Christian is Co-founder of Transition Collective, a public-purpose enterprise, and Adjunct Professor with University of Technology Sydney. He is the former CEO of the Danish Design Center (DDC), a government-backed non-profit foundation (2014-2023). Previously, he was Director of MindLab, the Danish government’s innovation lab (2007-2014), and Business Manager with Ramboll Management Consulting, a global advisory group (1998-2006).

Christian is a frequent keynote speaker to government, business and civic leaders at home and globally on topics such as innovation, design, expansive thinking, missions, organizational redesign, leadership, foresight, and sustainable transitions. He has acted as a leader, facilitator and advisor in a wide range of contexts, focusing on how to innovate and address complex societal challenges across multiple sectors.

Christian has extensive experience delivering executive training for leaders in business, government and the non-profit sector. Currently he works with amongst other CEDEP/INSEAD, Henley Business School, Parsons School of Design, Copenhagen Business School and the European School of Administration.

He is the author of nine books on leadership, innovation and design, including "Expand: Stretching the Future by Design" (2022) and "Leading Public Sector Innovation: Co-creating for a Better Society" and (in Danish) "The Organization Was Set Free and the Leadership had to be Rediscovered" (2023).

Christian is member of a range of boards and institutions, including the International Jury of the Bay Urban Visioning Awards, the Board of the Centre for Leadership (CfL), the Advisory Committee of the Crown Princess Mary Center at the University of Copenhagen, and the Think Tank of the Copenhagen Business School Leadership Centre. Previously, he was a member of the Board of the Royal Danish Academy, the World Economic Forum's Global Futures Council on Agile Governance and Chairman of the EU Commission’s expert group on public sector innovation. Christian is a Good Design Ambassador. In 2018 he was awarded the Creative Bureaucrat Prize by German daily Tagesspiegel and the Creative Bureaucracy Festival. Also he is a Fellow with Salzburg Seminar.

Christian holds a Ph.D. in design, leadership and governance from Copenhagen Business School, an M.Sc. in political science from Aarhus University, and executive education from Wharton and Harvard Business School.