Marilyn M. Taylor, PhD

Leadership: values-based leadership, distributed organizational leadership

Values and Culture: social values and cultural change that favour organizational and community sustainable productivity and quality of life;

Graduate Leadership Education: emergent learning, practical wisdom, ethical decision-making and values fluency

Marilyn Taylor's work focuses on catalyzing the enhancement of our values-perspective as individuals, leaders, organizations and communities in order to address challenges that are critical and so far 'unsolvable' by traditional ways of approaching them. Her scholarship has been focused on learning, leadership and cultural change.

Taylor's research on learning has been concerned with second-order learning (reframing our assumptions) and third-order learning (reframing how we understand ourselves). Her book, Emergent Learning for Wisdom, was written for those who want to catalyze this kind of learning; it offers a process model and practices that enable people to develop this learning expertise.

Taylor and her colleagues in the Canadian Institute for Research and Education in Human Systems (CIREHS) launched a pilot study of 21st century leadership in Canada in 2004. This work launched her interest in the interplay of value perspectives in leadership, organizational culture and wider community culture. With the Barrett Values Centre and Dr. David Jamieson of Environics Research Group, she led the inaugural National Values Assessment for Canada in May 2009.  Taylor is currently working with colleagues in an International Collaboratory for values survey-based community dialogue in association with National Values Assessments. 

Taylor was appointed to the Institute for Values-Based Leadership at Royal Roads University in August 2008 and became its director in October 2009.  She joined the university in April 2006 as a professor in its School of Leadership Studies; she was appointed to Concordia University in Montreal for 23 years where she was a primary architect for the MA in Human Systems Intervention. Taylor is a founding member of the International Consortium for Coaching in Organizations and is a member of the Editorial Board for the International Journal for Coaching in Organizations. 

Taylor's full bio can be read here. Media queries for RRU staff and faculty should be directed to Phil Saunders in RRU Community Relations, 250-391-2526.