About Kate
Dr. Kate Isaacs is a teacher, researcher, speaker, and strategy advisor who helps leaders design organizations and stakeholder partnerships for people and places to thrive. She draws on design thinking, system dynamics, and developmental psychology to help leaders create conditions for collective intelligence, agile performance, and transformative change.
Isaacs is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where she teaches courses on Discovering Your Leadership Signature and Distributed Leadership: Cultivating Nimble Organizations. A recent interview with Isaacs and her colleagues about their work on Nimble Leadership was selected for publication in HBR at 100: The Most Influential and Innovative Articles from Harvard Business Review’s First Century.
Isaacs is cofounder of a new MIT Sloan Executive Education program in 2024, Businesses for Inclusive Local Thriving Lab (BILT-Lab) for business-led teams to accelerate their impact on local talent development, workforce participation, and community prosperity. She also teaches courses on topics of Leading with Purpose, Optimizing Team Performance, and Adaptive Distributed Innovation, all with a focus on inclusive innovation and human thriving.
Isaacs serves as an Executive Fellow at the Higher Ambition Leadership Alliance, where she is lead faculty for HALI, a 9-month leadership development program for senior business executives. She consults with organizations in all sectors on strategy and culture change, and specializes in designing peer-based learning experiences and facilitating multi-stakeholder collaborations.
Isaacs is a certified Shadow Work coach and is trained in Internal Family Systems therapy. She emphasizes the positive potential in people and organizations—noticing and expanding what is already working—and releasing obstacles that block our natural orientation towards joy, creativity, growth, and health.
She is a dynamic and engaging speaker who delivers inspiring keynote addresses, and is a frequent author on topics of leadership, innovation, systems change, multi-stakeholder collaboration, and corporate sustainability for publications including the Harvard Business Review, the Sloan Management Review, strategy+business, Chief Executive, The Hill, and The Conversation.