About the talk

Dr Askeland talked about the lived experience of endings and new beginnings. She writes: 

When we talk about organisational change, we seem to idealise the new beginnings and leave the losses in the shadows. But landscapes of transitions both in our work-lives and in life more broadly are highly emotional and conflictual and by no means straight forward as every beginning is also an end. We might have to find ourselves anew.

I have spent some time researching what ideas we seem to be governed by when it comes to change, and I will talk about alternative ways of making sense of endings and beginnings. I invite you to allow your own experiences of endings and beginnings in your life and leadership take centre stage as we explore these ideas together.

And yes. There will be poetry.

Hear a recording of (most of) Majken’s talk on 23 April

About Majken Askeland

Majken holds a Doctor of Management in complexity and leadership from the University of Hertfordshire - focusing on Organisational Change and the Politics of Identity. Poet by heart and engineer by training it has taken her a substantial part of her adult life to reconcile her sensitiveness to interpersonal dynamics and existential curiosity with the hard-nosed business and analytical skills. It is still work in progress.

Majken is an Associate Fellow at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford and is a tutor and faculty on the Oxford Strategic Leadership Programme – one of the leading open leadership development programmes in the world.

She is employed at the Norwegian foundation AFF and staff at their senior executive leadership programme, which has been running for more than seventy years and is ranked top in the Nordic countries. She is the Program Director of the Headmaster Program, delivered in cooperation with the Norwegian School of Economics. She designs and runs various programmes for clients in a variety of sectors.

Majken has worked for big international companies such as Deloitte and Hewlett-Packard and commercialised a high-tech start-up and run her own Management Consulting Boutique with main clients from finance/bank/insurance and oil/gas in the Nordic market.

 

Fun fact:

I dance salsa. It’s one of my favourite ways of just being without thinking.