Think more rigorously about everything you think you know

If you have reached a point in your practice where the standard ethical frameworks feel less like tools and more like furniture — present, familiar, and no longer really examined — then you already know the problem this seminar is designed for.

The principals and practitioners I work with are not careless people. They are experienced, thoughtful, often genuinely wise. And yet, again and again, the most consequential professional errors I have seen — my own included — do not come from ignorance or malice. They come from confidence. From the assumption that has never been named because it has always seemed too obvious to name. From the intervention that was undoubtedly well-intentioned, in a situation that was more complex than the intervener's model of it. From the moment when competence quietly became certainty, and certainty became a kind of blindness.

The Sparrow is the most exacting literary examination of that dynamic I have encountered. Russell gives us people who are brilliant, caring, and disastrously wrong — not in spite of their best qualities, but, in certain terrible ways, because of them. Using the novel as a professional crucible is not a literary exercise. It is a way of examining, at depth and under pressure, the assumptions, convictions, and ethical habits we carry into high-stakes work. The novel is precise enough to hold that inquiry. Most professional frameworks are not.

What this seminar asks of you is something that senior principals and practitioners are often not asked, and that can be genuinely uncomfortable at first: to sit with genuine uncertainty about things you have long considered settled. To apply the same rigorous close-reading discipline to your own professional narratives that you would apply to a difficult text. To build — or rebuild — an ethical framework not from first principles in the abstract, but from the specific pressure of extreme moral scenarios, with your own non-negotiables named explicitly and tested honestly.

The work is unhurried, Socratic, and serious. You will leave with two concrete things: a drafted personal ethical framework, and a reflective practice for sustaining moral rigour across your career. But you will also leave having asked questions of yourself that most professional development programmes quietly avoid. I think that is worth something. I think, if you are the kind of practitioner this seminar is designed for, you already suspect it is worth something too. I'd be glad to work through it with you.