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For 22 years, senior leaders from Fortune 1000 companies have brought their hardest problems here — and left sharper than they arrived.

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Find the peer conversation that moves your work forward.The right exchange builds better leaders, closes capability gaps, and cuts through what internal meetings can't.

Figure out if ELE is for you. Straight answers on what ELE is, who it’s built for, and how contributing members actually work together. Still have a question? Contact us.

Get answers about how Executive Learning Exchange (ELE) works — peer-powered leadership development that fixes real work issues, reverses burnout, and accelerates business value. No programs. No vendors. In the flow of work.

Real challenges. Real peers. Clear next moves.

This is where people-leaders get sharper.

Want ELE to come to you? Propose a local gathering — the community decides what gets scheduled.

Lake Forest Center for Leadership

The journey is never linear — we Bloom, we Burn, and we Breakthrough. In this keynote, Matt Sernaker will share the unique duality of his career and how his work in hospitality and entertainment has enabled him to craft impactful experiences for both audiences and employees.

From Balance to Breakthrough

Engagement &amp; Culture

Leadership

talent development

employee experience

well-being

CHIE2025

emotional intelligence

matt.sernaker

organizational culture

resilience

work-life balance

Personal Development

Leadership Journey

Leadership Insights

engagement strategy

breakthrough leadership

practical wisdom

culture design

Crisis means many things to different people, depending on perspective and experience. But what is universal is that people will experience times that challenge them.

This session provided invaluable insights into managing crises through self-awareness and wellbeing, emphasizing the importance of leadership in recognizing and addressing team member needs. Here are three key takeaways from the session:
<ol>
 	<li style="list-style-type: none;">
<ol>
 	<li>Spot and Address Stress Early: Leaders need to be vigilant in identifying signs of stress among team members, such as changes in behavior or engagement. Addressing these signs early can help prevent burnout and maintain team well-being.
<blockquote>"It's important as leaders to think about what are we seeing in our team members and how we can support them. Sometimes it's about digging a little deeper." -- <a href="https://www.ele.llc/members/jennifer-kern" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Jennifer Kern</a></blockquote>
</li>
 	<li>Integrate Wellbeing into Leadership: Adding fitness, nutrition, and stress management to leadership programs makes them more effective and helps everyone handle challenges better.</li>
 	<li>Prepare for Crises with Structured Plans: A clear crisis plan with specific roles helps organizations respond better during emergencies.
<blockquote>"Crisis can be the gap between what you need and what you have. Recognizing this gap early can help us better manage our responses." -- <a href="https://www.ele.llc/members/kirstin-mahar" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Kirstin Mahar</a></blockquote>
</li>
</ol>
</li>
</ol>
In summary, this session underscored the critical role of leaders in fostering resilient teams by being proactive, integrating wellbeing into their leadership practices, and preparing structured plans for crisis management. These strategies not only enhance organizational resilience but also create a supportive and responsive work environment.

Personal Resilience | Crisis Management & Well-being

leadership

leadership development

self-awareness

employee engagement

learning and development

jennifer.kern

skills development

employee well-being

workforce productivity

well-being programs

integration of wellness and learning

wise2024

kirstin.mahar

crisis management

crisis planning

Versiti

U.S. Coast Guard

In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, organizations face continuous change and must adapt to remain competitive. As a C-level executive, it's crucial to develop and maintain a thriving corporate culture that fosters innovation, agility, and resilience. This interactive session will delve into strategies for enhancing skills and nurturing a culture that not only endures change but thrives in it. Through a combination of expert insights and real-world examples, attendees will gain valuable tools to help their organizations flourish in times of change.

Skills & Culture During Times of Change

Strategy

Future of Work

kery.mortenson

Change Management

agility

strategy

wendy.greeson

cultural transformation

bryan.burkhalter

organizational success

insights-wise-2023

corporate culture

C-level executives

skill enhancement

Lurie Children's

DX Learning Solutions

Fostering a healthy work culture

The intersection of learning and development (L&amp;D) and wellness is crucial for maintaining a healthy and productive workforce. As workplace stress rises, CEOs and corporate leaders must acknowledge and address the relationship between employee health, resilience, and productivity. This session will explore the importance of integrating wellness initiatives into L&amp;D programs, creating a well-trained workforce, and fostering a healthy work culture.

