Our Story

Gervase Bushe

Ph.D., Partner

Gervase is the Professor of Leadership and Organization Development at the Beedie School of Business, Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, which is ranked in the top 100 management research universities in the world. He is an award-winning author of over 100 articles and books on leadership, teams, and organizational change. Gervase has been rated one of the world’s most influential thinkers in “people strategy” every year since 2016 by HR Magazine.

The 80s

In the 1980s Gervase was involved in redesigning, delayering, and empowering companies in the move to team-based organizing. When research showed that many of the most collaborative organizations reverted to command and control within 6-8 years, he began a program of study to understand why, and what was needed to sustain collaborative organizing. In the 1990s he developed new insights into the problems that well-intentioned leaders and professionals that wanted to work collaboratively created, unknowingly, for themselves. He took the results of his research into his coaching with leaders and developed the set of models that were published in the first edition of Clear Leadership in 2001.

The Course

When he coached senior leaders on his models and methods, they wanted a way to train all their employees in these collaboration skills, so he developed the Clear Leadership Course with the intention of having the internal training function of these companies teach the program. What he didn’t expect was that leadership development professionals from around the world would want to translate and take the program into their own markets. After eight years of experience implementing Clear Leadership in diverse organizations, and the spread of the course growing organically, Gervase revised the models and course and published the second edition of Clear Leadership in 2010.

Now, ten years later, we are making another major change, evolving Clear Leadership from a course, to a learning journey for leaders and professionals who are committed to deepening their relational mastery and managing the irrational side of organizations, rationally.