 So, now, it's a pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker, Kirsten Dunlop. Dr. Kirsten Dunlop is Chief Executive Officer at Climate Key YC. You might not know this complicated brand, but it's Europe's largest public-private partnership focused on climate innovation. Kirsten brings to her role a deep conviction in our capacity to learn and evolve in a climate resilient society. She is a specialist in experiential learning. She has over 30 years of experience in systemic transformation across three continents. So, we are very happy to have you here. The stage is yours, Kirsten. Thank you. OK, so let me start by explaining a little bit about where I'm speaking from. So, you have a sense of what that KIC means. And then I'm going to give... I am going to set a scene for the conversations today, which is not a comfortable scene, but is informed by the work we're doing. And then what I wanted to do was give you my view as a practitioner of the role of culture, creative arts, industries and museums in this question of how on earth we face a climate crisis and a climate emergency. So, Climate KIC, Knowledge Innovation Community. It is an organisation that has existed since 2010, and our focus is really on trying to address very difficult areas of human life and industry and productivity, where it's extremely hard to resolve climate crisis, where there is a massive implementation gap between the commitments that Europe, the rest of the world, every country, every community, every business, and every institution or association of institutions is making to climate action and the reality of where we are now. We chose some time ago to focus on systemic change, acknowledging that climate, the climate crisis, the climate emergency is really fundamentally about human transformation. We can talk about the fact that it's about emissions, it's about the possibility of renewables, it's about the possibility of technologies and change, but fundamentally it's about social change. And our journey to transform ourselves as an organisation, to think about the way in which innovations could be combined and integrated and deeply into woven, into the social fabric, led us to be an organisation that is now needing a consortium that implements something that Europe has created, called the mission on cities. We are also involved in a mission on climate adaptation for regions and a mission on soil. And this is an initiative that attempts to create a breakthrough in momentum and mobilisation of change. But what it fundamentally means is working in whole cities, whole places, whole regions to transform human society, ways of living, ways of imagining, ways of working, ways of eating, moving about, was pretty much every aspect of our lives. And one of the things that we have done and we now commit to for the next seven years, when I go to Dubai in 10 days to the COP, we will publish our next strategy for 24 to 2030, is to partner with the new knowledge innovation community created by the EIT, the European Institute of Innovation Technology, on culture and creativity. Because we believe that one of the most important things we need to do now is to find a way to reintegrate art and science, to address urgently together how we are going to achieve human transformation in time. So, that leads me to give you a little bit of a flash around what it is that we're talking about. I know you know, I'm assuming you know, but I don't know how much you know or how crisp and precise and profound is your understanding of the situation we are in. We are not in the world that is described by the IPCC report officially. We are in a world that is significantly worse than that. So significantly worse that it is politically unacceptable across the entire suite of nations across the world to describe just how significant that difference is. We are currently in a world where we are on track for somewhere between three and four degrees, three and six, if you look at the research that came out two weeks ago, three and six degrees of global warming. If you think about what that means, three degrees of global warming is five degrees on land and eight degrees in cities. We mostly live in cities where eight degrees of warming is not liveable. The reason why this is happening is because of feedback loops. We have underestimated and not fully understood the way in which life cycles and complex dynamics work in the planet that we live on. We have made a set of calculations based on the ways in which we taught ourselves to think in linear mechanistic ways and we begin to understand that the world is not like that, that we have a set of feedback loops that are beginning to feed on each other. If we wish to change this scenario, please fix that image in your head. That is a picture of the scale, the pace and the extremity of the differences we need to make to ourselves. This is what we need to do if we don't want to get to this. This is a picture of the world at four degrees. It is a public picture of the UN's backup plan for what happens when the world does get to four degrees. The green areas on this map are areas that are still capable of producing food. Look at where they are and think about where conflict is happening in the world now. One of the things that the UN is really worried about is that the area, the most significant area of food producing land at four degrees sits in the Russian steppes and is quite likely to be walled off. The areas that have those little gray dots are solar arrays, a massive renewable energy arrays to power human population moving to areas that are green. The gold, brown, they are uninhabitable. I come from Australia. It's looking like I'm going to need to move to the West Coast. Certainly it's not a comfortable picture. So please remember, this is the shape of a future that avoids this. And we know unfortunately that there are a set of other impacts and effects that have not been calculated into policy, that are not being well-prepared for, that in particular our