IN CONVERSATION

Luisa

Ferreira

Social Impact &

Leadership Development

Q. You've been commissioning work with Kim (and now with Ann) for over a decade. What has kept you coming back?

The results. That's the honest answer. When we first worked together in 2012, we were looking for something that would genuinely shift how NGOs and their volunteers connected with people. What Kim delivered wasn't a standard training — it opened up what people were able to communicate by changing their state of mind. That's a different kind of intervention entirely. And once you've seen that work, you don't go back to the conventional alternatives.

Q. You eventually commissioned a full leadership programme for founders and senior leaders working in impact entrepreneurship across Europe. What were you trying to address?

We were already partnering with business schools, and they were covering a lot of the technical ground well. But there was something else, a set of transformational skills that wasn't being touched. The kind of leadership that the challenges of social impact actually demand. We wanted something that would meet people at that level. The feedback from delegates was consistent: this changed their lives. That's not language people use lightly.

Q. You mention neuroscience as a thread running through the work. How did that land with a room full of impact entrepreneurs?

Kim and Ann have a rare ability to take something that could easily feel academic or inaccessible and make it land in the body — make it something you can actually use in the middle of a difficult conversation or a high-stakes decision. Neuroscience in their hands isn't a lecture. It's a practical toolkit. And for people working at the pace and pressure of impact entrepreneurship, that matters enormously.

Q. You attended the programme yourself, separately from the cohort you'd commissioned it for. What made you decide to do that?

Partly curiosity. I'd been watching others go through it and wanted to understand it from the inside. But honestly, I also felt that if I was going to keep recommending this work, I should know what it was to experience it, not just observe it. What I didn't anticipate was quite how much it would ask of me. Attending this training was like embarking on an expedition to the frontiers of human potential. I mean that seriously, not as a figure of speech.

Q. What made it different from other leadership development you'd encountered?

The structure was rigorous — properly rooted in theory, not just experiential for its own sake. But it never stayed abstract. Everything was immediately practical, immediately applicable. And it was designed with a clear intention: not just to build leadership skills, but to cultivate a genuine orientation toward change and possibility. Those two things don't always go together in leadership development. Here they were inseparable.

Q. You mention neuroscience as a thread running through the work. How did that land with a room full of impact entrepreneurs?

Kim and Ann have a rare ability to take something that could easily feel academic or inaccessible and make it land in the body — make it something you can actually use in the middle of a difficult conversation or a high-stakes decision. Neuroscience in their hands isn't a lecture. It's a practical toolkit. And for people working at the pace and pressure of impact entrepreneurship, that matters enormously.

Q. You said it reshaped your approach to leadership and redefined your understanding of decision making. Can you say more about that?

What shifted was something quite fundamental about where decisions come from and whether I was actually drawing on my full capacity or operating from a much narrower, more reactive place. The programme gave me a different relationship with that question. I make decisions differently now. I lead differently. And perhaps most unexpectedly, it has had a profound effect on my private life too. The work doesn't stay at the office door.

Q. For someone weighing whether to pursue this kind of development, what would you want them to know?

That the pace of today's challenges requires a different quality of leadership than most of us were trained for. Business school gives you frameworks. This gives you access to yourself as a leader, which turns out to be the thing that was missing. For anyone serious about closing that gap, working with Kim and Ann isn't optional.

In Converstion - curious

What would your leaders do with

their full capacity

Curious about broadening impact in your leadership team? You can book a 30 minute Zoom call here or reach out through our contact page.