Complexity Leadership Expert. Psychometrics Entrepreneur. Street Epistemologist#
Dr Aiden M. A. Thornton is a complexity leadership expert, management consultant, psychometrics entrepreneur, and street epistemologist.
As a complexity leadership expert, Aiden holds an interdisciplinary PhD in leadership, complexity, and cognition and currently serves as the Inaugural Menzies Senior Research Fellow in Leadership and Complexity at the Australian National University’s School of Cybernetics. He co-leads the ANU Complexity Leadership Lab and his work spans the theory, measurement, research, education, and practice of complexity leadership. He applies principles of cybernetics, systems thinking, and complexity science to making sense of leadership and its development.
As a management consultant, Aiden has over 25 years of international experience across Australia, Asia, and Europe, working with top-tier consulting firms and blue-chip organisations. He has led large-scale and multi-million-dollar programs and currently runs his own consulting company that specialises in leader and leadership development, change management, organisational culture, and organisational design.
As an entrepreneur, Aiden is establishing a psychometrics company that offers an innovative suite of instruments that measure different aspects of leadership. His mission is to introduce more rigorous and sophisticated measurement approaches to the science and practice of leader and leadership development.
As a street epistemologist, Aiden is deeply engaged in creating conditions in which diverse social groups can participate in discussions about controversial socio-political issues. His work in street epistemology focuses on enquiring into what people believe, why they hold those beliefs, and their underlying epistemologies.
Aiden is a radical political centrist in the tradition of JFK, a classical libertarian, the lead moderator for Heterodox Academy Australia, a podcaster, and a blogger on leadership, complexity, and epistemology. Aiden brings a unique blend of intellectual intensity, pragmatism, and wicked humour to his work.
Areas of Expertise: the nature of leadership and its development, complexity leadership, adult development, cognitive-developmental psychology, The Model of Hierarchical Complexity, ego development, complexity science, systems thinking, cybernetics, theory of truth, the ethics of belief, psychometrics, structural equation modelling, the Rasch measurement model, management consulting, leadership consulting, organisational transformation, change management, operating models and organisational design, organisational culture change, human capital consulting, learning and development, group facilitation, street epistemology, socio-political affairs, the culture wars