Project Overview & Focus
The Wave Effect was a seven-month leadership program designed as a deeper dive into adaptive, collaborative leadership in Eastern Carteret County. Our aim was to equip everyday leaders to navigate complexity and build community resilience in a place where progress was often stalled by unaddressed grief, persistent divides, and entrenched power. This powerful work was highlighted during Carolina Engagement Week by the Carolina Center for Public Service.
Systemic & Local Context
Eastern Carteret is a place shaped by beauty and pain. The coastline and environment are central to life here, but so are histories of racial inequity, cultural division, and economic struggle. Hurricanes and other tragic losses left deep layers of grief on top of older wounds.
The Wave Effect was born out of the Eastern Carteret Collaborative effort. ECC staff and advisors recognized that collaborative leadership was needed to offset and address dynastic political practices that appeared both corrupt and unjust. Although we had observed this challenge generally (as was depicted to some extent in the Silver Dollar Road documentary), we also had firsthand experience with Eastern Carteret dynastic power.
When our collaborative effort was just getting started, local “old guard” power brokers reacted badly to our effort to co-create something outside the usual channels (where they held gatekeeping power). In response, power brokers started pulled strings behind the scenes to block our funding, citing concern that leaders were overstepping their mandates by working across jurisdictional and racial lines. The high school principal, one of our founding collaborative partners, was warned by county leadership that the school had “no business engaging in actions to integrate the eastern part of the county”, which was both inaccurate and ironic given that the school’s catchment area encompassed the eastern part of the county. In fact, as an institution, the high school was the one place where integration was truly present.
This early resistance showed just how fraught leadership could be here, and why we needed to equip leaders to see the systems at work within the power struggles, their role in these systems, and know how to best respond.
My Role & Approach
Designing and delivering The Wave Effect was not work I did alone. I co-led it with a team of peers and advisors, drawing on our formal education, research, and lived experience as practitioners to various aspects of adaptive leadership. We held collective expertise in systems thinking, cultural competency, trauma awareness, civic engagement, and more. With significant facilitation experience as well as relational knowledge of participants, my role was to anchor the program and hold the throughline across sessions. I built in rhythms of reflective practice that helped us see ourselves more clearly, and I named patterns as they emerged so we could work with them.
The design was intentionally emergent. We had a broadly defined learning trajectory, with lenses, principles, and activities serving as guardrails to keep us on track. But there was no pre-designed curriculum; each session was shaped by where the group was in their learning at that point. My visible work was guiding reflection and keeping continuity. My less visible work was sensing when people needed more support, or more stretch, and adjusting the design to keep them learning without tipping into overwhelm.
What Shifted Through the Work
Over seven months, people shifted in ways that were both personal and collective.
At first, the focus was on safety and connection. We established session norms which incorporated art, music, and snack-filled care packages. They were able to practice sharing bits of information about themselves with each other – which snacks were favorites, who had children eyeing their goodies, who acted like kids themselves, raiding their packages before class had begun. The music and art invited different parts of the brain, and provided moments for being together without having to think. Participants opened up to each other naturally as they felt cared for and enjoyed these experiences together.
As the container strengthened, harder truths surfaced. Resilience and trauma showed up as real forces shaping lives and communities. One person reflected, “If something really bugs me, maybe it’s a mirror – something I need to look at in myself.” Another said, “All of us are helping because of a trauma we experienced… it’s also the thing that brought us together.”
By the third session, as we stepped into discussions of cultural difference, vulnerability was visible. “The vulnerability today – that was huge. I didn’t expect that kind of openness.” Another participant said, “I realize now this is what shared leadership looks like.”
Soon thereafter, we had a session disrupted by a community crisis in which an armed, distressed individual led police through multiple hours-long standoffs with a chase in between, ultimately leading to his very public suicide. Our participants working in law enforcement, teaching, and any who had children in school were suddenly pulled away as lockdowns ensued and community safety became paramount. We put into immediate practice personal resilience tools we had learned in earlier sessions.
When we reconvened the next month, we used systems thinking to debrief the event. Participants worked through various perspectives of the situation: news reports, school system announcements of the crisis, the individual’s obituary and guest book comments from those who knew and loved him. One participant noticed, “Multiple realities can be valid at the same time, even when they feel in conflict.”
As we debriefed at a meta-level, where we looked at how the learning trajectory occurred, one participant observed, “Adaptability comes from listening and being in the moment, not always thinking we have to respond.” And another noticed a shift in group dynamics: “Early on, we were apologizing before we even spoke. Now people just jump right in.”
The trajectory was clear: from building safety and connection, to facing trauma and power, to embracing complexity and agency. People grew in confidence, awareness, and in their sense of being both shaped by the system and able to shape it.
Reflections & Insights
Even though I know that social shifts happen when we create an enabling environment, I was still surprised at how fast significant shifts in leadership and personal capacity can happen given these conditions. But this kind of work is delicate and requires the right container and pacing.
We paid close attention to safety and to keeping people at the learning edge without pushing too far. The month between sessions mattered as much as the sessions themselves. It gave space for the nudges and disruptions to rattle around and settle in, so that people could absorb and integrate them. Participants didn’t just understand new ideas in their heads; they embodied the learning.
Not everything was resolved. By the end, there was strong momentum toward applying the learning through projects, but we didn’t have the container in place to carry that forward. A community of practice might have extended the arc, giving leaders space to keep reflecting as they tried new things.
Still, the shifts were real. In a place where leadership had long been cautious or siloed, people began stepping into a more collaborative, adaptive stance. They saw themselves not just as actors inside a system, but as shapers of it. That awakening, and the trust they built with each other, are conditions that will keep rippling outward.
If you’re interested in cultivating adaptive, collaborative leadership within your team, organization, or community, I’d love to join you in creating the right conditions for growth.
