Reserved for leaders who are ready to stop just managing the pressure - and begin to THRIVE™ within it
Join us on 11-12 July for two immersive days in Lichtensteig, Switzerland, a town that is already doing what we are going there to explore, or if the dates don’t work for you join us in Amsterdam instead on 25-26 July. Choose the city and the dates that suit you. A small, intentional group of leaders. Four expert faculty. A methodology grounded in decades of Harvard-based research. And a rare offer: come as our guest, experience the work, and decide for yourself what it was truly worth.
Day One standalone, or Day One and Two for the expanded experience.
You are capable. You are committed. And right now, you are carrying more than any single leader should have to carry - decisions, teams, politics, boards, budgets, and a world that keeps changing faster than your plans can keep up with.
Most leadership development gives you more to carry. More frameworks. More models. More to implement on top of everything you are already managing.
This is different. This works at the level of the person behind every decision, every relationship, and every choice you make. Not your strategy - YOU. Your capacity to see more clearly, lead more powerfully, and navigate complexity without it costing you everything you have.
Backed by decades of Harvard-based research: develop the leader, and everything they touch - their teams, their decisions, their organisation, their city - becomes more potent, more purposeful, more capable of the impact that matters.
And, It starts with three questions. Most leaders have never answered before.
Why do I see different challenges in the same situation than other leaders do?
How does the leadership maturity stage from which I lead shape every decision I make?
What becomes visible to me when I grow into my next leadership developmental stage?
The way you see the world is the product of your history, your experiences, your biology, and the developmental stage you are currently living and leading from. What matters is that it can evolve - if you attend to it with intention.
We help bring that intention. Most programs give you more tools. This one develops the person holding them. It works at the level of meaning-making itself: the worldview from which you act, decide, and relate.
Grounded in Dr Susanne Cook-Greuter's Leadership Maturity Framework, developed through decades of research at Harvard, and brought into the city leadership context through the Integral U© framework of Dr Paddy Pampallis - the way you make meaning shapes who you see as a stakeholder, what you count as a challenge worth addressing, and which futures you can even imagine.
This is vertical development: nurturing a genuinely deeper foundation to lead from - because leaders at more mature stages navigate complexity with greater ease, engage a wider range of people, and create more durable, regenerative change.
We are confident in what we have to offer, therefore, you are invited as our guest. Come with nothing required of you but your presence, openness and your truth. At the close of the program, sit with what you received. If something shifted - if a new awareness opened, if you leave with something you can actually use - we warmly invite you to contribute what it was worth to you.
The program value is normally £899 per day, or £1,499 for both. What you give is entirely at your discretion: the full amount, a portion of it, or nothing at all. All are received with the same openness.
What matters most is that you are genuinely present - for yourself and for the group you will join.
We offer this training without a fixed charge because we want to remove any barrier you may have and we repeatedly witness the powerful impact of this, room after room. We have tested it, refined it, and seen what it does in the room. Come and experience that for yourself.
This program is designed for leaders, like you, who are already doing significant work in the world - and who sense that a higher level of performance and impact is available to them.
The Swiss Leadership Edge certificate is a document you can present to citizens, councils, and partners - not just keep in a drawer. It names what you learned and what you committed to.
Day One is a full, coherent experience in itself. You will leave with a new and personal lens on your own leadership, a deeper understanding of how developmental maturity shapes the way leaders see, decide, and relate - and a concrete commitment to carry meaningfully back into your work. Day Two is an invitation to go further. For those who feel called to continue, it takes everything opened on the first day into deeper, more personal territory - working directly with who you are in relation to the people, teams, and systems you lead. Come for one day, or stay for both. Either delivers a complete experience.
“"What does the world look like from where I am standing - and what becomes visible when I move?"”
This question opens the program. It returns at the close of every half-day.
A Personal Lens That Makes the Work Directly Your Own.
The Maturity Profile is an individual assessment that offers a lens onto your current centre of gravity in the developmental landscape - how you make meaning, where you are most fluent, and where your growing edges lie. It is the instrument that gives everything in the program a direct, personal dimension.
completing the profile is your choice. The day holds its full value with or without it. What it adds is intimacy - the ability to meet every concept and every conversation not just intellectually, but as a direct reflection of where you are in your own leadership journey. We strongly encourage it.
the profile is essential. The work of the second day moves into deeply personal territory: how you relate to the people you lead, your teams, your patterns under pressure, your growing edges in working with others. Without knowing where you are standing, that work cannot reach you the way it is designed to. The profile is the ground it is built on.
if, at the close of the program, you find yourself wanting to take this work all the way home, you are warmly invited to book a one-on-one coaching session with one of our lead facilitators. Your profile and your experience of the two days becomes the foundation for a deeply personal next step.
Cost of the Maturity assessment: EUR 80, paid separately.
Facilitated by Dr Paddy Pampallis, Lev Gordon, Ferial Puren, and Dr Robert Fischer. All times are Swiss local time (Central European Time, CET).
