Conferences and symposiums Inner Development Goals Summit 2022

Anders Gustafsson, Vice President, Karolinska Institutet

Moderator morning program:

Carl Johan Sundberg, MD, PhD, Professor at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology. Head of the Department of Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics (LIME)

Stefan Swartling Peterson, Professor of Global Transformation for Health, Karolinska Institutet; former Global Chief of the Health for UNICEF

In this session you are invited to share Stefan’s journey during his 4.5 years as Chief of health for Unicef. During his years with Unicef Stefan learnt that success in putting mental health and wellbeing on the Unicef agenda and into its new Strategic plan does not necessarily come with inner development, or personal growth. Join Stefan on this very personal journey where he reflects and share his thoughts on what would be possible if we would put greater emphasis on and allowing us to flex and stretch our inner development muscles in our strive to create outer development and drive change.

Christine Wamsler Professor, Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS) and director of the Contemplative Sustainable Futures Program.

Jamie Bristow, Co -Director of The Mindfulness Initiative - a policy institute about mindfulness and compassion training that grew out of a programme of mindfulness teaching for politicians in the British Parliament.

Climate change is a physical reality, demanding political and practical solutions. But its inner dimension, overlooked entirely by mainstream approaches, is a crisis of human relationship. Over the last two years, Jamie Bristow and Professor Christine Wamsler have been researching the role of mindfulness and compassion practices in addressing the endemic disconnection from self, others and nature at the root of the climate crisis, and have authored the first public policy report on the subject. In this session they will explore the cognitive and emotional foundations of conscious connection and discuss the potential for mindfulness and compassion practices to be developed into powerful enablers of reconnection, fostering both greater resilience and more appropriate responses to global sustainability crises. They will draw upon the emerging evidence base linking internal transformation to sustainability, and broader academic literature on the prosocial impact of mindfulness and compassion training.

Maria Watter, Ph.D, Operations director, Teaching and learning, Karolinska Institutet

In a rapidly changing complex modern society it’s clear that most of the knowledge and skills we acquire today we will not be able to use tomorrow. Emphasizing why education and learning in all formats are more important than ever. Not just for trying to catch up with the latest development, but rather to approach learning in a deeper sense to develop our inner capacity to learn, adapt and transform. Doing so we release the potential power of learning to transform the world to a better place.

If you think about it, how would you design learning for inner development? How would you tackle going beyond specific knowledge and skills to also target for example a learning or growth mindset? An increased capacity to learn and develop new skills throughout life.

We all have great experience of learning, from childhood, through school to work and adult life. From our learning experiences, mostly without knowing it, we create assumptions on how we learn. Later, when we design and lead learning our approach start in those assumptions. So even though the content is new we reproduce both an approach to learning that is far from evidence and mindsets of the past no longer fit for tackling challenges of tomorrow.

In this session, we bring some general assumptions forward and compare them to evidence on how we learn. We try the evidence out and give the mindset needed a thought. If curious to learn about learning to be equipped to lead learning for transformation this is a session for you.

Mini Ruiz, MD, PhD, senior consultant and lecturer  within the medical program at Karolinska Institutet. Dr Mini Ruiz has lead the professional development thread at the medical program,  implementing important changes in the curriculum. Dr Mini Ruiz is passionate about teaching, providing psychological safety and reflective environment for students and staff.

In Sweden as in many countries in the last 15 years, the medical program has had an increasing focus on professional development, including several warranted skills and capacities that we today recognize have several similarities with the IDGs.

 Many learning activities have hence been created and used to support medical students in their development towards empathetic, teamworking healthcare professionals of tomorrow. However promising this may sound it isn´t so easy and I will share some experiences from the professional development thread at the medical program at the Karolinska Institute.

Moderator: Maria Deckeman, Leadership and Organisational Development Specialist, Karolinska Institutet

A brief conversation on Karolinska Institutet´s investment in a pilot development program and research project to further explore and stimulate growth that matters to drive external sustainable development.

Maria Deckeman, Lead and initiator of development program and Walter Osika, P1, research project

Walter Osika, MD, PhD, is a scientist and physician specialized in Internal medicine, Cardiology, and Psychiatry. He is also co-founder and Director of the Center for Social Sustainability, and Associate Professor at the Center for Psychiatry Research, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, at the Karolinska Institute, Sweden.

Christin Mellner is a PhD, researcher and senior lecturer in work- and organizational psychology at the Department of Psychology, Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research focus on the increased pace of change and complexity, and the rapid development of boundary-transcending technology in contemporary working life as related to work-personal life boundaries and balance, sustainable leadership and the role of contemplative practices herein. Moreover, she is interested in personal development, mainly in terms of the role of inner transformation for outer sustainability.

