Thinking Ahead with Neuroscience
- Emma Chandler
- Jan 19
- 3 min read
Updated: Jan 21
How One Government Agency is Elevating Leadership from the Inside Out
When this government agency began working with Unlocq, their challenge was both familiar and complex. Operating in a fast-changing, high-pressure environment, senior leaders were being asked to deliver more. More accountability, more consistency, more strategic clarity, while navigating uncertainty, organisational change, and increasing demands on their people.
What they wanted wasn’t a traditional leadership programme. They were looking for a development experience that felt real,
practical, and deeply relevant to the pressures their leaders were facing day to day. Most importantly, they wanted a programme that would strengthen decision-making, performance conversations, and leadership behaviours, without burning people out.
Why Leadership Development, and Why Now
Like many public-sector organisations, the agency recognised that technical capability alone was no longer enough. Leaders needed to think ahead, act decisively, and hold accountability, while still maintaining trust, resilience, and connection across teams. The risk wasn’t a lack of commitment; it was leaders operating under pressure with only part of their capability switched on.
That’s where the Elevate Leadership Programme came in.
A Neuroscience-Led Approach to Leadership
At the heart of Elevate is the mBIT (multiple Brain Integration Techniques) model, which recognises that human intelligence is not located solely in the head. Instead, effective leadership draws on three interconnected intelligences:
Head intelligence for clarity, logic, and strategic thinking
Heart intelligence for empathy, values, and relational awareness
Gut intelligence for courage, instinct, and decisive action
By integrating all three, leaders move beyond simply “thinking harder” and begin accessing the full intelligence they already have.
“We don’t just train leaders to think better, we help them access the full intelligence they already have.”
Emma Chandler Founder of Unlocq and Award Winning Leadership Coach
This neuroscience methodology underpins both Unlocq's Elevate and Edge coaching pathways and was central to the agency’s leadership journey.
From Strategic Leadership… to the Wilderness
Following the Strategic Leadership phase of the programme, leaders took their learning out of the classroom and into a very different environment, the outdoors. Working alongside Megan Hine and her team, leaders stepped into a wilderness-based experience designed to stretch resilience, sharpen decision-making, and test leadership behaviours under real uncertainty. Removed from familiar structures, titles, and comforts, leaders were challenged to rely on instinct, collaboration, and situational awareness, skills that are just as critical in corporate leadership as they are in survival settings.
In the wild, feedback is immediate. Poor communication has consequences. Clarity matters. Trust matters. And leadership quickly becomes less about authority and more about presence, adaptability, and collective problem-solving. What emerged was a powerful parallel: the same skills that keep teams safe and effective outdoors such as clear roles, calm decision-making, emotional regulation, and courage under pressure, are the very skills required to lead high-performing teams in complex organisational systems.
What the Programme Covered
Across the programme, leaders explored and applied five core principles:
Strategic (Thoughtful) Leadership: thinking ahead, not just reacting
Emotional Leadership: building self-regulation, confidence, and resilience
Executional Leadership: turning strategy into action and accountability
Relational Leadership: strengthening trust, collaboration, and performance under pressure
Reflective Leadership: learning in real time and adapting behaviour
Sessions combined neuroscience insight, practical tools, live leadership conversations, workplace missions, coaching, peer learning and experiential learning in the outdoors, ensuring development translated directly into behaviour change.
What Leaders Are Achieving Now
The impact has been tangible. Leaders report:
Greater confidence in holding clear, adult-to-adult performance conversations
Stronger accountability without damaging relationships
Improved team resilience during periods of change
More consistent decision-making under pressure
A shared leadership language that has strengthened culture across the organisation
Perhaps most importantly, leaders have developed a deeper awareness of how they lead, recognising when pressure pulls them into reactive patterns, and how to reset using head, heart, and gut intelligence.
The wilderness experience in particular has stayed with leaders, providing a lived reference point for resilience, adaptability, and leadership under uncertainty, one they now draw on back in the workplace.
Looking Ahead
As the organisation looks to the future, the focus is shifting from capability-building to embedding and cascading, using coaching, observation, and continued development to sustain momentum and deepen impact. The next phase will further strengthen strategic thinking, system-wide leadership alignment, and performance at scale.
What stands out in this partnership is not just the content delivered, but the way neuroscience and experiential learning have been combined to create lasting change. By helping leaders think ahead, act with intent, and lead with their full intelligence, Elevate has become more than a programme, it has become a catalyst for cultural shift.
For this agency, leadership development hasn’t been about learning new theory. It’s been about relearning how to lead under pressure, whether that pressure shows up in the boardroom, the field, or the wild.
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