A 90-day program to enable leaders in transition to lead with confidence, trust, and clarity of direction.
Designed and delivered by Harvard and Georgetown professors.
Limited to 10 seats per cohort · Money back at any point if you don't see the value
of executives fail within their first 18 months of being promoted or hired. — Harvard Business Review
Most failures share one cause: people are promoted into a new level of responsibility while still operating from the identity, mindset, skills, and practices of the previous level.
None of these mean you're not ready. They come with every real transition — earning trust, leading without all the answers, understanding a new level of politics, letting go of the work that got you here. All of them can be learned.
The goal of this program is simple: build that map — together, with up to ten other leaders navigating the same transition you are. And alongside the map, you'll get the Uncertainty Compass itself — a set of leadership tools you can reach for whenever you feel lost or need direction.
Across the ninety days, three milestones:
Cut through the noise. Have a new level of clarity on what exactly you need to tackle first.
Move the situation that's been stuck. Take the action that the version of you 90 days ago couldn't.
Walk away with a way of leading you can run again — at every inflection point that comes after this one.
You are not alone anymore. Join the cohort of six to ten carefully selected leaders in the middle of the same kind of transition you are — a community of peers that sees your challenge from the inside, tells you the truth about how you're leading, and holds you accountable.
Cohorts are deliberately small and deliberately matched. The challenge in the room scales with the talent in the room.
Our proprietary AI — exclusive to this program — gives you behavioral feedback after every session, built from what you actually said and did in the live simulations and discussions. Not what you remember doing. Not what you'd report in a survey. What actually happened.
Your strengths and growth areas, grounded in your actual behavior — a feedback loop most leaders never get once in an entire career, every single week.
At the end of the 30 days, a synthesis report shows the patterns running across the whole program — deep clarity on your leadership edge.
Grounded in the Collective Intelligence framework you're learning in the program — so the feedback uses the same language as the work.
The assessment reads how you see yourself. LeadUp reads what you actually do. Two instruments, one model.
Weekly live sessions with immediate applicability to your case — to see the progress as you are in the program.
We surface what each participant is navigating, establish how the group will work together, and build the trust that makes honest peer exchange possible.
We work on where you're headed, how goal-oriented behavior can become your biggest asset, and how to set goals that don't break you when circumstances change.
We work with values and reflection to identify the cornerstone behaviors that, practiced consistently, shift everything else about how you lead.
This session introduces the difference between adaptive and technical problems — and the real difference between leadership and authority.
A different approach: leading with clarity and purpose, and communicating honestly with your team, even without complete information.
This session focuses on one-on-ones that go beyond task updates — and on the conditions that make real trust between people possible.
Map the power landscape of your specific transition: who has changed around you since you moved into the new seat, and why.
What a real team launch requires — and, just as importantly, how to relaunch a team that's been running without you.
Build the capacity to notice what groups are actually experiencing, and to facilitate in ways that surface real collective intelligence.
The skill and mindset for the conversations that matter: the performance issue, the boundary, and the disagreement that needs to be worked through.
The Iceberg Model gives you a tool for seeing the structures and mental models that generate the problems leaders keep reacting to.
This closing session uses feedback loops to help you see how you might be reinforcing the dynamics you want to shift — and how to act at the level that actually changes things.
Embodied simulations and live exercises — not lectures. You'll lead through realistic scenarios under realistic pressure, with feedback you can use the next time you're in the room.
Every week introduces something you can use Monday morning — a question to ask, a move to make, a habit to start. No waiting until you've "finished the program" to put it to work.
You don't study someone else's case study. You bring your own — the leadership challenge you're carrying right now — and the method gets applied to that. The work is the program.
“My participation in the program Nikola led was life-changing. It gave me tools and mindsets I'm still using three years later.”
The program is co-facilitated by leadership professors from Harvard and Georgetown — each with two decades of teaching and coaching leaders through high-stakes change.
He is a Leadership Professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and the author of the forthcoming book The Uncertainty Advantage. Over 20 years, he has trained thousands of leaders across 30+ countries — at the Obama Foundation, UNICEF, the World Bank, U.S. Government agencies, and Fortune 500 teams — and coaches executives, founders, and senior officials navigating transformation, scaling, and high-stakes change.
His methodology, Collective Intelligence Leadership, was forged in environments where the stakes were real and the outcomes measurable. It began in his teenage years as an activist — learning to navigate uncertainty alongside other activists, dissidents, journalists, founders, and movement builders — was refined through co-founding four organizations and four companies across Europe and the United States, and has been tested with the world's most demanding institutions and leaders.
He holds a master's degree from Harvard University and lives in Washington, DC with his wife and two daughters.
