Change is Challenging Hierarchical Norms: Navigating Overload and Competing Pressures
Many of the top managers we work with are overloaded. Everyone is looking to them for direction and answers, but as a top manager, you don’t always have them; you need to check with your boss, board, and/or other stakeholders first. And no one appreciates that you’re caught in the middle of too many competing pressures and interests; this person needs one thing from you, and that group wants something completely different.
Sound familiar?
Amidst these conditions of overload and crunch, many of us respond with what human systems pioneer Barry Oshry calls “The Dance of the Blind Reflex” – a series of unproductive moves that are especially common in hierarchical organizations. Executives continue to absorb even more work. Entry-level workers blame and shun the higher-ups. Folks in the middle run themselves ragged trying to make everyone happy.
It’s time to break out of these unproductive patterns and learn more effective ways of working and collaborating.
In this workshop, you will:
Learn about the common patterns of unproductive behavior in hierarchical organizations and notice where you might be engaged in them
Explore new strategies for breaking out of these patterns and apply them to your real-life work challenges
Meet like-minded, like-hearted practitioners
This workshop is best suited for:
Executives and team leads who’ve become the go-to person for problem solving and hope to get better at enrolling others to take initiative
Change agents or activists tackling complex challenges in their workplaces and getting stuck in bureaucracy
People and learning professionals interested in developing employees’ capacity to manage complexity and drive change See this document
This workshop takes places on Wednesday, November 20, 2024, 10.00-11.30 am ET / 16.00-17.30 CET.
The workshop fee is $119. You will receive an email with payment link after registration. If you have a discount code, please enter it in the registration form.
Change is Challenging – Yourself: Grounding Yourself and Staying Creative Amidst Adversity
The practice of leadership is difficult. Adaptive progress requires mobilizing collective responsibility on a challenge, engaging new partnerships, synthesizing diverse perspectives, and ongoing experimentation to co-create a new path forward.
In this session, we want to explore one of the common reasons people struggle to sustain this difficult work: the heartbreak, exhaustion, and anger that arise when we are challenged to make compromises to our ideals, loyalties, or sources of meaning in the name of progress. These moments can take a significant emotional and even physical toll, and many of the aspiring change agents we work with lack the practices to recover and stay in the game.
You will come away with:
new insights into your own belief systems and “limiting narratives” that could be getting in your way
a framework for differentiating your “roles” from your “self”
develop practices to help you build more emotional bandwidth, stamina, and stomach for draining work
This workshop is suitable for:
Executives, team leads, people & learning professionals, and change agents who find themselves curious about finding more sustainable and less draining ways of engaging in their work
This workshop takes places on Wednesday, December 11, 2024, 10.00-11.30 am ET / 16.00-17.30 CET.
The workshop fee is $119. You will receive an email with payment link after registration. If you have a discount code, please enter it in the registration form.
Post-Election Community Session
Perhaps you, like us, are feeling anxious in anticipation of next week’s presidential election in the United States — where the electorate is as divided as never before and where the threat of authoritarian rule is real and looming..
Whatever happens next week (and in the days, weeks, and months to follow), we know we’ll need each other to stay anchored.
We’ll be holding space and bringing relevant frameworks to help us all make sense of the moment and where we go from there.
Registration is now closed.
Change is Challenging: Your Story Using a Somatic Lens
A challenge at work can feel overwhelming. Yet, we rack our brains trying to find a solution and it keeps us up at night. It’s a habit of ours that we try to solve challenges through mental gymnastics and it rarely occurs to us that our body may hold valuable information about how we go about driving change. In fact, that would be a big change in itself, for us to consult our body as a way to see the bigger picture. Resistant? Then this is a workshop for you!
Change is Challenging - Your Notion of Leadership
Too often, we think of leadership as a position we hold – team lead, the managing director, CEO, or President. Then we hold back on leading until we assume that role. Or, we think of leadership as a personality trait that some people are born with. Then we hold back on leading because we feel we lack the necessary charisma or gravitas. These are ways of thinking about leadership that are self-limiting. At KONU, we subscribe to the idea that leadership is something you do – it’s an activity (Heifetz 1994). There’s no such thing as a great leader, but there are many opportunities for great leadership. And this can come from many places and people.
