Posted 24 Nov
Brooke Ferguson 
Lina Srivastava is a strategist, writer, speaker, producer, and storyteller. Driven by the belief that everyone deserves the opportunity to create lives of fulfilment in peaceful, just, prosperous communities, Lina dedicates her work to community-led social transformation. She is the founder and director of the Center for Transformational Change. A social enterprise that supports community-led social, cultural, and political transformation through storytelling, creative expression, and relationship-building. She joined us in August as our Futurist-in-Residence and BHP Visiting Research Fellow (VRF). During her fellowship Lina further developed her frameworks on collective leadership. Read Lina’s reflections on her stay in Adelaide below.
I am the director of the Center for Transformational Change, an organisation I founded in 2021 to support community-led systems change through narrative strategy, media production, and convening. We work at the intersections of climate change, displacement, inequity, and civic participation. Centring the voices and collective leadership of those most impacted by these interconnected crises.
Our work is rooted in collective leadership and narrative power models that honour community wisdom and shared power. We build visions of new futures through stories of love, joy, justice, liberation, and collective action. Frames that transform how we understand and reshape systems. What this means in practice is that we produce documentaries and media projects; advise civil society organisations on social impact strategy, community engagement, and power shift; and build tools and frameworks for narrative strategy, governance, and collective leadership.
This work straddles the line between fulfilling and fraught, especially now, when our global systems demand remaking. The questions I grapple with daily are:
Questions that feel increasingly urgent and deserving of deeper inquiry.
The very systems we’re trying to transform demand that we constantly move, produce, respond. This leaves little room to ask whether our approaches are scaling, adapting, or reaching those who need them most. After years of developing frameworks and supporting organizations through crisis and transformation, I was thankful to have space to step back and examine the work itself. To test its assumptions, explore its edges, and discover where it might travel next. It was in this frame of mind that I came to MOD. as a Visiting Research Fellow. I love fellowships for the chance they provide to pause, deepen understanding, and create opportunities for cultural and knowledge exchange, and the four weeks at MOD. thankfully provided all of this.
My fellowship was dedicated to my work on collective leadership. I’ve explored this through my Transformational Change Leadership (TCL) framework. A set of concepts and practices I’ve developed over nearly a decade by working with social impact organizations, community groups, and human rights initiatives. TCL identifies seven characteristics of transformational leaders:
More fundamentally, it argues that collective leadership is a process, not a position. A proccess that must be collective, community-based, grounded in narrative and lived experience.
First, through MOD.’s networks, I explored how TCL could reach new sectors beyond my foundational social justice and humanitarian work. TCL’s emphasis on distributed intelligence and community-centered practice opened up productive conversations across educational, cultural, and corporate contexts. The cultural sector faces distinct power dynamics, but TCL’s core questions about who leads, how decisions get made, and whose knowledge counts remain centrally relevant.
Two workshops at MOD. helped test this expansive potential. A visualising workshop I conducted for TCL brought together participants from across disciplines to imagine how TCL concepts could reach different audiences. What made it productive was both the prototypes and the process of using futures thinking methods to explore how communicating collective leadership practices might evolve. A second workshop presenting the entire TCL framework opened up questions of emergent collective leadership to participants across various sectors, from climate technology, to design and nonprofit management.
Beyond MOD., three distinct convenings pushed TCL into expanded territory. Working with the innovation team at BHP, my fellowship’s sponsor, allowed us to explore how narrative strategies and community engagement principles function in a corporate context in evolving geopolitical realities, particularly when working with Traditional Owners. My presentation at a symposium on AI pushed further into creative governance. Asking, how do creative communities build collective governance over technologies being developed without their input? And a roundtable at the Mercury Theatre with the SA Philanthropy Network exposed perhaps the most critical tension. Social movements need resources, but philanthropic funding structures often undermine community-led approaches by requiring hierarchical accountability systems. Kay Burton of SA Philanthropy and Heather Lord of the Centre for Social Impact convened this panel. Which mapped how storytelling, capital, and community relationships could align rather than work at cross-purposes.
TCL can translate across sectors when adapted thoughtfully. Different contexts bring different challenges—the cultural sector’s power structures, corporate teams’ vision constraints versus grassroots groups’ resource constraints. Yet the core insight holds: complex challenges require distributed intelligence and networked action, not command and control.
Second, TCL’s intersection with strategic foresight revealed exciting synergies. Adelaide’s foresight community, particularly through the SA Futures Agency Strategic Foresight Masterclass and MOD.’s Foresight Community of Practice, use structured methods to explore multiple futures, map pathways, and build adaptive capacity. TCL emerged from social movements that create change in part by mobilising communities around shared vision. These complementary traditions have the potential to strengthen one another: TCL’s participatory practices can expand strategic foresight beyond expert-driven exercises, while foresight methods can make collective leadership’s future-building at once more structured and imaginative. The challenge to meet this potential is in adapting language to reconcile the different ways community leaders and foresight practitioners might use to describe their work, their frames, their understandings of past injustices, and their visions of just, equitable futures.
Finally, the fellowship’s timing created an unexpected intellectual exchange with Vaughn Tan, another MOD. fellow. Where the workshops and convenings had tested TCL across different sectors and contexts, my conversations with Vaughn pushed into deeper conceptual territory, challenging and refining a part of TCL’s theoretical foundations.
Vaughn works on distinguishing between quantifiable risk and different types of not-knowing. TCL treats “risk-embracing” as a leadership characteristic, which immediately opened up productive and provocative questions between our work: How does embracing risk as a social movement leader or advocate differ from navigating uncertainty in other contexts?
Our joint talk at Stone and Chalk explored these tensions. Combining TCL’s emphasis on collective navigation through uncertainty with Vaughn’s analysis of why traditional risk management tools fail when problems themselves keep shifting, opened up new frames for the audience. Though our frameworks don’t always align in vocabulary, our conversation illuminated for me how leaders in social movements, and those closest to the harms of geopolitical collapse, disasters, and oppression, experience and navigate uncertainty, and how collective leadership practices help them embrace risk and navigate uncertainty without pretending it can be managed away.
This intellectual exchange differed from the cross-sector applications in a particular way: rather than translating TCL into new contexts, It strengthened the framework’s theory itself, revealing nuances in how collective leadership actually functions under conditions of deep uncertainty.
What became clear through each of these exchanges: TCL can translate across sectors when adapted thoughtfully. Different contexts bring different challenges—the cultural sector’s power structures, foresight practitioners’ temporalities, corporate teams’ vision constraints versus grassroots groups’ resource constraints. Yet the core insight holds: complex challenges require distributed intelligence and networked action, not command and control. TCL provides a robust framework for building that capacity across contexts.
Thanks to Lisa, Brooke, Ariella, and the MOD. team for creating space for these exchanges, to co-VRF Vaughn for the intellectual provocation, and to BHP for supporting the work. My work in social justice and political and cultural transformation will continue to be enriched by the cross-sector collaborations begun during this fellowship.
Find out more about Lina’s work here.
Hear from the other Futurist-in-Residence who have participated in the program: