Leadership Conversations

 

Leadership Conversations 2025

Below we set out the dates and themes for our Conversations through to December 2025. Some Conversations are marked “Fellows only” because attendance is restricted to Leadership Fellows. Others are marked “Fellows+” because we are very happy to welcome Fellows’ nominees, such as a member of their top team or a key business partner.

Participants May to December 2025

Here is the current list of participants booked to join us for Leadership Conversations from May to December 2025.

Details are also are available on the Agenda page for each Conversation.

 

Leadership Themes:

Our programme is organised around 2 core themes:

Wisdom and Personal Growth

Providing a space for a deeper authentic enquiry into the character, purpose and ambition of our leadership.

Practical Wisdom For These Times

Providing an opportunity to share practical experience, expertise and learning around key contemporary issues.

To read more about these themes please click here.

 

Leadership Conversation
116

Leadership Focus and Attention
**Limited Availability**

From 6.00pm on Tuesday 6th May 2025 until 12 noon on Friday 9th

We all know that what we focus on as leaders gets done. It is therefore probably the single most important aspect of our leadership. There are always too many things to do. So we have to choose what we focus on. There’s the nub of the challenge.

The core quality that underpins this is our attention. But our attention needs attending to! Why? Because it is often reactive and ‘caught’ by the wrong things. We often talk about ‘paying attention’ which is an interesting metaphor. What do we ‘pay’ with? All too often it is with a life not lived, opportunities lost – all the things we could have done or made happen (or just enjoyed!) if we had not been distracted, or focused on the wrong things.

We will explore and enquire into:

  • Things that seem to be ‘crowding out your attention’ or sucking up all your time – and why?
  • Things you are not getting to that you really want to?
  • Things you can see developing in your context that are starting to ‘catch your eye’ and, whilst smaller now, may be of huge significance soon?
  • Any sense in your gut that something just doesn’t ‘feel quite right’ but you either don’t know what it is or can’t put your finger on why?
  • How you might relax and start enjoying your life more as a leader rather than over-worrying, or over-striving.

Fellows only/ Facilitators: Chris Blakeley & Karen Stefanyszyn
Core Theme: Wisdom and Personal Growth

Three-night Leadership Conversation fee: £1470

See the Agenda
Leadership Conversation
117

Power and Responsibility: Navigating Leadership Dynamics
**Fully Booked**

From 6.00pm on Tuesday 3rd June 2025 until 4pm on Wednesday 4th

In this Conversation we will make the most of the special, high trust culture of the Fellowship to hold a full, frank exploration of our relationship with power as leaders. In particular we will explore the subtle dynamic between power and responsibility – ‘With great power comes great responsibility’, as the Spiderman adage has it. But this is true the other way round too, when we step up and take responsibility we need to ensure we are wise to the power dynamics of this – otherwise we may succumb to weariness and disillusionment.

We will be enquiring into:

  • Personal and Historical Contexts of Power: how individual experiences from childhood to adulthood shape perceptions of power and responsibility.
  • Organisational Dynamics of Power: how it works overtly and covertly within complex systems, its impact on institutional structures and how to work wisely with this.
  • Power and Its Consequences: the true responsibilities and false projections that come with power, the potential for misuse, and the ethical dilemmas leaders face.
  • Power in Action: Strategies for harnessing power effectively to achieve desired outcomes while maintaining integrity and respect for others.
  • ‘Power-plays’: both positive and negative. How to bring our true power into play and help others do the same; how to challenge power games and the abuse of power.
  • Personal reflection: understanding our own power, its impact and limits; exploring our own questions on how to use and grow it – confidently, wisely and responsibly.

Fellows +/ Facilitators: Chris Blakeley & Tony Wood
Core Theme: Wisdom and Personal Growth

One-night Leadership Conversation fee: £825

See the Agenda
Leadership Conversation
118

Leading in a Polarised World
**Fully Booked**

From 6.00pm on Wednesday 18th June 2025 until 4pm on Thursday 19th

This is a topic that seems to be emerging as one of the most important amongst our Fellows. Whether it is people ‘entrenching’ around diversity issues, or the hardening of political positions, or a tendency to resort to legalistic process instead of dialogue. More and more we are encountering situations with people entrenched deeply in polarities and/or a experiencing a climate where there is an inherent tendency for people to spin off rapidly into polarised positions.

Our purpose in this Conversation is both to seek to understand this more fully – what is driving this polarisation – as well as to share wisdom as leaders about how to handle this tendency to polarise and harness it as a productive force.

We will cover:

  • “Us v them” : Understanding the dynamics of polarisation in order to mitigate and channel the energy of conflict.
  • The ‘Ladder of Inference’: Exploring personal biases and their role in escalating conflicts.
  • The Impact of Polarisation: The challenges of facilitating dialogue among divided groups.
  • Balancing Conformity and Conflict: Navigating the tension between fitting in and asserting diversity.
  • Perspective: Enriching inner awareness to better understand our own and others’ viewpoints.
  • Adaptability and Flexibility: being versatile and resilient in our leadership, inspired by the philosophy of ‘being like water’.
  • Polarity Management: Using a polarity management tool applied to our own contexts to unlock the power and wisdom of ‘harnessing opposites’
  • Intervention: Focusing on strategic, high leverage, interventions – minimum effort, maximum effect – and the importance of timing.
  • Growth Through Extremes: how embracing the extremes can catalyse personal and professional growth, if we can bear it.

