The Use of Power is a Vital Concern in Our World Today.

The essence of collaborative leadership is not getting people to work together but helping them remove the obstacles to doing so— to everyone contributing and connecting equitably. More fundamentally, the work of people exercising such leadership is to remove the obstacles to love, power, and justice. They engage love when they connect and unite. They engage power when they contribute and grow. They engage justice to provide their movement with purpose, direction, and structure. To move forward together, all three are required.

Adam Kahane is a Director of Reos Partners, an international social enterprise that helps people move forward together on their most important and intractable issues.

Adam is a leading organizer, designer and facilitator of processes through which business, government, and civil society leaders can work together to address such challenges. He has worked in more than fifty countries, in every part of the world, with executives and politicians, generals and guerrillas, civil servants and trade unionists, community activists and United Nations officials, clergy and artists.

Adam is the author of Solving Tough Problems, about which Nelson Mandela said: “This breakthrough book addresses the central challenge of our time: finding a way to work together to solve the problems we have created.” He is also the author of Power and Love, Transformative Scenario Planning, Collaborating with the Enemy, and Facilitating Breakthrough.

In 2022, Adam was named a “Social Innovator of the Year” by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship.

Navigating power in collaborations and organisations is challenging and costly work.  Our current environments are amplified and charged.  How do we create conditions to work explicitly with power and sustain this work? Mark Yettica Paulson and Liz Skelton will share learnings from their work on Deep Collaboration, building the capacity for First Nations and other multicultural leaders to navigate power dynamics and find new ways to lead together.

An Indigenous leader from the South East Queensland and North East NSW regions, Mark Yettica-Paulson is from the Birrah, Gamilaroi and Bundjalung peoples. He is the founder and Chief of Super Native Unlimited, specialising in creative and cultural leadership development. Mark is currently the Deep Collaboration Lead for Collaboration for Impact, Australasia’s leading capacity building & learning network for responding to complexity through effective collaboration.

Liz Skelton, renowned globally for her work and expertise in Australia and the UK as an author, consultant, and facilitator of leadership for social and adaptive system change, she is the co-founder for Collaboration for Impact. Liz has developed her practice in leadership and power to transform collaboration across race and power to influence racial equity, leading to the development of an innovative capacity building practice and platform Deep Collaboration currently being developed by CFI.

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Our continued struggle with racism in our societies is often seen as a problem for those who experience racism to ‘fix’. Many initiatives are happily targeted at people of color, in the anticipation that  by doing so, some positive impact will be made.

Over the last two years in particular, there has been a focus on re-engaging white presenting individuals in racial justice movements – recognizing that they are often well placed to use their power in support of anti-racism.

This workshop will discuss the development and delivery of the Anti-racist leaders program (for white presenting allies ) which positions the use of the Diamond Power Index® as a tool to support participants to recognize how they use their power in support of racial justice. This program has been running for just over a year now and targets senior white presenting NHS colleagues in London UK as its participants.

Joy Warmington is the CEO of brap ( www.brap.org.uk) a charity committed to transforming how we think about and practice equality. Joy’s area of expertise is leadership and organizational development, and she applies this lens to the work that brap does with organizations, boards and leadership teams.

Joy has led on the design and delivery of a White Allyship Program for London senior NHS staff, in partnership with the Kings Fund. Joy was awarded an MBE in 2019 for services to healthcare and the community in the West Midlands and is a Visiting Professor for Middlesex University Business School.

As Julie Diamond so eloquently says, “Power should be a plural noun.” One type of power that impacts us strongly and yet often remains unremarked on is “status behavior” – the verbal and non-verbal signals that we use to communicate our dominance or submission.

We typically engage in these behaviors, the same innate behaviors that can be seen in much of the animal kingdom, unconsciously and habitually. In this highly interactive workshop, Kat will help participants cultivate familiarity with dynamics of status to inspire trust, increase their influence, minimize unhealthy conflict, and create environments where people feel engaged and respected.

Kat Koppett is the founder of Koppett, an organizational development company specializing in blending traditional organizational development tools and principles with cutting-edge improvisation and storytelling techniques to enhance individual and group performance. She holds a BFA from NYU, and an MA in Organizational Psychology from Columbia. Kat is a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach, and the vice president of the Applied Improvisation Network. In addition, she is an adjunct professor at eCornell University where she teaches Executive Presence.