degrees of tolerance, understanding and anticipation of change are ill-prepared for. We have so far seen 6 million people leave Ukraine because of the invasion of Russia. We have no idea of what hundreds of millions of millions of refugees looks like. It completely crushes our ideas about European autonomy and the ways in which we think about the mixture of societies that we're used to. And yet that's what we're looking at. Once you lose the green and ice sheet which is actually now happening, it's not refreezing in summer. We lose Indonesia and Vietnam, the two largest rice producing areas in the world. That's one of the big staple crops that we need to feed people. People need food, they move. And we know and we have realized finally that this is not just about global warming, that there is an enormous correlated and reinforcing effect from the ways in which our land practices, food cultivation, expansion of human environment and human community is degrading, breaking down, and removing species, breaking down biodiversity and environmental protection. And we desperately need nature to help us. Finally, we are also beginning to understand, but again, I'm not sure how clear that really is for most people, that we are not living in a world in which the change that we need to make, that dramatic transformation of ourselves, happens in a stable, extended present of what we have become used to in the last 50 years. It doesn't. It happens in a massively discontinuous, disruptive and uncertain present, full of crises. So our capacity to act needs to be designed for very different circumstances. I see this on a daily basis when I'm working with cities or with regions, because I see solutions that have been designed on the assumption that the world will continue more or less as is, that the temperature will remain as we know it, that water levels will remain as we know it, that storms will happen as frequently as they currently happen. And I have to keep explaining, you're going to need to build buildings with very, very different circumstances in mind. But that's not yet quite in our mindsets. So we have a situation that requires us to become different, not just different in the way in which we understand ourselves and the way in which we live, but different in terms of the way in which we are equipped to deal with the context in which we will need and we are needing to act. And that really is a call to arms. It's a call to all of us to ask, what are you doing? What am I doing? What are we doing? How could we collectively partner and join forces to do something about this? And one of the reasons why it is so fundamentally important to collaborate is not simply that we collectively are in this together, but that it requires working in ways that we have not been working. We tell ourselves, I hear it on a constant basis, well, it's a bit complex. You can't tell that story, it's got too many things in it. Make it simple, keep it simple, break it into small parts and then we'll deal with it. Our problem is that that's exactly our issue. We have been running the world in small, linguistic, disconnected parts. We've broken everything into the parts that we find easier to deal with. And our challenge is that we need to do something that encompasses the whole. And that's where I believe we have an extraordinary opportunity to do something together. So this is my perspective. It's not the perspective of an expert in museums and cultural institutions. It's the perspective of a practitioner of change, working in the field of climate innovation, working to change systems, ways of thinking, structures, institutions, policies, places, particularly places, the places where we find and we can understand change in ways that are meaningful and contextual to us. This is the perspective from the ground of what I would love to achieve by partnering with you, with the institutions that are in this room and the institutions that form part broadly of the creative sector and cultural sector. And of course, it's a glimpse of possibility because I do indeed believe that everything, anything is possible if we put our minds and above all our imaginations to it. We need the European city mission not to be focused on whether or not we can add a few more solar panels and decarbonize a little bit more buildings with retrofit but to conceive of urban living fundamentally differently. How is that going to happen? So that's the point of these few slides, these ways of explaining my perspective on the answer to that question. What can culture and creativity bring to the question of climate change and climate action? I have a series of suggestions and what I have done for each of these is just to explain what are these? Why am I speaking about this and how might it connect to museums? I'm going to start with mindsets and identity. I'll go through every single one. There is simply, as I said, a view from the ground of a practitioner working on climate innovation. So let me start with mindsets and identity. If there is one thing we need to change for long-term, mid-term and short-term, it is our sense of self. We have three abramic religions who have taught for hundreds of years that we have, should have, and have a right to have dominion over nature. And it's as subtle as the water we drink. It's baked in so many things, our assumption of rights, our assumption of the right to exploit, the right to use, the right to buy, the right to extract. If there is one thing that we could try collectively to shift, it would be our understanding of our identity as fully interdependent with, dependent upon, interwoven in, part of belonging to nature, not dominion over, but something fundamentally different. Secondly, we have for at least 300 years, specifically the last 150, been working steadily to pull apart the two hemispheres of our brain and to create different orders of importance and prioritization for something that is rational and something that is emotional. For separating art and science. I'm