10,000 Swamp Leaders

Kit Lykketoft is the Director of Conventions at Wonderful Copenhagen. The official tourism organization of the Capital Region of Copenhagen. Her work is attracting and convening international association conferences to the city while designing a sustainable agenda for attendees. Finding this balance is the challenge of leading. Kit brings a strategist and change maker mindset to proactively use re...

034 Kush Doshi jumps into the Swamp to share his views on leading inside a community health system. He brings his passion for advancing health efforts for communities of color and mobilizing health equity by addressing the social determinants of health within communities. But he doesn’t stop here. He is also an advocate for equity, inclusion, and diversity within the workforce so that reflects the...

033_Larisa Halilovic jumps into the Swamp to share her deep wisdom on leading and building teams. Her leadership journey began when she escaped her war torn country, became a refugee and learned how to adapt and thrive in a new country. Larisa has over twenty years of experience leading teams in the United Kingdom, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. She has made it her personal mission to introduc...

032_Kurt O’Brien, friend, thought partner and leadership teacher comes to the Swamp to share his insights on how to teach leadership. Kurt brings 22+ years of experience helping emerging leaders in healthcare build their craft of leading. He shares what gives him hope for the future and reflects on the importance of balancing classroom learning with real world experiments. Kurt Links: Kurt’s websi...

031_ Leen Gorissen: Biologist and founder of Center4NI takes us on a journey to reconnect us with our own Natural Intelligence. She asserts that the difficult conditions of our planet call for us to focus more on developing our Natural Intelligence than seeking artificial solutions. Leen shares the Story of Wolves. A remarkable regenerative example that demonstrates how nature provides all of us w...

030 _  Judy Rees shares how simple questions, sharp listening and exploring metaphors can access fresh ideas, improved strategies and sharper actions for addressing challenges and accessing more human potential. Links ReesMcCann Books by Judy Judy Rees’ Ebook Clean Language: Revealing Metaphors and Opening Minds The Five Minute Coach  Buzzing Online Workshops   Thanks for listening. Send me your f...

029_ Guillaume Wiatr joins us in the swamp to explore the power of strategic narratives and why building one is an act of leadership. We will explore the difference between stories and narrative and how to use them both inside your team or organization to mobilize change. Guillaume will also talk about External Discipline and External Freedom and how to cultivate both through a reflective practice...

Terry Rogers has been a practicing physician for over 56 years. He was the director of respiratory and  critical care at Seattle Swedish Hospital,  served  a Senior Medical Officer and  CEO for King County Blue Shield.  He was also CEO of the Foundation for Healthcare Quality in Seattle.  He retired as Medical Director of Lakeside-Milam Recovery Centers and still sees patients on a weekly basis. T...

027_ Lea Ranalder is a committed advocate for building more sustainable cities. Her work with UN-Habitat is focused on developing more renewable energy resources that mitigate climate change in our greatest urban hubs. Cities are both the heartbeat of countries and vulnerable collectives that impact millions of lives everyday. Lea brings her years of experience and passion to facilitate the hard w...

026_John Scherer: Facing The Tiger  John Scherer brings a lifetime of developing leaders around the world to the swamp. He shares what is possible when we face our tigers and the five deep questions we must answer to understand our purpose and power. As John says: “You don’t need to CHANGE yourself. You need to COME HOME to yourself. This changes EVERYTHING.”  John also shares how he mobilized a l...

025_Jole Berlage-Buccellati discusses the potential Highly Sensitive People bring to the world and the workplace. Jole’s coaching mission is to support the empowerment of highly-sensitive and highly-gifted people to self-actualize, embrace their sensuality, their talents, their power and their unique gifts. The four capacity building themes that guide her work are resilience, adaptability, joy and...

024_Annika Torseth: Community Impact Through Second Chances. Jails are often the end of the road for many people. For a few, a jail is a place where a second chance might emerge. Annika Torseth, a forensic case manager joins the podcast and shares what she has learned about how to hold difficult conversations, building a trusting relationship and how to design a re-entry system that will support a...

