Nexus

The Nexus programme accepts up to 24 applicants per year, drawn from across a wide range of interdependent systems, sectors and people who impact UK public services. This cohort of people work together closely throughout the programme and can then join ongoing Nexus community events. 

The first residential of each Nexus programme is an orientation and a chance to explore shared interests and concerns. The faculty will invite you to bring difference, creativity and imagination into the room. A structured co-design process invites you to reflect critically on yourself, your context, and the world at different spatial levels. 

What we learn together informs the final design of your Nexus programme. Our faculty draws on The King’s Fund’s extensive network of practitioners, academics and partner organisations to shape what happens next. 

Hosted at Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park, each Nexus programme includes four immersive residentials (varying between two and five days each). Through a blend of whole-group sessions, small-group activities and individual reflective practice, our faculty and guest contributors provide content inputs, facilitation and other structured support to deepen your learning.

The content is shaped in co-design with each cohort. Recent topics on programmes designed and led by the Nexus faculty include:

• Alternative intelligence: impact and implications – guest contributions and workshop

• Getting out of my own way: understanding my ‘immunity to change’ – masterclass, small-group activity and coaching

• Public narrative, framing and reframing – skills-based masterclass

• Whiteness as a system – full-day workshop and facilitated discussion

• Listening to the emerging future – workshop and small-group activity

• How to lead as ‘a good ancestor’ – guest contributions and workshop

• Understanding our cohort as a system – facilitated case-in-point learning

In addition to the residentials, each cohort comes together for virtual workshops with guest contributors. This enables you to have regular touchpoints as a cohort between each in-person session.

Traditional leadership development programmes sometimes offer coaching in-tandem with the main sessions. Nexus is different.

Once your Nexus programme is underway, you will be matched with an experienced coach from The King’s Fund. Coaches are core members of the Nexus team. Their job is to walk alongside you throughout the programme, offering supportive challenge as well as dedicated personal space to make sense of what you’re learning.

When you invest in an executive leadership programme, you expect it to make a difference in your real-world experience and impact. The one-to-one coaching experience, integrated into your programme, is designed to ensure that what you learn survives contact with reality.

The midway point in your Nexus programme is a study visit to the city of Boston, USA. Here, you’ll be exposed to some of the latest thinking and practice in leadership and change, working directly with people from across the USA.

Our core faculty includes academics and practitioners based at Harvard University, MIT and Suffolk University (Boston). Together, they lead the design of an immersive, experiential study visit that includes:

• a tailored orientation tour of central Boston, drawing on leadership themes explored throughout your Nexus programme

• bespoke workshops, lectures and seminars with Nexus faculty based at Harvard, MIT and Suffolk universities

• additional content input from our guest contributors, who include internationally renowned academics, practitioners, artists, politicians and senior public servants

• experiences across both Boston and Cambridge, MA. in and around the most historic buildings in the USA, including small-group activities with a wide range of current students from the three universities

• the Nexus evening reception hosted in the heart of the city, with esteemed guests from across the city of Boston.