OUR TEAM

Kate Isaacs

Dr. Isaacs holds PhD in Organization Studies from the MIT Sloan School of Management, where her work straddles two broad domains. One is the technology of collaboration, in particular collaboration that engages multiple stakeholders across organizational boundaries and societal sectors to achieve common goals. The second domain involves the strategic purpose and design of private enterprise, including the strategies and practices that firms use to engage external stakeholders, as well as new organizational forms of “distributed leadership,” in which many individuals, not just formal leaders, work across boundaries to mobilize the collective intelligence of a social system to attain desired goals. These new organizations exhibit flattened  structural hierarchies; more nimble, flexible strategic capabilities; and an empowered workforce with greater knowledge and responsibility to achieve organizational aims. Read more about her academic research at www.kateisaacs.com.

Dr. Isaacs holds an M.S. degree in Technology and Policy from the MIT Engineering Systems Division, and a B.S. in Biology from the Oakland University Honors College. She has worked on a number of corporate sustainability and systems change projects over the last ten years, including the Generative Dialogue Project and the Global Action Network, which promote multi-stakeholder dialogue practices for systems transformation. Dr. Isaacs previously worked at the Rocky Mountain Institute on issues of community economic development and corporate sustainability, in municipal water resources and planning in Colorado, environmental consulting in California, and as a backcountry field biology researcher in Alaska. She is a certified ShadowWork facilitator and trained in the Subject-Object method for evaluating adult development. She currently lives in Concord, Massachusetts with her family, and loves running, biking, yoga, skiing, and gardening.