The Leadership Development function of one of the world’s largest energy companies wanted a programme that would equip its GMs and VPs with the will and skill to both improve the performance of the company in today’s fossil energy system while also making it fit for a net-zero future. Success would mean a portfolio of change experiments, catalysed and led by a newly revitalised, engaged and accountable senior leadership community.

Our programme design drew inspiration from Mezirow’s Transformative Learning Theory. This work is about helping people develop a more future-fit worldview through exposure to discomforting dilemmas and experiences and working with peers to assimilate and respond in ways that enable evolution.

The company has a proud engineering heritage, and a highly skilled, global and engaged workforce. It is performing strongly in financial terms, but it is widely criticised, and experiences both internal and external tensions, with respect to its role as a leading fossil fuel extractor. As with many of its peers, the company experiences a tension between its perform and transform imperatives. We wanted to devise an intervention that would harness its legacy strengths in the service of progress rather than prioritising the capture and coercion of potential disruption.

We developed (and three years later are still running!) an eight-month senior leadership programme (both virtual, asynchronous and in-person) that worked at three systemic levels of the Individual (Me), Organisation (Us) and Energy System (It). Each year a cohort of 50 senior leaders build foundations in personal, interpersonal and system awareness, develop longer-term and wider-boundary understandings of their role through powerful and formative experiences with each other and outsiders, and develop their own catalytic experiments to stimulate organisational performance and evolution.

Our evaluation data show Bramble’s theory of change in action. Leaders on the programme (a) come to appreciate and internalise external and challenging perspectives (Awareness), (b) improve their ability to identify, describe and inspire positive opportunities (Hope) and (c) feel empowered to realise them in ways that have both short and long term, shared benefits (Agency).

This work is always subject to cycles of changes in external conditions. We’ve noticed the ways in which ambition, purpose and risk can wax and wane in line with these cycles, and how both organisational and personal defences kick in when exposure to the dissonant becomes too much. One of the things we are learning is therefore about how to foster our own resilience and courage in the face of temptations to take an easier path.