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About TKC

THE KEYNES CENTRE

The Keynes Centre at University College Cork – National University of Ireland is a Centre of Excellence for Leadership Thinking and Practitioner Development based in Cork City in the south of Ireland.

Our academic researchers and business practitioners design and deliver Transformative Thinking Experiences for better leadership in business, politics, and society.

TKC is an applied-research centre directed at translating frontier research into practical solutions for individuals and organisations working at the uncertainties of the world today.

Centred on our innovative concepts of ‘Leadership’, ‘Leadership Mind’ and ‘Leadership Experiences’ our purpose is to:

  • advance leadership by working with ideas grounded in realistic applications to deliver better thinking for decision-making and judging
  • re-think and test practical approaches to adult development based on experiences of people and organisations
  • promote innovative and effective ways of growing and realise the leadership potential in people and organisations
We are committed not only to highlighting what is not working in the field of leadership thinking but also to finding workable solutions in collaboration with practitioners.

Our Approach

Organisational and social transformation flows from personal transformations.

Support is regularly available in the form of new skills, more information, advice, consultancy. While these can address certain problems, they occur only at the Competence level of observable behaviours. As Professor Robert Kegan says, this is leaving many people feeling ‘in over their heads’.

Real development requires trans-form-ation – going beyond current forms of knowing. We work on this at the foundational Capability and the bridging Capacity levels which govern our behaviours.

Our approach to ‘Leadership Development’ is truly transformational, being focused on transforming minds to change behaviours.

Results and Benefits for Participants

As the Centre for Transformative Thinking we work How We Think, not telling people What to Think, as the key to future leadership. Our Experiences for Leadership Development show people the method for Transformative Thinking. By working on this method together, people practice doing it for themselves and can take it into the rest of their lives – true ‘life-long learning’.

Our Leadership Development Experiences and collaborative way of working with people differs from many offerings in Executive Education which often focus on doings for/to people, adding more of the same to unchanged minds.

RESULTS:

Self-Leadership:

  • Enhancement of self-awareness, responsibility, and self-governance through a method for life-long development of minds

Beyond Frameworks:

  • Development of Power of Judgment, the basis for how we lead, strategize, form opinions, and have dialogues with others

Theories Matter:

  • Have greater understanding of the power of theories in thinking and how to use them most effectively as tools of the mind

Attending to Self

  • In our reflective challenging and supporting space the exploration of how growth of meaning-making capability improves decision-making and judgement

Really Lifelong

  • Practice of a Sustainable Transformative Method will guide to ways of expanding how we see the world and interact with new ideas and other people

Organisational Development

  • Organisations can’t think. Only people think. Organisational transformation can only be based on personal transformations.

 

WHO FOR:

The Centre is open to anyone who is open to undertaking transformational development and is interested in learning a method for continuing to self-manage their mind growth.

The Centre has welcomed participants from a wide range of professional backgrounds and life experiences – business executives, farmers, lawyers, engineers,  teachers and retirees. This diversity is also a key to the quality of explorations and enriching of the experiences that people encounter in The Keynes Centre.

Our participants come from large and small organisations in the private, public and non-profit sectors across Ireland, including:

  • The MBA Associaton of Ireland
  • Sea Fisheries Protection Authority
  • VM Ware
  • Stryker
  • Dublin City Council
  • Statsols
  • Gilead 
  • Dell 

STORY OF OUR NAME:

Our work is influenced by real ‘Thought Leaders’. These are different from charismatic people, so-called commercial ‘influencers’, or the self-styled social-media ‘thought leaders’ who send existing ideas to their ‘followers’. We believe everyone can and should be their own thought leader for their own well-being, their organisation’s viability and the general good in society.

That puts focus on How We Think – not on telling people what to think – and our inspiration is drawn from what we call our ‘Source Thinkers’ who contributed major ideas to our lives.

John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) is our first source of motivation and the person we seek to honour with our name. He is a rare example of someone who went through the struggle of escape from old, powerful ways of thinking to develop a new way of thinking about the business economy in a world of fundamental uncertainty.

More About TKC

Find out more about our past events, the TKC team, and browse our photo gallery.

TKC Team

TKC Team

Photo Gallery

Photo Gallery

The Keynes Centre

TRANSFORMING HOW YOU THINK

University College Cork, Ireland,

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