In this workshop, we will explore the concept of leadership as an activity, drawing on the Adaptive Leadership framework developed at Harvard University. You’ll:
Learn to differentiate between leadership and authority
Understand that good authority work is about meeting expectations
Understand that good leadership work often entails disappointing expectations and mobilizing collective learning
Develop ideas for and build your capacity to exercise leadership
Meet like-minded practitioners
This workshop is suitable for
executives and team leads who are interested in developing their capacities around mobilizing learning and change in their teams and organizations
people & learning professionals, who are curious around new ways to think about leadership and management programs for distributed leadership at multiple levels of their organization
change agents or activists engaged in the dual work of exercising leadership on their causes – and managing their teams
Registration has now closed for this workshop.
CHANGE IS TRIGGERING: Gain more freedom and optionality for leadership.
We all get triggered, but our triggers can cause us to react in ways we’re not so proud of (not to mention, in ways that are counter-productive to goals beyond ourselves) – you might lose your temper, when it would be more productive if you asked a question; you might withdraw from a heated discussion, when it would inspire greater progress for you to engage; you might misinterpret a colleague as untrustworthy, when they could be a vital partner.
But though triggers are perfectly human, they can also be an obstacle in our practice of leadership if you don’t know how to ‘read’ them and channel them. They can restrict curiosity, creativity, and partnership. This workshop is about building more freedom and optionality, so that we are more effective when we notice we’re getting triggered. The goal is not to “rid” ourselves of triggers, but to build the capacity to decipher them – learning how to read the valuable data our triggered responses carry and be in dialogue with them. As a result, we can act with more intentionality, strategy, and discernment for what a specific context calls for.
You will come away with:
A framework for understanding your triggers and the underlying assumptions behind them
A better understanding of the valuable data your triggers contain
More self-awareness of how your triggers might be counter-productive to your leadership efforts and how they can become assets
An expanded universe between trigger and response
Alternative action-options beyond your common triggered reactions
More optionality for how to respond to others when they are triggered by you
This session will be facilitated by trauma-informed specialists and is suitable for:
Executives, team leads, people & learning professionals, and change agents who wish to break out of old habits, overcome internal obstacles, and wish to develop themselves and others more effectively.
This is a workshop for those curious to do internal work, open to questioning preconceived mindsets and beliefs, and committed to taking their leadership practice to the next level.
This workshop takes place on Wednesday, July 10, 2024, 10.00-11.30 am ET / 16.00-17.30 CET.
Registration is now closed.
The Adaptive Leadership Lab — An experiential workshop for women-identifying* change agents
How do you lead with greater creativity and self-trust in a sea of competing voices, pressures, and projections?
As women, we often receive conflicting messages about how to lead:
Hold people’s emotions but be tough. Don’t be too tough if you’re a woman of color, though; then we’ll think you’re angry.
Integrate different perspectives but also don't compromise your vision. And just make sure your vision fits in with a dominant cultural context.
Build credibility but be humble about your accomplishments. There’s a code to follow and you better get it.
We walk a tightrope.
Leadership is a balancing act between meeting expectations and disappointing them to mobilize collective learning and shared ownership. This delicate balance is often made more complex while navigating societal expectations on women — which vary across racial and cultural identities and can still feel taboo to acknowledge.
We designed this highly experiential 2.5-day Lab to help you to move from awareness to effective action. We will delve into the root causes of systemic challenges women face in practicing leadership with an intersectional lens and expand our toolkits for responding.
This Lab will help you shift from feeling torn, unseen, and/or overwhelmed to a sense of agency, optionality, and creativity. Through reflective and embodied exercises, simulations, presentation, peer coaching, and more, you’ll explore frameworks for diagnosing your internal and external systems and scaffold your own unique leadership development journey. And you’ll do it in a community of women who, like you, are here for the ‘real talk’ on experiences across lines of difference (e.g. age, race, sexuality, class, religion, industry, and more).
Program Outcomes
By the end of the Lab, you will have:
Explored your own stories, projections, and triggers around authority, gender and race, and leadership
Unearthed your developmental edges, as they relate to your authority role and your practice of leadership
Improved your diagnostic skills for understanding both internal and external systemic pressures and conflicts
Practiced negotiating with your own inner voices
Deepened relationships with a cohort of confidants to support you well beyond the program
Our Frameworks
KONU’s approach builds on the Adaptive Leadership and Adult Development framework which has been developed over 35 years of research and teaching at Harvard University by Professors Ronald Heifetz, Robert Kegan, and their collaborators, including KONU co-founder Tim O’Brien. This year’s Adaptive Leadership Lab facilitators also bring additional expertise in social and emotional learning, identity development, multiracial and cross-class group processes, performance, somatic practice, and organizational development.
