Explore the gallery Leadership Sojourns Ireland This was a journey across Ireland for leaders who recognized that their most complex challenges required more than analytical thinking. They demanded imagination.
Details 8 days | Up to 20 participants
As with every Sojourn, I interviewed and selected each participant.
The Choice of Ireland We chose Ireland because it holds on to something business education (formal and informal) systematically eliminates: imagination as practical intelligence.
While much of Europe moved through waves of industrial rationalization, Ireland preserved what W.B. Yeats called “unity of being”—a way of thinking that blends reason and imagination. Its landscapes, stories, and creative traditions show how imagination isn’t an escape from reality, but a tool for seeing patterns, spotting possibilities, and revealing dimensions others miss.
Neuroscience backs this up. The parts of the brain that power creativity also drive strategic thinking, adaptive leadership, and systems-level insight. We called it “imaginative intelligence.” But those circuits go quiet under pressure, routine, and over-reliance on analysis.
We designed this journey to wake them back up. Through structured experiences across Ireland, we worked to rebuild each participant’s access to imagination, and to show how it can sharpen strategy, unlock new thinking, and lead to better decisions.
Highlights The Economics of Obsessive Quality
Inside Trinity College, we examined the Book of Kells, a 9th-century manuscript made with materials from five countries, pigments mixed from crushed jewels, and detail work so fine it took decades to complete. For the monks, quality wasn’t about luxury. It was about lasting impact. We explored what happens when an organization commits to excellence at a level competitors won’t. What seems inefficient at first often becomes the most durable advantage.
Finding Your Homegrown Advantage
At the Ballymaloe estate, the Allen family sparked Ireland’s culinary renaissance by championing local ingredients when most restaurants imported their food. The visit became a case study in imaginative intelligence: building on what’s specific, available, and already good in your context, rather than chasing what’s new or external. Participants reflected on where their own unfair advantage might be hiding, unnoticed.
Winning the Long Game
At the Cliffs of Moher, we reimagined time. The Atlantic assaults these cliffs, claiming inches of rock, yet over 300 million years the limestone has stood strong. The erosion looks like loss, but what remains endures. It’s where we learned to treat time not as a threat, but as a collaborator.
The Wisdom of the Circle
In evening fireside salons at Gregans Castle, we recreated Ireland’s hedge school tradition: clandestine learning spaces that emerged when 18th-century Penal Laws restricted Catholic education. These informal gatherings taught hundreds of thousands through the collective pursuit of knowledge, with no single authority directing the learning. Participants practiced building the kind of space where people say what needs to be said, and collective intelligence emerges.
Photography by Max Kütz
Fellowship for Inevitable Hosts
