Leadership for Collective Intelligence

Participants in Leadership for Collective Intelligence describe crossing a threshold—shedding old patterns, stepping into emotional maturity, and embracing a level of responsibility they had not accessed before. LCI does not add tools on top of old habits; it reshapes how you perceive and engage with the systems you lead. Once crossed, this threshold cannot be uncrossed: it opens a wider field of clarity, presence, and responsibility.

This groundbreaking program continues to help leaders across sectors move beyond incremental change and into the deeper work of alignment, coherence, and system-wide impact. Graduates of LCI now run global enterprises, lead UN agencies, steward national finance systems, direct space exploration at NASA, and carry responsibility for breakthrough transformations in organizations worldwide.

“I hope that I’ve embarked on a journey which will never end. It’s a quest. A continuous quest.”

— Sanjay Kathuria, Former Chief Economist South Asia, World Bank

The Journey of Transformation

The journey you’ll take through LCI is an arc that moves from the inner to the systemic:

• Transform Within – Discover how your inner landscape—the shadows, assumptions, and untapped presence you carry—shapes everything around you. This is where true transformation begins: cultivating self-mastery, clarity of vision, and the presence to stand steady in high-stakes environments.
• Create Catalytic Space – Learn to design and hold powerful containers for dialogue and collaboration, where trust can grow, old patterns dissolve, and groups access their deeper intelligence. These catalytic spaces enable collective breakthroughs that no single leader could produce alone.
• Unleash Collective Power – Build the capacity to read systems clearly and lead change at scale. Recognize leverage points, transform resistance into energy for change, and step into collective leadership that re-patterns institutions, ecosystems, and cultures.

This movement—Self, Space, System—is not incremental improvement. It is a re-patterning of perception and action, a journey where each level mirrors and amplifies the others.

“The experience was both practical and magical at the same time.”
—Director, The World Bank

What You’ll Explore

• How your internal landscape shapes what’s possible in the systems you lead
• Practices that enable you to hold strong containers for collaboration and change
• Ways to surface and shift the deeper patterns that hold back transformation
• Tools for leading with presence and perception in complex, high-stakes environments
• The architecture of systemic change: how to design interventions that stick

“This is going to stay part of me for the rest of my life. This is not something that will go away. This is not something that I can forget. This is something that is with me. It’s part of me. It’s part of my mosaic. It’s part of who I am”

— Alzbeta Klein, CEO & Director General at the International Fertilizer Association (IFA)

What You’ll Get

• Significant new understanding and experience of your own Self Leadership
• Strengthened ability to hold space for team and system level change
• The four essential capabilities for building high-performance and high engagement teams
• Understanding of your leadership footprint, patterns and the acceleration path for growth
• Tools and methods for facilitating mapping of systems and enhancing system level awareness
• Understanding of the Generative Spiral Model methodology and its application
• Methods and practices for facilitating dialogue
• Grounded practices for navigating complexity with clarity and presence
• Strategic frameworks for seeing leverage points and leading systemic shifts
• One-on-one, peer, and team level coaching and applied fieldwork between sessions
• A lifelong network of peers leading real change in the world

“It changed my life both personally and professionally…it gave me the tools to look inside myself and figure out what I was doing that needed to be modified to be effective.”
—Senior Executive Vail Associates and U.S. Forest Service

Legacy and Impact

LCI stands in a lineage of pioneering work that began more than three decades ago at MIT, when William Isaacs co-founded the Center for Organizational Learning with Peter Senge. Building on Isaacs’ collaboration with physicist David Bohm, the MIT Dialogue Project explored new ways to catalyze generative change across institutions worldwide. From this foundation, Dialogos created methods of dialogue and systemic leadership that have since become touchstones for organizational transformation. LCI integrates this heritage with the lived experience of hundreds of leaders who have carried it forward into the most complex arenas of business, government, and society.

Organizations that have sent participants to LCI include: BP, Shell, and the Royal Bank of Scotland; Lockheed Martin and NASA; Sprint, Motorola, and Merrimack Pharmaceuticals; The World Bank and International Finance Corporation; the U.S. Forest Service and SEWA; as well as the Kellogg Foundation, Axis Capital, and Renaissance Reinsurance.

Alumni now serve as:

• Vice President of Portfolio & Risk Management at the International Finance Corporation
• NASA astronaut and Director of the Johnson Space Center Moon to Mars program
• Head of the Self Employed Women’s Association in India
• CEO of national utilities and financial institutions
• Senior leaders in BP, Shell, Lockheed Martin, Novartis, UNEP, the World Bank, and beyond

Projects initiated through LCI have included:

• Redesign of union–management relations in a major chemical plant
• Transformation of leadership culture across BP’s global supply chain
• Large-scale education reforms in public school systems
• System-wide technology strategy dialogues engaging hundreds of executives

Each reflects the enduring influence of LCI: transformation that lives on long after the program itself.