While our goals and circumstances may differ, there is a universal thread that runs through the core ingredients it takes to embody our personal power and let this guide our actions:

• Self–awareness;
• Clarity about our values and what we really want;
• Courage to take risks to pursue it; and
• Proven and practical strategies to enact our power and achieve our goals.

In this highly interactive session, you will learn insights and strategies drawing from the latest neuroscientific and psychological research, age-old wisdom and insights from Emma’s experience working as an executive coach with leaders over the last 20 years.

Emma will engage audience members to explore their personal stories of operating from a place of empowerment and how we redefine ourselves and re-ignite our potential to operate in line with this personal power.

For the past 22 years, Emma Laing has worked with CEOs and C-suite and Senior Executives in Australia and internationally, offering key notes, leadership team development, strategy and team alignment sessions, culture change initiatives, and consulting and executive coaching.

As the Founder and Managing Director of Emmanate, Emma has provided bespoke initiatives working at the individual, team, and organizational level to create sustained ongoing positive change. Emma assists leaders to optimize their impact and influence, to navigate transition points and changes, and implement strategic and business plans in complex organizational environments.

Similar to the superhero genre, there are characters in the racial justice universe that take centre stage and drive the story forward in both society and within our organizations. This engaging talk will introduce three such personalities—from organizational leaders to activists—and explore how they advance and simultaneously hinder progress when tackling racism in the workplace. By focussing on the misuses of power by these characters, light will be shed on emotional traps that lie in wait for all of us who seek to embed equity, diversity and inclusion practices in our organizations. And four things we can do about it!

Shakil Choudhury is an award-winning educator, consultant and author with over 25 years of experience in the field of racial justice, diversity and inclusion. He coaches executive teams and has worked with thousands of leaders across sectors in Canada and the United States to help improve their equity outcomes. Shakil is the author Deep Diversity: A Compassionate, Scientific Approach to Achieving Racial Justice.

All leaders are faced with the challenge of using power with awareness and intent to inspire and empower others. This presentation introduces interventions and attitudes that support leaders in facing the most difficult of circumstances: moments when tey are faced with criticism, attack and highly polarized groups. With examples from the political arena, this presentation will show how we can address polarity, deepen dialogue, and improve collective discourse, useful for leaders across all sectors industries.

Dawn Menken, Ph.D, an internationally respected educator, facilitator, coach, and conflict resolution specialist has been working in the field of facilitator development for over 35 years. Dawn is also the creator and director of Teens Rise Up (TRU), a summer leadership program that brings youth of diverse populations together in order to cultivate youth leadership and create community across differences. She is the author of a new book, Facilitating A More Perfect Union: A Guide for Politicians and Leaders, a handbook for leaders on methods to improve social discourse and inspire more meaningful civic engagement.

Power is inherently relational, but we rarely think of it that way. In every relationship, power dynamics can create opportunities for effectiveness or dysfunction; empowerment or disempowerment; healing or harm. In order to navigate the complexities of power with more connection, efficacy, and ethical responsibility, we must have the ability to be conscious of our impact, a framework for understanding and navigating power differentials, and a language for talking about interpersonal power dynamics. In this workshop, Cedar and Amanda will create an opportunity for you to explore the nature and impact of the power differentials and become more sensitive to the responsibilities and vulnerabilities embedded in interpersonal power differential relationships

Driven by core values of curiosity, courage, and connection, Amanda Aguilera’s mission is to be courageous in the service of reducing and repairing harm in relationships and promoting the cultural shift toward Power-and-Equity Consciousness, conflict positivity and conflict competency. Amanda is the Senior Director of Mission, Culture & Inclusive Community at Naropa University where she currently supports students, faculty, and staff in critical consciousness raising, understanding power dynamics and expanding capacity for difficult conversations.

Dr. Cedar Barstow is the Founder and Executive Director, Right Use of Power Institute. Cedar has been passionate about working with issues of power and ethics for 25 years. She is the author of Right Use of Power: The Heart of Ethics. Her abiding interest in the nature of wise use of power was incubated first as the director of a non-profit organization and then as a consultant seeking to facilitate lasting resolution, repair, and re-education following an ethical breach. Her work focuses on four dimensions of using power wisely and well: Be informed and present, Be Compassionate and aware, Be Connected and accountable, Be Skillful and Proactive.

Power is the central concept of the social sciences but is often misunderstood. This presentation addresses some of the uses of the concept of power and differentiates power over from power to and power with. Power is not something that you have but a function of the relations in which you are embedded. A central concept is that of power steering – knowing how to steer power relations.

