Better questions, wiser leaders: Conscious Consulting at SPJIMR
15 October 2026
What if leadership could be more conscious, compassionate, and wise?
SPJIMR’s Centre for Wisdom in Leadership (CWIL) put that question to Julia Culen and Christian Mayhofer, Co-founders of the Conscious Consulting Group (CCG), who joined the SPJIMR community for the Faculty Excellence Forum (FEF) and a session for Fellow Programme in Management (FPM) scholars.
Bringing together decades of experience in executive coaching, organisational transformation, leadership, and wisdom traditions, Julia and Christian offer a distinctive perspective on bridging wisdom, compassion, and presence with contemporary business and leadership. They have spent over a decade addressing such questions and exploring whether leadership education can keep pace with disruption, uncertainty and the rise of artificial intelligence.
Explore the highlights of their sessions at SPJIMR:
Faculty Excellence Forum: Rethinking business, leadership and change
The FEF session, ‘Conscious Consulting – Rethinking Business, Leadership, and Change in a Complex World’, invited faculty to look beyond problem-solving and expert advice. Through examples, reflection and discussion, it drew on international consulting experience, systemic thinking, modern business practice and wisdom traditions to explore how leaders can navigate complexity.
Key takeaways
- Old approaches have reached their limits. Rapid change, disruption and complexity call for a new paradigm in consulting, leadership and management.
- Move beyond problem-solving and expert advice. Conscious Consulting enables insight, awareness and sustainable transformation.
- Better questions matter more than right answers. The future of leadership may depend on asking better questions, seeing systems more clearly, reaching different conclusions and creating conditions for new possibilities to emerge.
- A wider lens helps leaders navigate disruption. Systemic thinking and wisdom traditions, combined with business practice, equip leaders for the generational task of transformation.
- Leadership works at three levels. Leading self, leading others and shaping organisations in the interwoven ecosystem of our planet.
- Timeless insights meet today’s challenges. Human wisdom connects directly with contemporary business problems.
- Meaningful change begins with reflection. Participants were invited to rethink how change happens and what role they can play in the transformation of the whole.
Ph.D. scholars’ session: a dialogue with researchers
The second session was open to all researchers, scholars and practitioners. It gave FPM scholars a chance to engage directly with two authors whose work sits at the intersection of practice, theory and wisdom traditions. Consciousness in organisations, leadership maturity and systemic change are themes that offer fertile ground for doctoral inquiry.
Building a culture of wisdom in leadership
The sessions reflect the purpose of CWIL: to make wisdom, compassion and presence part of how SPJIMR thinks about leadership. By inviting global voices into faculty forums and doctoral conversations, SPJIMR keeps its own scholarship in dialogue with the international research community.