an art historian, a medieval Renaissance art historian. My training is in looking at when and how does this happen, where and how do we pull apart the idea that somehow things that are logical and things that are not about logic need to be managed in different ways. And this is critical. This is a picture of governance. This is a policy picture from the 14th century painted on the walls of Siena above the seats on which decision makers took decisions on behalf of their peers because they were elected by their peers every six months. It's an image that has deeply interwoven art, culture, authority coming from the representation of power through visual forms and the politics of the temporal politics of decision-making policy and power. And this is something we somehow need to recuperate. We need different mindsets, different ways of being. So I've chosen to pull up Italo Calvino's six memos for the next millennium because they capture ways of being that rarely show up in the boardrooms of companies where we are holding people to account for how they create and run businesses that determine human living, human expectations and human aspirations. How can culture, creativity and the arts train, retrain, reshape mindsets and identity? Think about one of the single most critical challenges structural changes that we need to achieve when I'm speaking about human transformation. This is the single greatest barrier we have to achieving that shape of change fast. The assumption that living well is about consuming and that consuming requires massive extraction of virgin materials so that we have something new every month, every year, every couple of months. That assumption of the material growth of economies is the way in which countries prosper. Communities prosper is something enormous. It is literally killing us. How would we change this mindset? How would we change this self-perception, economic, social and political? How would culture and creative industries lay in the neural pathways, the habits, the mindsets, the practices, the ways of thinking, being the meaning structures for something like sufficiency? I hear that the Swedish concept of lagorm, not too much and just enough, is approximate. But then I hear that it was also captured by the Calvinists, so you need to be careful on how you use it. But something like that, because this is not about new mechanics. This is about new assumptions. This is about unlearning and relearning. And we need, ultimately, our businesses to begin to see this as normal, as a basic understanding of what it means to engage in productive human activity and take responsibility for stewardship of productive human activity over time. That means we need to relearn our way back in to what it means to be part of nature. How does one live in a world where the DNA of a butterfly is already resident in a caterpillar? Where we are talking about ontologies, shifts of state and being. Where we need, finally, to start to understand and learn and look at the natural environment and begin to understand that everything we see has more to it than we have understood and assumed. There are enormous wealth of solutions for us to live differently, to live well, to adapt in the ways in which nature and the natural environment work. This is Skyler Tibbetts working on the properties and materials we so often think as humans that every material has one property. Coffee is good for coffee. Metal is good for eggs. We rarely understand that materials can change themselves. This is about four-dimensional printing so that materials self-adjust and self-transform without human intervention, simply be understanding the properties of the material world. There are institutions in the world of museums as I was sitting there doing my research that are beginning to work on the reimagining of human existence in relationship to the natural environment. How do we do more with that? This is an abjain super-flux, creating mind imaginaries, literally physical imaginaries of what it means to live differently, of what it means to deal with the uncertainty of present-day choices, or the British Museum's experiment of colonizing nature, starting to expose this notion of imagining alternatives, imagining different ways of being. I am about to go to Dubai for COP with concern, worry, skepticism, but it's the only international process we have. This is the Museum of the Future in Dubai. I am going to be very curious to see what shows up there. Is it a museum of a future of possibilities? Is it a museum of a future of negotiated outcomes? What is there? So, habits and practices. This is the image of a rave festival, one of the practices that comes with the greatest concentration of waste in human culture and society at the moment. What can be done through the ways in which the cultural sector is now beginning to think about decarbonization, raising awareness, building understanding, using tools to change habits and practices. I was particularly interested to come across Klimafor, where I think you, how many people know of this? No, it's a group of museums in the United Kingdom who are working with food cultivators in particular to tackle salmon farming, but to change what restaurants are serving in museums. They're starting to really build in the context of museums greater public awareness of what it means to eat ecologically and particularly to tackle some of the things that we tell ourselves are all about not capturing wild salmon, but are actually just as polluting as anything else. Then I found it particularly interesting looking at the museums for climate action that prepared for COP26 in Glasgow, a series of questions about the role that museums could play. Fantastic questions, I wrote some of them down. What if museums became centres for community-led research and action? What if museums were small places that supported local community action? What if indigenous lands were understood as museums for sustainable living? What if museum buildings contributed to climate