The SSE Leadership program is for senior leaders responsible for transitions, both within and outside the organization. Each edition of the program focuses on a specific societal issue as a common thread, thereby connecting organizations and professionals. SSE Leadership ’26 is organized around the grid congestion challenge within the energy transition and will result in a joint manifesto on personal, organizational, and systemic action perspectives.

What you are going to do

The context in which transformation tasks are being addressed in the Netherlands is changing rapidly. International tensions are increasing, making cross-border and domestic cooperation more challenging, while a joint agenda in Europe is becoming increasingly necessary. National policies are also erratic, with insufficient long-term focus for businesses and co-governments, and there is growing tension between local and national governments. Dealing with ‘truth’ in a post-truth society is a growing challenge, as is the devaluation of scientific knowledge and research. The outside world is becoming more assertive. Stakeholders have direct access to data and have less respect for authority figures and knowledge organizations. Transition tasks are stalling in this complex context.

SSE Leadership aligns with the learning needs of senior leaders who are responsible for driving transition, both outside and within their organizations. For a year, the program offers a learning and experiential space where participants learn to navigate complexity in societal challenges, co-create value, and define their own positioning.

This training program is delivered in partnership with Saline Advies and Next Level Change Management, by Marc Wesselink and Maria Sturm. They developed this program in consultation with senior professionals from the government, the business sector, and the research and consulting communities.

The program is based on four content learning trajectories:

• Value creation from interests: you will learn the method of Strategic Stakeholder Engagement (SSE) with which you can tackle complex tasks in a playing field of many parties.
• Personal and network leadership: you will learn how to grow in agility, resilience, and robustness, and develop network leadership to steer societal change together with your organization's ecosystem.
• System transformation: you understand the dynamics of political-administrative and societal processes during a transition and learn how to effectively influence them and translate them into interventions within your own organization.
• Organizing and managing: you build a strong internal culture that fosters innovation and collaboration and is open to the environment.

These learning pathways run through six blocks and two short trips between September 2026 and June 2027. The program consists of twelve training days. Between the blocks, participants will provide feedback on insights and recommendations to their own organizations.

For whom it is

Our training concept is unique: each group has a specific societal challenge as a connecting factor. By following this training together with other stakeholders from the field, you will develop a shared conceptual framework, action perspective, and language. The other participants share the same questions and problems, and they need each other and their organizations to solve these challenges. The result of the training is a joint manifesto on personal, organizational, and systemic action perspectives in this challenge. For this reason, participation is only possible by invitation.

SSE Leadership 26 is organized around the assignment powergrid congestion within the energy transition This is therefore intended for senior leaders in this endeavor. Think program directors, project leaders, public affairs directors, strategic environment managers, and strategic board advisors who are working on this task and securing the future for their own organization. Participants are at the internal and/or external tables where decisions are made, work in a highly complex playing field, and have experience working with shared and conflicting interests. They are curious, open to new perspectives, focused on collaboration, and familiar with external and internal change efforts.

What this training will bring you

For you as a leader:

• Acting more effectively in complexity: you learn to recognize and break patterns.
• Leveraging the collective: the ability to read the context and environment.
• Showing courage: taking responsibility, especially when it's not obvious.
• Developing more complete leadership: in addition to rational and social intelligence, also intuitive knowledge, feeling, and the utilization of experience and wisdom.

For your organization:

• A vision for developing a relationship with the environment that yields both a permitted and a desired future.
• Concrete results on societal challenges, not abstract, but linked to your own challenges and with an eye to your own interests.
• A vision for embedding environmental management within the organization.
• Agility and future-proofing, a robust organization in which you can deal with uncertainty from a good external compass and internal connectedness.

For society:

• Less delay in transitions; less wasted time, lower costs, and less frustration.
• From problems to solutions, leaders who truly contribute to urgent transitions.
• More social value through transparent and responsible action.

The program focuses on personal growth and societal impact. SSE Leadership connects thinking and doing so that as a leader, your head, heart, and hands are in balance.

Why train at the SSE Academy of WesselinkVanZijst

At WesselinkVanZijst, we work on the complex societal challenges of the present day. Our trainers are therefore strongly embedded in the daily practice of SSE: they are involved in societal changes with high stakes, acting as strategic stakeholder engagement professionals, process facilitators, or negotiation experts. For the past fifteen years, our consultants have, in addition to guiding organizations and professionals through complex societal issues, trained 5,000 colleagues and are currently delivering around 100 training sessions annually in the Netherlands and abroad. For all our training courses, we utilize the didactic philosophy of the SSE Academy.

As developers of the SSE method, we are also actively involved in the further development of the field on a daily basis through publications and podcasts, among other things. In this, we work closely with our knowledge partners, including the Global Network of the Consensus Building Institute (CBI) and the Dutch Mutual Gains Network. In the Netherlands, we provide modules within training programs for the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the AOG School of Management.

Do you want to spar a bit to see if this training is a good fit for you? Then contact us.

Experts