Pioneers in Adaptive Leadership

Our People

Our Leadership Advisors spanning the globe have spent years mastering the tools and techniques of Adaptive Leadership.

Molly Alexander

Molly is a deeply intuitive change management consultant and executive coach with over two decades of experience. She is an Integral Development Coach™, systems change practitioner, and leadership facilitator with a track record of tackling some of the world’s most complex challenges. She is passionate about enhancing leadership, learning, and development in social enterprises, social justice initiatives, education, health equity and climate change-focused organizations.

At Adaptive Change Advisors (ACA), Molly designs and delivers Adaptive Leadership workshops, retreats, and hybrid (online) programs to diverse cohorts of social change leaders, democratizing leadership by sharing access to mission-driven Adaptive Leadership tools and systems-change approaches. She is also co-lead of the Adaptive Coaching business pillar, providing targeted 1:1 accompaniment to social change actors, deepening their capacity to self-reflect in service of driving lasting impact and systems-change outcomes.

Molly’s extensive experience also includes business development, fundraising, and operations management roles in various regions, including India and New York. She is highly regarded for her expertise in organizational design, leadership development, and values-based performance management. Her work has resulted in improved employee satisfaction ratings, increased retention rates, and higher investment in talent and leadership development. With her proven track record of generating alignment of purpose and skills, Molly is sought after by clients looking to drive lasting impact and systems-change outcomes.

Greta Cowan

Since 1999 Greta has been coaching clients on The Four P’s:

  • helping leaders to connect with and congruently communicate their passion
  • lead with their principles
  • find clarity of purpose 
  • leverage their full, authentic leadership presence.

She helps clients make their vision of the future vivid, compelling, tangible, and possible.

Greta is a certified leadership coach who has worked nationwide and abroad with a wide variety of executives from both the corporate and non-profit sectors. Coaching leaders and teams of mission-focused organizations, NGO’s, and those in the social impact sector is her specialty; working with organizations like The American Red Cross, Acumen, Achievement First, AJC, Uncommon Schools, and the UN Foundation. She brings a dynamic blend of humor, compassion, honesty, and rigor to her approach to coaching; helping leaders become more inspired and inspirational.

Greta has taught and lectured at Harvard University Executive Education, Darden Business School, and Columbia Business School under the auspices of the Executive Education and Executive MBA departments and the Institute for Not-for-Profit Management.

Mari Haraldsson

Mari is a Swedish-Korean New Yorker who has facilitated purposeful processes globally for over 15 years. Her work began with co-creating community-building workshops with homeless individuals in New York City and leadership development workshops with young women running for office in rural Cambodia. From there she spent four years catalyzing a global urban resilience movement with 100 Resilient Cities, a program pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation, where she began her adaptive leadership journey. She has since joined the Adaptive Change Advisors team, founded Tidal Change, and led a global transformation journey at Hyper Island in Stockholm. 



Mari has facilitated groups and coached leaders wrestling with adaptive challenges in boardrooms, recovery spaces, government agencies, unconventional learning spaces, and at the United Nations. In her various roles, Mari brings her whole self to bear to support people in unlocking clarity of purpose and courageous action when leading consequential change. Mari is an ICF Professional Coach, a certified Adaptive Leadership Facilitator, and a certified practitioner of the Swedish Defense University’s methods in Understanding Groups and Leadership. She holds a Master of Public Administration with specializations in international nonprofit management and public policy, and a Bachelor in social justice and leadership from New York University.

Saima Irtiza

Saima is a seasoned facilitator and certified Adaptive Leadership trainer, having spent the last decade working with hundreds of changemakers globally.  Saima’s experience leading Acumen’s flagship fellowship programs in Pakistan and East Africa, while seeing the world through the eyes of individuals with diverse world views, has given her a strong understanding of how to curate learning experiences and build spaces that harness the transformational power of meaningful dialogue. She trains and coaches change leadership cohorts in the private and public sector around the world, leveraging the tools and framework of adaptive leadership. Saima directs ACA’s Train-the-Trainer program that provides certification for aspiring Adaptive Leadership facilitators.

Vimal Kumar

Vimal is the founder of Movement for Scavenger Community (MSC), an organization committed to the eradication of manual scavenging in India and bringing education and awareness to the existing scavenger community. Under MSC he also operates the Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Youth Study Center which provides career counseling and a small library to disadvantaged students in Haryana. As a Ph.D. scholar in social work with a focus on “Caste violence” at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, he was awarded the Young Professional Fellowship from the Dalit Foundation in 2008. 

Vimal holds a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Social Work from the University of Kurukshetra in Haryana. He was awarded by DAAD research fellowship in 2016 under Student Exchange Program with Westfalische Wilhelms – Universitat Muenster (WWU), Germany. He is also Acumen Fellow at Acumen Fund.

Eric Martin

Eric Martin is the author of the book Your Leadership Moment and Founder of Adaptive Change Advisors (ACA). A Detroit native turned prominent leadership expert, Eric has brought leadership development to hundreds of thousands of people around the world. He has been published in Fast Company, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and Environmental Leader.