Day One closes with a full integration and personal commitment session - a complete experience for those not continuing to Day Two.
Each facilitator brings a distinct and complementary depth. Their collaboration across the two days is itself a live demonstration of what mature, multi-perspectival leadership looks like in practice.
“"How consciousness shapes the decisions that shape our cities."”
Paddy is a qualified psychologist and psychotherapist who also holds one of the world's first three doctorates in executive coaching and is the co-architect of the Global Mayors Academy's City Leaders Program. She has worked alongside Dr Susanne Cook-Greuter - Harvard-based pioneer of the Leadership Maturity Framework - for over two decades, bringing that depth into the city leadership context through her unique Integral U© approach. She serves as faculty at Meridian University, the University of Cape Town, and the Da Vinci Institute, and is co-founder of the Ubuntu Coaching Foundation. Her work rests on a conviction at the heart of GMA: that the quality of our cities emerges from the maturity of the consciousness shaping them.
“"Cultivating the response-ability to lead in service of life."”
With 25 years of experience at the intersection of regenerative city transformation, leadership development, and whole-system change, Ferial co-architects the Global Mayors Academy's City Leaders Program alongside Dr Paddy Pampallis. A Harvard Business School alumna with a foundational background in architecture and design, her deep investment in her own personal development has woven these disciplines into a multidimensional intelligence that serves to cultivate the conditions in which individuals - and the cities they serve - can truly thrive. She co-founded Living Cities Earth as an action-research ecosystem, now convening 130+ co-founders across systems thinking, city building, policy, and transformational leadership.
“"Inspiring leaders to co-create cities where life truly thrives."”
Lev brings over 30 years of global experience across more than 35 countries in business, leadership development, and city transformation. He holds an Executive MBA from Columbia Business School and has completed executive education at Harvard Business School and London Business School. After shaping multi-billion-dollar platforms at ING, he dedicated the last decade to supporting city leaders through executive coaching and integral development - bridging every developmental concept with the lived realities of urban complexity.
“"The inner life of leaders shapes the outer reality of cities."”
Trained as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Robert brings decades of clinical and developmental experience to his work with city leaders. His practice explores how individuals relate to the fundamental dimensions of human existence - identity, meaning, love, responsibility, and mortality - and how these deeper layers shape the way people perceive, relate, and lead. He supports leaders to become more conscious of the emotional patterns and personal narratives that quietly drive their decisions, turning the friction of worldview encounters into developmental insight.
Inspired by the work of Dr Susanne Cook-Greuter, pioneer of Ego Development Theory and creator of the Leadership Maturity Framework at Harvard University; Integral Theory (Wilber); Existential Psychology; African and indigenous philosophy woven into Integral U© by Dr Paddy Pampallis; and Integral Cities by Dr Marilyn Hamilton.
Lichtensteig is a small, historic town in the Toggenburg valley of the Saint Gallen canton, one hour east of Zurich - home to one of the most remarkable stories of civic renewal in contemporary Europe. When the textile industry that had sustained the town for generations relocated overseas, Lichtensteig lost more than half its population. Shops closed. Streets emptied. What remained was a fraction of a community - and a question: what do you do when the world your city was built around no longer exists?
What happened next is why we chose to host this training here. Under the leadership of Matthias Müller - the town's President and our host for these two days - the people of Lichtensteig chose to answer that question together. They did not look for a new industry to replace the old one. They asked what they wanted to become, and built toward it. Today, almost every citizen is either leading or actively participating in a local development project. The population has returned to what it was at its peak. The town is alive - not with what it used to be, but with something it chose to become.
We will gather in one of the town's historic buildings, now transformed into a vibrant space for co-working, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation. During our time here, we will more deeply understand the story of Lichtensteig's renewal firsthand - from a town that treats transformation as a living, ongoing practice. The town has come far, and precisely because of that, Matthias and his team understand that the work of development never stops. The environment keeps changing, and so must the people who lead it. That ongoing commitment to development is not incidental to why we are there - it is the spirit that makes this the right place for this training.
In 2026, Lichtensteig became one of the campus sites for the Global Mayors Academy.
The setting, and the people in it, are part of the learning - a rare opportunity to be surrounded by radical transformation in action, across every dimension of these two days.
This same two-day program - the same four faculty, the same developmental arc - is also being offered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on 25-26 July 2026, for those who cannot make the Lichtensteig dates.
Amsterdam carries its own distinct lesson in how leadership maturity affects impact. For centuries, the city has existed only because its people learned to govern collectively - reclaiming land from water through cooperation, negotiation, and shared responsibility. More recently, Amsterdam became one of the first cities in the world to officially adopt a new model for measuring civic success - choosing the wellbeing of its people and its planet over growth alone. A city, like Lichtensteig, that has chosen - again and again - what it wants to become.
Pick the city and the dates that work for you - and claim your place below.
Note: If you choose Amsterdam, we will be in touch with all the details you need.
And begin to THRIVE™ - from the inside out.