In 2012, Elizabeth Filippouli raised her hand to lead. In so doing, she has fostered a movement to promote values-based thinking and accountability in leadership among women around the world. She has launched two organizations that support women building their capacity to lead inside a supportive community of peers and mentors. Global Thinkers Forum and Athena40 Forum are the containers for leader...

021_Benjamin Taylor: This week I am talking with Benjamin Taylor about Systems Leadership, Barry Oshry and his deep commitment to transform public services. His core purpose is improving the lives of those most in need of support. Benjamin has built his consultancy, RedQuadrant, into a dynamic resource for helping UK governments agencies, charities and NGOs. The depth and breadth of his knowledge...

Families are complex human systems. Running a business is always a complex system. Put the two complexities together and there are bound to be swamp issues at work. Bart Parrott talks about the challenges family businesses face when transitions are happening. Given that each of us has a family and we all need to navigate life and career transitions, Bart offers some useful ideas and approaches to...

020_Knights: Knights Jump into the Swamp. We travel a different journey of leading in this episode. I am joined by four life-long friends. Bryan Garinger, Kevin Olson, Mark Eathorne and Rick Walker. These four men have been part of my life almost since birth. We shared a unique early life experience that has shaped and informed how we live our lives, how we show up in our work and how we choose to...

Max Martina brings his deep experience with Adaptive Leadership and his classroom time with Ron Heifetz down to the swamp to share. This is a natural fit for both Max and we swamp dwellers. After all there is no difference between an adaptive challenge and a swamp issue. Max offers tight, specific points on how we can use ourselves to lead how we might do this work using adaptive leadership approa...

018_Rick Torseth: A View From the Balcony #1 After a few month’s and several episodes, I’m pausing to answer the question: Why 10,000 Swamp Leaders? and 2) reflect on the mass shootings in Buffalo NY and Uvalde, Texas. I have no solutions AND I believe these events have exposed our elected Senators to be weak authority figures. The tragic events are also self-identifying many people who are choosi...

017_Dave Cooper: A Navy Seals Who Swims Against the Current. Dave Cooper brings unique experiences to any conversation about leading. For twenty-five years, Dave was deployed to Bosnia, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq. It was on these battlefields that Dave learned to create the conditions for team effectiveness based on candid “after action reviews” that challenge all members of the team to...

015_Sharon Wood: A Life Spent Leading In Cross-Cultural Environments. Sharon Wood began her leadership journey “at home” as a teenager on the island of Macau. Over the course of fifty plus years she has steered her leadership career from that home base to Executive VP of business development for a Chinese global enterprise. Along the way, she has refined her views on what it takes to lead in a cro...

014_Sadaffee Abid: Leading a Social Enterprise Focused on Women’s Empowerment and Leadership. Sadaffe is the Founder of CIRCLE: a social enterprise supporting the next generation of women leaders through the development of digital literacy, mentorship and greater participation in the economy. CIRCLE’S mission is to “Impact One Million women across Pakistan." She is well on her way to realizin...

013_Dennis Vergne: A Leader Who Doesn’t Intend To Lead. Dennis comes to the Swamp and shares his views on leading. And without giving it all away here, he displays his positive deviant orientation to building teams based on freedom and candor and trust. He also flips the field on how to lead change projects. He is more interested in taking actions than talking about “how to do it.” If you are tire...

012_Kitty Nooy & Tycho Prins: The Four Virtues of Leadership. We are living in a time of the rise of the oligarchy model of leadership. Which means giving power to a small group of people to decide the future of the larger collective. This is risky business. What the collective risks is the loss of fairness and justice to all. Kitty Nooy and Tycho Prins have made it their work to help groups a...

012 We have arrived at a critical moment in the transition from fossil fuel to renewable sources of energy. Ren21 is located at the center of a community of energy players. The organization is using its knowledge and expertise to do the hard leadership work of mobilizing this network to sustain the momentum required to shift the balance away from fossil fuel and onto renewable energy. Rana Adib, t...

011_ Polina Makarova drove out of Kharkiv on February 23rd, 2022 as Russia began its invasion of Ukraine. She took with her six family members but not her husband. He stayed behind to help defend their home town. In this episode she speaks directly to the possible futures that are ahead for her country, the courage of Ukrainians and what is at stake if the world doesn’t back up its words with mean...