Sara Gry. Copyright: David Valentin Schweiger
Kindred Lab
Kindred Lab helps organizations find direction in the complexity and paradoxes that define our welfare society, and to turn uncertainty and complexity into new opportunities.
Kindred Lab is a laboratory for new ways of thinking, leading, and creating change, sustained by shared ambitions, curiosity, and the willingness to explore and take responsibility.
In recent years, there has been a strong focus on innovation in our welfare society through citizen involvement and co-creation. This has significantly strengthened the public sector’s capacity for innovation. However, the focus has primarily been on individual projects and initiatives rather than on more systemic, long-term change or governance.
Results and user experiences have gradually improved, but we often address symptoms by innovating within existing structures, silos, and arenas, without truly engaging with the underlying causes of the problems. The complex, systemic challenges we face cut across sectors and domains, and a solution in one place can easily create new and unforeseen problems elsewhere. Through close collaborations, often within the public sector, Kindred Lab works to transform this reality.
A laboratory that explores new possibilities
Kindred means related. Belonging together, not because we are the same, but because we share a direction, a curiosity, and a willingness to challenge the familiar.
Lab stands for laboratory: a place where we investigate, experiment, and learn together along the way. A laboratory for curiosity, questions, and exploration, a place where ideas can be shaped, tested, and developed together with others.
Committed collaborations
Kindred Lab creates transformation and transition by bringing people and organizations together around a shared direction in the complex challenges society faces: the growing shortage of healthcare professionals, young people’s mental well-being, demographic pressure, and the possibilities of technology within healthcare. Through experiments and practice-based innovation, we help test new solutions and translate experiences into action.
Kindred Lab builds capacity and anchors learning so that organizations can make better decisions – not only for today, but also for the future.
Kindred Lab works both with the people who are to create change and with the organizations that must transform, while also creating space for new roles, positions, and thus new possibilities. Taken together, this enables organizations, ecosystems, and individuals to work with new narratives, shift power, develop and discover new opportunities, and unlock new resources, all with the aim of creating better lives for people in our society.
The founder of Kindred Lab, Sara Gry Striegler, has over the past 15 years worked to address complex societal challenges and to drive change and innovation across major agendas within health, welfare, young people’s mental health, and ageing. In addition, she is a leading and widely recognized thought leader in futures design and has for many years experimented with new leadership principles and organizational models.
She is the author of several book chapters on public innovation and futures studies and is currently publishing the book Navigating Societal Change through Design, co-written with Julie Hjort and published by Policy Press (September 2025). The book offers new perspectives, cases, and tools for addressing society’s complex challenges, including welfare, well-being, climate, and the green transition.