Maxime Fern and Dr. Michael Johnstone - Provocation as Leadership

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Maxime Fern and Michael Johnstone are life and working partners, based in Sydney and Canberra, Australia, where they started their consulting practice (Vantage Point Consulting) in 1988. They have worked as leadership consultants, facilitators, and coaches with clients in the public and private sectors, not-for-profits, and professional service firms for forty years. They were visiting faculty at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University for fifteen years, are on the Faculty Advisory Board of the global Adaptive Leadership Network (Washington, D.C.), and are members of the Inaugural Faculty for the Australian Adaptive Leadership Institute. 

Before starting Vantage Point, Maxime was a development officer for the Australian Public Service, a social health visitor in a low-income neighborhood, and a counseling psychologist for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. She is an Australian National University (Psychology and Politics) graduate with a Master of Educational Counselling from Canberra. Maxime can be found in her gardens, and she practices her Italian on Duolingo in her spare time.

Michael trained as a youth worker and has worked as a town and regional planner, social researcher, and university lecturer in Human Geography and Sociology - and for a while, was a dairy farmer on a kibbutz in Israel. He holds a BA from Auckland University, a Master of Social Science (cum laude) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a Ph.D. from the Australian National University. In his spare time, he likes to read, cook, watch movies, and work in the gym.

They have three children and eight grandchildren and live in Sydney and Lazio, Italy, north of Rome.

Quote From This Episode

• "We wanted to expand people's capacity to think about provocation as something productive, something worthwhile, and that, for leaders, something essential."

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Book: Provocation as Leadership - A Roadmap for Adaptation and Change by Fern and Johnstone
• Book: The Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful Groups by Camilleri, Rockey, and Dunbar
• Book: Musk by Isaacson 

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