Kirsten Dunlop has just received LUT’s honorary doctorate. She is the CEO of Climate KIC (Knowledge Innovation Community), which is Europe’s leading climate innovation agency and community. She reflects on her career in academia, consulting, financial services and her leadership in climate innovation, emphasising the importance of paradigm shifts, interdisciplinary learning, and most importantly, creating the conditions for hope in the race against division and despair.
For Dunlop, completing a PhD in cultural history years ago was a life-changing experience. It was a journey across three continents and disciplines. It was also a journey inward: a deep realisation of her strengths, her growth edges, and her patterns of thought and perception and sensemaking.
“I have the deepest respect for what a doctorate means, what it signifies, and the level of depth and breadth it requires – the integrity and robustness of inquiry and of original research knowledge creation. It is of special significance for me to be awarded an honorary doctorate from LUT University,” Dunlop says.
“This institution is ready to challenge its own assumptions and to take on new ideas about approaches to learning and the role of universities going forward. Considering the courage of what LUT is doing with the System Earth Collegium, that’s not an honorary doctorate from just any university. That’s an honorary doctorate from an institution for which I have enormous respect.”
Kirsten Dunlop was one of the first fellows invited to join LUT’s System Earth Collegium – a groundbreaking, long-term initiative for tackling the world’s wicked problems. The Collegium aims to establish a new culture of scientific inquiry focused on catalysing positive tipping points to accelerate the change the world needs.
“My work has been oriented from an early time, and progressively deeper and deeper, towards changing paradigms: what it means to live through major paradigm shifts and explore new possibilities that are created through the power laws associated with our capacity to learn.”
The power of arts and science
Dunlop’s path has taken her from the humanities through consulting and financial services into the public sphere. In a sense, she is now working between the public and private worlds. One of the most important lessons she has learned is the importance of reintegrating the arts and sciences.
Scientific enquiry opens up a world of almost insatiable, unending curiosity – and the question of what if? The humanities ground that enquiry in questions of meaning, purpose and choice – to what end? With what significance and applied values?
“Think about Aristotle’s original distinction between things that cannot be other than they are, for which he created the logic, and things that shape shift in relation to meaning and consequence – that can be an infinite series of possibilities because humans are involved, for which he created the rhetoric,” she says.
Dunlop is fascinated by bringing together diverse forms of inquiry into the worlds in which we live and the worlds within us. She points to the value of using the tools of sensing, creative and critical thinking, meaning-making and knowing that allow us to identify values and assumptions, exercise judgment, and pay attention to perspective and interpretation, representation and context.
“This combination of being able to bring together the rigour of inquiry into what is there, with what is emerging, what is possible; the discipline and the tools for thinking about what we are enacting and what we are becoming, and of exercising self-awareness and choice. For me, this is one of the most powerful things that I work with; that I benefit from and draw upon every single day.”
The power of learning to learn
Another lesson Dunlop has learnt is about learning itself and the power laws associated with our capacity to experience – and then discover – that we can rise to a challenge and become different. She emphasises the power of learning to learn, noting there is a real discipline in knowing how to use that human capability in its various ways and forms. That has been a very critical aspect of her work and something she has applied deeply in business contexts when helping companies make sense of a rapidly changing world.
“A disruptive structural change might put your business at risk. So, you are going to need to learn how to learn about what is going on and, through that ability anticipate and experience new possibilities, build a capability to adapt, be prepared to respond, and to become different.”
The power of the ‘how might we’ mindset
Dunlop advocates for a mindset that looks at the world not by starting with a set of constraints – what is, what must be, or what cannot be done – but by starting with a fully open space for possibility.
“Working with innovation design organisations – some of the world leaders like IDEO and Frog – I learned to frame enquiries with a ‘how might we’ mindset. It’s an enquiry that keeps effort focused on the power of the imagination and working with possibility – how we might bring something that doesn’t yet exist into existence?”
Applying such a mindset to almost any situation helps you move further and faster – inspiring others to follow – than starting from the assumption that there are things you will not be able to do. It is the lesson that anything is possible if we invest in our imagination.
What we feed is what we get
“One of the lessons I have learned is neatly summed up by the Cherokee parable of the two wolves. The story goes that in every single one of us, there are two wolves that are constantly fighting. One represents hope and possibility and the other represents despair and fear. The point of the parable is to ask the question: ‘Which one of these wins?’ And the answer is: ‘the one we feed’. What we choose to pay attention to determines what we see and what we believe.”
