Doctorate: Virtual Open Day
Are you considering embarking on a journey of inquiry and breaking free from the confines of traditional leadership and management models? Join us online at our upcoming open day and discover how you can transform yourself as well as the working world through our PhD in Organizational Change.
Tuesday, May 20, 2025
12:30-4pm GMT (London)
Zoom Webinar
Register Today
Event overview
Spend an afternoon among like-minded professionals considering embarking on a radical new approach within our warm and welcoming community. Led by our faculty, you'll get the chance to find out more about our ethos and meet recent graduates who will share their respective journeys on our doctoral program of advanced study.
Meet the Speakers I Faculty
James Traeger, BA(Hons), PGDip, PhD
James is an organizational and personal development specialist with extensive practical delivery and teaching experience.
From 1996-2006, James specialized in organizational and leadership development, with clients including the Metropolitan Police Service, Newham NHS Trust, Surrey County Council, Thus Plc and the University of Cambridge. He created the Navigator Men’s Development Programme and won acclaim for his work on the Metropolitan Police’s "gender agenda."
It was a yearning to delve deeper into this gender work that brought James to action research and inquiry. In 2004, he started the journey toward an inquiry-based PhD. His thesis, entitled On Mentshlichkeit: An Inquiry into the Practice of Being a Good Man, was the culmination of six years of action research into the discomforts and dilemmas faced by a man attempting to "be the change" of a masculinity that actively attempts to disrupt the sexist power structures of organizations, rather than just "talking about it." In this work, he was inspired into futuristic narrative and dialogue by the loving voices of challenge and support he heard in the course of his diverse roles in work and learning communities, and as a father and a Jew.
Meet the Speakers I Associate Faculty
Jane Stevens
Jane trained in the UK as a medical doctor, qualifying in Manchester in 1996. She specialized in haematology and worked as a consultant in the NHS until 2016. Jane developed an interest in clinical leadership, undertaking an MBA at Hult Ashridge in 2014. She hoped this would equip her to be a better leader in the complex ecosystem of healthcare. It did, and it didn’t. She left the NHS to pursue other projects and in 2017 embarked on the Ashridge Doctorate in Organisational Change ("ADOC": a precursor of the current DOC program).
Jane returned to the NHS in 2020 during the pandemic, and now refers to herself as a "recovering" doctor. She works exclusively with medical students and healthcare practitioners, helping them explore for themselves how they might not just survive, but perhaps even thrive, in the complex challenges of 2024 and beyond.
Jane is Associate Medical Director at Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust for Wellbeing, Workforce & Patient Safety, a Senior Lecturer at Kent and Medway Medical School, and a qualified practitioner in Sophrology (defined as the study of consciousness in harmony).
Jane's ongoing research interests include salutogenesis (the study of factors that bring health and wellbeing), the importance of creativity in healthcare, and the emerging movement of Creative Healthcare. As such, she is a champion for the National Centre for Creative Health.
Meet the Speaker I Alumni
Paul Argyle
Paul is a practising entrepreneur whose PhD thesis, completed in summer 2024, was titled Reframing the process of family business succession: An autoethnographic study. (“It’s not about me.”). It explored, through the use of autoethnographic stories, the change in his relationship with Sam, his son, during the period when the leadership and ownership of his two family businesses were transferred to Sam.
Paul has a first degree in Management Sciences and a Master's in Entrepreneurship, which developed into a period of research into the likely processes which produce emergent entrepreneurial practice. He's currently is a Director (but no longer the owner) of two family businesses. One, Alternative Airlines Ltd, which is an online flight booking agency, was recently awarded a Sunday Times 100 Award for being one of nine UK organisations deemed to be "Recovery Heroes" for significant growth post the pandemic. The other, Flight Directors, is an airline General Sales Agency, which has just celebrated its 40th anniversary. Together, they employ over 130 people and have a turnover in excess of £80 Million.
Paul has been a judge at the Venture Further Awards, organized by Masood Entrepreneurship Centre in Manchester and continues as a mentor to a number of young entrepreneurs who have been successful in this competition.
Paul is a keen walker, who, during his time as an doctoral student, completed two caminos in Spain and compares the period of personal transition he experienced whilst conducting his PhD research with that which took place within the context of a long distance pilgrimage.
Meet the Speakers I Alumni
Marjan Timmer
Marjan Timmer is an Ashridge/Hult accredited coach helping professionals in organizational and group learning. She runs a relational practice in the Netherlands as an executive (team) coach and is a supervisor in OD and coaching. As a member of faculty at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, she teaches and supervises in postgraduate executive coaching programs. Marjan is a lifelong learner who embarked on the EDOC research program in 2018. She was on the go as a Western European woman, anticipating an empty nest while having raised her children as a single parent, wanting to find new truth(s), meaning, and purpose in life and work.
Marjan's curiosity led to a full first-person artful inquiry by combining creative practices (painting, singing, and writing) with analytical reflection based on theories from fields of action research, arts-based research, depth psychology and feminist performativity. Her research shows how epiphanies - profound existential moments in artful encounters - initially disrupt the status quo and subsequently bring the potential for healing. Her inquiry brought a liberating, deepening (re)connection with life itself.
Taking up self-leadership while trusting the processes brings a habitual narrative to a stop. And in the pause lies the possibility for making choices for expression of voice, self, and mind from a combination of the senses and the intellect. Through time, this brings practical wisdom to create a flourishing existence for the good of self and others and the wider world.
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