Miha Pogacnik

Why organisations work with Miha Pogacnik

• His Macro Violin concept is cited by C. Otto Scharmer in Theory U and across MIT Sloan’s leadership writing. Senior teams engage with an arts-based framework that already has standing in serious management thought.
• He has worked inside the leadership floors of IBM, Microsoft, Bosch, Nike, Shell, Novartis and Porsche. The frame of reference is decades of access to people running companies that compete on judgment.
• His Resonance Platform method, taught at IEDC-Bled and in client sessions, moves a leadership group from positional debate into composed creative dialogue around the actual decision on the table.
• He has taught at Harvard, INSEAD, IMD, IESE Barcelona, CEIBS Shanghai and THNK Amsterdam, alongside his appointment at IEDC-Bled. The work is taken seriously inside management academia and in client rooms.

Biography highlights

• Adjunct Professor of Arts and Leadership at IEDC-Bled School of Management; has taught at Harvard, INSEAD, IMD, IESE Barcelona, CEIBS Shanghai and THNK Amsterdam
• Macro Violin concept attributed to him is cited by C. Otto Scharmer in Theory U and across the MIT Sloan body of work on systemic leadership
• Founder of IDRIART (Institute for Development of Intercultural Relations through the Arts); originated the Chartres Festival d’Eté in 1981
• Ambassador of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia
• Has worked with leadership teams at IBM, Microsoft, Nike, Shell, Novartis, Bosch, Coca-Cola and Porsche
• Speaker at the World Economic Forum (Davos and China), European Forum Alpbach and UN agencies; TEDx talk “A Creative Detour to Unleash Human Potential”

Biography

Most senior teams have absorbed every available framework for leadership. None of those frameworks change how they listen, or how they bring a room of expert voices into a coherent decision. The capacity that matters at the top is closer to conducting an orchestra than to running an analysis.

That is the territory Miha Pogacnik has worked in for four decades. As Adjunct Professor of Arts and Leadership at IEDC-Bled School of Management, he uses musical performance to develop the listening and composed judgment that leadership at the top requires. His Resonance Platform method, taught in sessions with leadership teams at IBM, Microsoft, Bosch, Nike, Shell and Porsche, walks executives through the structural intelligence of a Bach fugue or a Brahms violin concerto and back to the decision on their desk.

His distinctive intellectual contribution is the Macro Violin: the principle that a leader, like a violinist inside Chartres Cathedral, cannot perform on instrument alone but has to play the whole space. C. Otto Scharmer cites the concept in Theory U and across the MIT Sloan body of work on systemic leadership. That principle now sits at the centre of how arts-based leadership is taught at IEDC-Bled.

The work has roots in something larger than corporate audiences. Pogacnik founded IDRIART in the early 1980s and went on to direct more than 200 intercultural festivals in crisis regions, including the Adriatic during the breakup of Yugoslavia and Central Europe in the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He serves as Ambassador of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia. The first IDRIART festival ran at Chartres Cathedral in 1981, the same setting in which Pogacnik first identified the Macro Violin principle, and where the entire body of work begins.

Key speaking topics

• Arts-based leadership development
• Listening as a leadership discipline
• Creativity and innovation through musical structure
• Cultural intelligence in international business
• Organisational learning through artistic practice
• The Resonance Platform method for senior teams
• The Macro Violin and ensemble leadership

Ideal for

• CHROs and Chief Learning Officers designing executive development programmes
• CEOs and Chief Strategy Officers convening senior teams for board offsites or strategic dialogue
• Business school deans and EMBA directors integrating arts and humanities into leadership education
• Conference programmers leading flagship events on creativity and leadership

Audience outcomes

• A demonstration of how musical structure reveals complex team dynamics, with a Bach fugue or Brahms violin concerto used as the diagnostic
• Live application of the Resonance Platform method to the strategic question the leadership team brings into the room
• A working vocabulary for leadership drawn from musical performance: composition, ensemble, listening from the periphery, and the macro violin
• The shift from treating the conductor as a metaphor to treating conducting as a working model of leadership