Leadership Conversations

 

Leadership Conversations 2025-2026

Below we set out the dates and themes for our Conversations through to December 2026. 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 September to December 2025

Here is the current list of participants booked to join us for Leadership Conversations from September 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

Leader to Leader Exchange via Zoom

Friday 3rd Oct, 14th Nov*, 12th Dec, 16th Jan, 13th Feb, 13th Mar, from 12 noon – 2pm
(* 1pm – 3pm)

This is a unique opportunity to be in a longitudinal learning conversation with fellow leaders over a period of 6 months. It is a forum in which we will openly share and honestly examine our own responses as leaders to events and experiences as they unfold over time.

We have entitled this, ‘The Gomboc series’.  A Gomboc’s remarkable shape ensures it always returns to its stable equilibrium position, however placed, on a flat surface.  We will focus on three themes in particular: Experience, Wisdom and Practice.

£320 for the 6 session series

See the Agenda
Leadership Conversation
119

AI Systems and the Workscape: Navigating Change and Innovation – *Limited Availability*

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’ – *Limited Availability*

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
*Limited Availability*

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 through 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
Leadership Conversation
124

Leading Without Formal Authority

From 6.00pm on Monday 19th January 2026 until 4pm on Tuesday 20th

As we grow in experience, we are often called to guide others and initiate change without the comfort of formal authority. Sometimes even in quite senior positions, we can be reduced to a kind of figurehead role, being ‘managed around’ by strong political forces. Whether we work in a large organisation, or in a smaller one seeking to get things done in a wider network, it can be frustrating and dispiriting to find ourselves up against powerful forces of inertia of one kind or another.

In this Conversation, we will have the space to examine some of these forces for inertia at work in our own context.

 

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

One-night Leadership Conversation fee: £825

Leadership Conversation
125

Inclusive Leadership: Bridging Divides in Work and Society

From 6.00pm on Thursday 19th February 2026 until 4pm on Friday 20th

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

One-night Leadership Conversation fee: £825

Leadership Conversation
126

What’s Going on with Leadership Today?

From 6.00pm on Monday 16th March until 12 noon on Wednesday 18th

The theme for this Conversation arose from an impassioned exchange at our recent Fellow’s dinner. “How come what we are seeing more and more at the top today is so far removed from everything we have been taught (and personally believe?) is good practice in leadership?”

We are experiencing in our socio-political context a model of leadership that is increasingly power-oriented, divisive, conflictual, directive and even brutal…. Is this now rubbing off into the more general leadership climate, leaves us with the fundamental question of how do we respond when we encounter a climate like this?  – a climate where sooner or later we will be asked to do things we do not believe in, compromise on our own standards, or find our leadership style simply ineffective in a context where it is seen as no longer valid.

During the Conversation we will enquire into our own experience of facing into this changing reality and the strategies we can deploy to respond appropriately to it.

 

Fellows +/ Facilitators: Chris Blakeley & Karen Stefanyszyn
Core Theme: Practical Wisdom For These Times

Two-night Leadership Conversation fee: £1105

Leadership Conversation
127

Planning for Succession

From 9.45am until 4.30pm on Wednesday 1st April 2026

Leadership is as much about legacy as it is about action in the moment. The act of planning for succession can raise questions that are as challenging as any strategic decision or operational change. How do we ensure what matters in our work outlives our direct involvement

Joining, Belonging and Leaving are always important. As we plan for succession, loyalties, entanglements, unfinished business surface. It is never just about filling a role. It lays bare our feelings about trust, control, loss, and hope. We are asked to consider the subtle demands of passing on responsibility for a deep purpose, or of letting go and preparing fertile ground for new voices and ideas to emerge.

This Conversation offers a safe space to explore what planning for succession means for our own wellbeing and the future success of all we leave behind.

 

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

One-day Leadership Conversation fee: £500

Leadership Conversation
128

Flow…

From 6.00pm on Sunday 10th May until 12 noon on Wednesday 13th

The overriding theme of this Conversation is leadership capacity – how do we respond as leaders to the endless pressure to do more with less?  The reality we are all facing today is of a seemingly exponential increase in the scale and complexity of the challenges we are being asked to address with simultaneous diminution of the resources available to us to do it. The answer cannot be work harder, it can only be work smarter, that is where ‘Flow’ comes in.

This is a true wisdom Conversation which will invite us to draw from our own experience to enquire into something of a mystery. We may know it when we see it, but we cannot turn it on like a tap. Yet maybe there is a stance we can take as leaders that opens up the taps, rather than closing them off, a work of readiness and disciplined attentiveness that means what we need is there, present, when  the conditions require it and the miracle of growth – economic, developmental or natural – can occur.

 

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

Three-night Leadership Conversation fee: £1470

Leadership Conversation
129

Trust and Truth in a Post Truth Era

From 6.00pm on Monday 1st June until 4pm on Tuesday 2nd

This Conversation will explore the dilemmas and challenges of providing leadership in our rapidly evolving context today where nothing is as it seems – symbolised in the phenomenon of ‘Truth Social’.

