Reflections from the Big Thinking Summit, Edmonton, June 2026
From June 9 to 11, 2026, I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences’ Big Thinking Summit in Edmonton. It was three days of conversation across disciplines, sectors, and perspectives. It was the kind of gathering that unlocks a kaleidoscope of ideas about navigating today’s complex challenges.
The summit brought together researchers and practitioners from across Canada. The keynote address by Tanya Talaga, and keynote panels with Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey, Michael Wernick, Shari Graydon, Kem-Laurin Lubin, Jerome Cranston, Geoffrey Martin Rockwell, Bobbie Racette, and Emily Ptak, sparked rich insight into the challenges facing institutions, communities, and the people inside them. The conversations in between were just as intriguing. There is something about being in a room with people who have chosen to think carefully about hard problems that makes the next steps possible.
The summit theme this year was inflection point. It included questions about who produces knowledge and whose voices carry authority; the strain on public trust in institutions and what that means for how research connects with policy and communities; and the need to rethink how scholarship is created and shared across society. Running through all of it was a practical question: how do we have actual impact? And how do we do this across sectors, across differences, at scale?
My presentation sat squarely in that space, but at a specific level of resolution: the everyday leadership behaviours that can either build the conditions for collaboration or quietly erode them.
For example, how you open a meeting. Whether you make space for disagreement. Whether the person with less positional authority feels safe to speak. These are the mechanism by which ambitious goals either gain traction or stall. Collective impact depends on people being able to work together, and the quality of that working-together is shaped, day by day, by how leaders use their power in ordinary moments.
That was the argument I brought to Edmonton: before we can solve the big problems, we must be honest about the everyday ones.
I was honoured to be both an attendee and a presenter. My session on June 10 was a 60-minute capacity-building lab titled “From Good Intentions to Real Impact: Power Intelligence® for Cross-Sector Leadership.” Here is the core of what I shared.
The Power Problem That Hides in Plain Sight
Most of us can spot the obvious power problem: the leader who dominates the room, overrides others, and treats their authority as the most important thing in it. That version is visible and destructive.
What is harder to see is the problem of powerlessness. When capable, well-intentioned people feel sidelined, outranked, or illegitimate at a table, they compensate. They get more controlling. They listen less. They reach for whatever authority they have and overuse it.
I have worked in rooms that looked full of difficult people. What it turned out to be was a room full of people responding to their own sense of powerlessness in ways that made everyone else’s experience worse.
Good intentions are not enough.
What I keep finding in my work is a pattern: smart, accomplished, well-intentioned people missing the mark on impact. This was not because they lack skill or insight, but because they forget to read the room, and specifically, their own place in it.
Power Intelligence®
In my practice, I draw on Julie Diamond’s Power Intelligence® framework and use her Diamond Performance Index 360 assessment to help clients understand how others experience their use of power. Diamond defines Power Intelligence® as the ability to use power in ways that ensure people speak up, offer honest feedback, disagree when needed, and bring their best thinking to the work.
I want to highlight the importance of feedback. Diamond calls feedback the lifeblood of leadership. Without it, a leader risks misusing their power without ever knowing it. And as Dacher Keltner’s research on the power paradox shows, the higher you rise in rank, the less feedback you will receive. Why? Because power is intimidating, a symbol, and a commodity.
Intent, Behaviour, Impact
A useful starting point for any leader is a simple chain: intent, behaviour, impact.
Intent is what you mean to do. Behaviour is what you actually do. Impact is what others experience. Behaviour is the only part others can see, and the power dynamics in the room are shaped by it in ways we rarely notice.
Mary Parker Follett had a useful metaphor for this: a tennis match. The way you serve the ball shapes how your receiver sends it back to you. The dynamic is reciprocal and iterative. Neither player is simply reacting; each is also shaping what the other does next.
Two things happen inside that reciprocal interaction. First, power changes how others treat you (because it is a symbol, a commodity, and it is intimidating). Second, your own sense of power shapes how you treat others. The higher you rise, the more you can take for granted how hard it was to get there, and the more you risk experiencing what Keltner calls an “empathy deficit.” Both shape your behavioural choices, and those choices land differently at a cross-sector table.
When you feel powerful, you have access to your full range of behavioural choices: thoughtful, collaborative, patient, curious. When you feel powerless, that range narrows. The first step is seeing the pattern. The second is choosing your response.
Seven Dimensions That Matter
Diamond’s research identifies seven behavioural capacities that people consistently expect from leaders:
- Accessible: people can reach you, and you are present when they do.
- Empowering: Your interactions leave people more capable, not more dependent.
- Conscientious: You are careful and thorough, not just fast.
- Respectful: You honour difference, even when you disagree.
- Professional: You are reliable and consistent in your approach.
- Fair: Your decisions and your process are clear.
- Decisive: People know where you stand.
One caveat for cross-sector work: these dimensions do not translate uniformly across professional cultures. What “respectful” looks like in one institutional context may be very different from what it looks like in another. The same is true of “decisive” or “fair.” That translation gap is another place where good intentions fail.
Pressure does not hit all seven dimensions equally. Some drop out first. Knowing which ones you are most likely to lose under stress is part of the self-awareness work.
What Changes When Leaders See the Dynamic
The conflicts that surface in partnerships (i.e., the stuck conversations and the broken trust) are almost always rooted in unnamed power dynamics. Someone feels sidelined. Someone feels disrespected. Sometimes that person is you.
What changes when leaders can see those dynamics clearly is that they gain a choice. They can interrupt their own reactive patterns before those patterns do damage. They can model the seven dimensions consistently, even when the system around them does not. The environment does not have to improve first. Your capacity to lead differently is available in the conditions as they are.
Thank you to the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences for the opportunity to connect and engage!
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Jennifer Jones-Patulli, MA, HSDP, is the founder of Productive Conflict LLC. She works with senior leaders and their teams to turn conflict into a strategic asset. She is a certified coach for the Diamond Performance Index 360-assessment.