Program Participants
This workshop is for you if you identify as a woman* and:
You are currently frustrated that you are not making much progress on issues that are most important to you
You are accountable to a wide set of stakeholders with numerous (and often conflicting) expectations of you
You are open to exploring within yourself and with others the ways in which race and other identity markers have informed your experience of womanhood
You lead a team or organization with a social impact mission, OR you are developer of people who thinks the Lab’s frameworks would resonate with those you support
You are curious to do internal work, ready for candid dialogues, open to questioning preconceived mindsets and beliefs, and committed to taking their leadership practice to the next level
Logistics
The Adaptive Leadership Lab is a multi-day workshop that will take place in Philadelphia, PA. It will run on:
Monday, June 24th from 8:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Tuesday, June 25th from 8:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. (plus optional dinner)
Wednesday, June 26th from 8:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.
Venue
The lab will take place at the Loft on Passyunk (pronounced “Pash-yunk”), a beautiful dance studio and event space located in the heart of South Philly. East Passyunk Avenue is also well-loved by locals as a foodie district; breakfasts and lunches for the Lab will be catered by various local food establishments for you to enjoy.
Address: 1919 E Passyunk Ave
Philadelphia, PA 19148
Transportation
SEPTA Public Transit:
By rail: 4-minute walk from Snyder Station via Broad Street Line
By bus: 3-minute walk from 12th St and Mifflin St stop via 45 Bus
By car: 4-minute walk from parking garage, available at 1930 S Broad St (Constitution Health Plaza).
Lodging
Our partners at Marriott have graciously provided a room block at their Downtown location in Center City for your stay. You will receive a link to reserve using our room block as a part of your registration process.
Address: 1200 Filbert St
Philadelphia, PA 19107
Investment
The tuition is 2950 USD for individuals working in corporations or 2450 USD for individuals working in nonprofit or government organizations. Scholarships are available (further information below).
Your investment includes:
All Lab materials (worksheets, books, journal, etc.)
Breakfast, coffee/tea, snacks, and lunch on all three days
Dinner on Tuesday, June 25th (optional to attend)
A 30-minute session with one of the Lab’s facilitators before the program
A 60-minute coaching session with one of the Lab’s facilitators 2-4 weeks after the program to help you integrate and apply your learning
Free access to the remainder of KONU’s 2024 virtual open enrollment offerings
50% off any coaching package purchased in the second half of 2024 (after the Lab)
Scholarships
We provide scholarships to ensure that the Lab is accessible to a range of change agents. Using a pay-what-you-can model; scholarship recipients will financially invest at a level that is meaningful yet doable for them and/or their organization, and KONU will cover the rest of tuition.
The scholarship application deadline was Monday, May 13th. If you are interested in joining the Lab but missed this deadline and finances present a barrier to your participation, please email info@konu.org to inquire about your options.
Payment Plans
We strive to make the Adaptive Leadership Lab financially accessible and understand that the cost of tuition may represent an appreciable investment on your (or your organization’s) part. In our efforts to provide you with flexibility in making this investment, we invite you to reach out and inquire about payment plan options by emailing gene.sun@konu.org. We are committed to making this experience possible for you!
Facilitators
How to Learn More
Interested in the Lab but want to learn more before registering? Book a 15-minute meeting with a Lab facilitator, or email Emily Wyner for a recording of our May 1st info session.
*We use the language of “women-identifying” because we know there is no one way to be a “woman.” We welcome anyone for whom the term “womanhood” resonates with their experience of gender.
CHANGE IS CHALLENGING – YOURSELF. Grounding Yourself and Staying Creative Amidst Adversity
The practice of leadership is difficult. Adaptive progress requires mobilizing collective responsibility on a challenge, engaging new partnerships, synthesizing diverse perspectives, and ongoing experimentation to co-create a new path forward.
In this session, we want to explore one of the common reasons people struggle to sustain this difficult work: the heartbreak, exhaustion, and anger that arise when we are challenged to make compromises to our ideals, loyalties, or sources of meaning in the name of progress.
