Ignite

hand holding an illuminate lightbulb
Generate the spark to solve your unsolvable

Duration:

  • 4 days over 4 months

Time commitment:

  • Short programme

Locations:

  • Oxford
  • International

Our goal

Solving the challenges of twenty-first century leadership

Almost every sector faces existential challenge. But in an ambiguous and fast-moving environment, where do you look for answers to problems previously unencountered?

We believe that the clues to solving your organisation's most complex challenges may lie in two places: in unexpected pockets of expertise in one of the world’s great universities, and within your own organisation. Therefore, we have created Ignite: an approach which brings the two together to create that vital spark.

Our offer

Creating leadership clarity

Saïd Business School exists to help leaders tackle the most deep-set, difficult issues. Meyler Campbell enables leaders to think significantly more clearly. We have come together to create an offering for a limited number of clients. It combines two things:

Clarity through foresight

Saïd Business School, embedded in Oxford University, brings cutting-edge ‘Oxford thinking’. For many years, leadership teams have accessed its research and deep expertise, building their understanding of the complex issues impacting them and their organisations. For Ignite, we have ranged deep into the University, collecting insights from a variety of fields about how true systemic change can be triggered - much of it not previously applied to the business world.

Clarity through skill-set

For twenty years Meyler Campbell has been enabling change in senior leadership teams. Its unique programmes create clarity for CEOs and Boards through the adoption of coaching mind-sets and skill-sets: a paradigm where leaders expand their already world-class ability to tell, with a newly deepened ability to ask – to listen as never before, and to unleash the latent spark, creativity, and energy in those around them.

Our approach

To tackle the toughest, most systemic issues, we work with you to blend these two elements into the very DNA of your organisation:

Oxford foresight

We give programme participants (a group of senior leaders at your organisation) distilled insights from leading Oxford faculty, providing cutting-edge thinking on how to create systemic change – not as lectures, but as distilled nuggets of human and web-based material.

Oxford unleashed

A group of the organisation's leaders will also embark on a special version of the transformational ‘Unleashed’ leadership development experience with Meyler Campbell’s renowned faculty. Through the programme, the volunteer participants from your team develop a world-class ability to coach. In other words, they gain space to think themselves, and can create it for others. But that enhanced power is not just useful in itself. Throughout the programme, as capability builds, that new fuel in turn powers work on the systemic issue the firm wants to change. At regular points, brief infusions of Oxford foresight offer radically new perspectives. So over six months, the team builds new leadership skillsets and mind-sets creating, collectively, a new organisational capability to examine, and start to solve, its own biggest systemic issues.

Measuring success

We always want to understand the impact of our work and the value we have created. To achieve this goal, we partner with each client organisation to co-create a detailed and tailored impact assessment, measuring ROI in hard numbers.

Ignite DNA diagram

Next steps

Ignite is a programme for a group of an organisation’s senior leaders and, to enable you to consider if Ignite is right for your organisation, we recommend that you consider:

  • What is the key ‘systemic challenge’ we are looking to solve (e.g. transforming our organisation in the face of disruption; our gender balance at senior leadership level, the quality of conversations we have with our clients, engagement levels throughout our organisation, retention of our best performers)?
  • Which senior executive Board member would be the sponsor of our Ignite programme? (We recommend the CEO/Managing Partner/Chair)
  • How many of our senior leaders are we seeking to put on the programme? (We recommend small groups, multiples of 6)
  • What is our budget?
  • When are we seeking to begin our Ignite programme?

 

If your organisation is ambitious, seeking to create competitive advantage through its leadership capability, and faces a systemic issue that has so far resisted change, we look forward to hearing from you. 

Professor Sue Dopson, Jon Stokes, and Dr Nigel Spencer - Saïd Business School, University of Oxford

Anne Scoular and Catherine Devitt - Meyler Campbell