Joan P. Ball works with emerging and established leaders to help them learn to navigate change, build resilience, and develop a wayfinding mindset—especially when they face uncertain transitions. Her work lives in the tricky space between ambition, impact and wellbeing at a time when we are forced (gleefully or kicking and screaming) to reimagine what it means to live meaningful and successful lives in a rapidly changing world. Joan’s work involves a constellation of activities that hang together around a deep desire to equip individuals, teams and organizations to prepare for life’s inevitable What Now? Moments by learning to engage uncharted territory as an invitation to curiosity and experimentation.
She is a tenured associate professor in the Tobin College of Business at St. John’s University in New York City where she teaches Creativity and Innovation for Business and Society, Strategic Service Design and Consumer Behavior to undergraduate and graduate business students who have a heart for changing the world. She is also the founder of WOMB Service Design Lab, an action research consultancy where she works with individuals, teams and organizations to develop new tools and approaches designed to help leaders learn to navigate uncertain transitions and teach others to do the same.
About Stop, Ask, Explore: Learn to Navigate Change in Times of Uncertainty
Your business announced a major restructuring and your role is put at risk. You just graduated into a changing marketplace. You finally have the career you always wanted, but you wonder if there is more to life than what you’ve built. Interruptions and disruptions will block your path throughout your journey. You need to learn to navigate them.
This book offers readers a practical framework for navigating life’s inevitable turning points, thresholds and transitions- at work, at home and in between. Drawing upon more than a decade of research and work with established and emerging leaders across the globe, leadership consultant, Joan P. Ball invites emerging and established changemakers and their teams to reimagine their relationship with interruptions and disruptions-life’s What Now? Moments. This book guides you on a quest to recognize the creative potential that exists in the times between what was, What Now? and what might be.
Stop, Ask, Explore is a lively and eye-opening book that introduces field-tested tools designed to allow you to more effectively engage interruptions and disruptions and develop the hopeful curiosity and experimental mindset needed to lead yourself and those around you in an era of unrelenting and exponential change. Discover how to learn, discern, choose and confirm the right way forward, rather than mindlessly ‘pivoting’ our ‘bouncing back’ without direction. They don’t teach this in business school, yet navigating change successfully will be the difference between those who thrive or survive in the new world of work.