action with their material substance? How can museums change lifestyles, habits and practices? And this, in fact, is a whole bank of resources for museums to draw upon. Rich, interesting, comprehensive. I suspect not going far enough, but a fantastic start. But then there's something more. There's the question of arts, culture and creativity also comes with a significant load. And I don't just mean rave festivals. Every euro, dollar, every form of currency spent on advertising is actively reinforcing a model of encouraging people to acquire, to buy, to consume, to change. Advertised emissions, when you start to think of them, are some of the most heavy, the most pernicious, the most widespread, the heaviest emission drivers that we have. How would we change the way in which our need to see, to visualise, to be fed a sense of attractiveness, of aspiration if it influences the ways in which we choose to live? How would we address that? This is an organisation called FUTERA, which has launched Solutions Union. It's one of the most important advertising agencies in the world that has been working for years on sustainability and has now really worked, really moved to launch a not-for-profit organisation that is trying to engage directly with the impact of advertising and the way in which advertising drives behaviours. Then there's the question of innovation itself. Because all of us, in some ways, end up being involved in innovation. Innovation is also a mindset that is currently involved in very, very tangled up in very linear mechanistic thinking. Come up with a brilliant idea, take it to market, bring on venture capital, make it scale up, and magically it should save the world. Unfortunately, there's not actually the way in which it works. Not if one of the things you need to save is the ways in which humans think about value, what they aspire to have, how they aspire to live. You can scale up lots of things if you feed them into the existing capitalist system. But that's a challenge. So that's the point of the missions. It is about trying to capture something different in terms of our imaginations, harnessing a way of innovating in such a way as to challenge our assumptions about what is possible and begin to open up space in the imagination for habits and practices in urban environments that are fundamentally different. Asking ourselves constantly the question, what stops us from doing this? What's the worst thing that could happen if this is the way in which we demanded every neighborhood, street, and district in every city in Europe in the world looked like? And of course that is the purpose of the European Bauhaus, falling explicitly for the combination of beauty, of aesthetics, of affordability, of accessibility, and of sustainable living, sustainable building. When I go to the US, this is one of the most fantastic conversations I have because it's literally incomprehensible. Like, what? Decarbonization with beauty? How does that make money? And there's a really interesting conversation about so what does it mean to create value, to generate a notion of wealth grounded in aesthetics, in well-being. You can start by explaining how big brands, the huge big designer brands are born in Europe, made in Europe, and have created global wealth. But then you need to work into the deeper areas of what it means to live differently and how that in itself produces value and that comes back to changing habits and practices around the definition of value and the relationship between those definitions of value and what we face. So let's come to institutions. And here are snapshots of institutions where I think the role of museums could be and is deeply entangled. Museums are already working to raise public awareness as institutions of what climate change means. The question is how much does that strike home? How much do people walking around installations of icebergs melting think of what that relays in how they may need to live, how their children will live in the next 20, 30 years? The Museum of Tomorrow I find really interesting and the way in which it's constantly bringing in information, a huge investment in raising awareness and understanding and information. The New Climate Museum that has been set up in the US to try and create awareness, to build understanding, to create that kind of experiential exploratory space for understanding the relationship between climate, climate risk, climate awareness, climate action. The Climate Action Museum I think in the UK, no, no, this is in the US and the other is in the UK, really trying to do the same thing, raise awareness, institutions being used to raise awareness. At the same time, institutions being used to raise understanding of the shadow side of museums, the extent to which what is preserved in museums, what is captured there, the way it is captured, is so often tapped into the history of colonization of extraction. So that very difficult tension, which at the same time is a wonderful opportunity to think about transforming by reintegrating, by unlearning, relearning, reintegrating tolerance, dialogue, understanding across the world. And there is, of course, the shadow side of museums as institutions. The extent to which they themselves, living in a fragile existence because they're not tapped into the most extractive parts of our economies, are underwritten by the same businesses that are causing us the trouble. And this is the exhibition that happened in the British Museum, which did in fact cause the British Museum to cancel its contract with BP and to remove the funding that BP was providing and had been funding for 27 years. So it was a big, a big removal of the shadow side. But that is showing up still everywhere. There still are enormous inch issues in the European Union. We are subsidizing fossil fuels at significant levels. We have just taken on, we have just enlarged the contract with Colombia to extract more coal than any other nation on the planet. There are questions about how do we close the