The Intersection of Employee Well-being and Skills Development

alex.draper

diana.halfer

mike.rockelmann

<div style="font-family: 'Segoe UI', Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; color: #333; line-height: 1.8; max-width: 850px; margin: auto; text-align: justify; font-size: 18px;">
<h4 style="font-size: 1.75rem; color: #1a1a1a; margin-top: 2.5rem; margin-bottom: 1.2rem; border-left: 5px solid #cc0000; padding-left: 15px; text-align: left; line-height: 1.3;">Adaptation and Decentralized Leadership</h4>
In a corporate world obsessed with five-year plans and static roadmaps, adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy offers a radical alternative. Inspired by Octavia Butler’s science fiction and the patterns found in nature—like the murmuration of starlings or the resilience of mycelium—brown argues that our strategies should be "emergent" rather than forced.
For the ELE community, this book serves as a masterclass in complexity. It suggests that if we focus on the small, high-quality connections within our organizations, the large-scale transformation will take care of itself. It is a shift from "command and control" to "facilitate and flourish."


<hr style="border: 0; border-top: 1px solid #eee; margin: 2.5rem 0;" />

<h4 style="font-size: 1.75rem; color: #1a1a1a; margin-top: 2.5rem; margin-bottom: 1.2rem; border-left: 5px solid #cc0000; padding-left: 15px; text-align: left; line-height: 1.3;">The Blueprint: Principles of Emergence</h4>
The book is organized around a set of core principles that challenge traditional management theory. These are the "biological" rules for organizational health:

<ul style="padding-left: 25px; margin-bottom: 2.5rem;">
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 1.2rem;">Fractals: The health of the whole is found in the smallest part. "What we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system."</li>
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 1.2rem;">Adaptive Nature: Change is constant. Leaders should not try to stop change but instead learn to "ride" it, staying intentional about their direction while being flexible about their methods.</li>
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 1.2rem;">Decentralization: Power and intelligence should be distributed. Just as a forest doesn't have a single "CEO tree," a resilient organization empowers every individual to sense and respond to the environment.</li>
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 1.2rem;">Interdependence: We are in a constant state of relationship. Success isn't about individual "rockstars" but about the strength and trust of the web between people.</li>
</ul>

<hr style="border: 0; border-top: 1px solid #eee; margin: 2.5rem 0;" />

<h4 style="font-size: 1.75rem; color: #1a1a1a; margin-top: 2.5rem; margin-bottom: 1.2rem; border-left: 5px solid #cc0000; padding-left: 15px; text-align: left; line-height: 1.3;">Why It Matters for the ELE Community</h4>
For senior HR and Talent leaders, Emergent Strategy provides a necessary bridge between "business as usual" and the future of human-centric work:

<ul style="padding-left: 25px; margin-bottom: 2.5rem;">
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 1.2rem;">Resilience Over Robustness: While robust systems resist change (and eventually break), emergent systems adapt. This book helps ELE members design cultures that thrive during market volatility and organizational pivots.</li>
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 1.2rem;">Authentic DEIB: brown’s work is rooted in social justice. It helps leaders move DEIB initiatives away from "compliance checklists" toward deep, relational work that actually shifts how people belong within a company.</li>
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 1.2rem;">Facilitation as a Superpower: It reframes the role of the L&amp;D leader as a facilitator of emergence. Instead of just delivering "content," you are creating the conditions for collective intelligence to surface.</li>
</ul>

<hr style="border: 0; border-top: 1px solid #eee; margin: 2.5rem 0;" />

<div style="font-style: italic; color: #444; background-color: #f4f4f4; padding: 30px; border-radius: 12px; border-right: 5px solid #cc0000;">As leaders, we often feel the pressure to have all the answers and to map out every mile of the journey. brown reminds us that the most sustainable growth is that which happens naturally through trust, adaptation, and small-scale intentionality. By embracing emergence, we stop trying to predict the future and start practicing the future we want to inhabit.</div>
</div>

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

future of work

dirk.tussing

systems thinking

collaboration

Emergent Strategy

DEIB

adaptive leadership

Community Building

L&amp;D strategy

human-centered design

complexity theory

organic growth

<div style="font-family: 'Segoe UI', Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; color: #333; line-height: 1.8; max-width: 850px; margin: auto; text-align: justify; font-size: 18px;">
<h4 style="font-size: 1.75rem; color: #1a1a1a; margin-top: 2.5rem; margin-bottom: 1.2rem; border-left: 5px solid #cc0000; padding-left: 15px; text-align: left; line-height: 1.3;">The Science of Failing Well</h4>
We’ve all heard the Silicon Valley mantras to "fail fast" and "fail forward," but in a high-stakes corporate environment, failure often feels like a liability rather than an asset. In Right Kind of Wrong, Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson provides the much-needed nuance that the "fail fast" movement lacks.
She distinguishes between unproductive mistakes and what she calls Intelligent Failure. For ELE members, this book is the definitive guide to building a culture where experimentation is rigorous, and learning is the primary objective, not just a consolation prize for a missed KPI.


