Who
we are
Dr Aiden M. A. Thornton is a leadership scientist, management consultant, amateur epistemologist, and entrepreneur.
Aiden is a leadership scientist and the Menzies Senior Research Fellow in Leadership and Complexity at the Australian National University. Aiden earned a PhD that was rated within the top 5% of higher research degrees. Several scholars have remarked that his thesis has made one of the most significant contributions to our understanding of leadership, complexity, and adult development for several decades. Presently, Aiden holds an academic position as the Menzies Senior Research Fellow in Leadership and Complexity at the Australian National University’s School of Cybernetics in collaboration with the Menzies Foundation. The Menzies Foundation is a non-partisan organisation established to commemorate the life and achievements of Sir Robert Menzies, Australia’s longest serving Prime Minister, and to promote leadership initiatives that tackle issues pertinent to Australia’s future. As a leadership scientist, Aiden is passionate about integrative conceptions of leadership that strive to integrate everything we currently know — and will come to know — about leadership into a single metatheory. He has a more specific interest in the intersection of leadership and complexity science. His scientific expertise lies in leadership, complexity, cognition, and adult development, and his scholarly skills include research design, advanced statistical analysis, Rasch modelling, psychometrics, symbolic logic, and analysing complexity. Aiden is currently undertaking various research projects on leadership and complexity.
Aiden brings over 25 years of international experience in areas related to leadership, complexity, and organisational development. As a management consultant, Aiden has worked across Australia, Asia, and Europe with top-tier management consulting firms and a variety of blue-chip organisations. His career includes pivotal roles such as Senior Director of People and Change at PWC, Global Lead of Change Management at ANZ Bank, and Deputy Head of Organisation, Change, and Leadership at Booz Allen Hamilton. For the past 10 years, he has led his own consulting practice. In these roles, he has led large-scale and multi-million dollar projects that have impacted tens-of-thousands of people across various industry sectors including financial services, telecommunications, consumer goods, retail, engineering, mining, education, the public sector, and not-for-profit.
As an amateur epistemologist, Aiden is deeply immersed in philosophical enquiry related to belief, knowledge, and theory of truth. He is particularly interested in exploring questions such as, ‘What does it mean to say that something is true?’, ‘Why does truth matter?’, ‘How can we identify or approximate truth?’, ‘What role does truth play in shaping the future of our civilisation?’. Aiden is a strong advocate for the correspondence theory of truth which defines truth as an objective relation between a proposition (e.g., ‘it’s raining outside’) and conditions in nature (e.g., whether it is, in fact, raining outside). Aiden is currently considering doing further postgraduate studies on epistemology.
With a distinctly intense style, Aiden strives to think integratively, enquire deeply, speak boldly, collaborate fiercely, act adaptively, and demonstrably shift the needle in his clients’ organisations. He is engaged in ongoing discussions about politics, current affairs, culture, and society. All of Aiden’s pursuits are unified by the goal of fostering the future of human civilisation through enriching and integrating the science and practice of leadership. Outside of professional life, Aiden is a tennis fanatic and yogi. He regularly practices biohacking, intermittent fasting, transformational breathwork, coherent breathwork, biofeedback, and meditation.
As an entrepreneur, Aiden is establishing a cutting-edge psychometrics company focused on delivering the world’s best measures of leadership. The psychometrics company will offer an innovative approach to measuring critical aspects of leadership (e.g., leadership effectiveness) to support leadership science and practice.
Research
Thornton, A. M. A. (2020, September). Developmental models and leadership (Seminar 9): Longitudinal growth in the hierarchical complexity of leaders’ reasoning skills [PowerPoint slides]. Seminar presented online via The Lectica Institute, MA, USA. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.32189.84966.
Thornton, A. M. A. (2020, September). Developmental models and leadership (Seminar 8): Are organisational leaders really ‘in over their heads’? Analysing the complexity gap in a large sample of organisational leaders [PowerPoint slides]. Seminar presented online via The Lectica Institute, MA, USA. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.12057.19047.