Eric serves as a Board member of the Clean Energy Leadership Institute, a founding Board member of the Democratizing Leadership Initiative, an Advisory Board Member of the MAVA Foundation and the American Resilience Project, and a founding member of the MAG Impact Collective. Eric holds a Master, Management Science in Organizational Change Management and BSC in Systems Analysis and Operations Research. Previously, Eric served in a governmental liaison capacity in Japan and at The Synergos Institute, a Rockefeller-affiliated international development organization.

Patrick McGowan

Patrick McGowan has spent his career as an inside change leader in several organizations, first in business then in healthcare. He specializes in aligning teams on a common path to achieving better results. For the past decade he has led several system-level change initiatives inside two major Midwest health systems. His work on the CMS Innovation Award resulted in the integration of behavioral health practitioners, processes, and assessments across 33 primary care clinics – an innovation which saw the adoption of a biopsychosocial approach to patient care for thousands of people. He also worked to realign 14 service lines on five strategic aims and two population health goals – collaborating with CEOs and Physician Vice Presidents in practice and technology standardization across multiple hospitals.

Patrick was introduced to the provocative teachings of adaptive leadership when leading the CMS Innovation Award and became a certified in Immunity to Change, a Harvard-based change leadership practice. Since then, he has facilitated over 100 small and large group meetings using adaptive leadership principles, including a series of discipline-specific Design Team meetings with physicians, social workers, and nurses. Patrick holds a Master Business Administration as well as a BA in Journalism. He completed Michael Porter’s

Nqobizitha Ndlovu

Nqo works at the intersection of climate innovation, regenerative systems, finance, biodiversity conservation, clean energy, and public health. With his expertise and network, he spearheads transformative change that centres the voices of marginalized communities. As a seasoned impact investor, facilitator, trainer, and speaker on leadership and change, Nqo has been instrumental in assisting communities and their partners in finding sustainable solutions to complex adaptive problems prevalent in regions across the global south.

 

His efforts extend to building leadership capacity in public entities, corporations, technology organizations, startups, sustainability-focused institutions, and multilateral bodies, enabling the maximum impact of development investments. His comprehensive understanding of the interdependencies among social, environmental, and economic factors serves as a guiding compass for organizations, leading them toward a future that embraces inclusivity and equity in decision-making processes. By promoting the involvement and perspectives of marginalized communities, he fosters a more just and balanced approach to shaping our collective trajectory. An approach he calls Ubuntu.

Winnie Ouko

Winnie is co-founder and a Director of Lattice Consulting Limited, a Kenyan corporate finance, project finance, and strategy advisory firm with a prestigious client base. Winnie has first-rate technical skills in valuation, project finance, financial modeling and analysis, and strategy. She is a gifted trainer and has taught management and executive training programs in many countries in Africa. She previously worked with PricewaterhouseCoopers (Nairobi) and Standard Poors’ (New York). 

Winnie holds an MBA from Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management as well as a Bachelor of Commerce (Honors) from the University of Nairobi, and is a Certified Public Accountant (Kenya). Winnie is an African Leadership Initiative Fellow and sits on the boards of numerous Kenyan companies.

Diane Rawlins

MA, LMHC, founder and president of InsideOut Consulting, Diane partners with healthcare leaders and their teams to meet today’s unprecedented opportunities and challenges. Drawing upon her deep expertise and practice in Adaptive Leadership, Diane strengthens leaders’ capacity to transform organizations by providing them with structured approaches for mindfully achieving outcomes, forging collaborative relationships with diverse stakeholders, developing a mature understanding of self and purpose, and acting with integrity in charged conditions. Diane has worked for over 25 years as a consultant, coach, facilitator and faculty with healthcare leaders and practitioners in the US, UK, and Canada. An early participant in the formation of the positive organizational psychology movement, she collaborated with David Cooperrider as a founding partner of Appreciative Inquiry Consulting, LLC.

In 2001, Diane co-founded Leading Organizations to Health, a nationally acclaimed institute on leading change in healthcare, where she continues to serve as senior faculty. Diane also works closely with Parker J. Palmer as a national facilitator for the Center for Courage & Renewal, where she fosters personal and professional renewal and leadership skills for healthcare professionals. She is a certified professional partner of the Relational Coordination Research Collaborative, based at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy

Trevor Rees

Trevor is a sustainability consultant working in collaboration with a diverse network of associates, colleagues and partners in the UK and internationally. He undertakes short and long-term consultancy assignments covering corporate partnerships, project design/management, strategy, fundraising and the design and delivery of sustainability leadership programmes. Most of Trevor’s work aims to address some kind of sustainability challenge with a response that is systemic and involves collaboration. Current projects include energy-access work focused on using gas flares to provide power for poor communities in the Niger Delta and building sustainable enterprise to reduce the use of firewood in Kenyan tea production. 

He also works with partners in East Africa to look at the challenges and opportunities presented by the developing oil and gas industry in the region. One of his passions is creating opportunities for learning through field-based engagement, creating experiences that challenge assumptions and allow groups and individuals to gain insight and understanding. He is an associate of Talik and Co and a Trustee of INTRAC.