Fellows returned to campus for four days of rigorous inquiry, renewed connection, and deepening clarity about the motivations and intentions for future leadership.
In late April, the Fellows of the Imagine Pathway returned to the University of Chicago for their second residential retreat of the fellowship year. If the January retreat was about beginning to ask enduring questions about what has shaped them and what matters most, the April retreat was about learning to live inside those questions more rigorously, and to test emerging answers against the best scholarship, the most honest peer conversation, and the University’s distinctive tradition of evidence-driven inquiry.
The four-days on campus centered around reconnecting with intrinsic motivations and reflecting on approaches to prioritizing future decisions aligned with each Fellow’s talents, passions, core values, and sense of leadership identity. It was an honor to welcome many of UChicago’s most eminent thought leaders including Nick Epley on habits for happiness, health, and connection; Ayelet Fischbach on the science of motivation; Eric Oliver on defining the transformative self; and a return from David Brooks looking at cultural shifts over the past 50 years that have shaped public and personal narratives, and what that may mean for leaders today.
A foundational question running through the retreat was deceptively simple: what are your intrinsic motivators? Not what you’ve been trained to want, or what a successful career has conditioned you to pursue, but what genuinely animates you at your core.
LSI Founding Instructor and Executive Coach, Carolyn Ou, anchored the weekend in this inquiry across multiple sessions using the Strengths Deployment Inventory (SDI). All LSI fellows completed the SDI, a framework that maps how motivation shapes behavior and, ultimately, the quality of our most important relationships and collaborations. For Fellows already accustomed to operating at the highest levels of their fields, the SDI offered something genuinely surprising: a new vocabulary for understanding themselves through not just their capabilities, but the motivational logic underneath them. Across the weekend Fellows applied these insights to their emerging visions for next-chapter leadership, moving from self-awareness toward intention.
Behavioral scientist Nick Epley, John Templeton Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science, extended this inquiry into the domain of human connection. Drawing on research from his new book A Little More Social, Epley shared evidence-backed insights into the everyday habits that cultivate happiness, health, and genuine relationship. In this session, Epley challenged Fellows to consider how habits of social interactions might be more deliberately built into the next chapter they are designing.
Eric Oliver, Professor of Political Science, brought a complementary lens, offering Fellows practical tools drawn from his recent book on self-knowledge for reconnecting with their deepest values after a long season of professional achievement. And Ayelet Fishbach, Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Marketing, closed the loop with a session on the psychology of goal pursuit, sharing research on what actually drives persistence, self-regulation, and sustained motivation, with direct implications for how Fellows might design the goals and habits of their next chapters.
Intrinsic motivation is necessary, but the retreat also pressed Fellows to grapple with a harder question: how do you translate purpose into impact that is real, measurable, and lasting?
LSI Senior Advisor and New York Times columnist David Brooks opened this inquiry by inviting Fellows to consider the relationship between what they want to contribute and what the communities around them genuinely need. The session resisted easy answers, instead encouraging Fellows to hold those two questions in tension and to move from a leadership orientation focused on personal vision toward one that begins with listening and response to community needs.
A choice between two breakout sessions gave Fellows a rigorous grounding in the infrastructure behind effective societal change. Jason Saul, founder and Executive Chairman of Mission Measurement and Impact Genome, introduced the emerging field of impact sciences, exploring how data-driven methods are transforming the way organizations standardize, verify, and measure their social contributions. In a parallel session, Roseanna Ander, Founding Executive Director of the UChicago Crime and Education Labs, shared the University’s Urban Labs distinctive approach to science in service of cities, and how they have translated years of rigorous research and community partnership into actionable policy. Together, the sessions reframed impact not as aspiration but as a set of methods that can be built, sharpened, and applied.
LSI Fellow ‘24 Laura Thrall brought a more personal dimension to this theme, facilitating a session on disruption and transformation that drew on her own experience navigating major change. Fellows examined the personal and societal disruptions that catalyze new directions, learned to anticipate resistance, and began developing bold, strategic approaches to shaping meaningful change in their own next chapters.
One of the retreat’s most distinctive features was its sustained attention to real examples of accomplished people who have navigated the transition Fellows are currently living through.
A group of LSI alumni Fellows offered four distinct frameworks for a purposeful next chapter: launching a new organization or enterprise, cultivating a portfolio life, sharing wisdom and thought leadership, and pursuing deeper personal and community development. What made the session memorable was not any single model, but the collective testimony that there is no single right answer and that each path demands honesty about what you most value and the courage to organize your life around it.
Imagine Pathway fellows were joined by the whole LSI Community for a lunch featuring a conversation with Mary Dillon, incoming Chair of Save the Children and former CEO of both Foot Locker and Ulta Beauty, hosted by Graham School Dean Seth Green. Dillon’s story of enduring, evolving leadership across multiple chapters offered Fellows something more than inspiration: a concrete example of what it looks like to integrate professional achievement with expanding purpose across a lifetime.
What the April retreat made unmistakably clear is that the Imagine Pathway is a community of inquiry–one where accomplished leaders make themselves genuinely available to be changed by ideas, by their peers, and by the enduring questions the University of Chicago has always asked its students to take seriously.
In between learning session, the retreat offered something that is harder to quantify but equally essential: time together. Time for conversation over dinner at local Hyde Park restaurants and the Quad Club; time to wander through millennia of human civilization at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures; time to watch, at the Court Theatre, a world-premiere musical about a family rediscovering joy and reconfiguring itself—a story that resonated, for many Fellows.
Fellows left carrying new frameworks, deeper relationships, and a sharper sense of what they are moving toward. But the work continues. And the Leadership & Society Initiative will continue to support them as they imagine and begin to shape their next chapters of leadership and contribution.
Learn more about the Imagine Pathway.
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