<hr style="border: 0; border-top: 1px solid #eee; margin: 2.5rem 0;" />

<h4 style="font-size: 1.75rem; color: #1a1a1a; margin-top: 2.5rem; margin-bottom: 1.2rem; border-left: 5px solid #cc0000; padding-left: 15px; text-align: left; line-height: 1.3;">The Blueprint: Three Types of Failure</h4>
Edmondson breaks down the anatomy of mistakes so leaders can stop treating all errors as equal. To build a resilient organization, you must learn to categorize:

<ul style="padding-left: 25px; margin-bottom: 2rem;">
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 1.2rem;">Basic Failures: Simple mistakes in known territory (e.g., a typo in a contract). These are preventable through better training and checklists.</li>
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 1.2rem;">Complex Failures: These occur when multiple small factors align in a "perfect storm" (e.g., a supply chain breakdown). They require systems thinking to diagnose and mitigate.</li>
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 1.2rem;">Intelligent Failures: These are the "Right Kind of Wrong." They happen when we experiment in new territory, the risk is calculated, and the potential for learning is high.</li>
</ul>
<blockquote style="background-color: #fdf2f2; border-left: 5px solid #cc0000; padding: 20px 30px; margin: 2.5rem 0; border-radius: 0 8px 8px 0; font-style: italic;">
The Framework for Intelligence: An intelligent failure must take place in pursuit of a goal, be based on a hypothesis, and be as small as possible to limit the "blast radius" while maximizing insight.
</blockquote>

<hr style="border: 0; border-top: 1px solid #eee; margin: 2.5rem 0;" />

<h4 style="font-size: 1.75rem; color: #1a1a1a; margin-top: 2.5rem; margin-bottom: 1.2rem; border-left: 5px solid #cc0000; padding-left: 15px; text-align: left; line-height: 1.3;">Why It Matters for the ELE Community</h4>
For senior HR and Talent leaders, Edmondson’s research provides a strategic framework for talent development and risk management:

<ul style="padding-left: 25px; margin-bottom: 2.5rem;">
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 1.2rem;">From Safety to Accountability: This book clarifies that psychological safety isn't about "being nice"—it’s about high standards and the candor required to report failures early.</li>
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 1.2rem;">Cultivating a Growth Mindset: It provides a practical curriculum for L&amp;D leaders to teach teams how to conduct "post-mortems" without the blame game, turning every setback into a competitive advantage.</li>
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 1.2rem;">Innovation Insurance: As organizations navigate AI and digital shifts, "Right Kind of Wrong" gives leaders the toolkit to encourage the bold experimentation necessary for survival without risking the entire enterprise.</li>
</ul>

<hr style="border: 0; border-top: 1px solid #eee; margin: 2.5rem 0;" />

<div style="font-style: italic; color: #444; background-color: #f4f4f4; padding: 30px; border-radius: 12px; border-right: 5px solid #cc0000;">Building a culture of innovation isn't about eliminating failure; it’s about mastering it. By teaching our organizations to distinguish between a careless error and an intelligent experiment, we unlock the true potential of our talent. Success isn't the absence of failure—it's the ability to fail in ways that propel us toward the next great breakthrough.</div>
</div>

Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well

growth mindset

talent management

psychological safety

accountability

Performance Improvement

michael.hruska

High-Performance Teams

intelligent failure

innovation strategy

baryons.aimentor

In The 6% Club, The Change Doctor Michelle Rozen, PhD, teaches audiences and readers how to create and actually stick to new positive habits, unlocking the secret formula to the life, success, and happiness they've always dreamed of. The book was born from a recent study where Dr. Rozen surveyed 1,000 people who pledged to make a change in their lives, and, shockingly, only 6% had stuck to the change just a month later.

Dr. Rozen's powerful, uplifting, and actionable methods have been tested on countless event attendees from all types of background for over a decade. In this book, readers will learn how to:
<ul class="a-unordered-list a-vertical">
 	<li>Work out more, eat healthier, save more money, do better in business, or attain any other personal or professional goal</li>
 	<li>Make changes solo, or with another individual like a friend or partner</li>
 	<li>Stop making excuses, giving up, or putting it off—effortlessly</li>
</ul>
Based on science and written by one of the most sought-after motivational speakers on leadership and change, The 6% Club earns a well-deserved spot on the bookshelves of all individuals looking to make lasting changes in their personal and professional lives.