coherency loop with our decisions and our policymaking. And that of course means that there are questions around institutional change in governance. Now one of the interesting things that I experienced earlier this year is to work on the Goethe Institutes of Voices of Culture project with the European Commission, working with representatives from institutions all over Europe from our cultural institutions. And one of the themes that came out most strongly was the capacity of culture and creativity in distributed, polycentric, networked, community-based ways. And that not just as a way of acting, but a way of governing, a way of making decisions. There is an institutional change that is desperately needed in the world of managing the commons of clean air, clean water, access to food, access to energy, polycentric governance, networked governance. How does culture and creativity institutions help change that? Then there's the question of law. We are beginning, finally globally, to write the rights of nature into human rights law. How might that be translated into public imagination, in partnership with cultural institutions, so that people begin to understand how those rights engage and intertangle at the moment it sits in a very dry space of international lawmaking. How might museums themselves begin to engage with the edges and the boundaries of what it means to be an institution in a world of self-transformation? And that then leads me to capabilities. We need very different capabilities for the world we're in. I referred to the fact that the world that I often engage with is a world in which I'm having to help decision-makers at all sorts of levels unlearn the things that they were taught were ways of being successful in the world. Unlearn ways of thinking that are sequential, that are linear, that are based on logical log frames and relearn or learn new ways of thinking, ways of acting, ways of behaving that allow them to operate, literally operate, in complexity. To operate when the problems are multi-sided, when the gap between climate commitments and where we are now is messy because it's full of humans. Determining their futures, believing different things, it requires ways of thinking capabilities this is David Snowden's Kenevan framework, that are fit for purpose, for complex adaptive worlds, complex adaptive change. Very different ways of thinking about mindsets, capabilities, enabling constraints. How are we teaching people that? How is that baked into education from primary school all the way through? It's not. Only marginally. How would museums and institutions fundamentally shift that up? Here is the mayor of Lervon, who is one of the remarkable people who embodies an effort in reframing, re-understanding and trying something really very, very different. Working with citizens and social housing communities and across the city of Lervon to try on his own skin and on the skin of the city, what does it mean differently? And he needs that kind of leadership support and reinforcing mechanisms because he is dealing with citizens who are showing up on the streets expecting and asking but not necessarily from a creative and a generative space from a place of anger and resentment and accusation and expectation so finding ways to engage finding the capabilities and the mindsets to engage with this becomes important and it requires a very different way of thinking about how to work with others. Deep, powerful, profound collaboration. Again, think about it. Every single fundamental mindset we have been taught is that the value of the invisible hand, the importance of self-interest, the power of competition to keep the world healthy, to keep people on their feet, to make sure that we will create thriving societies. We're going to have to unlearn that because we cannot survive if we keep thinking of ourselves as a set of competing interests. We need to find ways to go together further, fast and fairly and that does require very different capabilities and practices. So I'm interested in institutional spaces that play that out, that give people the chance of experiencing, of experimenting, of understanding what are the profound differences that this entails, that it comes with, that it unlocks, that it enables and that it needs incentives for. And for that we need something that is powerful enough to mobilize. Story. The most powerful tool that human societies have had, have used and have developed over 5,000 years. The stories that get us out of bed, that move us to different countries, that move our imaginations, our hearts and our minds. Climate action, climate change has been managed so far on a horribly mistaken assumption. That if we just tell people and think of my talk here, I'm doing exactly the same thing. If we just tell people how bad the situation is they will wake up and start doing something. We are catastrophically wrong. This is not working. Certainly not fast enough. So here again you have institutions, organizations who are now really looking at how do we get the parables right. What are the parables that tell us that in bed in our imaginations that living sustainably is not about losing everything that makes life fun. No more meat, no more car, no more travel, no more working around the world. This is all about loss and austerity. But the living sustainably is enjoyable, is beneficial, is rich, is full of possibilities, is possibly one of the ways in which we will create societies that are fundamentally different and much more rewarding. But we need a different way of thinking about the story of that. The climate care exhibition at the Mark last year experimented with ways of telling those stories and also exposed how hard it is to do that because often the stories are normative. They're not so easily, they're not so easy to embed in the nuances of every single culture, every single food culture, every single environment culture. There are new museums that are starting to embed and create experiential spaces for discovery and