Workshops
LI Lab Reunion

Vernice believes that leaders can learn to expand their impact and agility through presence, connection, and awareness across contexts. With over 15 years of experience working with global Fortune 500 companies and large nonprofits, Vernice Jones creates experiential leadership programs and leadership development solutions that connect and drive business results. Vernice is a Director and Faculty of Adult Development at Georgetown University’s Institute for Transformational Leadership. She is also an Associate (Coach, Facilitator, Consultant) at Cultivating Leadership, where she is currently co-faculty of The Leading Inclusively Lab. Vernice leverages her former experience as a diversity, equity and inclusion leader in her work in the Leading Inclusively Lab and her work leading circles of executive women of color. Vernice designed and delivered a two-week curriculum and trained instructors for prospective students at Duke University’s prestigious Leadership Academy in North Carolina, Shanghai and Beijing, China. Through her executive coaching business, she has been an executive and professional coach for clients in the US, Europe, Africa and Asia. As a certified coach, Vernice Jones has completed coaching certification programs from the Coaches Training Institute (CTI), and Organizational and Relationship Systems Coaching through CRR Global. She is qualified to administer The Leadership Circle 360 profile, and the Myers Briggs, MBTI. Vernice has been designated by the International Coaching Federation as an MCC (Master Certified Coach), and a mentor coach. Vernice graduated from the University of Maryland with an undergraduate degree in Economics. She also holds a Masters degree in Finance and a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. Vernice has worked on a number of community development projects including an Origami camp for girls in South Carolina, an English language program for Chinese seniors, and a program for church elders at a church with locations in South Africa, Zambia and Nigeria.

Nothing brings more joy to Akasha than supporting other people’s growth and development. One reason for this is that he believes advancing one’s development leads to an ever-unfolding reality that reveals unconditional all-inclusive Love. It is encountering and expressing this Love that facilitates a more expansive sense of self and identity. He feels that the world needs more compassionate leaders with this experience of identity and expression of love. He sees mature leadership as an outgrowth of identity work. Akasha also believes that developmental and liberatory possibilities exist when people radically and authentically engage across their social identity differences at multiple levels of systems. He pulls from adult development, gestalt facilitation, and mindfulness techniques to help his clients increase their capacity, courage, and comfort for navigating increasingly complex interactions and systems. He does this through his group facilitation and by teaching them to interrogate unconscious biases, practice cultural humility, and acknowledge multiple perspectives. Akasha stands for the development of leaders who lead through a diversity, equity, access, and inclusion lens while navigating the complexity of effectively engaging across differences. He has been coaching for over 10 years and brings deep interest in spirituality, adult development, and intercultural consciousness to his work in the world. As a consultant, he integrates diversity, equity, and inclusion principles with ideas and practices from adult stage development, polarity management, and complexity. Akasha is known for his success working with men across differences, such as sexual orientation, race, age, country of origin, and religion. He designs and facilitates we-space gatherings and international retreats on leadership development, inclusive leadership and masculinities. He teaches at Fielding Graduate University in their Evidence Based Coach Training Certificate program and also at St. George’s University in Grenada in the Schools of Graduate Studies and Arts and Sciences. Akasha holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in Human Development from Fielding Graduate University. He is credentialed through the International Coaching Federation as a professional certified coach (PCC). His active research interests are in the areas of coaching across differences, pilgrimage as developmental journeys, and meaning-making and complexity development in university students in the Caribbean. Akasha is a pilgrim and enjoys being in the woods. He spends most of his time between Grenada and Bermuda with partner, son, and a very protective and energetic cockapoo dog. He makes time for goofing around with his pre-teen son, reading fantasy books, and sitting still doing nothing.

