Leading the Charge: A new vision for leadership development.
Welcome to the first instalment of our trilogy of blogs exploring how our new programme THRIVE: Passion, Purpose, Performance is leading the charge in a new vision for executive education.
In this series of blogs, Programme Director Chris Coghlan and Programme Leader Dr Jutta Tobias Mortlock talked to us about how their new programme THRIVE is offering a very different experience of leader development to traditional executive education.
Before we dive into this instalment, let’s briefly meet Chris and Jutta.
Chris My background is within the health, fitness and sports science arena, and my passion is creating learning experiences for individuals that are progressive, that put people on their learning edge - right on the edge of where they are comfortable.
Jutta Before becoming an academic I was a business analyst, but I’m now a Social Psychologist and my expertise is in behaviour analysis. I specialise in understanding what gets people to change their behaviours, so I bring the science into THRIVE - science is my superpower!
PART 1
Q: THRIVE: Passion, Purpose, Performance – what’s new?
Chris The exciting aspect of THRIVE is that it really takes leadership education to another level. We have curated dynamic new content, using the amazing academics and specialists in Cranfield's network to give people the opportunity to take a new step in life.
We explore how our physical experiences affect our intellectual and spiritual domains, and how bringing alignment to these three dimensions creates the conditions for optimal performance.
Jutta: Research-led behavioural insight is woven throughout THRIVE and brings a fresh approach to holistic leadership development. The latest science all points to acceptance and mindfulness being the most powerful forces in terms of behaviour change, which is the focus of my research.
THRIVE really is very different to traditional executive education. It’s different from what other business schools are doing and it’s different from anything we are doing at Cranfield.
Chris: One main point of difference with THRIVE is that there are no learning outcomes. You bring yourself, and where you are in your life journey, to this experience. We give you some tools, some techniques, and an opportunity to reframe your mindset, and from there you create a platform from which to step forward into what’s next.
Jutta: Conventional leader development has aspired to offer leadership as ‘practice development’ with the intention of being a “better” leader afterwards. But by giving people a learning outcome – being a better leader - we’re not holding the space for them to truly develop. The psychodynamics of adult learning and the unconscious forces that drive us to stay safe and conventional end up holding us back. It’s into this unconventional and sometimes uncomfortable space that Chris and I will lead you in THRIVE.
Chris: Jutta makes a strong point, which really gets to the heart of how THRIVE is different. As educators, we build outcomes in order to show something tangible, but with THRIVE, as your facilitators we are holding the unknown, we are holding that ambiguity, and we are showing that you can be comfortable with that.
Q: Why is there a need for change in the executive education space?
Diversity of thought
Chris: A lot of the inspiration for THRIVE is rooted an awareness of neurodiversity, and a recognition that our whole educational system favours a ‘standard’ brain. After 20 years in adult education, I now understand that it’s when we notice people's differences and allow them to embrace those differences, and to work in a different sphere, that we bring a new creativity and a new dynamic to their leadership. So finding ways to step out of that conventional way of learning and thinking - for everyone, not just those with a diagnosed neurodiverse condition – is where the true development and self-awareness blossoms.
Jutta: There is a need to make space for the concept of neuro-diversity, that is to say a diversity in thinking, in being, and a diversity in belonging too. From a hardnosed business performance perspective, we will not find answers to today's problems with conventional thinking. So bringing in the diversity will, inevitably, generate more creative solutions for the business problems of today, because they’re so complex.
Chris: Our old framework and our old paradigm of running the world is crumbling. So we need people to think in a different way, to start creating new paradigms to solve the huge problems of the world socially, environmentally, economically.
Jutta: We also need to acknowledge that even those who might consider themselves to have conventional learning approaches can open up their thinking in new ways. There are there are many shades of grey throughout that cognitive spectrum.
Chris: This is true, and you might not know where you actually fit, because everyone is part of a system that expects learning and thinking to be done in a certain way. This is where mindfulness and meditation can be so impactful, because many of us are not attuned to our own learning and thinking patterns.
Essentially it’s about embracing the diversity of the human race and catering better for that diversity. By embedding inclusion and diversity of thought, organisations achieve a key advantage for future change. As people are encouraged to find those fresh, new, innovative and inspirational ways of thinking and being, across whole person and with authenticity - so work, relationships, health – we begin to really find the human advantage.
The importance of connection
Jutta: I'd like to talk about the social and the interconnectedness of our reality. So beyond being individuals we are looking at returning to a mindset that is about interdependence and interconnectedness in a world that technologically is interconnected, but actually in terms of lived experience is often becoming more isolated and more insular. That is a problem, because it shuts people down, it shuts creativity down, and that shuts wellbeing down.
So one of our key themes in the THRIVE programme is to create a safe space where individuals can visually feel interconnectedness, either with other people or with nature. It’s about finding that awareness and confidence that ‘I am somebody who stands in the world, and I look different from you, and I sound different from you, and perhaps you're taller than I am or you're smaller than I am’. But instead of feeling I must compete with you like one object competing with the other, if I can see the world more as an interconnected space where things change (and things change all the time), then I can feel differently about those differences.
So it’s about seeing that in the world everything always changes, and there's hope in that. There's an acceptance in that, and an acknowledgement that everything always changes and if we realise that we're actually interconnected, that constant change becomes empowering.
Chris: When I’m working with clients, we often go into the woods at Cranfield and we look at the woodland as a living system. We consider how all living systems work, and the ways they are all absolutely interconnected, dipping into the theory of quantum biology¹ which proposes that we are all made of exactly the same matter and that matter just appears in different ways. So when we translate that concept into a personal development and growth environment, the impact of combining these cognitive and visceral experiences can be very powerful.
