Thank you for joining the Leadership Lab community. This is a small, growing group of people who come together to work on adaptive problems — the real, messy, high-stakes challenges that sit beneath our technical routines. The Lab exists to create shared space for that work.

We offer a few different kinds of experiences.

First, we run courses inside organizations, often in healthcare, where teams have the chance to learn the basics of adaptive leadership together, build shared language, and begin experimenting with new ways of working.

Second, we occasionally offer open-enrolment executive education. Our first one-day session through McMaster Continuing Education brought together people from very different settings and created a uniquely powerful learning environment.

Third, people sometimes reach out with difficult leadership cases. When that happens, we write the case with them and host a consultation in the style described by Ron Heifetz and colleagues at the Harvard Kennedy School. These conversations allow us — collectively — to surface tensions, loyalties, losses, and hungers that sit beneath the surface of leadership work. From time to time we will email the list when a consultation is happening or when a case is ready for feedback.

Emails from this list will be infrequent. You might hear from us when a course is offered, when we’re testing new material, or when we’re convening a consultation group. Occasionally, facilitators will bring cases forward for learning purposes, though the reality of our schedules means that will never be a high-volume stream of communication.

If you have a case you’d like us to consider, you can reply directly or email Andrew at healea1@mcmaster.ca. Some people use the list this way—as a place to bring a difficult situation that would benefit from a structured, confidential leadership consultation.

We’re still in early days. There’s no website yet, though we expect that to come in the next year as this work continues to evolve. Each offering is an experiment. Participants shape the experience as much as the faculty or the material. What we provide is a holding environment: a place to think, to be stretched, to sit with uncertainty, and to explore the practice of leadership as a capacity to grow rather than a set of steps to follow.

Past participants have told us this work helped them “lead with more presence,” “surface tensions I’d ignored,” and “create space for hard conversations.” One wrote that the experience offered “a necessary pause to reflect on how I show up—not just what I do.” Another said it “finally helped me name what I’ve been carrying.”

We take that seriously. We’re in this work with you — not as experts standing apart, but as fellow practitioners navigating complexity alongside our clinical, operational, and ethical responsibilities.

Welcome. We’re glad you’re here.

— Andrew

True North Leadership Lab