story writing. And there are old environments in which some of the most powerful storytelling is embedded and played out for us to learn from. I said I was a historian of medieval Renaissance cities. This is a city that was built over 800 years consistently with governments changing every six months. My inquiry when I was young was how on earth is that possible? It certainly wouldn't happen now. The same building program individuals around this square homeowners who were required to pull back their house, their facade of their house by 14 centimeters, knock it down and rebuild it at their own cost so that the line of piazza would be perfectly regular so that Florence could claim itself to be the new Rome. These are the building programs that built stories of economic, social and political identity. So simple, so powerful and so enduring that they mobilized investments, building programs, governments, decision making, economic choices, financial alliances and political alliances for hundreds of years. That's what this is about. It's a story about what good governance leads to. It's literally here, the decision making seats are there and on this side of the wall you see two things. A city in which productivity, human activity flourishes and thrives and a land on which it depends in which farming, landscape, well-being thrives and survives. On the other side of the wall is the depiction of what happens if governance is not held in balance, where the interests of the individual are held in balance. So let me finish with two reflections. We also need to be able to let go and that as we know of ourselves as emotional, not logical and rational beings first and foremost, is something that will require some form of catharsis. We are going to need to ritually say goodbye to cars as individual forms of mobility for every single individual human being with empty seats beside them. We're going to need to let go of ways of living that for us are so normal, it's never occurred to us to question them. Ways of understanding and living with nature that are fundamentally different. How do museums, cultural institutions art, architecture media, film help us do that? How do we grieve, say farewell, let go and move on? And deal with the impact of climate anxiety and grief and despair that younger generations in particular but not only are experiencing. I have a 14 year old and a 16 year old. My biggest challenge is going home and not telling them what I know because they already look at me and tell me that they can't see any point. Because it is clear nothing will change in time. And there are some interesting experiments. I was particularly intrigued by this. This weathering with us. It's a massive mandala sculpture made of olivine that captures material from the air, captures carbon from the atmosphere and drops it into ocean structures. It's an interesting way of thinking about how do museums and cultural spaces act as places of real, literally, reforging a relationship with an environment and a catharsis. And that leads me to two final reflections on museums for this conference and for the discussion you have here. Museums are places of social learning, of informal and formal learning, structured dialogue, places of transition. Gregory Bateson said a lot about the importance of every civilization investing in flexibility in the spaciousness to adapt to uncertainty and change. And that whenever a particular variable in one civilization gets too rigid and stuck, it forces everything else to come behind it. So that if we start, and his example was over population, if we start to worry about overpopulation but we can't let go of the idea that we all should live the same way we have in the past, then we start to think only about how to create new houses, more cars, more cities, instead of changing the underlying paradigm for a different world. And we face something like that now. How could museums be places where budgets of possibility and flexibility are invested in? Where there are spaces for the enactments of future selves. Where there are spaces for laboratory of difference, laboratories of imagination making the space for us to learn how to become something different. I think that is ultimately what we would really need, that partnership, that collaboration between those seeking to change the way the world is and close the implementation gap and the partnership with the creative industries and culture and arts. This is a picture from Tomorrowland. I love Tomorrowland, not just because of George Clooney, although that's definitely a factor, but because the parable of the two wolves, the little Cherokee parable, there are two wolves inside all of us, all of the time fighting, all of the time. One is hope, one is despair. Which one wins? The one you feed. Self-reinforcing loops. The one you feed. Are we feeding our imagination stories of despair, of disaster, of austerity, of loss? Are we feeding our imagination stories of possibility, of difference, acts of imagining that carry us through hundreds of years of change? This is what we need. We need something that genuinely creates the social spaces and laboratories of difference and of becoming different. Thank you very much. I will and do have, I think, some time for questions and would love to initiate a dialogue before you go on to a set of discussions about how you and your institutions do play a role partnering together and with all of us. I'm going to stand here uncomfortably and if anyone has comments or questions, this is the time. