These are uncertain times. COVID-19. Brexit. Trump. North Korea. The economy. Travel. Jobs. Working environment. The weather. Healthcare. The future of work. The rise of the robot. TikTok.

Our ability to control or predict has never been less. What’s more that won’t positively change in the short-term. With uncertainty so present in our lives, we believe leaders, teams and organisations need to evolve their relationship with uncertainty and explore new ways of interacting with it. We need to stop fighting it and learn how to be in it. To learn how to inhabit it.

This 6-week Leadership Programme is led by Russell Saunders, a partner at inernational consultancy inchigo, who has spent the last 20 years exploring uncertainty in his own work and that of clients such as Airbus, Unilever, Novartis, National Association of Head Teacher’s, Countrywide, GSK, The U.K. Green Building Council, Care UK and Dentsu Aegis. He has worked with everyone from the boardroom to “high potentials” and future leaders.

Programme Outcomes

Through the course of the programme its participants will be asked to engage in a “Leadership Research Project”. Simply explained, this will ask each participant to apply the content of the programme to their work and then bring their findings back to later programme sessions. Their findings will be shared with other participants and the learnings spread across the group. This means we will all benefit from each other’s findings. Feedback is a constant theme of the programme. The feedback given will be offered by the course tutor, other participants and (as appropriate) sought from the organisations the participants work for.

As such, the time invested in the programme will very quickly begin to positively impact the participants’ working lives. Specifically, the participants will:

1. Have understood how to reframe uncertainty so that they can utilise its energy and impact in their work
2. Explored their identity and appreciated its significance during uncertainty.
3. Developed techniques that enable teams and organisations to thrive during uncertainty by tapping into collective wisdom and celebrating diversity.
4. Have crafted their personal, team and/or organisational purpose for use as a “guiding light” in times of uncertainty.
5. Have refined their ability to see the wicked problems present in uncertainty from new and different perspectives using a unique framework.
   

Programme Structure and content

This is a 6 week programme with weekly two-hour long contact sessions with the tutor.

Week one – context, mindset and future leadership

• The future of leadership
• The VUCA context
  
• Uncertainty bias and the uncertainty paradox
• Reframing uncertainty to unlock its power
• Leadership Research Project (LRP) set-up

Week two – Self and Identity in uncertainty

• Resilience
• Resourcefulness
• Self - LRP

Week three – Self and identity in uncertainty (continued)

• Self LRP evaluation
• Energetic states
• Rest and Recovery

Week four – Connection in uncertainty

• Wicked problems
• Collective wisdom
• Connection LRP

Week five - Connection in uncertainty (continued)

• Connection LRP evaluation
• Leveraging diversity
• Covering and uncovering

Week six – Purpose in uncertainty

• The business case for purpose
• inchigo purpose model
• Purpose LRP – finding my purpose
• Stopping to find insight