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David Wilkinson

David has had a wide and varied career. He was brought up and attended school in Africa (Zambia, Malawi and Kenya). He obtained his first degree in Psychology at the Open University in the UK and his postgraduate degrees are from the University of Oxford.

After finishing school in Africa he joined the British Army serving primarily in Northern Ireland in the mid to late 1970’s. Following this he joined the UK police service from 1980 until 1995. As a senior police officer he was Director of Studies with the UK National Police Training and was responsible for trainer training and the design and development of the UK National Command Level Public Order Training in the early 1990’s.

After winning a scholarship to conduct doctoral research into police acculturation at Oxford he started to work in academia at Oxford University. This was followed by a Senior Lectureship at the Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development. In 2000 he took up post as Head of Professional Development at Cranfield University. During his time as Head of Department at Cranfield University he developed and ran a series of Disaster Management Trainers’ Courses though the Cranfield Resilience Centre. This work has taken him to many parts of the world helping to develop leadership agility and capability in a number of countries including Malaysia, The Philippians, and Kenya. As a result of this work and five years of research into leaders responses in high stress, high ambiguity situations like natural disasters and post terrorist incidents he wrote ‘The Ambiguity Advantage: what great leaders are great at.’ Published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2006.

His work on leadership agility in ambiguous situations has lead to the development of a series of powerful leadership development approaches. These approaches to leadership development have lead to developments in emotional resilience, problem solving, creativity, the development of critical thinking and practical understanding about the nature of ambiguity.

David left Cranfield University in July 2006 and set up Centre i to continue this work. He currently provides leadership development and coaching many organisations including Schroders, Royal Mail, The Royal Air Force, The Pentagon, and a number of governments.  He is currently working on the following books "The Handbook of Leadership Problem Solving" and "Emotional Resilience - a guidebook for leaders".