The 6% Club: Unlock the Secret to Achieving Any Goal and Thriving in Business and Life

Coaching

productivity

motivation

Goal Setting

Self-Improvement

Overcoming Obstacles

business success

Habit Formation

laura.sandera

Success Habits

Achieving Goals

Positive Change

Life Success

Goodall shares a perspective that resonated greatly with me - change has become a cult, treated as a sacred easy button for leaders and organizations. The problem that change initiatives often disregard the change toll or on the people and organization's resources for true transformation. What if there were fewer change initiatives and more resources/effort were put into improving what already exists? What if there was more stability and less turbulence that would allow people to thrive? Fix what's really broken, transform what's not longer relevant, and create environment and systems that honor humans.

If you’ve had enough of the constant turbulence that defines corporate life today, you’re not alone.  Learn why change is bad for people and for business, and discover how to create the stability that we all need to thrive.

For decades, “disruption” and “change” have been seen as essential to business growth and success. In this provocative and incisive book, leadership expert Ashley Goodall argues that what has become a sacred dogma is both wrong and harmful.

Whether it’s a merger or re-org or a new office layout, change has become the ultimate easy button for leaders, who pursue it with abandon, unleashing a torrent of disruption on employees. The result is what Goodall calls “life in the blender”—a perpetual cycle of upheaval, uncertainty, and unease.

The problem with change, Goodall argues, is that a culture where everything from people to processes to strategic priorities are constantly in flux exerts a psychological toll that undermines motivation, productivity, and performance.  And yet so accustomed are we to constant churn that we have become numb to its very real consequences.

Drawing on two decades spent leading HR organizations at Deloitte and Cisco, Ashley Goodall reveals why change is not the same as improvement, and how, by prioritizing team cohesion (instead of reshuffling teams at will), by using real words (rather than corporate-speak), by sharing secrets (not mission statements), by fixing only the things that are truly broken (instead of moving fast and breaking everything in sight, and more, leaders at every level can create the stability that people need to thrive.

The Problem With Change And the Essential Nature of Human Performance

corinne@innovatingresults.com

organizational development

Strategic HR

Burnout Prevention

diana.anderson

employee wellbeing

Leadership Effectiveness

Corporate Strategy

human performance

workplace stability

Did you know 24 percent of employees report feeling curious in their jobs on a regular basis?

The Workplace Curiosity Manifesto: How Curiosity Helps Individuals and Organizations Thrive in Transformational Times combines real stories and case studies of corporate executives, academics, and entrepreneurs to reveal opportunities and challenges for success. Intentional curiosity is needed especially in times of change. This book speaks to those who are looking for ideas to accelerate in life and work and embrace the concept of curiosity as a positive force in the digital age.

You’ll learn:
<ul class="a-unordered-list a-vertical">
 	<li>How to get better at intentional curiosity</li>
 	<li>How to overcome forces that limit productive curiosity</li>
 	<li>How companies can support the people in their care—leaders and employees—to embed curiosity in their culture, processes, and practices</li>
 	<li>Best practices of professionals and companies leading the way</li>
</ul>
Stefaan van Hooydonk believes curious professionals need curious workplaces to thrive. The Workplace Curiosity Manifesto will help you to discover how professionals can grow and maximize their own curiosity and what organizations can do to encourage curious behavior.

The Workplace Curiosity Manifesto: How Curiosity Helps Individuals and Workspaces Thrive in Transformational Times

innovation

bill.ryan

continuous learning

organizational change

workplace culture

Personal Growth

Creative Thinking

Professional Development

workplace curiosity

transformational leadership

Working parenthood can be overwhelming, frustrating, and riddled with guilt. It can also be a source of joy, inspiration, and creativity. Balancing rich scientific research with friendly, supportive tips and anecdotes. Yael Schonbrun offers a toolkit to help even the most stressed of working parents grow the good while better managing inevitable challenges. She banishes the idea that the key to ultimate working parenthood is the ability to do it all. Instead, the key is to learn how these roles, together, can help you thrive!
<h3>Key Aspects of the Book</h3>
<ul>
 	<li>Based on Science, Not Just Opinion: The strategies in the book are rooted in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a form of mindfulness-based behavioral therapy. This provides a strong, research-backed framework for the advice.</li>
 	<li>Focus on Mindset: The book is not about productivity "hacks" to fit more into your day. Instead, it's an "inside-out" approach that teaches you how to change the way you think and feel about your roles.</li>
 	<li>Practical Strategies: The book outlines 12 specific strategies, such as getting clear on your core values, practicing mindfulness, and viewing the transition between roles as a form of "micro-rest." These are designed to be actionable and manageable for busy parents.</li>
 	<li>Embraces Imperfection: Work, Parent, Thrive encourages you to let go of guilt and accept that some things are out of your control. It helps you focus on what truly matters to you, rather than on the pressure to be perfect in every area of your life.</li>
</ul>

Work, Parent, Thrive: 12 Science-Backed Strategies to Ditch Guilt, Manage Overwhelm, and Grow Connection

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