Dr. Petra Kuenkel is a leading visionary thinker and full member of the Club of Rome, who has advanced a systemic world-view of enlivenment and a re-orientation towards human reverence for humanity’s participation as a conscious actor in an interconnected self-regulating natural system that is called the world.
This approach has been belittled 15 years ago, as it suggests a new way of seeing the nature of reality and humankind’s role on the planet. But Petra has consistently advanced this view conceptually in a number of publications, but also advanced the practical implementation of such life-enhancing approaches in the strategic management of multi-stakeholder change initiatives that address complex sustainability challenges such as the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
She is a thought leader on re-inventing leadership as a collective competence, which gradually moves into the attention of leadership discourses. She has promoted leadership and collaboration methodologies that help cross-institutional actors find solutions to complex challenges such as water scarcity, environmental degradation, climate change impact, social tension, or unsustainable value chains. She raises awareness for the potential of collaborative inventiveness and fosters mind-set change among decision-makers. The leadership methodologies that she has developed are based on invigorating human competences to change the current state of affairs towards an agenda of sustainability. The latter differentiates her from the mainstream discourse on leadership, as she promotes an appreciative approach that assumes that everybody is capable of leading transformative change collectively.
