Tim Pidsley

17th October 1963 – 19th February 2017

Tim was a founding director of Leadership Lab. He was humble, unassuming and deeply competent with a wonderfully dry sense of humour. His quiet confidence and capability was both reassuring and calming, and made him great to work with. Tim valued people greatly and was passionate about making a difference in the world. He was a key architect of our Leadership Lab vision to support leaders in creating equitable and flourishing communities and organisations. 

Tim co-lead many of our projects and loved the significance of the contributions he was being invited into. In the many conversations that have occurred since he passed away, it is vividly apparent that many people saw Tim as a friend, a trusted colleague and a safe pair of hands that had helped them be more thoughtful and confident in their own work. Tim would have loved this. Empowering others was a signature of his style and character. He often advocated for us to not do others’ work for them, but instead to stand alongside them as they did it themselves. This continues to be a distinctive aspect of the way Leadership Lab operates. 

Tim loved systems and he saw them everywhere.  He described our role as “supporting people to do together what they couldn’t do separately”. This applied not only to our projects and the organisations we engaged with. It applied to us as individuals in Leadership Lab – we wanted to create an eco-system where we can all be supported to express our purpose, our calling and grow our strengths. 

Complexity thinking underpins our Leadership Lab work… creating the conditions for good things to emerge is what we do. Tim was cutting edge in his thinking around complex systems and collaborative leadership and he played a huge part in the design of our open and collaborative Leadership Lab processes. Many of our team are ideas people. We loved the fact that Tim was too, but especially that he would never be wholly convinced by our passionate arm swinging and whiteboard mapping. He would get us to pause and ask us hard questions. We always would end up with something better than any of us had thought of. 

Tim’s passion for making a difference, his unique strategic thinking and authentic, engaging approach is irreplaceable.  We all connected with his deep sense of valuing people and were stimulated by his ideas and approach. He increased our confidence and capacity for the work and we miss him deeply as a colleague.  Above all, we miss him as a friend.