Dr Desley Lodwick
Transforming Knowledge.
Deepening Insight.
Cultivationg Wisdom.
do you>
Envision a new, unconventional chapter in your life, but feel uncertain about what it might be like?
Wonder how stepping away from traditional leadership roles will affect your identity and influence?
Feel that there's something more for you to accomplish—something deeply aligned with your values and a legacy focused on people?
Value personal growth and lifelong learning?
AI and Human Coaching
AI offers powerful scalability and data-driven insights, but it falls short on the relational depth and contextual nuance needed for adaptive, ethical leadership. Over-relying on it risks reducing coaching to transactional skill-building—missing the deeper growth leaders need in a complex world.
To lead effectively, we need both:
Horizontal Learning
– Building technical skills and know-how for routine challenges.
Vertical Development
– Cultivating deeper insight, adaptability, and sense-making to navigate uncertainty and complexity.
Our hybrid approach combines AI-supported skill-building with human-led coaching, bringing together the best of both worlds to support meaningful and transformative progress.
AI INTEGRATION:
Horizontal Learning
it's about WHAT you know>
AI enhances efficiency and scalability by reinforcing technical skills and providing data-driven feedback.
Horizontal learning equips leaders with the technical skills and knowledge to address well defined problems. AI can play a powerful role here by:
Providing consistent, data-driven feedback.
Customising learning experiences to individual needs.
Tracking progress and reinforcing skill acquisition.
While valuable for routine tasks and clear challenges, horizontal learning alone is insufficient to address the complexities of today’s leadership environments. This is where vertical development becomes critical.
Contextualist Coaching:
Vertical Development
it's about HOW you think >
Human Coaching that focuses on relational depth, adaptive capacity, and advanced sense-making, fostering the transformative growth necessary to navigate complexity.
Vertical development is about transforming how leaders perceive and respond to complexity, enabling them to:
Integrate diverse perspectives.
Foster adaptability and innovation.
Lead with emotional intelligence and systemic awareness.
Unlike horizontal learning, vertical development often requires reflective conversations and relational depth—areas where AI falls short.
Human coaches bring empathy, contextual understanding, and the ability to support profound self-awareness, all of which are critical for fostering this level of growth.
AMPLIFY Wisdom Coach Development
We offer a progressive pathway to becoming a contextualist coach through three immersive programs crafted to meet your needs.
Programs build on each other, blending depth, insight, and practical development to empower you at every stage of your journey towards impactful coaching.
In addition to individual participation, you can become part of a small cohort of up to 10 participants in the two advanced program.
Both scenarios ensure focused, individualised guidance and meaningful feedback.
When working in a cohort, the intimate setting fosters deep engagement, building trust and encouraging open, transformative conversations.
core themes>
A solid grounding in philosophy, research, theory and practice.
Deepening self-awareness.
Peer interactions and shared experiences.
Ethical practice emphasises a values driven coaching approach,.
Focus on empathy, integrity, and respect for autonomy.
Integration of mind and body.
As your sense-making capacity grows, your relationship with feedback will shift. You’ll learn to view feedback as a vital tool for coaching.
Cohort Coaching
Cohort Coaching is more than a professional development program—it’s a shared learning experience grounded in their real-world leadership challenges.
Individual insight is necessary, but insufficient. What is needed is collective leadership where leaders, in the company of others, lead with wisdom, purpose, and adaptability.
Each cohort brings together a small group of professionals—either from within a single organisation or across sectors—who meet regularly to engage in structured reflection, dialogue, and experimentation.
The process is guided by a contextualist coaching methodology, informed by adult development theory and systems thinking. Rather than focusing on quick fixes or transactional outcomes, cohort coaching fosters deeper development.
Participants explore their assumptions, examine patterns in how they think and act, and test out new ways of responding to complexity. The group becomes a living learning system—one that supports vertical development, cultivates psychological safety, and invites multiple perspectives to surface fresh insight.
Cohort members benefit from:
Collective Wisdom: Learning with and from others facing equally complex realities.
Contextual Relevance: Applying insights directly to their leadership contexts.
Safe-to-learn spaces: Holding each other in reflection and challenge, not judgement.
Real-Time Experimentation: Turning insight into action through live, unfolding challenges.
Each session is facilitated with care, curiosity, and a steady hand—bringing together research, reflective frameworks, and real-world leadership experience to ensure the cohort remains both grounded and generative.
Whether you’re developing future-ready leaders inside your organisation or offering seasoned executives a meaningful space to grow, cohort coaching is a proven approach for developing insight, amplifying leadership capacity, and making progress amidst uncertainty.
Jane Anderson
What I love most about Desley is her warmth, edginess, and how clever she is.
Her expertise in amplifying wisdom is exceptional and so transformative for those who work with her. She is deeply insightful, fun and has incredible stories.
Max Edwards
Desley easily relates to people at all levels and is also a systemic thinker who helps people address the real issues that limit or enable them to achieve their goals. Desley’s coaching programs deliver the right balance of sensitivity, challenge, warmth and respect to mobilise lasting change.
Meg Hansen
Desley’s PhD is a remarkable and much-needed piece of research because it compellingly identifies the need to understand how adults learn.
The methodology cuts to the heart of leadership teams' challenges as they seek genuine collaboration to achieve improved results for themselves.
Frequently Asked Questions
Answers to common questions about our services.
What makes Aberrant Learning different from other leadership or coach development providers?
Aberrant Learning doesn’t follow a one-size-fits-all model. Our programs are built on contextualist coaching, vertical development theory, and real-world application. We don’t focus on ticking boxes or compliance-based learning. Instead, we create spaces for reflective inquiry, safe-to-fail experiments, and deep developmental progress. It’s learning that sticks because it’s anchored in your lived complexity.
What is contextualist coaching?
Contextualist coaching is grounded in the belief that the best way to make progress is to ask, “What’s useful here, in this context, right now?” It doesn’t assume fixed answers or rigid frameworks. Instead, we draw on multiple perspectives and focus on insight and action that fits your unique environment. It’s responsive, adaptive, and designed for real-life complexity.
Why do you call your programs ‘ethically deviant’?
Because we believe leadership needs a reimagining. In a world that rewards conformity and control, we challenge leaders to act with courage, insight, and wisdom. Ethically deviant leaders prioritise collective progress over individual heroism. Our programs support leaders to do more than cope—to lead with integrity in complex, messy, and fast-changing environments.
What is the FMA model?
FMA stands for Frameworks, Method, and Area of Application. It’s a process that helps you: Draw on diverse frameworks to gain multiple perspectives. Use action research to reflect, experiment, and learn. Embed your learning in your real-world challenges, not hypotheticals. This approach ensures your development is practical, meaningful, and transformational.
Who is the AMPLIFY Wisdom Coach Development program for?
This program is designed for experienced professionals in mid-to-late career who are ready to make a meaningful contribution beyond traditional leadership roles. If you’re considering transitioning into coaching, or want to use your insight and wisdom to support others’ development, this program offers a deeply reflective and practice-based path forward.
How do I start coaching with Desley?
Simply reach out via the Contact page. We’ll have an initial conversation to explore what you’re looking for and whether we’re a good fit. If it feels right, we’ll design a coaching arrangement that supports your direction.
