Circular Leadership
Your sustainability strategy is approved. So, why is nothing actually changing?
Dates: 31 May – 4 June 2027
Location: Hotel Miramare, Crikvenica Riviera, Croatia
Workshop Leader: Dr Gordana Kierans.
Your reality?
The board approved the strategy. The pilots are running. The reports are filed on time.
And eighteen months in, nothing structural has changed. The circularity roadmap lives in slide decks, middle management quietly deprioritises it, and every quarter you defend a transformation that has not yet transformed anything. Meanwhile the pressure only builds: CSRD and CSDDD deadlines, customers auditing your supply chain, investors pricing in transition risk, and competitors who seem to be moving faster with less.
Here is the uncomfortable truth: you are not failing from lack of will, budget, or effort. You are failing from lack of leverage. Most transformation initiatives target symptoms, not the underlying structures that keep the old system in place. Work harder inside the wrong structure and the structure wins every time.
I have spent a decade consulting, coaching, and teaching circular transformation, including four years as a professor at Shenzhen Technology University and my current board work with the Circle Economy Foundation in Amsterdam. I have watched capable, committed leaders repeat the same pattern in Europe, the Gulf, Africa and Asia: strong strategy, weak leverage, stalled change.
In this programme I will be three things for you at once: a calm voice, a devil’s advocate, and a guide. You bring your real transformation challenge. Together we find where your system will actually move.
Ready?
Bring your stalled transformation. Your organisation is the case study all week. No generic exercises, no fictional companies.
Find your leverage. You map your system, locate the points where intervention actually changes behaviour, and match circular strategies to your organisation’s real capabilities.
Leave with a tested plan. On Day 5 you present your integrated intervention strategy and have it stress-tested by peers who face the same pressures, and by me.
What you leave with?
Developing this externally would take a consulting retainer and six months. You will do it in five days, with your own hands, so you can defend every line of it to your board.
Who should attend?
This programme is for senior leaders who carry responsibility for transformation, not only for sustainability reporting. You will benefit most if you are a:
You do not need prior training in circular economy or systems thinking. You do need a real transformation challenge to work on: every framework in the programme is applied directly to your own organisation. Participation is limited to keep discussion at genuine peer level.
Why five days?
Five days away from the office is the real price of this programme, and it deserves a straight answer.
Leverage cannot be found in a webinar. It takes time to map a system honestly, admit which initiatives are cosmetic, test interventions against resistance, and rebuild a strategy you believe in. Compressed formats produce inspiration; this format produces a plan. You return on Monday not with notes, but with an intervention strategy your board can see, question, and fund.
The five-day journey
Each day builds on the previous one. Mornings establish the lens; afternoons you apply it to your own organisation.
| Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 |
| Circular Economy | Systems Thinking and Mapping | Leverage Points | Circular Strategies | Stakeholders and Integration |
| Regenerative Leadership | Systems Leadership | Complexity Leadership | Transformational Leadership | Implementation |
The programme follows a carefully sequenced progression, where each day builds upon the previous one:
Day 1: See your business the way the system sees it
You start by confronting why the linear take-make-waste model is failing your organisation specifically: where value leaks out, where risk accumulates, where regulation is heading. Then you run a biomimicry-inspired audit of your own processes and reinterpret your waste streams as potential resources. This is not symbolic. It exposes structural inefficiencies you have stopped seeing. You close the day with regenerative leadership: moving beyond doing less harm to leading for long-term system health, drawing on living-systems thinking rather than short-term performance optics.
Day 2: Map where your transformation is actually stuck
You learn to read feedback loops, delays, and the mental models that quietly steer your organisation’s behaviour. Then you build a systems map of your own organisation or value chain: interdependencies, material flows, points of friction. Most participants discover their initiative is stuck somewhere different from where they assumed. You end the day with systems leadership: the shift from controlling internal structures to influencing the wider system, from exercising authority to seeing the whole, fostering honest reflection, and co-creating the future with actors you do not control.
Day 3: Decide where your political capital actually belongs
Building on Donella Meadows’s work, you analyse why well-intentioned initiatives fail: they target symptoms, not structures. Using your Day 2 map, you identify the leverage points in your own system and separate deep interventions from the shallow actions that consume budget and deliver headlines. In the afternoon you turn to complexity leadership: in a complex environment, circular transformation cannot be implemented top-down. You face a disruption scenario and practise enabling adaptive, network-oriented responses, working with emergence instead of fighting it.
Day 4: Choose your circular strategy and learn to sell it
You work through the 9Rs as a hierarchy of value retention, not a checklist, and test circular business models against your organisation’s real capabilities and constraints. Expect hard discussion of trade-offs and the gap between theoretical potential and what you can actually implement. In the afternoon you turn to transformational leadership: articulating a vision your stakeholders will follow, inspiring and intellectually challenging your people rather than merely instructing them, using our long-established Communicate-Convince-Connect framework. Communication is treated here as a strategic capability, not a supporting function.
Day 5: Present your strategy. Defend it. Refine it.
You examine stakeholder dynamics, power structures, and the sources of resistance that undermine transformation, and you build governance and incentives into your plan. Then the week moves from leadership theory to implementation: you present your integrated intervention strategy, combining your system analysis, leverage points, circular strategy, and leadership approach. Your peers and I challenge it. You leave with a plan that has already survived its first round of resistance.
Your investment
Your fee of €3,200 (excl. VAT) covers the complete five-day programme:
Accommodation is not included. Hotel Miramare offers preferential rates for programme participants – details on registration.
The cost of another year of incremental change
You can keep funding pilots that do not scale, defending a roadmap that does not move, and hoping the next reorganisation fixes what the last one did not. The deadlines will not wait, and neither will your competitors.
Or you can spend five days finding the leverage, and return with a strategy built to survive contact with your own organisation.
Places are limited to keep discussion at genuine peer level.
Not ready to register?
Book a 15-minute call with Gordana to discuss whether the programme fits your challenge. No pitch, just a straight conversation.
Registration
Places are limited to keep the room small. Secure yours below. Prefer to pay by invoice? Click on “Request an Invoice” below.
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