Transformative executive coaching: considerations for an expanding field of research

Executive coaching is growing in popularity as a methodology for developing leaders in organisations. Drawing on recent experiences of the authors, being both educators and practitioners within the field of higher education and executive coaching, this paper explores how the use of transformative learning in a model of transformative executive coaching can enhance the development of the person (P) being coached, thereby augmenting their working environment (E). The purpose of this article is to consider the potential of transformative learning to increase the effectiveness of executive coaching for coaching practitioners and also consider the potential for further research and implementation within the field of transformative learning

Transformative action coaching in healthcare leadership

The context of this study focuses on the collaborative interest of three organizations devoted to the development of Healthcare leadership in the United Kingdom, namely the National Health Service (NHS), Army Medical Service (AMS), and the University of Cumbria (UoC). Each organization acknowledges the challenges facing healthcare leaders in their pursuit of effect organizational, personal, and professional learning and have come together and bring into play their own organizational learning to collectively design this pilot programme of leadership development that facilitates deep transformative critical self- reflection, reflexivity and learning. The authors have used the theoretical and practical integration of autoethnographic storytelling and arts-based action learning approaches to facilitate such transformative learning in the group setting of professional leadership development programmes. The aim of this study is to add to the growing discourses in the fields of Transformative Learning, Action Learning, Coaching and Autoethnography by critically evaluating the application of this approach when designing and delivering a combined military, university and NHS leadership development program to a cohort of 24 senior leaders within an NHS hospital

Interdisciplinary doctoral education and strategic management in crises: harnessing agency with praxis

Interdisciplinary working within and between different professions is now commonplace, with the transferability of knowledge across situated contexts of implementation. Education at doctoral level can be one mechanism of ensuring that mid-career professionals are equipped with the skills needed to build the capacity and capability required to deal with crisis situations. Interdisciplinary professional doctoral pathways and their associated learning trajectories are now a recognised mechanism of operationalising translational research from the context of work-based praxis. The longstanding debates of how best to bridge the theory-practice nexus in the field of business remains a challenge, although the progressive development of professional doctorate programmes has seen a rise in the number of clinical and professional practice doctorates across Western educational providers. This theoretical chapter will provide an insight into the concept of translational research in the context of research-based practice/work-based praxis within organisations across the globe

Engendering perspective transformation: a model for designing programs and facilitating transformative learning

Traditional training and education events—also referred to as learning in corporate talent development programs—often focus on delivering content. Adults work to define, identify, or apply the content in ideal conditions as detailed in the courses’ behavioural learning objectives. Such lower-level learning may serve organizations well when training disassociated skills, but it fails in allowing the adult learner to deliberately examine their theories of action. Failing to do so may result in missing out on the work required to develop their capacity and could result in experiencing unproductive dilemmas (Argyris, 1976). Therefore, the authors propose a model for creating and facilitating programs that engages adult learners in examining their purpose, values, feelings, and how they make meaning as they work toward realizing their professional development outcomes. The model provides a framework for designing, developing, and facilitating perspective transformation, so that the participants embody course concepts and can employ them in their context, even in the face of complexity. This model materialized through the examination of the transformative learning literature and two distinct, long-standing, successful transformative learning programs (McCann & Barto, 2018; Corrie, 2023). The model (Figure 1) begins with establishing the foundation of future work, the learning environment. Next, attention to learner motivation helps examine participant purpose in relation to extrinsic influence. The work in this model transpires through discourse with self, others, and the material itself. Much of the work concerns epistemology, or how the individual and organization create knowledge. The course curated discourse includes the practice of reflection, from simplistic individual process reflection to the more difficult critical reflection. Perspective taking and positioning takes the center of the model as they touch each component and directly relate to addressing a participant’s worldview. Together, through purposeful design, these components create opportunities for emergence (Pendleton-Jullian, & Brown, 2018) and emancipatory adult learning, where participants can hold object, the forces they were once subject to, and grow their capacity (Kegan, 2018). Designers using this model select course concepts to serve as meta themes, meaning that they hold relevance in achieving learning outcomes as much as engendering perspective transformation. The concepts assist the participants in planning their own course of action and in acquiring new capability and capacity in later stages of transformative learning. Upfront, the concepts promote an exploration of more ideal ways of being and serve participants in a critical assessment of assumptions. And when trying on new roles, building competence and confidence, and reintegrating the new perspective, they continue to provide the support required for perspective transformation. This paper will detail the model for designing and facilitating transformative learning (Mezirow, 1990), while providing examples from real world research (McCann & Barto, 2018; Corrie, 2023). During the roundtable session, the authors will present the model (Figure 1) and invite conference participants into the discourse around the model’s efficacy as a tool for promoting transformative and emancipatory learning in professional development programs

Acknowledging Emotive Response and Epistemic Positionality: Disruptive Transformative Pedagogy Amidst a Global Pandemic

In the dynamic and iteratively changing landscape of global Higher Education, processes of learning, teaching and professional practice have been irrevocably impacted upon by the COVID-19 virus. This brief paper explores how the concept of emotive response generally and emotional labour specifically, have impacted on the context of Higher Education Institutions globally and the implications of this in practice based educational settings. Wider civic society will bear the burden of this pandemic via processes of economic restraint for a generation, yet transformative perspectives have great significance to both how people’s capacity to reflect and make meaning of current times will continue to drive a proactive and reflexive response to the challenges and opportunities it provides. Mezirow’s, now seminal, Transformative Learning Theory (2009), and the Hayes and Corrie (2020) Disruptive Pedagogical Approach to facilitating learning provide the baseline theoretical frameworks for this conceptual discussion

Advances in medical countermeasures and lessons from ‘main stream medicine’