CHANGE IS CHALLENGING - YOUR USUAL ANSWER. Diagnosing whether the work needed is technical problem-solving or adaptive learning.
Too often, we think of leadership is about “fixing” problems and offering solutions. That’s particularly true for those of us in management roles – after all, isn’t that what we were hired for? The reality is more complex. A key leadership skill is to know when problem-solving is the right approach – and when you need to mobilize learning in others in order to drive progress.
In this workshop, you will:
Get in touch with your own inner tunings to fix and problem-solve – and how those might stand in your way when it comes to engaging others in the work.
Gain new insights into your challenges, by distinguishing between routine, technical challenges and complex, adaptive challenges that require learning
Learn strategies for “giving the work back” and orchestrating learning
Meet like-minded practitioners
This workshop is suitable for
For executives and team leads who’ve become the go-to person for problem solving or hope to get better at enrolling others to take initiative
For people & learning professionals who are curious about new ways to design and deliver leadership and management programs – programs that encourage more collaborative problem solving, developing a bigger stomach for ambiguity and complexity, and the ability to drive change
For change agents or activists tackling complex challenges and driving change
This workshop takes place on Wednesday, May 15, 2024, 10.00-11.30 am ET / 16.00-17.30 CET.
Registration has now closed.
CHANGE IS CHALLENGING - LOYALTIES. Understanding and managing your inner ecosystem and how it supports and resists your own change agenda.
Mobilizing change requires not only confronting external stakeholders with difficult realities, loss and offering them new possibilities. Sometimes it is our own inner world that gets in the way, generating blind spots and limiting options.
In this workshop we will explore ourself as a system bringing multiples voices to the table: wisdom, resistance and even sabotage to the change efforts we care most about.
CHANGE IS CHALLENGING - RESISTANCE. Understand and move beyond the inevitable failed attempts to affect change.
Are you trying to drive crucial change in your team or in your organization – but you are facing resistance? Maybe you are the founder of a startup pushing for real innovations in the climate & sustainability space. Or you are in charge of people development in a large organization confronting the challenges and opportunities of fast-paced technological shifts.
Or you are an executive who cares about making social justice not just a catch-phrase, but actually wants their teams to examine what is getting in the way so they can really be a part of the solution.
When people are confronted with change, they will far too often respond with cynical denial (“been there, done that”), stonewalling, or even outright opposition.
It’s frustrating! Why do people resist change? And what are effective strategies to overcome it?
In this workshop, you will explore core ideas and strategies from Harvard’s Adaptive Leadership framework that will illuminate how to make progress on some of the most thorny challenges of our times.
You will:
Diagnose resistance to change efforts and the motives underlying them
Explore the losses, loyalties, and competing values that people’s resistance
Learn strategies to move beyond the resistance into learning and achieving results
Connect to like-minded practitioners and learn from their experiences
This workshop is suitable for:
Entrepreneurs, executives and team leads driving change in their teams and organizations and struggling with resistance
HR/People & learning professionals interested in developing employees' capacity to drive change
This workshop takes place on Monday, March 25, 2024, 4.30-6.00 PM ET.
The workshop fee is $119. You will receive an email with payment link after registration. If you have a discount code, please enter it in the registration form.
CHANGE IS - MEETING YOUR INNER CRITIC. Shifting Negative Self-Talk Through Presence and Creativity
All too often, we fail to lead not because of external circumstances but because we just don’t believe we can: systemically-imposed imposter syndrome and shame gets the better of us. It’s time to unleash your full leadership potential in this masterclass designed to tackle self-doubt head-on. Taught by leadership development luminary Rosi Greenberg, this transformative, experiential workshop delves into the origins of self criticism and guides you to embrace more powerful self-narratives.
CHANGE IS CHALLENGING - EVERYONE. It's Getting Hot in Here! Strategies for Driving (or Coping with) Change and the Heat that comes with it
Are you the one driving crucial change in your team, organization, or community – but you are facing resistance? Resistance comes in many forms: outright opposition, cynical denial (“been there, done that”), stonewalling. It’s frustrating! Why do people resist change? And what can you do to overcome it?
CHANGE IS CHALLENGING - YOURSELF. Unpack Your Leadership Possibilities for 2024
“How can I be a better leader this year?” We often use the start of a New Year to set intentions for “getting better” at exercising leadership. But it can be challenging to define the improvement goal that will lead us to the most progress – let alone figuring out the path to get there!
