Inner Development Goals

In April 2019, a group of developmental psychologists and organizational change leaders met on an island off the coast of Sweden to explore the relationship between human development and the crises we are facing. They issued The Growth that Matters manifesto. The heart of the matter was the realization that the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals—which is the global plan to stop global warming—will not work unless humans themselves change. In other words, without inner human development then outer sustainable development will not happen.

Jan Artem Henriksson, who has led over 70,000 people through transformative leadership programs in Sweden, has been at the center of this work from the beginning. Over the past three years, he has been leading the Inner Development Goals Initiative that launched in April 2022, gathering over 5,000 people live in Sweden and online around the world. Reaching out to researchers and to the change-making community, they have collected a wide range of qualities and capacities that would create the inner development needed for sustainable development. Now they are creating a “tool kit” with research-backed training processes so that individuals, groups, and particularly organizations can become incubators for inner development.

READ an interview with Jan conducted by Elizabeth Debold here.

In this evolve LIVE! online event, Jan and Elizabeth invite us to think together about the inner development needed in this time of urgent crisis. What individual and collective capacities do we need to develop? What strategies are the IDG Initiative using to move this inner change?

As Jan said in an interview with evolve: “With sustainability in focus, inner development gets a bigger purpose! By showing some of the most important skills that we need to build and showing some interventions that are based on a good scientific method and evidence base, we can help
professionals who are new and somewhat skeptical to it, to navigate the field of inner development better. This is the holy grail, to get the people who are not already part of the choir to try out this new song.”

Let’s try out this new song on Tuesday, October 25 from 18:00-21:00 Central European Time. (For the time at your location, please check World Time Buddy.)

evolve LIVE! events are live and interactive. The intention is to create a forum for shared inquiry that is catalyzed by the contribution of a compelling thinker or innovator, in this case, Jan Henriksson. Beginning with a dialogue between Jan and our host, Elizabeth Debold, you will have the chance to join the dialogue with Jan and then to work in small groups together with like-minded dialogue partners. Then we come back together, with Jan, to share and continue the investigation.

COST: The admission fee for evolve LIVE! is on a sliding scale. To cover our costs in hosting and producing the event, a contribution of 30 euros would be most helpful.