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed your talk. You mentioned that you're specializing in experiential learning and I was curious if you saw any particular tools that are more effective in changing maybe behaviors that you've implemented so far? Yes. I used to work for 20 years I worked in financial services in banking and insurance and I was responsible particularly in one of the big global insurers for learning education for the whole organization and one of my challenges was to train men predominantly, in fact they were all men who were just below two levels below the C-suite so they were below the level of CEO or CFO they were in kind of very top flight career and my challenge was to work out how would I have them learn a different sense of the world and a different sense of themselves and the organization had invested over some time sending them to Harvard Business School sending them to INSEAD, sending them to wherever I did some research I looked at what was called at the time the masters in practicing management and we designed a program of 18 months of modules of one to two weeks each of full immersion in mindset shifts adapted for this environment so it started off taking them to the headquarters of NATO and listening to the military and political side talk about what happened the night the Berlin Wall came down when all of a sudden there was no reason for NATO to exist how did they get through that night how did they make a decision whether or not to keep going and so on then it went to London and talked to stock exchange and the share price of the company dropped every single time so it was a very live experiment in what happens when you engage with the share market then it went to China to northern Mongolia to engage with the Chinese National the Chinese Communist Party because they own one of the biggest companies that this organization had a partnership with and so on there were a series of modules my experience was really immersive experiential the deliberate design of experiences that are long enough to be immersive and confronting enough to be fundamentally different so you are making environments where people are supported to be deeply uncomfortable for long enough and well supported and facilitated enough for pieces and chinks of world order and framing of understanding of how things work in the world to start to pull apart and get space and kind of gaps in them and for that re-meaning making to start and it would always take in this 18 month program it would always take about the middle of the program before something began to shift and then you would watch the second half of the program of helping that kind of reordering and reorganizing of a sense of self in the world happen it takes time and one of my concerns is we are living in a Twitter world where we have words that have more syllables than Vegemite and characters that are more than 150 we don't have time well we are it's a self fulfilling prophecy we don't have time and we are making that real so it's not a comfortable answer I know in this world but that is my experience it works it sounds like storytelling is very central to your approach that's kind of what I'm trying to achieve as well with VR like showing climate futures to people I don't think I can make an 18 month one but yeah thank you so much I think my one reflection with is storytelling about climate futures that are devoid of context I don't think work there is a difference for how Madrid will become sustainable that is fundamentally culturally different to the way Vienna will do it or Lahti will do it if we don't find ways to embed this in cultural meaning structures narratives of self we won't get this and that really matters if VR can help us do that and then I think that really helps thank you very much for that for that presentation your final bit on catharsis you talked about museums as places to transfer the message of daily lives have to change we have to lose cars and how to deal with that do you see a place for museums also in a wider perspective of more established heritage aspects that are being lost as if we lose heritage sites because of climate change and therefore have another story to tell not just about futures but also a past that was lost and we stored there absolutely I think there is I think we often underestimate just how people are subliminally aware and attached to the natural environment and to cultural history and heritage loss of that hurts and we don't have a place for letting that grief out and for talking about and turning that grief into some form of positive action or positive change places that make that possible that make it I mean in Sydney when I grew up there was something called the festival of dangerous ideas it was an institutional space for difficult dialogue about loss and the grief around tensions around conflict I think that's incredibly important catharsis is not to be underestimated and particularly crisis and catharsis produces generative and creative energy how do we not just make it about one and not the other but really pull them together so that the grief produces a sense of beauty beauty produces a sense of a desire to preserve loss produces a sense of a desire for action thank you for a very interesting and very enlightening speak I was but one thing that I started to think about was how to consolidate human rights and climate change for like because a democracy and that is a slow process while for example a dictatorship is very fast at least what we've seen now China is doing extremely fast green in changes while Europe just lags behind and is behind committees and stuff like this so do you think there is actually a chance to reach enough people so that it will be faster in a democratic society I think it's one of the big conundrums we have and it kind of comes down to be careful what you wish for I think we do I think if we think about how some things that are not necessarily directionally guided sees public imagination and mobilized conversations on mass again I look at what my children consume on tiktok and begin to understand that there's a conversation out there that I'm not actually very literate in but that is getting to mass numbers of a scale that in my experience was unprecedented and I think about what would it take for us to turn that into powering democracy up to form fractals I have experienced in my own past and my own history the ways in which small movements roll into large avalanches of change