The Ecological Approach to Developing CBRN Defence. History: - the ‘silver bullet - Medcm are not stand alone/fire and forget - Learning over the last two decades Recent and Current Threats - Corona viruses - Filo viruses - Novichocks - NPPs - All Hazards approach Advances in Medcm development: - Vaccines technology - Requirements - civ mil - In silico down selection - Manage end to end product development - WHO’s R&D Blueprint Human Security - environmental animal human ecological approach to PH - FHP - Multi professional/disciplinary/agency response Situational Awareness - Common Operating Picture: - Medical intelligence - Indicators and warnings - Prevention - ecological approach to PH - FHP - Windows of Opportunity Challenges: Diagnostics/vaccines/small molecule toxicology

Designing personalised cancer treatments

The concept of personalised medicine for cancer is not new. It arguably began with the attempts by Salmon and Hamburger to produce a viable cellular chemosensitivity assay in the 1970s, and continues to this day. While clonogenic assays soon fell out of favour due to their high failure rate, other cellular assays fared better and although they have not entered widespread clinical practice, they have proved to be very useful research tools. For instance, the ATP-based chemosensitivity assay was developed in the early 1990s and is highly standardised. It has proved useful for evaluating new drugs and combinations, and in recent years has been used to understand the molecular basis of drug resistance and sensitivity to anti-cancer drugs. Recent developments allow unparalleled genotyping and phenotyping of tumours, providing a plethora of targets for the development of new cancer treatments. However, validation of such targets and new agents to permit translation to the clinic remains difficult. There has been one major disappointment in that cell lines, though useful, do not often reflect the behaviour of their parent cancers with sufficient fidelity to be useful. Low passage cell lines — either in culture or xenografts are being used to overcome some of these issues, but have several problems of their own. Primary cell culture remains useful, but large tumours are likely to receive neo-adjuvant treatment before removal and that limits the tumour types that can be studied. The development of new treatments remains difficult and prediction of the clinical efficacy of new treatments from pre-clinical data is as hard as ever. One lesson has certainly been that one cannot buck the biology — and that understanding the genome alone is not sufficient to guarantee success. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the development of EGFR inhibitors. Despite overexpression of EGFR by many tumour types, only those with activating EGFR mutations and an inability to circumvent EGFR blockade have proved susceptible to treatment. The challenge is how to use advanced molecular understanding with limited cellular assay information to improve both drug development and the design of companion diagnostics to guide their use. This has the capacity to remove much of the guesswork from the process and should improve success rates

Designing personalised cancer treatments

The concept of personalised medicine for cancer is not new. It arguably began with the attempts by Salmon and Hamburger to produce a viable cellular chemosensitivity assay in the 1970s, and continues to this day. While clonogenic assays soon fell out of favour due to their high failure rate, other cellular assays fared better and although they have not entered widespread clinical practice, they have proved to be very useful research tools. For instance, the ATP-based chemosensitivity assay was developed in the early 1990s and is highly standardised. It has proved useful for evaluating new drugs and combinations, and in recent years has been used to understand the molecular basis of drug resistance and sensitivity to anti-cancer drugs. Recent developments allow unparalleled genotyping and phenotyping of tumours, providing a plethora of targets for the development of new cancer treatments. However, validation of such targets and new agents to permit translation to the clinic remains difficult. There has been one major disappointment in that cell lines, though useful, do not often reflect the behaviour of their parent cancers with sufficient fidelity to be useful. Low passage cell lines — either in culture or xenografts are being used to overcome some of these issues, but have several problems of their own. Primary cell culture remains useful, but large tumours are likely to receive neo-adjuvant treatment before removal and that limits the tumour types that can be studied. The development of new treatments remains difficult and prediction of the clinical efficacy of new treatments from pre-clinical data is as hard as ever. One lesson has certainly been that one cannot buck the biology — and that understanding the genome alone is not sufficient to guarantee success. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the development of EGFR inhibitors. Despite overexpression of EGFR by many tumour types, only those with activating EGFR mutations and an inability to circumvent EGFR blockade have proved susceptible to treatment. The challenge is how to use advanced molecular understanding with limited cellular assay information to improve both drug development and the design of companion diagnostics to guide their use. This has the capacity to remove much of the guesswork from the process and should improve success rates

Early relapse on adjuvant gemcitabine associated with an exceptional response to 2nd line capecitabine chemotherapy in a patient with pancreatic adenosquamous carcinoma with strong intra-tumoural expression of cytidine deaminase: a case report

Funder: Cambridge Experimental Medicine InitiativeFunder: Cancer Research United KingdomAbstract: Background: Pancreatic adenosquamous carcinoma has a poor prognosis, with limited prospective trial data to guide optimal treatment. The potential impact of drug metabolism on the treatment response of patients with pancreatic adenosquamous carcinoma is largely unknown. Case presentation: We describe the case of a 51 year old woman with pancreatic adenosquamous carcinoma who, following surgical resection, experienced early disease relapse during adjuvant gemcitabine therapy. Paradoxically, this was followed by an exceptional response to capecitabine therapy lasting 34.6 months. Strong expression of cytidine deaminase was detected within the tumour. Conclusions: This case study demonstrates that early relapse during adjuvant chemotherapy for pancreatic adenosquamous carcinoma may be compatible with a subsequent exceptional response to second line chemotherapy, an important observation given the poor overall prognosis of patients with adenosquamous carcinoma. Cytidine deaminase is predicted to inactivate gemcitabine and, conversely, catalyze capecitabine activation. We discuss strong intra-tumoural expression of cytidine deaminase as a potential mechanism to explain this patient’s disparate responses to gemcitabine and capecitabine therapy, and highlight the benefit that may be gained from considering similar determinants of response to chemotherapy in clinical practice