Transformative Leadership

Concentration Description Selected Courses Academic Structure Learning Format

Concentration Description

The Transformative Leadership concentration emphasizes coursework aligned with practice in contexts such as executive coaching, developmental assessment, and management of deliberately developmental organizations. 

Practices, methods, ideas, and topics engaged within this concentration’s courses, by way of example, include: culture as strategy, ritualization, liminal capabilities, and perspectival capability.

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

—Arundhati Roy

Selected Concentration Courses

Meridian courses aligned with this concentration include:

  • Foundations of Transformative Leadership
  • Developmental Assessment
  • Post-conventional Development
  • Models of Self-Identity Development
  • Human Development

Academic Structure

Meridian’s academic structure gives students the flexibility to navigate the University’s curricular architecture in ways that match their passions, professional goals, and other life commitments.

The structure is designed to serve a diverse student body, who live around the globe, have varied cultural and clinical visions for their careers, and are at different stages in their professional journey.

Students enroll in a degree program, can elect a concentration, and register for one or multiple courses each quarter. In addition to core courses for the specific degree program and anchor courses that represent the Transformative Learning intent of Meridian’s curriculum, students select elective courses that align with their Meridian concentration, background, and career path.

Learning Formats

Hybrid Format

Meridian’s hybrid learning format combines online courses with onsite weeklong residential intensives. The hybrid learning format is designed to enable students to pursue their graduate education at a flexible pace, combining asynchronous coursework via the University’s custom social learning platform, Pivot, live course video calls with faculty, synchronous student community engagement, and one-week residential intensives. By combining innovative online education methodologies with rich video calls and deep residential connections, the hybrid format enables students to contribute locally and perceive globally.

Each quarter, students take one or multiple seven-week online courses. This schedule provides students with time between quarters to rest, engage, and prepare. Additionally, students attend at least two weeklong onsite residential intensives per academic year. Intensives run Monday through Friday throughout the year, with residential intensives taking place at Meridian’s Bay Area Center and other globally distributed locations.

Online Format

In Meridian's online learning format, students can complete 100% of their coursework degree requirements online. Virtual intensives are also available for students who choose not to travel to residential intensives. Students can select intensive dates, locations, and formats based on their personal circumstances and professional aspirations.

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"A culture provides an individual with a mapping of time and space, but as the culture goes through a period of change and stressful transformation, this map becomes distorted. In periods of intense cultural distortion, the map becomes so changed as to be almost obliterated. For some this can be a moment of terror, for others, a time of release… The old forms fall away, there comes a new receptivity, a new centering inward, and in an instant there flashes onto the screen of consciousness a new re-visioning of the map. There in the receptive silences of meditation new possibilities of time and space announce themselves, possibilities that lie beyond the descriptions of the old institutions of the old culture. This is the prophetic moment, the annunciation of a new myth, and the beginning of a new culture."

— REMEMBERING WILLIAM IRWIN THOMPSON, 1938 – 2020