Tinna C. Nielsen

Tinna is an anthropologist, behavioural designer, and social entrepreneur specialised in creating inclusive and diverse organisations, communities, governmental policies, cities, and societies. For the past 18 years, her passion has been to make differences make a difference in as many domains as possible and empower as many people as possible to be change makers.

For this purpose, she founded the organisation MOVE THE ELEPHANT FOR INCLUSIVENESS in 2013. In 2015 Tinna was selected Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum (WEF). She will be part of this community for 6 years contributing to solutions that will improve the state of the World and ensure inclusive growth. She served as Co-Chair for the WEF Global Future Council on Behavioural Sciences 2016-18, and is a member of the WEF Expert Network and is a regular author for the World Economic Forum blog Agenda. Tinna is also a gender parity advisor at the United Nations.

In every aspect of organisational and people development, Tinna focuses on enabling and empowering individuals, organisations, societies to be successful by achieving the UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals, mitigating unconscious bias and designing interventions for more inclusive behaviour, processes, culture, leadership and collaboration. She works with some of the largest companies and some of the most prestigious NGOs in the world. She has extensive experience with leadership development at all levels and functions, leveraging team potential to high-performance and innovation, as well as cultural, behavioural and systemic changes in organisations and systems. Currently, Tinna is engaged in redesigning the Social Welfare Benefit system in Denmark based on behavioural insights. She has co-authored the book “Motivated Employment” as part of this work.

Tinna has, in collaboration with a peer specialist in Inclusion & Diversity Lisa Kepinski, pioneered the internationally recognised change-approach called Inclusion Nudges; practical interventions designed based on behavioural sciences to nudge the unconscious mind to be inclusive by default. They co-authored the Inclusion Nudges Guidebook; designed and collected more than 100 examples of Inclusion Nudges. They founded the non-profit Inclusion Nudges Global Community in 2015 to share these techniques to fundamentally change how we can achieve more inclusiveness and less polarisation in our societies. For this innovative approach Tinna & Lisa has been named on the “Top 10 List” of The Global Diversity List (supported by The Economist) in 2015, 2016, and 2017.

Tinna is former Global Head of Diversity, Inclusion and Collaboration in Arla Foods (2010-15), the World’s largest organic Dairy Cooperative. Prior to this position she worked for the Danish Institute for Human Rights to implement diversity in the labour market and private/public organisations. Tinna pulls heavily on her internal experiences from these organisations in her work as a change maker and influencer.

Tinna is a dynamic influencer and a trusted partner. She is a top-rated key note speaker, panellist, leadership trainer, Inclusion & Diversity expert, writer, and workshop facilitator in many different domains such as private and public organisations, academic institutions, urban development, United Nations, non-profit organisations, public schools, International Committee of the Red Cross, and more. She serves in various advisory boards. Tinna is also a faculty member of the Open University in Denmark, Amani Institute for Social Innovation in Kenya and Brazil, Ludwig Boltzmann Institute; LOIS for Open Innovation in Science in Austria.

Tinna is continuously searching for innovative solutions, new learning opportunities and is happily sharing her knowledge and approach with others. She lives in Denmark with her family of five and has lived in various countries.