About
Humanum
is a personal and leadership development organisation founded by Nicholas Bradbury in 2016.
Humanum
is founded on an ambition and passion to transform lives, enable wellbeing, promote diversity
and enrich society. Its approach is adaptive and flexible. We work as co-creating partners, catalysts and facilitators more than teachers, willing to share but not impose what we have learned.
Nicholas became aware of the common shortcomings in leadership development in the 1970s and developed more effective methods using experience and appreciation and taking account of unconscious processes.
Each participant is invited to own their personal and professional development, be open to increased self-awareness, transform defenses into self-confidence and so enjoy warmer and more satisfying inter-personal relationships.
What is Humanum?
What does the word humanum
mean?
The word humanum derives from the feminine Latin noun humus meaning ground, earth or soil. This became the adjective meaning
both human and humane, humanus, humana, humanum.
From 1969-75 The Humanum Studies of the World Council of Churches, under the Direction of the brilliant David E. Jenkins (former Bishop of Durham), researched not all that’s involved in being human but, more modestly, if still ambitiously, ‘what is distinctively necessary for our existence to be a human existence’ (The Humanum Studies 1969-1975. WCC. Geneva. 1975 p.5).
Humanum is inspired and influenced by these studies. Today when the geopolitical and environmental situation is so uncertain and inequalities so extreme and when Artificial Intelligence is developing so rapidly and, for all its opportunities, worryingly, the questions involved in what is distinctively human have never been so apt or urgent.
In leadership this issue comes to the fore because good leadership always prioritises what promotes the human and enhances human wellbeing. In ethics the means never justifies the end. Yet in government regulation processes, societal institutions, organisations, teams and families de-humanising leadership frequently prevails. Humanum rejects and strenuously resists this wrong approach to leadership. It aims to develop leaders as fully thinking, rounded and wise human beings.
What exactly do we offer?
Full scale leadership development programmes for up to 24 participants
Collaborative development across organisational boundaries
Systems interventions to achieve improved wellbeing outcomes or care pathways
Away days
Cultural transformation
Cross-sector work
Interpersonal skills development
Board, team, group, couple or individual development
Development involving music, drama and the arts
Conflict resolution
Executive coaching
Key outcomes for Humanum are:
Spontaneous negative judgements changed into curiosity, questioning and compassion
To think systemically and across boundaries so as to see complex interdependencies
Insight into what I need to know but do not yet know I need to know (like a tennis player who has never heard of backhand)
The skill to ask powerful catalytic open questions that force someone to think for themselves
To stop trying to control and learn to influence by role-modelling and dialogue
Understanding that compassion for self is a prerequisite for compassion for others
To know and name feelings, to feel them fully and to bracket them where appropriate
Enhanced creativity and increased powers of imagination
To learn to learn
What is the key challenge in Leadership Development that Humanum
is addressing?
The key challenge is to enable leaders in every role and at every level to empower staff and colleagues (rather than control and micro-manage them). It is to enable all leaders to prioritise human relationships and gain the self-awareness, compassion and interpersonal skills to do so.
This sounds obvious. Isn’t this what most leadership development does at the moment?
Unfortunately not. There are three common problems:
- It is far too superficial. It stays ‘in the head’ at the level of ‘knowledge and understanding’ and fails to engage the heart and gut
- It fails to contract with those concerned that this work requires a personal inquiry; a profound exploration of the self that the participant must own and take responsibility for to enable personal transformation
- It avoids the experiential psychodynamic learning basic to increasing self-awareness and perceiving how unconscious processes are playing out in the system, organisation, group and self.
About Nicholas
Nicholas has facilitated leadership for over 40 years, for some of this time as NBLD (Nicholas Bradbury Leadership Development). To create Humanum, Nicholas stepped down from his role as Head of System Leadership at the NHS Leadership Academy (2013-16) where he was also Director of Nursing and Midwifery Leadership Development. He was a Senior Fellow of the King’s Fund from 2002 – 2013 where he directed a wide range of programmes for doctors, managers, clinicians and community leaders including the Top Manager Programme and Leadership for Senior Managers. From 2010 he was on the faculty of NHS Top Leaders.
Nicholas has long and wide experience in the design and delivery of development interventions. While a Senior Fellow of the King’s Fund he did this for over 30 healthcare organisations including the Bristol Royal Children’s Hospital, Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, the National Orthopaedic Hospital, The Royal Free and University College of London Hospital (UCLH), the Irish Health Service Executive, Macmillan, the Naomi Children’s and Willan Hospices, the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health, and the South Central Strategic Health Authority.
He is the author of two books:
City of God? Pastoral Care in the Inner City,
(SPCK New Library of Pastoral Care, 1989)
The Practical Theology of Pierre-André Liégé: Radical Dominican and Vatican II Pioneer, (Ashgate Publishing, 2015 – Paperback published by Routledge, 2018)