About

I was born in Hagfors, Sweden, grew up in Rendalen, Norway, and carry a Danish surname, which makes me Scandinavian in roughly the way a mutt is a breed. I served in the Norwegian Army Corps of Engineers, took the International Baccalaureate at Pearson College on Vancouver Island, studied engineering at McGill, and spent my first working years as a process engineer building oil and gas platforms for the North Sea. It is a good place to learn what a constraint is. The sea does not negotiate.

Then came a Master of Design at the Institute of Design in Chicago, where a professor made us hand-letter in Univers while a Mac sat in the corner, with an internship at IDEO along the way. Three decades as an innovation consultant followed, most of them at Doblin, which changed owners more often than I changed desks. Perot Systems bought us; when Ross Perot came back in, we bought ourselves back; nearly ten years later Monitor Group bought us, and then Deloitte bought Monitor. The heart of the work stayed the same throughout: using ethnography and design to understand what people actually need, as when we helped Scandinavian Airlines see its passengers again after years of cost-cutting. Doblin eventually folded into Deloitte Digital, by which time I was a Managing Director. From there I moved to Monitor Deloitte, the strategy group, co-founded Deloitte Launch, a practice that helped large companies build new businesses, and finally led sustainability strategy for financial services. Along the way the work took me through airlines, healthcare, professional services, automotive and agriculture, into the Wall Street Journal, Ad Age and Fast Company, and, somewhat to my surprise, onto a US patent for how knowledge moves through organizations.

The lesson I keep coming back to is that companies seldom run short of ideas. What they run short of is the ability to try them without betting the company. Chock is how I work on that now, with founders, leadership teams and boards, using a method I call ENDURE: a training plan for the habits that let a company keep doing new things and survive the ones that don't work.

I also build things myself. Atamai, a compliance and data platform for New Zealand farmers, is my own test of whether the method survives contact with a startup. So far it has, mostly.