Dunlop finds it insightful to think about the world not as static but as fluid and full of feedback loops. The way those loops run determines exponential outcomes – the possibility of action – innovation, collaboration – having an effect that is greater than the sum of its parts.
She asks how we direct our attention in a world of war, horror, normalised aggression, and bullying. Are we feeding a sense of normalcy and acceptance? Or are we creating space for the possibility of something different – a belief in principles worth standing for? Feeding hope makes that hope real.
The storm is the time to fish
There are a few more lessons Dunlop reflects upon. She has lived through significant challenges both privately and professionally: funding shocks, geopolitical changes, a pandemic, and the difficult issues and business restructurings that followed. One of the lessons from that experience has been that ‘the storm is the time to fish’.
“The moments of the greatest doubt, difficulty, uncertainty, and crisis are often the times we find a way to become our most creative and our most generative.”
The current context is numbing and difficult, yet Dunlop sees it as a moment of immense opportunity. She believes it is important to learn how to find opportunity in the confusion and doubt of the ‘transitions’ described by William Bridges.
“But that does require perhaps another lesson. It does require being able to inhabit what I would call a way of working and a way of being that is at once geometric and loose. Working with principles, frameworks, heuristics, and ontologies that create an architecture with which to navigate what matters – and at the same time, staying very fluid and loose, working in flow. Because things are changing so rapidly, sometimes it’s important to almost use jujitsu moves to work with the energy that the universe offers.”
That helps you find opportunities that would not have been possible yesterday.
Abundance thinking and scarcity thinking
“I am working on climate and, in that, the capacity to work the tension or polarity between abundance thinking and scarcity thinking. We are living in a world where we are going to have to accept that there are absolute limits and constraints in the physical resources available for an expanding human population, but we must apply abundance thinking when we think about how to solve that.”
Bringing the arts into science is becoming vital at this moment. It is about combining creativity with an acceptance of limits and working with constraints to develop new ideas.
The mission of Dunlop’s organisation, Climate KIC, in both a European and a global context, is to demonstrate what is possible.
“We are an organisation that creates a place and a space in the world for generating options, possibilities, experiences of new ways of living, and learning from those experiences to support decision-making, policy-making, investment, and capital to begin to adopt and embrace different ways of living. What we are really trying to achieve is to feed hope.”
Climate KIC works on transforming cities, on industry value chains with hard-to-abate emissions, on regenerative landscapes, forestry and agriculture, peatland restoration, coastal areas, and ports. These high-impact areas require a combination of learning mindsets, new skills and business models, technologies that are often nature inspired as well as digital, materials innovations, policy innovation and capital mobilisation. One of the most critical domains is in changing and innovating the way finance works – building an economy in service of life rather than just committing capital to a subcategory of business as usual called ‘impact investing’.
Feeding hope
With global warming heading towards 3–4 °C, we are in a race against despair. As people begin to realise the implications of extreme heat – water scarcity, food insecurity, conflict, storms, and infrastructure damage – we face a world of volatility and uncertainty.
“Climate KIC as an organisation wants to continually build the understanding that it is still possible to live well and sustainably – in fact to live significantly better than we are currently living. It is possible to achieve that at the scale of whole cities, of whole regions, of whole countries.”
Addressing all this requires changing how we live: our assumptions about what we eat, how we dress, how we move, what materials we use, and how we view the properties of the natural environment, from metals to chemicals. These are key elements of LUT’s work as well.
“It is beneficial and possible to create a beautiful, just, and climate-resilient world – one in which seven billion people can live well.”
“It is about developing solutions, implementing them, and creating the conditions for multiple solutions to join up, so that you have multi-solving ways to make materials more efficient and circular; to apply the lessons of natural ecosystems and ecosystem services to the way we think about infrastructure, transport, or food systems, and to be better stewards of the environment that we are so extraordinarily fortunate enough to be born into. That is our effort,” Dunlop says.
Dunlop has noted the driving emotions and energies in place in the Global North – in Europe and North America. At the moment, everybody is paying attention to fear: risk, uncertainty, security, competitiveness and protection.
“Competitiveness is a driver that can open up a lot of action around climate. If we take the word ‘climate’ and we call it ‘competitiveness’, as long as what we invest in is sustainable and regenerative, we can achieve the change we need. And at the same time, we observe a very different energy in the Global South: one grounded in recognition of the wealth of nature, long-term thinking, stewardship, family business-led transformation, and a sense of real prosperity and opportunity offered to all by the sustainability transition. At Climate KIC, we are actively investing in the driving energy of both worlds so that they learn from one another and give to one another.”
