A Glimpse into the future

Interview with Petra Künkel, Founder and Executive Director of the Collective Leadership Institute

The CLI team recently spent some time looking deeper on the organisation’s strategy. Why?

We are actually at a threshold that is taking the CLI to the next level. It is not just about next level growth; it is about asking what our impact is. Our impact is getting up – that is why we had the two strategy days. We asked ourselves: how can we reach more people with our methodology? How can we ensure that our methodology has impact regarding stakeholder dialogues and collective leadership?

Is CLI changing in the future?

I would say: yes. If I look at our vision then I think that we are tremendously changing in terms of more people and more structures that we need in order to bring the people’s delivery where that delivery is supposed to be. I do think that we will be changing in terms of internal culture. That is partly diversity – looking at having more staff from non-German backgrounds. But diversity also relates to diversity of skills, allowing us to address different content issues of people we work with (be it water, health, standard development, supply chain management, private sector expertise e.g.).

So, what is the vision behind these changes?

The vision behind these changes is quite a large vision. Whether we talk about the difficulties in fair supply chain management, about climate change or about the conflicts between populations and governments: it actually becomes clear that humankind’s capacity to dialogue, to find agreements and to find consensual issues is at the core of the future humanity. People must learn how to lead cooperation and dialogue processes and how to overcome the lack of insight into the world view of other people. That actually requires building competence and that is exactly what we do. We believe that building competence at a larger scale helps people to master these challenges – to actually overcome conflicts, deepen democracy and make businesses responsible and to generally move humankind into a future that is probably determined more by our mutual understanding on mutual support.

Which trends in leadership or even collective leadership do you see? And how does CLI respond to them?

I see a little bit of a shift in terms of realizing that the old paradigm of leadership does not work anymore. I am not saying that the old paradigm does not have its relevance, because leadership development has been around for several decades. However the old leadership paradigm is a paradigm that is looking at the model of individual leaders and followers. There has been a lot of discussion on followership and how to work on the relationship between the leader and the followers. But only recently there has been more discussion on the factors that enable people to lead collectively and to take responsibility collectively. We believe that we are pioneering an approach with collective leadership that is probably one answer to what is needed in future. This approach means looking beyond the individual, not ignoring the individual, but looking beyond the individual. That is why we developed an approach out of twenty years of experience that is looking at collective action in cross-sectorial settings and at sustainability issues. Developing this approach is our contribution to a new leadership paradigm.

CLI offers more than just courses, can you tell us a bit more on these other products?

Our core “products” are indeed the Executive Education Programs. Why? We as a non-profit organization aim at conveying our ideas, our models, our approaches and our competence building into the world. However, beyond that we offer more and more Integrated Capacity Development e. g. for governments, initiatives and companies – which helps them to actually implement cooperation and dialogue processes. Integrated capacity development means that we do capacity development, while helping people to become independent from us and to be able to convey the approach by themselves.