That process, although largely intuitive for me, in its essence is a process of diagnosing who is the best fit for each role in the play among those auditioning. This is a set of skills that will serve me well in my future career in sustainability in higher education because an important piece of that work involves diagnosing the organizational situation regarding progress towards sustainability. My intuition was telling me that AUNE had many of the right elements in place to excel in advancing sustainability: a point person (chief sustainability staff person) who understands both the academic and administrative sides of the campus because they work in both or have experience in both; the support of a standing committee; direct reporting to the top level leaders of the institution; a stated institutional commitment to sustainability; strong support for sustainability from top level leaders; sustainability staffing with leadership and change skills; and a variety of other characteristics. The interviews I conducted for the Case Study Analysis served to confirm all of these and more.
	The Nature of Leadership Essay offered me the space to really test my ability to assimilate a large amount of information in the form of leadership theories and re-package it into the beginnings of a model that might apply especially well to sustainability in higher education. I developed a tool to evaluate leadership theories based on five continua or polarities: Nature/nurture, leader/follower, situatedness/noncontextuality, descriptive/prescriptive, and task/relationship. The tool helps to uncover theories or aspects of theories that have fallen prey to what I call the disassociative fallacy of dualism wherein the outer poles are separated from the continuum that connects them, leaving a distorted view comprised of only one or the other of the isolated extremes. The best leadership theories will recognize the need to reach a point of harmonic balance on these continua, albeit contingent to the situation at hand. The model I developed from this line of thinking flows directly from my own ideas about the ontology of relationships, wherein one considers four nested spheres of relationship to oneself (psychology), other people (sociology), the rest of nature (ecology), and the Great Mystery (theology).  Using that same notion of nested spheres, I developed the BRIL model – Balanced, Reflective, Intelligent Leadership. It consists of four nested spheres of intelligence and practice that need to be developed: self-intelligence/development at the core, surrounded by relational intelligence/practice, then contextual intelligence/sensitivity, and finally reflective intelligence/practice. It was a very rewarding exercise to develop my own approach to leadership theory/practice by reviving some ideas I began to develop more than fifteen years ago. How it might relate specifically to sustainability in higher education is something I look forward to exploring in the next phase of my career.

	My overarching purpose in pursuing the PhD in Leadership and Change is to reframe myself as a leader of change in the field of sustainability in higher education. 