2025-Survive and Thrive Whatever the Weather. 

Building Adaptive Leaders for a Transforming World

All our research and experience tell us there will be no return to "normal" any time soon. We can now see the pandemic as an inflection point where changes that had been bubbling up finally broke out and changed everything. The disruptive forces that were already gathering pace were turbo charged.

Today's leaders navigate artificial intelligence adoption, manage multi-generational hybrid workforces, address climate challenges, and build organizations that serve all stakeholders—not just shareholders. Success no longer comes from managing predictable change, but from thriving in continuous transformation.

At ALP Partners, we've evolved our approach over two decades to meet these modern realities. We help leaders develop the capabilities essential for today's complex environment: psychological safety, adaptive thinking, diverse leadership, and the ability to transform pressure into breakthrough performance.

Our Modern Leadership Philosophy

We believe exceptional leadership in the 2020s requires four fundamental capabilities:

1. