Leith Sharp hit a wall.
After two decades of leading change within complex organizations, she was stuck. All around her she saw other long term change leaders burning out and stalling too. Something was wrong with the way we were leading. Forced to choose between giving up and getting curious, Leith started to investigate what was making change so hard. She had no idea she would uncover a fundamental truth that would challenge everything we thought we knew about transformation.

Leith didn’t start with theory or academic models. Instead, she rolled up her sleeves and, working together with hundreds of thoughts partners, they mapped thousands of their actual change journeys—documenting what really happened when leaders attempted to bring new ideas to life to transform their organizations.

What was discovered was startling: the way we tell the story of change is fundamentally different from the reality of how change actually occurs.

Over the course of a decade-long conversation, involving thought partners that spanned all sectors (profit/non profit/gov) and many countries, a body of work started to organically emerge, rich with insights and patterns that revealed the secrets of how healthy change, resilience and democratic governance actually happen.

The breakthrough insight was that real change requires both a healthy management driven hierarchy to standardize and enforce new ways of doing things as well as a much more collaborative, adaptive, relationship-based network for creating and de-risking the right new ideas to fit our ever-changing contexts.

After mapping thousands of idea journeys, it was clear that every idea journey requires us to harness the synergy of hierarchical and adaptive networks. When we do this well, we get flow; when we do this poorly, we generate harmful friction. That friction harms relationships and health, fracturing organizations and communities, leaving us vulnerable to authoritarian leaders, social and environmental breakdown. The evidence was clear. How we lead change can either harm or heal, regardless of what change we are leading.

Leith synthesized the contributions and discoveries of her vast network of collaborators and then reached out to the C-suites of some of the world’s most influential brands:

Her interviews with global CEOs provided invaluable opportunities to test,refine and validate various insights at the highest levels of leadership thinking.

Leith and her many collaborators went on to run workshops to further test and evolve the Flow Leadership body of work across the USA, Canada, Mexico, Australia and New Zealand, Europe, the UK, Hong Kong and Japan. The insights and patterns translated across these diverse contexts, further illuminating the universality of their value.

To build further credibility for the body of work that had emerged, Leith then founded Harvard’s Executive Education for Sustainability Leadership program at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Leith and her teaching team went on to teach Flow Leadership at Harvard for over a decade—with thousands of change leaders experiencing this groundbreaking and soul-nourishing training.

What we now know is, when people see how change is really done, everything changes.