73rd Leicester Conference.
The Financial Times (FT) reported that there is a growing need to use the arts in leadership development. Janina Conboye (7th June 2019) sets out in her article
“How the arts help hone leadership skills” what London Business School, Iese Business School, University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and Warwick Business School are doing to support learning for leadership.
In the FT article, Conboye states that Professor Harry Davies sees leadership as a “lived experience” that requires life-long efforts to mastery. At the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations studying the exercise of authority, the taking up of roles and the organisation of resources to meet the primary task of an enterprise has taken place in the real-time learning laboratory, affectionately termed, the Leicester Conference.
The Leicester Conference has taken place every year since 1957 and provides an unparalleled space in which leaders and followers can study the nature of leadership at the conscious and unconscious levels. In this context, the lived experience is the ART of role, where ART is not simply a creative practice, but is the embodied sense of Authority Role and Task as both concept and behaviour that form the backbone of leadership practice.
As the world looks on in shock at the unfolding of the UK Brexit process, the Trump administration’s energising announcements, the rousing return of the Modi government in India and the various Latin American political re-imaginings; political and corporate leaders are looking for new resources to support them in their task. The complexity of the external world has made it clearer to the savvy, innovating-disrupters of leadership that the only place these resources can be usefully harvested is from their internal world.
The Leicester Conferenceprovides opportunities to journey inward, whilst simultaneously getting deeper connections to the context in the form of groups and organisations. This paradox of simultaneously journeying inward whilst connecting outwardly, is what makes the Leicester Conference learning so powerful. It is now replicated in some form at the leading schools such as Harvard, INSEAD and Chicago. The Leicester Model has stood the test of time because it is a live laboratory underpinned by a mystery: humans when brought together and given freedom, discover remarkable things about themselves and their contexts.
Extinction Rebellion a cultural movement aiming to challenge the way of life that could destroy the species, held a “Day of Love” in London in April to call for action. Business as Usual=Death was one of the slogans for the day….. the FT article suggests that our business schools seem to agree. I would say that we need leaders able to engage in Love at Work as they take up their roles and understand their task with appropriate authority.
Applications close on 19th July, and the conference takes place from the 3rd to the 16th August at College Court at the University of Leicester. Is this your year?
Find out more about the Leicester Conference
For further details, to apply, or if you have any questions, please contact
Anabel Navarro, Pre-Conference Administrator.