Adriano Pianesi

Adriano Pianesi has 20 years of leadership development, team coaching, and change experience built on capacity development, possibility thinking, and sound strategy. A member of the Society for Organizational Learning, Adriano holds an MBA in Communication/Group Dynamics from the University of Milan. Adriano trained at Harvard Business School, Harvard Kennedy School and the Art of Hosting, where he refined his repertoire of experiential and innovative teaching practices. His consulting practice has helped leaders work for change by harnessing the powers of conflict, diversity, and complexity. Among his clients are Microsoft, Philip Morris International, The World Bank Group, Rotary International, Pan-American Health Organization, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, NASA, U.S. Marine Corps.

Adriano is an enthusiastic, emotionally intelligent leadership educator deeply schooled in theory with business skills and operational experience. Results‐driven facilitator with strategic vision and passion for professional development as a tool for strategic realignment/enterprise‐level organizational change. Focus on increasing client success through self‐awareness, tolerance for ambiguity, learning agility, demonstration of new processes, and advancing collaborative intelligence.

Through ParticipAction Consulting, his consulting practice, he helps diverse groups of people come together to solve tough problems, and helps leaders work for change by harnessing the powers of conflict, diversity and complexity.

As a leadership practitioner, Adriano speaks throughout the U.S. and internationally on leading integral change and leveraging the collective intelligence of systems for innovation. In his faculty role at Johns Hopkins University, Adriano teaches graduate students and executives the kind of leadership done through the work identity (inside‐out) and the work of mobilizing resources within systems (outside‐in) for shared learning and future co‐creation.

Adriano holds an MBA from the University of Milan. He studied Leadership Development at the Harvard Kennedy School with Prof. Heifetz and is a passionate experiential learner/teacher.

He is a faculty member of the Carey Business School, Johns Hopkins University where he also teaches for the Office of Executive Education. He is a faculty member of the World Bank "Team Leadership Program" and of the State Department "Experiential Learning Program". He is the author of the e‐book “Teachable Moments of Leadership” where he describes a state‐of‐the‐art experiential leadership learning methodology that gets real results.

His work draws on an advanced knowledge of transformative social change, and group dynamics and interventions, including human‐centered design, Adaptive Leadership framework, large systems dialogue, cultural transformation tools, multi‐stakeholder collaboration, systems thinking, IAF facilitation and leveraging the innovative power in conflict and diversity.

His teaching repertoire includes experiential learning, Dialogue Education, Action Learning, Case teaching, Open Space Technology, the World Café, Circle and Case‐in‐Point.