Speaking
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Every organization forms people. Few have been asked what they are forming.
Brian Jenkin asks.
Across two decades in human rights, education, healthcare, and technology, he brought the same question to leaders and organizations: What is your organization actually forming — and how do you know?
Brian holds an interdisciplinary PhD in Science, Philosophy, and Religion, with work spanning ecology, economics, and behavioral science. That training taught him to examine the assumptions beneath an argument before its conclusions. He reads organizations the same way.
An hour is enough to see the gap. Closing it takes design. His talks make the gap visible — the structures, rhythms, and incentives already forming people in the room, and the distance between those and what the organization says it values. The VIA Framework — Virtue, Integrity, and Agape — gives an audience a language for what they’re seeing, and a place to begin.
Formats: Keynotes · Workshops · Faculty formation days · Conference presentations · Panels
Culture
The Formation Gap
Why organizations don’t produce the people they say they want.
Every organization sets out to develop its people. Many can’t explain why the results fall short. This talk makes the gap visible — between what an organization hopes to form and what its systems produce — and shows why closing it is a design challenge, not a values problem.
Technology
Formation in an age of AI
You’ve adopted the technology. Have you examined what it’s forming in people?
AI adoption is a formation event, not only a technology decision. The tools an organization implements shape how people think, work, decide, and relate — whether or not leaders designed for it. This talk reframes AI strategy as a question of human formation.
Leadership
Leadership as Formation
Every leader is already forming people. The question is whether it’s by design.
Leadership is a formation system, not only a matter of direction or style. This talk shows how leaders shape the habits, behavior, and beliefs of the people around them — and why the sharper question isn’t whether you form people, but what your leadership forms.
Design
Built to Form
Built to perform, or built to form? Most institutions have never named the difference.
Organizations treat performance and human development as competing priorities. Often they aren’t. This talk shows what becomes possible when an institution is designed to do both — and what’s lost when human development is treated as separate from how the organization succeeds.
Bring the work to Your Team
Every talk is a live examination of what your organization is actually forming. Built for your context, VIA Forma keynotes and workshops help a team see the connection between mission, culture, systems, and the people they’re forming.