Jennifer believes that leadership is one of the most vital renewable resources in the world. In this topsy-turvy time, when uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity are raging, we need a new form of leadership for a new era. While it might be natural to experience these swirling currents of change as a threatening force to be survived or an inconvenience to be managed, those who will lead us into the future see complexity as the natural state of the world. These leaders use the forces of change to cultivate new possibilities for their people, their organisations, their communities, and the environment. If we want organisations where people are thriving and bringing their best, we need leaders who are learning. To that end, Jennifer designs and teaches leadership programs, coaches senior teams, and supports new ways of thinking about strategy and people. In her three highly acclaimed books, Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps, Simple Habits for Complex Times (co-authored with Keith Johnston), and Changing on the Job, Jennifer builds on deep theoretical knowledge to offer practical ways to make leaders’ work more meaningful and their lives more fun. Jennifer has worked with senior leaders in the private, non-profit, and government sectors around the world (like Novartis, Google, KPMG, Intel, Microsoft, Wikimedia, and the New Zealand Department of Conservation). Jennifer also supports executives one-on-one as a leadership coach. Over the last decade, Jennifer has developed the Growth Edge Coaching approach. She supports clients to find their current growing edge and then make choices about how they want to develop. She teaches coaches around the world transformational and developmental coaching approaches in her Growth Edge Coaching certification series. Jennifer speaks at leadership and coaching conferences, and she offers occasional courses for coaches at universities all over the world like Harvard University, the University of Sydney, and Oxford Brookes University. Jennifer has a masters and a doctorate from Harvard University. Eschewing work/life balance for a life that feels like fun across the board, Jennifer loves to write, to scuba dive, and to roll on the floor with her dogs. Formerly an associate professor at George Mason University, Jennifer learned about deep change more than a decade ago when she turned down the tenure offer and moved to a small seaside village in New Zealand with her husband, two kids, and the family dog. While she still considers herself a Kiwi by choice, Jennifer opened her European chapter when she and her family moved to central London in 2018.

Carolyn Coughlin is passionate about supporting people, including the leaders with whom she works, not only to grow into their biggest selves, but also to live as fully as they can. She was introduced to the idea of adult development about 15 years ago shortly after leaving her career as a management consultant, and it was love at first sight. Carolyn believes that as the complexity of our world and our lives increases, it will be by paying greater attention to the ways we and our clients make sense of the world that we can uncover new ways to see differently, to be differently, to take different actions, and to live into the fullest version of ourselves and our lives—thereby expanding our possibilities to impact the world in increasingly positive ways. Carolyn has been an executive coach, facilitator, and leadership development specialist for over 15 years. Her journey began in the corporate world, where she was a management consultant first at Price Waterhouse and later at McKinsey and Company. With her fellow Cultivating Leadership partner Jennifer, Carolyn co-designed and runs the Growth Edge Certification series, an endeavor that continues to provide her with endless joy and learning. She also has a keen interest in supporting women to step into leadership positions in greater numbers so that we might finally achieve the power parity toward which we’ve been (slowly) moving over the last century. She writes and talks about developmental coaching, why and how it can be such a powerful support to growth, and how, in particular, she thinks it might hold promise for shifting the gender imbalance in our leadership ranks. Carolyn has also become increasingly interested in the role of the whole self, the realm of sensation and emotion, and how those, together with language, can be powerful ways into both noticing and intervening our own and our clients’ meaning-making patterns–and she approaches her coaching and organizational work through that lens. Carolyn earned an A.B. in Economics from Brown University, an M.B.A. with distinction from the Wharton School, and an M.A. in International Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. She is a Certified Somatic Coach through the Strozzi Institute, a Qualified Administrator of the Intercultural Development Indicator, and a certified user of the Global Leadership Profile, the Leadership Circle, and the Myers Briggs Type Indicator. Carolyn, whose childhood family vacations included not trips to Disney, but week long backpacking trips through the mountains of Wyoming, loves natural beauty and the outdoors second only to her family. She has lived and worked extensively in New Zealand and many countries in Latin America and currently lives with her husband on the campus of a boarding school outside Princeton, New Jersey and spends her summers in a small cabin on a lake in the Catskills of New York State, where they are often joined by their three young adult children.

