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Every organization forms people. Few have been asked what they are forming.
Brian Jenkin asks.
Across two decades of work in human rights, education, healthcare, and technology, he returned to the same question with 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 evaluating 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 audiences a language for what they are seeing, and a place to begin.
Formats: Keynotes · Workshops · Faculty formation days · Conference presentations · Panel discussions
Culture
The Formation Gap
Why organizations don’t produce the people they say they want.
Every organization sets out to develop the people within it. Many struggle to understand why their intentions do not become reality.
This talk examines the gap between what organizations hope to form and what their systems actually produce—revealing why closing that gap is not a values problem, but a design challenge.
Technology
Formation in an age of AI
You’ve adopted the technology. Have you examined what it’s forming in people?
AI adoption is not just a technology decision. It is a formation event.
The tools organizations implement will shape how people think, work, decide, and relate—whether leaders design for those outcomes or not. This talk reframes AI strategy as a question of human formation, not simply infrastructure.
Leadership
Leadership as Formation
Every leader is already shaping people. Few do it intentionally.
Leadership is not only about direction, decisions, or style. It is a formation system.
This talk explores how leaders shape the habits, behaviors, and beliefs of those around them—and why the most important leadership question is not whether you are forming people, but whether you are doing so intentionally.
Design
Human Flourishing and Design
Built to perform, or built to form? Most institutions have never considered the difference.
Organizations often treat performance and human flourishing as competing priorities.
This talk explores what becomes possible when institutions are designed to achieve both—and what is lost when we continue treating human development as separate from organizational success.
Bring the work to Your Team
Every talk is a live examination of what your organization is actually forming.
Designed for your context, VIA Forma keynotes and workshops help teams explore the connection between mission, culture, systems, and the people they are shaping.