Growing On Purpose: Self-Coaching Practices for Immediate Action and Long-Term Growth
Great leaders know that every difficulty is a learning opportunity. And yet, some difficulties are just so… difficult!
If it’s going to be difficult, how can you get the most out of your difficulties? How do you ease the process of addressing immediate needs while also embracing the opportunity to invest in your long-term capacity?
Self-Coaching is the art of intentional, compassionate conversation with yourself, typically conducted in writing. Spacious listening, unwavering support, and penetrating questions are rapid accelerators of growth, whether you receive them from a professional coach or provide them to yourself. Within that conversation with yourself, you’ll find opportunities to address the immediate challenge at hand and build new capacities to address future challenges more easily.
If you find it easy to be kind with others, and harder to be equally kind with yourself, you may find this experience particularly transformational. As tempting as it often is to be harsh on ourselves in the pursuit of development, that harshness is unnecessary and counterproductive; this program will teach alternative methods of directing your own growth.
Join us for a workshop offered jointly by Presence Tree’s Yotam Schachter and KONU.
In this workshop, you will:
Build rapport with yourself as both coach and client
Learn key questions and frameworks for a powerful self-coaching conversation
Dissolve barriers to your progress and development for a specific challenge you are facing
This workshop is well suited for:
executives, managers, and change agents interested in taking daily leadership challenges as developmental opportunities
People/HR and learning & development professionals looking for new ways to support the development of their people
Fellowship program managers/directors looking for sustainable ways to support their fellows’ development
This workshop will take place on November 14, 2023. 10 am - 11.30 am Eastern Time / 4.00 - 5.30 pm Central European Time.
Thank you for your interest! Registration for this workshop is now closed.
Why Is It So Hard to Work Together? (And How to Do it Nevertheless!)
Harmony, consensus, and collaboration are often the buzz words in international development. Everyone agrees we need all stakeholders to work together better. And yet, in private moments, you’ll hear a different story:
”Collaboration is like herding cats.”
“Everyone’s just paying lip service to the shared work!”
“People say one thing and do another! That’s a competition disguised as a partnership!”
“Please don’t make me participate in another coordination platform! I already have too many meetings...”
In this session, we’ll explore the ways people can resist efforts to change a system. Resistance comes in many forms: outright opposition, cynical denial (“been there, done that, it’ll never work”), avoidance, downplaying, stonewalling... How frustrating! To practice leadership, though, we need to look deeper to understand what’s beneath this resistance – and how to address it to keep making progress.
In this workshop, you will:
Diagnose the losses that underpin resistance to change
Identify different types of losses stakeholders in your context may be facing
Learn strategies for managing loss and overcoming resistance
Meet like-minded professionals in international development space
This workshop is best suited for:
Executives and managers who have been tasked with implementing programs that depend on political work to shift stakeholders’ perspectives or behaviors
Development Agency and organizational leaders who sense that pathways to greater scale or deeper impact require engaging complex systems
Donors who support organizations or initiatives working to achieve systemic change
This workshop is offered by Dalberg and KONU.
All workshop times are in Eastern Time.
SOLD OUT
WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO CHANGE A SYSTEM? (AND WHY DO WE SO OFTEN FAIL?)
The world of international development is fantastic at planning solutions to the challenges we face. Roadmaps, work plans, impact frameworks, and models exist in abundance. Development professionals spend many hours—and considerable money—building, announcing, promoting, and implementing these planning frameworks.
And yet, underlying challenges of unproductive behaviors, stakeholder resistance, or overmatched capacities persist year after year, program after program. What’s going on here?
This session will explore the difference between the execution work needed to solve technical problems and the learning work required to achieve deeper systems change.
In this workshop, you will:
Get in touch with the pressure present in your system to fix and problem-solve – and how that can produce unproductive responses to complex challenges
Gain new insights into your system change challenges by distinguishing between routine, technical challenges and complex, adaptive challenges that require learning
Meet like-minded practitioners in the international development space
This workshop is best suited for:
Executives and managers who have been tasked with implementing programs that depend on political work to shift stakeholders’ perspectives or behaviors
Development Agency and organizational leaders who sense that pathways to greater scale or deeper impact require engaging complex systems
Donors who support organizations or initiatives working to achieve systemic change
This workshop is offered by Dalberg and KONU.
All workshop times are in Eastern Time.