In this keynote on February 28, CCL Senior Research Scientist Marcia A. Dawkins shared three stories about fortitude and leadership – a “story about fortitude,” a “story about burnout,” and a “story about you.” Drawing on 20 years of communication research on identity, storytelling, and strategy Dawkins offers a kaleidoscope of well-researched perspectives that directly and indirectly address how boundaries are negotiated in today’s social and organizational cultures—including tales of an unhoused college-drop turned CEO, a traumatized introvert turned rock star, and an orphan turned matriarch. Dawkins retells their interconnected sagas, all the while reconciling these stories with an emerging model of fortitude. Finding value in experiences of the underestimated and underrepresented, she shows how boundaries and resilient leadership are defined, debated, imposed, confounded, and created every single day.

On March 1, Marcia led a custom workshop based on multimodal communication methodology. Participants responded to prompts based on music, art, or writing and shared them back with the larger Foundation Fellow community.