Pedja is a physician and a member of the Harvard faculty who holds an MD and an MPH from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and teaches three transformative courses: Enabling Teams, Enabling Large System Change, and Narrative Leadership.
His method was developed inside institutions widely regarded as leaders in health system design — among them the Trinity Health System, Jefferson Health, Carilion Clinic, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services — and refined with more than 500 senior healthcare leaders. The dynamics it addresses are common to complex organizations wherever they operate.
It starts with a 45-minute prequalifying coaching call with the faculty. Together we'll see whether you qualify for a seat in the next cohort, and whether this is your right next move.
Nikola has been a cornerstone in my leadership journey, guiding me from leading a small team to my role as President of Volt Italy, and now as Deputy Mayor. His mentorship enabled me to align my leadership with my core values.
Seeing a Harvard and MIT-based approach transformed into a practical method of community building with our European changemakers was a mind-boggling experience.
My coaching sessions with Nikola were truly transformative. They pushed me to reframe my thinking patterns and identify the internal thoughts that were the root of my challenges.
Nikola's coaching empowered me in a way I hadn't expected. I grew and saw in myself a leader I hadn't previously recognized. He guided me to answer for myself how I would address the challenge at hand.
In Nikola, I found an invaluable mentor whose dedication to fostering leadership skills profoundly shaped my approach to leadership. The program equipped me with the tools and confidence to lead with purpose.
Through simply asking probing questions, he gently guides you till you realize you had the answer all along. He taught me not only to be a better leader, but also a better colleague and person.
Nikola's ability to empower and inspire me has allowed me to step out of my comfort zone, take risks, and embrace innovative approaches to addressing challenges.
The Uncertainty Compass Assessment maps how you meet uncertainty — how you hold your footing, read the terrain, make the move, and lead together. Seven minutes. A direction, not a grade.
Twelve weekly live sessions across the four pillars — with your real challenge as the case.
Our proprietary AI, exclusive to this program: personalized reports after every session, based on what you actually said and did — and a final patterns report.
A small, vetted cohort of 6–10 leaders in transition — plus the broader community across all cohorts.
Realistic scenarios under realistic pressure — a practice environment your day job never gives you.
A private session with Nikola and Pedja focused on diagnosing your specific challenge before the cohort begins.
Direct access to Nikola and Pedja every week for twelve months after your cohort ends.
For difficult conversations, decisions under pressure, trust, delegation, office politics, and uncertainty.
A leadership operating system you can run again at every inflection point after this one — plus recordings of every session and a year of access to all materials and the community platform.
A premium program for a small cohort. Cohort placement, schedule, and payment plans are discussed on the prequalifying coaching call — where we'll figure out together whether this is the right next step for you.
Just a real conversation · 45 minutes
We're ready to return your money at any point during the program if you don't see the value. Your only job is to show up and do the work.
If your question isn't here, bring it to your prequalifying coaching call.
If you're at a real inflection point — leading change, managing a big project, a team, or a complex organization — and you're ambitious enough to want what's next without compromising what you stand for, this is built for you.
This program is only for leaders who are transitioning to the next leadership challenge. Mid-level to senior leaders. We are very particular about who we accept in the cohort to create a valuable peer-to-peer experience.
The participants who get the most from this are those who've been successful AND know they're approaching a wall the next step requires them to break through. Cohorts tend to include people who are seeking promotion, leading teams, founders, NGO leaders, and public servants. The challenge in the room scales with the talent in the room.
MBAs teach you to analyze; this teaches you to lead under pressure. Executive coaching is one person's perspective on your situation; cohorts give you 6–10 sharp peers running similar gauntlets. Most leadership programs are theory — this is built on tools refined in 30+ countries, in environments where outcomes were measurable and stakes were real.
The program runs over 90 days. Plan on roughly 2 hours per week for the live cohort sessions, plus another 1–2 hours per week for prework and application — bringing the method to bear on your actual challenge between sessions. The most common feedback: it's the most concentrated leadership work participants have ever done.
Every session is recorded and shared within 24 hours. The cohort experience is best live, but no one is penalized for a missed week. Office hours run weekly for a full year after the cohort ends, so you can revisit anything later.
Many participants do. We provide an itemized receipt and a one-page program description suitable for HR, L&D, or finance approval. If you'd like a draft justification email to send your manager, ask on the prequalifying coaching call.
We're ready to return your money at any point during the program if you don't see the value. Your only job is to show up and do the work.
Bring the leadership challenge you've been carrying. We'll figure out together whether this is the right next step for you — a real conversation about where you are and where you're trying to go.
Money back at any point if you don't see the value · Limited to 10 seats per cohort