I think the challenge is how do we design for this it seems to me that one of the problems is that we have been working with a passive relationship with democracy it's in the water, it's in the furniture we consider it a value we're not talking about the fact that in US it's not democracy at all it's actually just a form of economic appropriation here there are very different forms of it and we're getting the polarizations that come with the kind of collapses and breakdowns in stability that we know we will see more of but how would we design for uptake how would we design for mass mobilization for movement building, for construction and one of the reasons why I think it matters so much that the creative arts and industries are involved is creating space for constructive dialogue for something that isn't just position taking that moves to action I don't have a neat answer because I know that one of the things that China is working on is on mass geoengineering because they can, they will simply intervene to change the planetary system there will be no easy way of engaging with that because the science continues to push the fact that we are probably going to have no choice but what, instead of sitting and waiting and letting our democratic in context simply just play out it's self perpetuating loops how would you design in every single one of you design for active dialogue and active mobilization I think that's a chance we have it's worth testing thank you very much if I can this way regarding the design for change I think that there is the need also of a switch of wording before your speech we heard many times the word success what success means in a different point of view in a climate change new economic sustainability so that's one reflection but then my question is in your research do you think that we need to change also the name museums because from what you showed us all the I mean you showed us art renaissance art I'm Italian I could recognize all of them and that's it they are the past that we have to treasure but the ones who are really doing something are the contemporary art museums with installation exhibitions and all these things so I see a very different approach that these two kind of museums might have one more into the institutional and building and architectural sustainability the other one into changing the narrative and providing a new sensibility to the visitors and what you think about that I think it's probably the richest conversation that you're going to have today so what I was showing you was not museums and it wasn't the past it was present when it was painted and it was embedded in public buildings of government so I think that's worth remembering because one of the problems and concerns I have is that arts and ultra have almost like got to a point where there's a nature reserve the museums, the cultural institutions everybody goes and plays we go to see art but the embedding of acts of imagination and imaginary difference in everyday life mainstreamed that's the thing we desperately need and if that's what we're going after then what is the role of museums because at that point in fact Pekka you said it yourself there is the question of this is where the stories of the future are made where the histories of the future are made where the future collide and we ask ourselves what do we want who are we, what do we stand for what do we care for if we can do both then I think we have a chance to retrain our minds but we need both in the global north here we are going to have to learn to live well using less resources, less energy less materials because we simply don't have enough to do everything even if Europe builds every single house that is currently in our planning not for climate action but for basic population we would exhaust and more the entire global reserves of metals and minerals needed for renewables so our ways of thinking are going to have to shift we can't heat volumes we're going to have to start working on clothing and cladding those kinds of acts of imaginary leaps where are they going to happen in the public decision making halls probably not yet in places of imagination mainstreamed maybe but I have a couple of answers I have working hypotheses that I'm desperately trying to make happen I think that's it or one more last one, over here Hi you spoke about the importance of time and how we really need time to make these important fundamental mindset shifts but as an exhibit developer I know that we only have a couple minutes of time to really engage with visitors and I'm curious how you would use that time that short period of time to really change people's minds well I'm probably not the expert on that although I would go for neuroscience and understand what is it that hacks into our brains and our bodies fastest chemicals run oxytocin through the air conditioners and you're already literally you will get more time because people will slow down but I actually think that this is one of the things if I named one big structural change that needs to happen which is our sense of ourselves in relationship to nature the other is our sense of ourselves in relationship to time the Romans had a notion make haste slowly our since we discovered longitude and we have taught ourselves that money equals instantaneity we have created a world of collapse literally to zero and we need to somehow just open the space for action so my question would be what could you do in those two minutes that would slow heart rates slow physical reactions and actually expand physical, mental, emotional and bodily chemistry time enough for people to pay attention for longer because if you could do that often enough you could start to get people into a different quality of dialogue it sounds trivial it's not we are using lizard brains to make decisions because we've collapsed the space for our free frontal cortex to actually operate and we desperately need this bit of ourselves to wake up and say hang on a minute we can do this differently