Psychology of Project Leadership (2019)
Psychology of Project Leadership was an early professional education project designed to translate psychology research into the lived realities of project work. Built for project, program, and portfolio professionals, it explored how emotional understanding, stress, cognition, creativity, respect, and risk communication shape leadership under pressure.
The larger curriculum was ambitious in scope, but the most substantial completed portion focused on emotional understanding. That strand developed into a coherent set of scripted video lessons connecting internal processes such as alexithymia, interoception, emotional overload, automatic thoughts, and reframing to practical project-management challenges.
What remains valuable about the work is not just the subject matter, but the method. Rather than offering generic leadership advice, the lessons aimed to bridge research, mechanism, and application. Psychological ideas were translated into concrete professional problems such as project overload, candidate experience, stakeholder communication, risk assessment, and resource planning.
What The Series Explored
- Emotional understanding and emotional recognition
- Alexithymia and emotional blind spots
- Interoception and bodily awareness
- Stress, overload, and project conditions
- Creativity and adaptation under pressure
- Respect, insensitivity, and the candidate experience
- Cognition, reframing, and risk communication
The completed emotional-understanding strand alone formed a substantial sequence of video-scripted lessons. It was one of the earlier places where research translation, competency thinking, and professional application began to come together in a more deliberate way.
Selected Lessons
- Emotional Understanding
- Alexithymia
- Alexithymia and Stress
- Emotions and Projects
- Interoception
- Managing Alexithymia
- Willful Ignorance
- Qualitative Risk Assessment
- Respect
- The Candidate Experience
- Cognition
- Changing Minds
- Quantitative Risk Analysis
Selected Clips
A few clips from the emotional-understanding strand are included here as archival examples. They capture an earlier phase of the work, but they also show the through-line that would continue into later competency-based programming: taking internal psychological processes seriously, and translating them into concrete professional behaviour.
Why It Still Matters
Although this was an earlier body of work, it remains a useful part of the archive because it shows how long the underlying interests behind Adaptimist have been developing. The emotional-understanding strand already contains many of the concerns that would continue to shape later work: hidden internal processes, behavioural expression under stress, competency development, and the challenge of moving from theory into practical application.
Seen in that light, Psychology of Project Leadership is less a finished destination than an important stage in the evolution of the work.
Where to next
