Leadership Development
Courses, cohorts, and residential retreats that go deeper than conventional approaches
Leadership development often involves training that offers new tools, frameworks, and mental models. That can help solve some problems — and it has, for me and others I’ve worked with.
But does the work of leadership require more?
Through my own experience as an executive, and by coaching and advising others, I've seen that the most difficult challenges facing senior leaders today are not technical. They are complicated and complex. They don't have a quick fix. They're systemic, but the impact is personal. They require people to adapt and shift their mindsets, not just their behaviors — even when the path forward is unclear.
That often asks people to question or change their values, beliefs, identity, and how they make sense of their experience. It involves loss. And letting go.That requires learning not just what to think, but how to think — and how to see. Problem seeing, not just problem solving.
My leadership development work builds on that. The most meaningful growth happens not just through instruction but through tension. My role is to design and hold a space that balances challenge with support — where people can remain curious a little longer, learn from and with each other, even when it's difficult, uncomfortable, or unsettling. After all, leadership begins where certainty ends.
Storytelling is one way in. Leaders often discover the power of their own stories — how they shape meaning; connect others to a shared mission, vision, or values; and reveal what's really going on beneath the surface. Sometimes that happens through examining case studies about how other leaders navigated impossible dilemmas: what they saw, and what they missed. Sometimes it involves presenting our own challenges or failures and inviting other perspectives in. And sometimes the most instructive story is the one unfolding live in the room — in the dynamics between us, right here, right now.
But stories don't only come from case studies or personal reflection. They also come from art. From novels and films. These can help leaders explore things that other methods struggle to address: the anxiety of not knowing, the losses no one names, the weight of holding responsibility for others when it's hard to contain it yourself.
The courses and cohorts I offer are designed for leaders who are ready to go there. I don't have all the answers. But I can offer a space that brings theory and lived experience together — in ways that are rigorous, experiential, and sometimes unexpected — so we can learn together.
Current Offerings
(2026 - 2027)
Each of these experiences uses a different medium — films, novels, or a single author's body of work — to reach the same territory: the adaptive challenges, identity questions, and unprocessed losses that shape how senior leaders see and lead. They are designed for small cohorts and are currently offered on a pilot basis. All are virtual, unless otherwise noted. Guided self-study will also be available.
Seeing What We Carry
Six Films · Twelve Weeks · Virtual Intensive · Cohort-based
Six carefully selected and sequenced films — from Gattaca to Lost in Translation — become the lens for the inner work of leadership. Each biweekly session pairs a film with guided reflection, structured dialogue, and exercises drawn from adult developmental theory, systems psychodynamics, and the adaptive leadership tradition. This is not a film club. It's a developmental arc designed to shift not just what you think, but how you see, in inform and support how you lead…and live.
Biweekly sessions over twelve weeks, plus a one-month follow-up gathering. Optional coaching check-ins between sessions.
Leading Through Loss
Six Novels · Nine Months · Virtual Intensive · Cohort-based
Six bestselling novels over nine months — from The Measure to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue — building genuine grief literacy as an organizational and leadership competence. Each three-hour monthly session includes structured dialogue, an experiential exercise, and case consultation: a methodology where participants bring live leadership challenges for the cohort to work through together. This goes beyond advice-giving. It’s diagnostic, building our capacity for problem seeing to support problem solving.
Six-week intervals between sessions. Journaling and micro-learning between gatherings, with optional coaching check-ins.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
One Novel · Four Sessions · Virtual Intensive · Cohort-based
What are you building, and who are you becoming while building it?
Gabrielle Zevin's bestselling novel, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow follows two people who build worlds together — through creative partnership, business success, devastating loss, and the question of whether genuine play can survive despite envy, betrayal, and grief. Building on Shakespeare and Macbeth's darkest soliloquy on life’s meaninglessness, the novel offers an alternative examination of uncertainty, beginnings, and endings with hope and playfulness. Does leadership require the same from us?
This four-session module uses the novel as a developmental container for leaders whose identity is entangled with their professional role and what they create. Through frameworks drawn from developmental psychology, grief literacy, adaptive leadership, and the psychoanalytic tradition, participants explore leading through loss. This focuses on how we might continue our tasks, in our roles as others who held the system together leave. What does it take to build — and rebuild — a holding environment with the skills you already possess, the curiosity to see clearly, and the courage to build something not for legacy, but for someone else. How might we create spaces that balance challenge and support to co-create, despite loss, together?
Four sessions over eight weeks. Participants read or listen to the full novel before the module begins. Journaling and micro-learning between gatherings, with optional coaching check-ins.
Holding What Remains
Three Novels · Three Months · Virtual Intensive · Cohort-based
Three novels by Kazuo Ishiguro — The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go, and Klara and the Sun — trace one author's curious exploration of the same question: what does it mean to be an individual inside a system that has already decided what or who you are? This concentrated three-month cohort questions our personal and collective responses to change — including loss and grief related to leadership challenges — making the work developmental, rather than purely intellectual or theoretical.
Monthly two-hour sessions over three months. Self-reflection and individual coaching woven throughout.
Curious about which learning experience might be right for you?
Let’s discuss what might make sense based on your challenges and interest.
Common Questions
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These courses and cohorts are designed for senior leaders — typically at the VP level and above — who sense that the most important challenges they face aren't solved by better frameworks or more information. If you're holding something you weren't trained to carry, or leading through complexity that doesn't resolve cleanly, this work was built with you in mind.
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The formats vary. Some are small cohorts that meet over several months, working through a shared set of novels or films as a lens for leadership. Some are intensive residential experiences. All of them combine theoretical grounding with experiential learning — which means you won't just be absorbing ideas, you'll be working with them alongside others in real time. The live dynamics of the group are often part of the material itself.
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It is, intentionally. Certain things are easier to see in a story than in a case study or a framework. Fiction can hold ambiguity, loss, and moral complexity without rushing toward resolution — which is exactly what senior leadership asks of people. Art gets at things that other methods struggle to reach.
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Yes. The texts are the shared ground we work from, so engagement with them before we meet matters. That said, there's no single right reading — part of what makes these courses useful is bringing different interpretations into conversation with each other. You can read the physical or electronic versions (in any language), or listen to the books.
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Coaching is one-on-one and typically focused on your specific challenges, goals, and development. These courses are cohort-based — the learning happens in relationship with others, and the group itself is part of what you're learning from. Some participants do both; they're complementary, not interchangeable
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The best first step is a conversation. Get in touch and we can explore whether any current or upcoming offerings are a good fit for where you are.