All leaders need to be able to do this and many are insufficiently reflexive about doing so. Power steering involves a capacity for leaders to live with paradoxes. Recurring power paradoxes will be elaborated as well as how to manage these recurring paradoxes. Paradoxes are not a bad thing to be avoided – cultivate them – and you will learn how.

Stewart Clegg is a Professor at the University of Sydney in the School of Project Management and the John Grill Institute for Project Leadership. He is a leading international researcher, recognized in several fields in the social sciences for his work in organization studies, power and project management.

Stewart is a prolific writer and contributor of over 500 articles to scholarly journals, books, and edited. Among his latest books are Managing & Organizations and Strategy: Theory & Practice (2022, forthcoming). Stewart has previously been a Distinguished Professor at the University of Technology Sydney, Professor at the University of Western Sydney, University of St. Andrews, Scotland and the University of New England.

Hawa will share expertise, experiences and examples of ways to make sense of institutional barricades in non profit organizations to anti-racism work through the consideration of personal and authority power. You will be able to take away some best practices to use in your own work around equity, diversity and inclusion with a specific focus on anti-racism in institutions.

Hawa Y. Mire has two decades of experience as a proven strategic senior leader focused on high-impact organizational culture change. Hawa has a specialty in anti-racism, particularly anti-Black racism, and the implementation of relevant policies and approaches including experience with the complex nature of Black communities in Canada. Hawa is a critical writer, commentator and columnist with Ricochet Media that has been featured on Macleans, Briarpatch Magazine, Metro Morning, CBC, CityTV, Rabble among others.

Lack of trust causes dysfunctional teams and cultures, but most of us – no matter what rung we occupy in the corporate hierarchy – think that we’re trustworthy. At the same time, we give dramatically lower marks to those around us. Why is this?

We judge ourselves by our fine intentions; we judge others by their impact on us. We frankly don’t care what they intended. Worse, we write them off, often based on one incident or hearsay. But we can’t afford to do that if we’re powerful. Power amplifies our actions, words and intentions – often in unintended ways. In this session, learn how you can:

• Explore the role of power in trust-based relationships
• Understand how to mindfully grow psychological safety to diminish the negative impact of power
• Use your power for good: Build and rebuild trust with a wide network

Well-versed in the perils and positives of power, Kellie Garrett describes herself as a ‘recovering executive’. She is now a speaker, executive coach and consultant on all things leadership, including high performance, team dynamics, constructive conflict, trust, organizational culture, and connecting culture to business strategy.

A former senior exec responsible for business strategy, enterprise risk, the customer experience and marketing communication at an agriculture bank, Kellie is fascinated by the intersection of power, internal politics, trust and ethical influence.  Kellie is a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) with the International Coaching Federation and a certified Board Director (ICD.D).

To develop a healthy and effective use of power in our workplace, community, family, and broader society, we need to understand what gets in our way. What are the challenges we face individually and collectively to create healthy power cultures? We often explore these challenges cognitively, thinking through them to find solutions. What happens when a group comes together to explore their challenges in using power effectively and consciously using an embodiment approach?

This experiential workshop invites participants to explore their difficulties using power through Social Presencing Theatre (SPT), a social arts-based practice created by Arawana Hayashi. Theatre is an emotional language that can access a deeper wisdom than traditional problem-solving approaches. SPT makes visible the invisible, illuminates the deeper blind spots and barriers that keep us stuck, and supports awareness shifts that lead to meaningful and sustainable change.

Louise Pitre is a leadership and systems coach, facilitator, and consultant with 30 years’ experience in government and the non-profit cultivating systems change in the areas of gender equity, gender-based violence, health equity, and equitable access to mental health services for LGBT2QSIA+ community and visible minority newcomers. Louise specializes in helping leaders and teams expand their understanding of power, privilege, equity, and oppression to co-create healthy organizational power cultures.

Cathy Bernatt has thirty-five years of global experience coaching teams and individuals ranging from CEO’s, senior executives and new managers in profit and not-for-profit organizations. She has designed, facilitated and directed Outward Bound programs around the world. She brings a wealth of experience in justice, equity, diversity and inclusion, creativity, teambuilding, leadership, systems thinking, conflict transformation and Process-oriented Psychology. She is an ICF Master Certified Coach, a Professional Facilitator, Leadership Specialist, and a DPI Coach.