Science as an asset
We are living in a time where science and scientific endeavour are being constrained or even shut down. For Dunlop, science is one of the most influential ways of knowing.
“I think about ways or forms of knowing as assets, not solutions. Science is a human capability that feeds powerfully into intelligence-based decision-making but it is important – especially at the moment – to be careful about relying exclusively on evidence-based decision-making.”
Science is an extraordinarily powerful toolkit. It enables us to discover new things and see ourselves differently. It allows us to expand the boundaries of how we understand the world’s limits and possibilities. However, Dunlop also highlights the limits of scientific enquiry to enable societal transformation in a time of unprecedented uncertainty and change.
“When I think about science, one of the people I go to learn from and read is Helga Nowotny, former President of the European Research Council, whose work on the ‘scientific agora’ is really helpful, especially at this time. She addresses the role of science in an age of radical uncertainty, where it is increasingly hard for science to provide certainty. She makes the case for re-integrating the sciences and the humanities to handle the questions of judgement, consequences of our actions and ethical complexities that we are facing.”
The tipping points of the Earth’s systems represent extreme uncertainties that we are only beginning to understand. Dunlop sees a powerful possibility in interweaving essential scientific inquiry with societal concerns, feelings, and meaning-making. This integration creates what Nowotny calls socially robust knowledge, which is based on trans-disciplinarity.
“That is why I think it is so important what LUT is doing with the System Earth Collegium. It is based on looking for and bringing together a multi-institutional and trans-disciplinary exploration.”
“At a time like this, when we have anti-intellectualism at play, manipulation of information, disinformation, and a closing down of all forms of scientific inquiry, bringing the practice of scientific enquiry and science disciplines into a humanities-enabled practice of robust social inquiry and robust reflection on what it means to be a society, is immensely important.”
About Climate KIC
- KIC stands for Knowledge and Innovation Community. Its role in the world is to bring innovation to tackle climate change, biodiversity loss, and the kinds of human transformations that we need to live sustainably.
- An independent foundation originally created 16 years ago by the European Commission.
- Operates in 70 countries across the world, has about 240 employees.
- Incubates solutions, accelerates ventures, and educates students and professionals.
- Works with industry and public actors, such as cities, regions, and national governments.
- Offers connections and conditions for achieving systems change.
- Aims to develop viable, thriving economies that can operate within planetary boundaries.
- Works with other organisations, communities, partners, entrepreneurial support organisations, entrepreneurs, and governments worldwide.
Tipping points and feedback loops
Let’s continue with the Earth’s tipping points. We are facing extremely complex, planetary-scale transformations that will change every aspect of human life. For example, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) – the current of warm water in the North Atlantic – consists of a pattern of physical feedback loops. These feedbacks are now changing, and those changes will mean a very different world for us.
“One of the most important fields of scientific inquiry is to understand physical and biophysical feedback loops at a planetary scale. Within the context of the System Earth Collegium, we are talking about the Earth system’s tipping points. We see now, thanks constantly improving research and modelling capabilities, the consequences of the tipping points being crossed. We are reaching some of these tipping points now, meaning that natural feedback loops in water cycles, heating and cooling as well as sea levels will change with catastrophic implications for humanity.”
Dunlop reveals that a core mission of the System Earth Collegium is to apply the thinking and epistemological frames behind the observation of earth systems tipping points to institutional and societal change.
“We start to think about generating positive tipping points for accelerating societal changes: we need to stop polluting and living with high emissions, to stop warming up the Earth, and to find a way to create a sustainable, regenerative way of living.”
Enquiring and investing into complex adaptive feedback loops in societies, economies, political economies, and institutions like universities helps us learn how to think in dynamics, to think exponentially.
If we could train people to design for these positive feedback loops, we could achieve change at a much faster rate, because the benefits begin to reinforce one another. This is an extremely important area of focus for the System Earth Collegium, which is currently seeking interdisciplinary and multi-institutional collaborations to turn it into a major field of inquiry.
This work promises to be deeply rewarding not only for current and future fellows of the collegium but also for the students whose lives are touched by these ideas and whose careers could focus on this field.
“It is a privilege to be involved with an institution that is creating the space for this inquiry and self-questioning. In the end, change comes down to people. If we can create a contagious effect of informed and capable people who are able to hold in their minds the shape of a world we need, and turn that into action, we have a chance,” Kirsten Dunlop sums up.