Otto Simonsson is a recent PhD graduate from the University of Oxford. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Karolinska Institutet's Department of Clinical Neuroscience, where he conducts research on mindfulness-based interventions in political context.

The world is currently facing multiple challenges related to mental health and well-being issues, organizational change and disruption, and social and political polarization. Over the last five years, Walter Osika, Otto Simonsson and Christin Mellner have been researching the role of different interventions in addressing personal, inter-personal and inter-group sustainability in terms of conflict and disconnection, as well as stress and resilience within various contexts. In this session they will present qualitative and quantitative research at the private life-, workplace-, and political level related to the emerging concept of the Inner Development Goals. They will draw upon the growing body of evidence on the impact of interventions based on ACT and self-leadership as well as contemplative practices such as mindfulness- and compassion-based exercises on the association between inner transformation and outer sustainability.

Ingrid Landin, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet; Adjunct lecturer and supervisor in Psychotherapy; Course Director, Psychotherapy Programme, Competence Centre for Psychotherapy, Centre for Psychiatry Research, Region Stockholm and Karolinska Institutet

Compassion starts with our capacity to care. It is the softening and opening of the heart to ourselves and all that lives; a profound experience of our mysterious interconnectedness with all life; the realization that we are not separate from others. Compassion is what the world needs to heal and become whole. We can develop and deepen an intention to be of help and not to cause harm; and also the wisdom and skills needed to see what causes suffering and what will alleviate it.

So how do we develop our capacity to be with suffering, wisely and compassionately? In the Buddhist tradition, and nowadays also in Compassion Focused Therapy and ACT, there are many ways to train the mind in the compassion that we so desperately need, so that we don’t turn away from suffering and can meet the challenges of today’s world. We will explore these in a short compassion exercise.

Shervin Shahnavaz, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist, and Psychotherapist at the Centre for Psychiatry Research and Centre for Education & Research at Karolinska Institutet and Region Stockholm. Vice-Chairman at Council for environment and Sustainable development, Karolinska Institutet.

Lundstedt/Shahnavaz duo is made up of Elvira Lundstedt and Viggo Shahnavaz, two trained and experienced jazz musicians. In close collaboration, they have created a unique jazz sound, merging Lundstedt’s mind-blowing voice and Shahnavaz´s musing guitar. The duo has toured in different parts of Sweden, now inviting you join them on their explorative musical journey.

"You are not a drop in the ocean; you are the entire ocean in a drop."

For over 800 years, Rumi's thoughts and experiences of inner growth and transformation have crossed cultural and linguistic boundaries, deeply affecting individuals all over the world. He is one of the most widely read poets globally. Thinkers and writers such as Emerson, Goethe, Fromm, and Gandhi have been inspired by him. With the help of poems and metaphors, Rumi creates images, emotions, and experiences that create new perspectives and enable inner growth. He uses music and movement (whirling) to elicit and strengthen these experiences. Compassion, acceptance, and love are at the heart of Rumi's work. Love is both the goal and the means of spiritual maturity, self-knowledge, wisdom, and personal transformation. Several modern psychotherapy schools such as Compassion Focused Therapy and Acceptance Commitment Therapy rest on psychological foundations that in many ways are advocated in Rumi's work. This presentation seeks to add perspectives and enrich the work on IDGs by bringing Rumi to the audience.

Daniel Siegel, Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute

What does it mean to be intraconnected? In weaving the internal and external, the subjective and objective, this workshop will reveal how modern culture, as well as how our brain is wired, may give us a message of separation as a solo, isolated self; yet a wider perspective unveils that who we are, what a deeper reality actually is, may be something more—broader than the brain, bigger even than the body—fundamental to the social systems and the natural world in which we live.  We will explore the nature of how our experience of what we often call, self, emerges across the lifespan and how this journey into identity and belonging can help weave our personal reflections with scientific discussions into how the mind, brain, and relationships shape who we are. Our body-based self—the origin of a Me— is not only connected to others but connected within our relational worlds themselves—a WE—forming the essence of how we belong and the fullness of our identity. Who we are is both within and between: Me plus We equals MWe, the reality of our intraconnected lives. 

Amy C. Edmondson  Ph.D., Harvard Business School

Amy C. Edmondson - "World's #1 Management Thinker" in 2022 and ranked by the biannual Thinkers50 global list of top management thinkers since 2011. She is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, a chair established to support the study of human interactions that lead to the creation of successful enterprises that contribute to the betterment of society.

Amy studies teaming, psychological safety, and organizational learning, and her articles have been published in numerous academic and management outlets, including Administrative Science Quarterly,  Academy of Management Journal, Harvard Business Review and California Management Review. Her most recent book, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation and Growth (Wiley, 2019), offers a practical guide for organizations serious about success in the modern economy and has been translated into 15 languages.