My vision is that societies and organizations function better if designed for effectiveness, good citizenship and positive impact (socially, environmentally, economically).
My mission: I share my knowledge and my experience gained from putting them in action and from putting knowledge and insights from other areas to solve challenges in new, transdisciplinary ways.
My individual contributions to realize my vision sprout from what I have learned and experienced over more over the past 40 years. And an organizational and management practitioner, grounded in organizational sociology of the public challenges and issues. I'm also a systems practitioner.
My purpose to contribute to the better functioning of organizations became manifest in 1984, when I decided to study public administration with a major in organizational sociology and management to gain first knowledge and tools in dealing with challenges to our societies and economies. Both my master’s (1990) and doctoral (1998) theses explored organizational opportunities and barriers to building knowledge and competence. Sustainability and ESG were not prominent themes in business and public management conversations then. Today, I carry 25+ years of skin in the game in practical business consulting and in corporate roles on sustainability and ESG. This has been about putting knowledge into action. Mainly in the areas of finance and in food and agricultural value chains.
I was born, raised and educated in the Netherlands. Having spent several years of working and living in Brazil was a fantastic learning cycle causing me to re-think and critically investigate my professional knowledge and viewpoints as well as the narrow Western contexts they have sprouted from. I currently live and work in The Netherlands, and I work from The Hague - city of justice and international law.
My experience in writing and sharing knowledge publicly goes back a long time. For example, I set up the now long-retired blog NGO Knowledge Map (2002-2003). And I acted as a co-editor in the also retired knowledge community Knowledgeboard for NGO knowledge and sharing (2003-2005). Skin in the game in applying sustainability knowledge came, among others, from exercising executive board responsibilities of the Roundtable for Sustainable Soy and the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). Both are innovative and ' first timer' standard setters for responsible and sustainable business, sharing their standards as public goods, contributing to Open Source and Open Knowledge.
As of 2020, I am keeping a sustainability knowledge collection The Sustainability Web which combines knowledge sources on Sustainability, Systems Science and Practice, and Knowledge Management. This web resource is formatted as a visual knowledge graph, presenting information in context of more general and more specific content, as well as associated content. It is a semantic web of some sort. The Sustainability Web is free to access, and is offered 'as is': it does not pretend to be complete, nor are all references in it endorsed by me personally.
Over the next months, you will hear and read about my new initiative: InMotu - Ecosystem initiative for Knowledge in Action, taking my work on the vision and mission above several steps further. The logo is already there, and the corresponding web domains have been claimed.
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