Thornton, A. M. A. (2020, August). Developmental models and leadership (Seminar 7): Scoring the ego development scoring system with the Lectical Assessment System™ and scoring various Sentence Completion Tests (SCTs) with the Computerized Lectical Assessment System™ [PowerPoint slides]. Seminar presented online via The Lectica Institute, MA, USA. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.27156.68489.
Thornton, A. M. A. (2020, August). Developmental models and leadership (Seminar 6): A psychometric analysis performed on cognitive-developmental scores yielded by the Lectical(™) Leadership Decision-Making Assessment (LDMA) [PowerPoint slides]. Seminar presented online via The Lectica Institute, MA, USA. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.29882.98244.
Thornton, A. M. A. (2020, August). Developmental models and leadership (Seminar 5): A psychometric analysis performed on ego development scores yielded by various Sentence Completion Tests (SCTs) [PowerPoint slides]. Seminar presented online via The Lectica Institute, MA, USA. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.21494.37448.
Thornton, A. M. A. (2020, August). Developmental models and leadership (Seminar 4): Evaluating the epistemic adequacy of claims about the hierarchically integrated nature of adult development stages [PowerPoint slides]. Seminar presented online via The Lectica Institute, MA, USA. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.20925.44000.
Thornton, A. M. A. (2020, July). Developmental models and leadership (Seminar 3): Evaluating claims about the hierarchically integrated nature of ego development stages (Part 2) [PowerPoint slides]. Seminar presented online via The Lectica Institute, MA, USA. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.24280.88329.
Thornton, A. M. A. (2020, July). Developmental models and leadership (Seminar 2): Evaluating claims about the hierarchically integrated nature of ego development stages (Part 1) [PowerPoint slides]. Seminar presented online via The Lectica Institute, MA, USA. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.35186.07367.
Thornton, A. M. A. (2020, July). Developmental models and leadership (Seminar 1): What is vertical about ‘vertical development’? [PowerPoint slides]. Seminar presented online via The Lectica Institute, MA, USA. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.11899.90405.
Dawson, T. L., & Thornton, A. M. A. (2017). An examination of the relationship between argumentation quality and students' growth trajectories. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Northeastern Educational Research Association, Trumbull, CT.
Dawson, T.L., Thornton, A. M. A., Rothaizer, J. M., & Hill, S. L. (2015). Cultivating the integral mind: The relation between development and perceptions of performance in large-scale leadership program. Paper presented at the Integral Theory Conference, Sonoma, CA.
Thornton, A. M. A., & Dawson, T. L. (2015). Exploring the relation between ego development and neo-Piagetian development: Practical and theoretical implications. Paper presented at the Integral Theory Conference, Sonoma, CA.
Publications
Thornton, A. (2023). Facing the Complexity Gap: Developing Leaders’ Reasoning Skills to Meet the Complex Task Demands of their Roles. [Doctoral Thesis, The University of Western Australia].
Thornton, A. M. A. (2023). A brief response to 'Deepening our understanding of developmental assessments use in developing leaders' capacity for complexity'. Integral Review, 18(1), 411-421.
Elliott, K., Hollingsworth, H., Thornton, A., Gillies, L., & Henderson, K. (2022). School leadership that cultivates collective efficacy: Emerging insights 2022. Australian Council for Educational Research. https://doi.org/10.37517/978-1-74286-694-9
Day, D., & Thornton, A. (2018). Leadership development. In J. Antonakis & D. V. Day (Eds.), The nature of leadership (Third ed., pp. 354-381). SAGE Publications Inc.
Presentations
Blair, S. & Doyle, E. (2018). The coaching podcast (Episode 21).
Stein, Z., Dawson, T. L., Fuhs, C., & Thornton, A. M. A. (2016). New views of leadership and leader development. Integral voices conversation series.