Patrice believes that today’s world needs leaders who can thrive in complexity and that with the right support and challenge, they can grow the ability to do just that. To that end she specialises in coaching, consulting and facilitating programs that help coaches and leaders, individuals and groups, develop in ways that increase their fitness for both the complexity of work and the challenges of life. Patrice has worked with people all around the globe in many different industries including technology, government services, not for profits, insurance, financial services and consulting firms. Along with Jennifer Garvey Berger and Carolyn Coughlin, Patrice is one of the core faculty for the Growth Edge Coaching certification program. As a coach Patrice believes clients thrive when they are supported to bring their whole selves to the table and then challenged to explore the unfamiliar territory of who they are becoming. Within individual or group coaching conversations, and in leadership programs her clients experience a better understanding of what has been true for them up until now, and they develop an expanded view of what is possible. She supports her clients to make lasting changes as they explore and push their growing edges. She facilitates the conversations that clients want to have—or the more difficult ones they need to have. Patrice loved being on the innovative leadership team of Cultivating Leadership for 4 years as they developed ways to work consciously with complexity principles and to walk their own talk. She is still Director of Cultivating Leadership Australia and has stepped off the leadership team to explore leadership from the edges of a system and to free up time for developing new ideas. With a Masters in Organisational Psychology and registration with the Psychology Board of Australia she is also deeply interested in neuroscience, the links between mind and body, and ways that we can heal and grow through applying complexity thinking to the complex adaptive system of us as humans. When not working Patrice loves to spend time with her husband and 3 adult children and their partners and enjoying life with friends especially if it involves being near or on the water and eating healthy and delicious food.

Marco works from the assumption that humanity is facing unprecedented, complex challenges, and believes in the power of dialogic methods to allow humans to come together and make progress on our intractable problems and build a resilient future. Marco is working primarily as a facilitator of multi-stakeholder dialogues with a diverse range of partners: from municipality planners across Europe, to LGBTI communities worldwide, to nanotechnology scientists at Harvard, and more. Primarily his work consists of providing teams with formats to improve their capacity to make sense and skillfully act on complex challenges. His work is informed by complexity theories, a decade of experience in facilitation, and over five years as a university lecturer, having taught sustainability science and leadership to over 300 master students. Marco likes to see himself as “bilingual” in his academic background, since he holds a MA in semiotics and social science in Italy and later pursued an MSc in sustainability science from a Swedish university. He is a trainer and active member of the “Art of Hosting” world-spanning community of practice of facilitators. When he is not doing consulting work, Marco enjoys deep conversations with friends in his home base in Malmo, Sweden, enjoys yoga to rejuvenate the body, and plays classical music by himself – or Beatles songs with friends.

Ayoub creates and facilitates development programs for individuals, partners, teams, and organizations; advises executives on strategy and leadership; and helps boards work more effectively. He serves clients in the GCC, Europe, the US, and South Asia, including senior executives, board directors, physicians, educators, foundation directors, engineers, and entrepreneurs. In his practice, Ayoub strives to cultivate a safe learning environment, to co-create leadership programs with his clients, and to find avenues for immediate and relevant impact. He invites his clients and teams to dynamically manage the polarity of group and individual development and calls their attention to the systemic forces that shape behaviors, relationships, and culture. His curricula focus on self-knowledge, self-mastery, interpersonal dynamics, critical thinking, complexity, and adult development theories. His work draws on problem-solving and design-thinking techniques to design and facilitate top-team conversations around strategy and organization. His facilitation increasingly brings about dynamics of power, diversity, belonging, and influence. Ayoub’s training includes interpersonal and diversity dynamics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, adult development theory and applications with the Growth Edge Network and the Leadership Circle, community and conflict facilitation with Processwork UK, somatic coaching and systemic constellations with Mobius Executive Leadership Trainers. Previously a management consultant at McKinsey and Company, Ayoub advised clients on strategy and organization, led economic development and real-estate engagements, and conducted economic research at the McKinsey Global Institute. Ayoub holds a MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, a joint Master’s degree in Energy Economics from the Colorado School of Mines and the French Petroleum Institute, and an Engineering degree in Applied Mathematics and Mechanics from the Ecole Polytechnique in France. He speaks Arabic, English, and French.