responsibly in a period of profound civilisational change.

I am a member of the Club of Rome, a fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences and a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science.

I describe myself as an applied philosopher. I use the word philosophy in something close to its original meaning: a love of knowledge and a desire to understand how things fit together. My interests have always crossed disciplinary boundaries – from physics, economics and complexity science to developmental psychology, philosophy, sociology, history and, increasingly, cosmology and theology..

I am not trying to develop expertise in all these fields. I am interested in the connections between them and in the larger patterns that become visible when different forms of knowledge are brought into conversation.

This integrative perspective has shaped my books, including The Market Myth, The Nordic Secret and The World We Create, as well as essays such as this and this.

Much of my thinking begins with a simple observation: many of the challenges we face cannot be understood in isolation. Climate change, technological acceleration, geopolitical instability, growing inequality, loneliness, loss of meaning and declining trust are different phenomena, but they interact within larger systems. They are also connected to how human beings perceive the world, what we value and the institutions and cultures we create.

This is why I have become increasingly interested in the relationship between inner development and societal transformation.

Our capacity to respond to complexity depends partly on skills such as perspective-taking, systems thinking, empathy, self-awareness and the ability to collaborate across difference. But over the years I have also come to see that capacities alone are not enough. How we act depends on the deeper assumptions through which we interpret reality – our worldviews, our understanding of what a human being is, what constitutes a good life, and what kind of world we believe ourselves to be living in.

This has gradually led me towards a deeper inquiry.

The modern world has given humanity extraordinary powers to understand and transform our environment. It has also encouraged us to think of ourselves as largely separate individuals standing outside a world of objects and resources. Yet many developments in science, philosophy, ecology and the contemplative traditions point towards a more relational picture: human beings are deeply embedded participants in biological, cultural, social and planetary processes that we can influence but never fully control.

Instead of asking only “How can we solve the problems we face?”, we also need to ask: What kind of participants must we become in order to meet the reality we are part of more wisely?

That question now lies close to the centre of my philosophical work.

It also connects my thinking with my practical projects. The Ekskäret Foundation, Protus, Perspectiva, 29k, the Inner Development Goals, Emerge and other initiatives have all, in different ways, explored the relationship between how human beings develop and the worlds we collectively create.

I was also a co-founder of Fri Tanke, a Swedish publishing house created to encourage serious public conversation across the boundaries of science, philosophy, politics and existential inquiry.

For me, philosophy has therefore never been primarily an academic exercise. It is a way of trying to understand the world deeply enough to participate in it more consciously and responsibly.

I grew up on a farm outside Borås in western Sweden. Curiosity about how the world works led me to study mathematics and theoretical physics. I loved the combination of abstraction and empirical inquiry, and for a time I could easily have imagined a life in science. But I was also drawn to acting in the world, not only understanding it, and eventually became an entrepreneur.

The first part of my professional life took me through information technology, investment banking and property development. I founded Investment Banking Partners and later served as chairman of EFG Investment Bank. Those years gave me opportunities and experiences I could hardly have imagined growing up. They also gave me the financial freedom, eventually, to ask a different question: what did I actually want to devote my life to?

That question became increasingly important to me. Success had taught me a great deal about markets, organisations and human motivation, but it had also made me curious about the forces beneath them – the assumptions, values, psychological needs and cultural narratives that shape both individuals and societies.

In 2008, I left the financial world and began what became a very different chapter of my life.

I founded the Ekskäret Foundation together with a group of friends and collaborators, and over the following years became involved in creating organisations, communities and platforms concerned with inner development, social transformation and the deeper cultural questions of our time. These have included Ekskäret, Perspectiva, 29k, Emerge and the Inner Development Goals, alongside many smaller experiments and collaborations.

When I began this work, I thought largely in terms of bringing together changemakers and creating conditions for personal and societal development. Nearly two decades of practical experience have both strengthened and complicated that conviction.

I still believe that human beings can develop capacities that help us meet complexity with greater wisdom, compassion and responsibility. But I have become increasingly aware that inner development cannot be separated from culture, institutions, economics, technology or the deeper worldviews through which we understand ourselves and reality.

This has brought me back, in an unexpected way, to some of the questions that fascinated me when I was young. What kind of world are we actually part of? What is a human being within that world? How much can we consciously shape, and how much must we learn to listen and respond to processes larger than ourselves? What does it mean to live responsibly in a period of profound civilisational change?

Today, much of my time is devoted to exploring these questions through writing, conversation and the institutions I remain involved in. Emerge Institute and Emerge Lakefront are the latest expressions of this work – places for learning, community and inquiry that also draw together many strands of the journey that began with Ekskäret almost twenty years ago.

My three adult children remain one of the deepest sources of meaning in my life. So do the friendships and communities that have grown around this work.

I feel fortunate to have reached a stage of life where I no longer need to search for the next project. What interests me now is how the experiences, relationships and institutions that have accumulated over the years can serve something larger than themselves.

The world feels more precarious to me today than it did when I began this journey – but also more mysterious. I am less certain that we can simply design the future we want. I am increasingly interested in how we can become better participants in what is unfolding: attentive to reality, capable of discernment, willing to act, and humble about how much we can know or control.

My academic background in mathematics and theoretical physics gave me a lasting respect for science – for its disciplined curiosity, its willingness to test assumptions, and its extraordinary capacity to deepen our understanding of the world. I continue to follow research across a wide range of fields, particularly complexity science, developmental psychology, cognitive science, sociology and ecology.

Over the years, however, I have also become increasingly aware of the limits of any single way of knowing. Scientific knowledge is indispensable, but many of the questions that matter most to us – about meaning, value, purpose, responsibility and how we should live together – cannot be settled by science alone. They require dialogue between different disciplines, traditions of thought and forms of human experience.

There is already an enormous body of knowledge that could help us create healthier institutions, more resilient communities and more meaningful lives. Yet much of it remains fragmented within academic disciplines or fails to find its way into education, organisations and public life.

Part of my work has therefore been about building bridges: between research and practice, between inner and societal development, and between different ways of understanding the human condition.

At the same time, I have become more cautious about the idea that society can simply be designed towards a predetermined future. Complex systems do not behave that way. Our actions matter, but their consequences are never entirely under our control.

The challenge, as I now see it, is to hold intentionality and humility together: to act on the best knowledge and values available to us, while remaining attentive to emergence, open to learning and prepared to revise our understanding as reality responds.

We cannot stand outside society and engineer the future. But neither are we powerless spectators. We are participants in the worlds we inherit, sustain and help bring into being.