Overview

⏱️ Schedule:  Doors 18:30 → Talk 19:00→ Q&A → Mingle
🌐 Language: English

We all know something needs to change — in how we live, what we consume, how we relate to the world. We've had the information for years. And yet, knowing rarely leads to doing. The usual explanation is a lack of willpower. Jessica Böhme thinks that explanation is wrong.

Her real argument: we've inherited the wrong model of change altogether — set a goal, make a plan, measure the result. That works for complicated problems. It doesn't work for the deeper kind of change we actually need. Over years of personal experiments and research in transformation — wearing one dress for an entire year, foraging food across Berlin, giving up motorised transport — she found that the failures taught her far more than the successes ever did.

This talk is an invitation to treat your own life as a laboratory: trying something specific, paying real attention to what happens, and letting the results reshape the question you started with. Everyone leaves with one experiment of their own design — a single sentence: "In the next 30 days, I will…" — shaped together during the talk.

What we'll cover

• Why knowing doesn't lead to doing — and why the usual explanation (willpower) misses the real issue.
• Why the plan-and-measure model of change works for complicated problems, but not for the kind of change we actually need.
• What years of personal experiments — one dress for a year, foraging in Berlin, giving up motorised transport — taught her, and why the failures were more interesting than the successes.
• "Life as a Lab": treating your own life as the most immediate, honest laboratory for change.
• A different way to measure whether something's working — not "did it succeed?" but what became visible that wasn't before.
• How to design your own experiment: not too big, not too abstract, but alive, specific, and slightly uncomfortable.

Speaker

Prof. Dr. Jessica Böhme

Founder and director of the Institute for Practical ekoPhilosophy (IPeP) and a professor at FHM Berlin

A sustainability scientist and transformation researcher turned natural philosopher. She writes a weekly column called "Life as Lab." Her work is driven by one question: how do we live well in a world that's visibly unraveling? She treats practical philosophy as a working tool for personal, social, and ecological change — not just a subject to study.