Jutta: This links back to mindfulness – and the word “mindfulness” incidentally means “remembering”, here for example that it's good to feel connected. So it's good to do things that are not just good for ourselves, but also for other people. We can all see the tensions in our societies now between the virtual world of technology and the organic world, or the ‘real’ world. But we can still feel that sense of connection even if we’re not physically close.
Q: How Will That Need for Change Manifest in THRIVE?
Technology vs the human advantage
Chris: I feel that there’s a mismatch between how quickly technology has driven forward since the industrial revolution compared with human evolution over that time. This loops back into our health, both our physical and psychological health, because the evolution of our society and technology has been so fast that we have a mismatch with our evolution as a species.
What humans can bring into our new technology-driven world is the five senses and creative intelligence. We are able to start things, see things, understand things, and create things that have never been in anyone's conscience before – but suddenly they are there, they manifest. That is the human advantage over technology, and that is what we’ll be focused on throughout the THRIVE journey. Having the ability, as a human, to recognise and navigate the world in a meaningful way, to understand what is reality and what are the stories of our society.
Jutta: Yes, and there’s amazing freedom in that, isn't there? Reality is grounding ourselves in the five senses, and reality is what I can see, what I can feel, what I can hear. By considering what's actually reality right now, versus what's the story, that’s a powerful place to be. What's real is how I feel and what's real is how I see you, everything else is in virtual reality.
Chris: But if we keep chasing to try and do the things machines can do that's no good. So we have to get ourselves in a place where we can be as human as possible, to maximise that human advantage. That human advantage incorporates everything that it means to be human, so it’s our health, it's our relationships, it’s our creativity, it’s our ambition. And then we bring those moments of creative intelligence; we bring the moments of magic that machines just can’t replicate.
Focus, attention and mindfulness
Chris: In the context of an organisation, one way of looking at this is a waste reduction strategy. If we are aligning people's energy to what really matters, in their business and in their life, then the focus is going where it’s most valuable. It’s about removing the distractions, the dramas, the other ‘stuff’ – and often that ‘stuff’ is what technology, especially AI, can deliver – so the individual can focus on what really matters and being present.
Jutta: Exactly! So, it’s about managing attention; understanding that where our attention goes that's where our energy goes, that's what we say in mindfulness. There's a difference between meditation as an escape from reality, and meditation to focus our attention on the here and now, and trying to understand ourselves and the situation, in order to actually do something that improves the status quo for ourselves or for other people. Meditation is not very helpful when it is seen as escapism from reality. When we use meditation as a tool to become more present and to pay more attention to what matters most, then we will have less waste, less frazzle and less fragmentation in our world.
Chris: That attention and that focus also drives self-awareness, and is the basis of successful leadership; the ability to coach others, and to nurture others. I think that's really important, and it’s a key aspect of improving performance and building better relationships. It also encourages more creativity from those leaders, being able to nurture not only the people but the organisation.
So nurturing that creativity and focus in a business context helps individuals to build important leadership skills such as problem solving, strategic thinking, the ability to look at issues from a different angle, and from a fresh perspective. It also goes back to changing paradigms; it's about being brave, it's about having conviction, in a world where change is happening so fast. Right now, many of us feel that we’re living on the edge of what it means to us, and we’re adapting to our new environment so quickly that keeping that focus and attention can be a challenge.
Jutta: There is something powerful about being comfortable with living on the edge, becoming more comfortable with that and changing our relationship with this experience of living in a precarious time. We can all recognise that stress can be both excitement and distress, so playing with how we experience stress, in our precarious world, gives us an alternative way of being.
The stress factor
Chris: In THRIVE we also look at reframing stress, and taking a deep look at what makes the stress and the dramas in people’s lives. In the moment, that stress is real, but taken in a wider scope and with a different perspective, so much of what causes us stress just doesn’t matter. So if you can reframe it to be bigger than that moment, that can be very a very powerful way for people to control their reaction to stress.
This ability to identify the controllable elements of a stressful situation and acknowledge what is uncontrollable is important, and we explore this a lot in THRIVE. There is a strong human tendency to get dragged into drama, and gossip, and other unhealthy scenarios which many of us need to work harder to resist.
Jutta: Yes, there’s a need to resist the impulse to get involved, and to control that impulse. We all need to resist the impulse to celebrate the stress as being something positive and affirming. That narrative of ‘I'm working harder than you, I'm more stressed than you, I’m busier than you’, all of us have this impulse to almost escape into that drama as opposed to just being with the ‘pain’ of reality. But that ‘pain’, if it’s addressed and recognised and experienced without that drama, it’s much less scary than most of us expect.
Our instinct is to escape the uncomfortable and avoid the ‘pain’, so we create this avoidance mechanism which causes us stress, and trauma because we turn to gossip, and we complain, and we compare ourselves and our lives to others.
Chris: I think many of us have a tendency to chase pleasure and not happiness, and this chasing of pleasure can quite quickly create a feeling of being stuck in our lives. When we are focusing our attention on the things which bring pleasure – which are usually transitory and quite superficial – we are not putting in the harder work of looking at what will make us happy in our lives.
Jutta: That chasing of pleasure, and avoidance of pain, relates to the concept that the mind and body are so connected. If you change something to the mind, something happens to the body. If you change something to the body, something changes to the mind.
Chris: THRIVE is all about exploration; exploring your own senses, exploring your thinking patterns and what other cognitive routes and experiences might offer, exploring what stimuli – both physical and mental – work or don’t work for you, exploring just being comfortable with being.
To find out more about the THRIVE: Passion, Purpose, Performance programme download the brochure here:
