Motivational Speaking
Lisa Fitzhugh
Past Keynotes

A collection of excerpts from past keynote speeches that touch on leadership, introspection, creativity, stepping up, and more.

Past Keynotes
Team Building
Lisa Fitzhugh
Adventure on the High Seas

This essay was based on a vivid and disturbing dream. It describes a large ship of adolescents trying to sail into a fierce storm, unable to harness the power of their collective courage and creativity to save themselves.  It speaks to what’s needed for any team to assemble well and survive such times. 

Adventure on the High Seas
Creativity
Lisa Fitzhugh
A Fool's Errand

In this essay, I highlight the essential role of the fool and his/her capacity to challenge our assumptions about what we accept as the truth, the key to any creative endeavor worth its salt. This may be more relevant now in 2025 than when I wrote it in 2021.

A Fool's Errand
Team Building
Lisa Fitzhugh
An Act of Imagination

During the pandemic we had different experiences of the lockdowns, the virus, and other people’s choices.  I encourage people to consider that we are, each of us, afraid of different things. So if something scary is happening ‘out there,’ it’s important that some people hold less fear, otherwise the collective nervous system would collapse under the strain. 

An Act of Imagination
Leadership Coaching
Lisa Fitzhugh
Leading From the Inside Out

How we lead is directly related to how well we tend to our inner emotional and psychic landscape. Whatever untended ‘business’ inside of us will be projected onto the people around us, especially if we hold more positional authority.   

Leading From the Inside Out

Tools Methods Influences

Team of Teams

General Stanley McCrystal, who led American troops in Iraq under President Obama, reinvented methods for collective sense- and decision-making in highly volatile, constantly changing conditions.  He has since left the military and consults with companies around the world who know that older leadership models have become increasingly defunct and new ways of leading are required for these times. 

McCrystal’s approach focuses on developing coherent team dynamics with the highest levels of trust, pushing decision-making much closer to the level of execution, and the practice of transparency by senior leadership to be much more forthcoming with the information needed for everyone to make better decisions.  Sharing information on a ‘need to know’ basis was no longer working.  Transparency has become an essential pathway to growing organizational resiliency.  This methodology aligns very closely with my approach to team building and leadership development.

Team of Teams: https://www.mcchrystalgroup.com/docs/default-source/playbooks/team-of-teams-summary.pdf?sfvrsn=8f00a506_7

Immunity to Change

Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey at Harvard’s Graduate School for Education have developed potent learning tools to help leaders shift from old behaviors and step into new ones.  Most of my work with leaders incorporates at least a few of these tools, in particular their Immunity to Change Map.  This map is designed to articulate a primary ‘learning edge’ for an individual as well as the undermining patterns, fears and beliefs—their immunity to change--that hold them back from growth and evolution.  

Kegan and Lahey share their extensive organizational development research in several publications including An Everyone Culture: Becoming A Deliberately Developmental Organization and Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization.  

For a good summary of their approach and its impacts, see this overview about their work from Harvard’s website.  

https://www.gse.harvard.edu/hgse100/story/changing-better