“LCI sharpened my ability to hold space for true transformation; where dialogue could surface deeper truths, resolve tensions, and build trust. I learned not just how to lead, but how to enable others to lead. It helped me move from managing discrete parts to stewarding the whole.

I learned first hand that real change doesn’t come from PowerPoint strategy decks—it comes from the quality of conversations an organisation can hold. Dialogos helped me transition from being a manager of results to a leader of transformation.”

— Savvas Manousos, former global trading head, BP

Core In-Person Sessions

Session 1: Identity Based Leadership

• Focus on discovering the science and power of the creative process.
• Learn a model and approach for setting creative fields for transformational change.
• Develop the presence and personal awareness that enables deep collective thinking.
• Learn how inner work becomes outer change—and how generative dialogue becomes the foundation for transformation.
• Discover and deepen awareness of your own Self-leadership and how personal transformation mirrors and catalyzes systemic change—the holographic nature of transformation.

Session 2: Catalyzing System Change

• See how systemic structures—both visible and hidden—shape behavior and outcomes.
• Learn to recognize leverage points, design for emergence, and hold complexity to foster growth and learning.
• Understand how to help systems see themselves, and learn an approach to untangling complexity.
• Learn the Art of Dialogue, facilitating collective thinking together and the emergence of previously unimagined and unimaginable conversations.

Session 3: Transforming Systemic Obstacles

• Understand the burdens, shadows, and protective forces that limit individual and collective experience.
• Master dialogue as a transformative vehicle for systemic change, while developing the capacity to access and elevate group intelligence through container creation.
• Learn how to transform shadow dynamics into sources of collective power and innovation.
• Master the implicit rules governing group knowledge creation and breakthrough performance.
• Develop the skills to build and lead teams that consistently deliver on ambitious vision, turning collective potential into tangible results.
• Strengthen your capacity to hold space for high-stakes dialogue and access the collective intelligence of your team.

Session 4: Facilitating Collective Leadership

• Build the capacity to intervene at the level of systems and guide the formation of collective leadership.
• Learn to design, diagnose, and lead complex change across institutions, value chains, and ecosystems.
• Learn to design interventions at the team and system levels with precision and impact.
• Build capacity to structure inquiry, assess system readiness for change, and elicit the deeper dream of those involved.
• Master how regression and resistance are natural parts of transformation that, when properly understood, create space for new organizational identity to emerge.
• Acquire practical tools to navigate these dynamics, ensuring lasting change.

“Books tell you what to do. They don’t tell you how to do it and how really to practice it. It is just like the experience of being on the top of Mount Everest. You can write it down, but you cannot write down the experience of being there truly, and nobody can express that in the language we have.”

— Rameshore Khanal, Former Finance Secretary, Nepal

Measurable Benefits

Leadership for Collective Intelligence is a transformational journey that equips leaders to architect systemic change and unlock collective potential. Through mastery of sophisticated tools and practices, leaders learn to:
Navigate Complexity and Transformation

• Navigate complexity with precision, transforming ambiguity into breakthrough solutions.
• Drive strategic and cultural shifts at scale through leveraged intervention.
• Achieve profound business results by unleashing collective intelligence beyond siloed thinking.

Catalyze Innovation and Value Creation

• Catalyze innovation that ripples across entire value chains.
• Activate shared intention to spark viral, system-wide transformation.

Build Cohesive Engagement and Alignment

• Create powerful containers of engagement that align diverse stakeholders in cohesive action.
• Generate sustained energy and commitment that transcends traditional boundaries.
• Master high-stakes dialogue across multicultural, multigenerational ecosystems.

“I’ve been a manager for almost 30 years and I will have to say that this program has the most advanced and  most holistic training that I’ve ever had. It really speaks to the mind, the body, and the spirit.”

— Sam Foster Short, Former Research Director, US Forest Service

How to Join

LCI is not about adding to your toolbox, it is about transforming the ground from which you lead. If you are ready to take that step, we invite you to join us on this journey.

For more information or to explore whether this is the right fit for you or your organization:
Contact: Jessica Sloan – jessica.sloan@dialogos.com

“All of a sudden, people—who otherwise in those meetings would not really speak up—started to talk. They even started to talk from their heart. It was a really amazing, almost magical experience. A very palpable, visible change happened. It opened up new possibilities because, in the first place, I had changed.”

— Raoul de Winne, Co-CEO at Spraying Systems Co