Fellows +/ Facilitators: Karen Stefanyszyn & Tony Wood
Core Theme: Practical Wisdom For These Times

One-night Leadership Conversation fee: £825

See the Agenda
Leadership Conversation
119

AI Systems and the Workscape: Navigating Change and Innovation

From 6.00pm on Monday 8th September 2025 until 4pm on Tuesday 9th

This Conversation will provide a unique opportunity for members of this community to exchange wisdom and insight on our lived experience as leaders of how AI is starting to become systemically embedded in our ‘workscape’. We will enquire into the nature of the disruption it is bringing in, with all its possibilities and concerns. In keeping with our ethos, we will do this from the grounded wisdom that comes from intelligent observation from the living edge of our experience – personal and organisational.

We will be careful not to slip into the froth of cliché and speculation. Equally, we will not be constrained from the vital work of imagining, from a wisdom perspective, the future work landscape now unfolding before us.

As ever, we will combine depth with practicality and real-time learning. We will equip each other with insights and strategies to harness AI’s potential responsibly while addressing the challenges and opportunities it presents in transforming the workplace.

Fellows +/ Facilitators: Karen Stefanyszyn & Tony Wood
Core Theme: Practical Wisdom For These Times

One-night Leadership Conversation fee: £825

See the Agenda
Leadership Conversation
120

Keeping the Business Human in a Tech World

From 6.00pm on Wednesday 24th September 2025 until 4pm on Thursday 25th

Our aim in this Conversation is to create a space where we can get granular about this, to turn concern into concerted care, wisdom and action. The Conversation will also follow naturally on from previous Conversations on the impact of AI and some of the other ‘gamechangers’ that are making themselves felt in our leadership contexts right now.

Our focus will be on maintaining ‘humanity’ in a technology-driven world, with its increasingly pervasive ‘machine’ underpinning of human (inter)activity. We are all experiencing this in various ways and will find it unconsciously driving our behaviour and responses. This Conversation will keep us conscious and awake to what must be remembered as well as re-formed.

An interesting historical parallel is how Taylorism and Fordism shaped leadership in the early days of mass production, which then led to a counter- response that became known as the ‘Human Relations’ movement.

Fellows +/ Facilitators: Karen Stefanyszyn & Tony Wood
Core Theme: Practical Wisdom For These Times

One-night Leadership Conversation fee: £825

See the Agenda
Leadership Conversation
121

Strength in Leadership: ‘Don’t be Afraid of the Dark’

From 2.00pm on Monday 20th October until 12.15pm on Wednesday 22nd

“The wise man in the storm prays not for deliverance from danger but deliverance from fear. It is the storm within that endangers not the storm without”

These words from Ralph Waldo Emerson will set us on our way in this Conversation. If the storm is coming, and we can’t, or choose not to, avoid it, then how do we respond?

It is a Conversation for those of you who want to face into some of the tougher stuff in your leadership – and to seek the wisdom, perspective and companionship of the Fellowship to help you do so.

It will be an enlivening exploration into where and how true strength flows and – what happens when it does – including our role in inspiring this in those around us. We will explore diverse aspects of strength and courage, how we cultivate these and keep them online for when they are most needed – maybe even right now, however subtly or boldly?

Fellows only/ Facilitators: Chris Blakeley & Karen Stefanyszyn
Core Theme: Wisdom and Personal Growth

Three-day Leadership Conversation fee: £1280

See the Agenda
Leadership Conversation
122

Never Underestimate the Power of Your Voice

From 6.00pm on Wednesday 12th November until 12 noon on Friday 14th

The central enquiry of this Conversation is – how we use our ‘voice’ as leaders. Voice reveals us, it sets tone, climate and mood. Our voice has power, both by virtue of our role and authority and also our capacity to discern and speak truth. Voice carries responsibility, to speak truth ‘to power’ and ‘from power’ – the responsibility to speak our truth into the world and the responsibility for the effect our words have on others.

‘Voice’ today of course has so much more dimensionality with the reach of social media and the massive increase in social sensitivity to the words we choose to use. Yet the sheer volume of words and ‘positions’ that now circulate are equally desensitising and numbing of true discourse. How do we navigate our way through all this as leaders?

Fellows +/ Facilitators: Chris Blakeley & Karen Stefanyszyn
Core Theme: Wisdom and Personal Growth

Two-night Leadership Conversation fee: £1105

See the Agenda
Leadership Conversation
123

Getting Beyond the Tropes of our Times

From 9.45am until 4.30pm on Wednesday 10th December 2025

The noun ‘trope’ is defined as an idea or expression that has been used by many people.

One of the risks of hosting leadership Conversations is we become a forum for the perpetuation of ‘tropes’ –  socialised, ‘sound-bite’ narratives that are substitutes for original and critical thinking. It is interesting to notice how the same narratives and even language can surface in people from very different backgrounds and contexts – a clue that powerful socialisation, even indoctrination, may be at work.

This Conversation will focus on our role as leaders in breaking though the surface of cliché, labelling and lazy thinking into robust dialogue that makes a real difference to real issues.

Fellows only/ Facilitators: Chris Blakeley & Tony Wood
Core Theme: Practical Wisdom For These Times

One-day Leadership Conversation fee: £500

See the Agenda
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