The seeds of Amanda Ridings’ third book, Approaching Difference Differently, were sown during her time at Lancaster. In 1998, she was awarded The Sunday Times MBA Scholarship for Women, which funded a full-time MBA in LUMS. It proved to be a transformational year:

‘I arrived as a Director of Finance and left as a freelance consultant and executive coach. I also took up T’ai Chi Chuan, a martial art that I still practise – this turned out to be crucial for the way my work evolved.’

After Lancaster, Amanda continued to explore organisational change, leadership and systems thinking through The Society for Organizational Learning, founded by Peter Senge at MIT. This led her to the discipline of dialogue, a conversational form that channels ‘the energy of our differences … toward something that has never been created before’ (William Isaacs). Over the next few years, the principles and practices of dialogue became central to her leadership development work.

In parallel, she realised that her martial arts experience offered a powerful window into what happens beneath the surface in difficult conversations:

‘I was fascinated by how my body reacted instinctively in moments of challenge, prompting me to attack or defend. I realised that this reflex is activated when people encounter difference in their conversations.’

This insight led Amanda to explore how embodied approaches could support leaders to transform their conversations. Her journey accelerated in 2010, when she met Wendy Palmer, a 7th dan in the martial art of Aikido. Wendy had developed ‘Leadership Embodiment’, an approach to studying our embodied reactions to stress and pressure, and then recovering composure whilst still experiencing them. Training with Wendy until her death in 2022, Amanda embedded Leadership Embodiment practices into her dialogue work:

‘Our embodied energy profoundly influences the energy and outcome of a conversation – especially when difference is present. Leadership Embodiment practices equip us to steward our energy skilfully.’

It is this emphasis on how we carry ourselves in our conversations that makes Approaching Difference Differently unique. Writing in an engaging, conversational style, Amanda invites the reader to use the frameworks of dialogue to understand how and why their conversations turn out the way they do. She includes eight embodied practices that change the energy of how we speak and listen, creating more space for curiosity about the provenance of our differences. This is the foundation of meaningful dialogue and, as one reviewer wrote, ‘is surely the topic of the moment, relevant not only to business leaders, coaches and supervisors, but also to our fractured global society.’

One significant Lancaster memory still makes Amanda smile. Whilst researching and writing her MBA dissertation, she worked through Drawing Forth a Personal Vision, an activity from The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook:

‘I no longer remember the details, but I recall a vivid image of a future ‘me’ holding a book that I had written. At the time, it was a distant aspiration. Today, it has been realised – three times!’

Approaching Difference Differently is available from online retailers such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble. It’s also available as an ebook on a variety of platforms.

Find out more about Amanda’s writing here: https://originate.org.uk/originate-books/