How do we find a grounded stance when the ground keeps moving? Without truth, how can we have trust? Without trust how can we lead?

Traditional models of leadership emphasise our role as leaders of setting vision and direction and mobilising people behind this. This requires trust: in us, in our strategic narrative, in the data on which our stance is based. But when the truth is as contested as it seems to be today, and narratives so readily distorted or dropped at a whim, how can we even be sure in what we trust, let alone ask others to trust us with in their followership?  One consequence of this is finding ourselves having to be very careful in what we say. But if we cannot be real with people, how can we get anything done?

 

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

One-night Leadership Conversation fee: £825

Leadership Conversation
130

Courage: Decision-Making Under Scrutiny and Unclear Evidence

From 6.00pm on Thursday 25th June until 4pm on Friday 26th

This leadership conversation will invite us into deep, reflective exploration of what it truly means to make courageous decisions when evidence is incomplete, the stakes are high, and every move is subject to external and internal scrutiny. In contemporary organisational life—whether in health, public service, or the private sector—we are increasingly called to act in ambiguous circumstances, to hold responsibility for the unknown, and to justify choices that may be challenged by regulators, boards, or the public, long after the moment has passed.

By coming together in honest enquiry and reflection, we will probe the ground on which we stand as leaders, individually and collectively. By sharing stories, struggles, and insights, we will surface strategies for holding complexity, stepping into uncertainty, being the voice that is listened to, and finding purpose, wisdom, and integrity even as the world watches and waits.

 

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

One-night Leadership Conversation fee: £825

Leadership Conversation
131

Leading Through Crisis and Uncertainty

From 6.00pm on Thursday 10th September until 4pm on Friday 11th

One-night Leadership Conversation fee: £825

Leadership Conversation
132

Mosaics of Hope

From 2.00pm on Monday 28th September until 12.15pm on Wednesday 30th

Taking inspiration from the 2025 St George’s House Annual Lecture, this conversation will explore how we cultivate and sustain the essential quality of hope as the basis for our leadership – and that of others. Our focus will be on ‘true hope’, not avoiding the painful realities and challenges of darker times, but wholly engaging with them in the necessary process of transforming things for the better – going ‘through’, not ‘round’ and taking people with us as we do….

We will also be spending time exploring the ‘mosaic’ of hope – how we engage with others, each one of us playing our fullest part in a picture we may never wholly grasp – until we have built it. The scale and complexity of the challenges we face today can make us feel overwhelmed, tempting us to withdraw into our own ‘rightness’ and  ‘othering’ those who do not share it. So we will be looking at the role of forgiveness and generosity in hope, how we make moves that allow it to root and breathe in others.

 

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

Three-day Leadership Conversation fee: £1280

Leadership Conversation
133

Leadership and Loneliness: Isolation or Empowered Solitude

From 6.00pm on Monday 12th October until 4pm on Tuesday 13th

Leadership is inevitably lonely at times. It comes with the territory. But when and how is this healthy or unhealthy?  When for example does a resolute clarity in the face of difficulty become isolation or brittleness?

In this conversation we will explore and learn practical approaches to cultivating solitude while finding healthier support networks. We will leave better equipped to integrate a healthy alone-ness into our leadership practice, nurturing both individual strength and meaningful connection with others.

 

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

One-night Leadership Conversation fee: £825

Leadership Conversation
134

Reluctant Leaders?

From 6.00pm on Wednesday 11th November until 12 noon on Friday 13th

In this conversation we are going to talk ‘imposter’!  A persistent feature in our honest conversations is the acknowledging of our experience of ‘imposter syndrome’ – when, for whatever reason, we find ourselves thinking ‘I am not up to this!’ Or related to this, the ‘accidental leader’, where, finding ourselves in a position with everyone looking to us for leadership, we ask ‘why me, how did I end up here…?’

It is a facet of leadership as old as time itself – described memorably in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, where Malcolm, wrestling with the call to rescue Scotland from Tyranny, has first to overcome his own self-judgements, and “abjure the taints and blames I laid upon myself for strangers to my nature…  My first false speaking was this upon myself.”

During the conversation we will enquire into our own experience, past and present, of facing into this phenomenon – and the strategies we can deploy to respond appropriately to it.

 

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

Two-night Leadership Conversation fee: £1105

Leadership Conversation
135

Releasing Entrepreneurial Leadership: Creating Spaces for Innovation & Change

From 9.45am until 4.30pm on Wednesday 2nd December 2026

The leadership challenge we want to explore together in this conversation is how we inject and sustain an entrepreneurial spirit and create environments that welcome rather than resist change. With careful nurturing, even the most apparently disruptive ideas can flourish.

The conversation will focus on our role as leaders in cultivating a climate in which innovation and rapid adaptation is a way of life. This will involve us examining and releasing our own energy and belief in the face of self-limiting patterns as well as how we encourage this in others – not just those in our direct teams but also those whom we engage with across organisational systems and boundaries.

 

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

One day Leadership Conversation fee: £500

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