The need for a different approach to leadership is evident from the growing loss of trust and faith in our existing “leaders”, institutions and authority structures. Developing a truly new kind of leadership starts first with taking a deeper look at ourselves.
We created this course with this in mind. Before tackling the adaptive challenges out there in our organizations or in our communities, we’ll engage first with the challenges in here. That is, the challenges, assumptions, and blind spots within ourselves. This is not a technical course about problem-solving, checklists, or easy answers. It’s a course about you, to help you discover your own leadership potential and capacity for freedom.
Course structure
This is a self-guided learning journey, which means you can move at your own pace. It lays out basic leadership ideas to prepare you to create consequential adaptive change. It’s a great introductory course that doesn’t require deep familiarity with Adaptive Leadership, and will prepare you for a deeper dive later if you wish.
The course has four sessions with short videos and light, but deep, content drawn from ACA’s refinement and expansion of Adaptive Leadership, developed at Harvard University over the past 35 years. Each session is also accompanied by some kind of practice — a reflection or “balcony” practice, a thought exercise, an awareness practice, or something work related — to experience the core ideas in a different way.
We track closely to the book, Your Leadership Moment. Your Leadership Moment was written to ‘democratize leadership’, so that anyone who seeks to create meaningful change can leverage their leadership moments regardless of their history, identity or access to power and financial resources. This course is part of that inquiry.
Whom this course is for
It’s for everyone. It’s for people who delight in self-inquiry. It’s for people who examine their beliefs and are disturbed by the loose ends and internal contradictions. You might say that this course is a kind of intellectual yoga: stretching, rewiring, taking apart and reassembling core conceptions of self, world, and leadership. It’s for people who are encountering deep adaptive challenge and trying to make sense of life, work, and the world. Quite likely, you will find that it changes the way you think, see, and experience many aspects of your life and work.
What we’ll explore
We explore questions that may seem original or unorthodox; even at times outrageous. Practical questions we’ll explore:
- How can I act on leadership moments in my professional and personal life to create meaningful change?
- What’s my purpose? How can I help others connect to their purpose so that I have more partners in leadership?
- What do I really mean when I say “leadership”? How can I get the kind of leadership I really want?
- What will it take, practically speaking, to get out of my own way so that I can lead more effectively?
Course fees
You can choose to pay what a normal workshop of this level of quality costs, or you may choose more, less, or even zero. We cannot really put a number value on it. That is not because we don’t think it is valuable. It is because we don’t know what the value will be for you, especially given the wide diversity of financial means out there. You will choose a fee that feels right to you, any amount. Whatever you choose, all content will be fully available to you.
You’re part of something bigger
By joining this workshop, you’re also a member of Gather, our overarching online space for community and coursework. Gather members hail from around the world and from different backgrounds – all dedicated in their own unique way to the exercise of democratizing leadership.