By Alex Van Tol

One of the great things about the way the world is changing is that people are more open than ever before to sharing their challenges. There’s a lot of talk about truth, openness and vulnerability (hat tip, Brene Brown), and although there are no metrics for this kind of thing, when you look around, maybe you’ve also started noticing that it just sort of … feels better out there. More human.

Sure, we’re still eager to read and listen to stories about people who knock it out of the park. We love a good success story, because it provides hope. But there’s a deeper hunger — a growing hunger — for the real stories. The gritty ones. The things that bring people to their knees as lovers, as leaders, as entrepreneurs, as humans. Those hit-the-wall moments that knock us, spinning, into a place of utter chaos and failure — but that also open the door to our greatest growth.

In 2016, Roy Group’s Special Advisor Jim Hayhurst and co-founder Ian Chisholm partnered with VIATEC to bring exactly these stories to the Victoria business scene. Together, we host F*ckup Nights, a global movement where people gather together to listen to other people’s stories about business failure. F*ckup Nights runs in 318 cities worldwide, and it’s growing. The stories are raw, riveting and inspiring. They might deliver key lessons; they might even deliver some new tools; but most of all, they knit us closer together by sharing snapshots of our common, fear-driven, ego-ridden humanness — and the rewarding road out.

More about F*ckup Nights in Douglas magazine

By Alex Van Tol

With his crack team of advisors at Roy Group, social innovator and business yoda Ian Chisholm is shaping this city’s leaders into
world-class mentors.

Ian Chisholm — Chiz to those who know him — is pretty open about being a bit of a zealot: he sees leadership in everybody. And, after decades of guiding people to bring only their best selves to every single interaction, he’s become one of Western Canada’s most in-demand organizational alchemists, working with government ministries as well as organizations like Fountain Tire, ATB Wealth, West Point Grey Academy, St. Michaels University School and Fraser Academy.

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By Ian Chisholm and Mark Bell

• “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
• Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

As leadership development practitioners, we often receive requests to design indelible learning events: experiences that will be utterly unforgettable for everyone who takes part and whose impact will far exceed the event itself. In the field of executive development, forums like this are complex, elusive, high-touch masterpieces calculated to connect with sophisticated consumers and to amplify, augment and anchor the impact of other high-tech learning strategies.

We recently orchestrated such a gathering, inviting key players from all of the different teams and client organizations that we serve. Unexpectedly, the gathering developed a formidable purpose that was more important, more relevant and more necessary than any of its designers or participants anticipated or planned for: The creative leadership required from everyone involved in bringing this experience to life was exactly the kind of leadership that the experience itself had been designed to develop.

How does one imagine, design and deliver an indelible learning event? Here we reflect on our process and present the key choices we made along the way.

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Photo credit: By Strobridge Litho. Co., Cincinnati & New York. Restoration by trialsanderrors and Morn – This file was derived from: Zan Zig performing with rabbit and roses, magician poster, 1899.jpg:, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19060350

By Bob Chartier

It is mid afternoon and Bob, an executive vice president of a well known high tech company must decide what strategy to take in upcoming negotiations around a major international deal. He has scheduled a session with his ‘coach’ to help think it through. His coach, Nathan, is a young man from a local west coast First Nation.

Unlike most executive coaching sessions, Nathan is not an executive, and the relationship is two-way — Bob shares his experience with Nathan. These two are about to embark on a real time coaching experience that could cover closing a major offshore deal to finding a way off the mean streets of Vancouver.

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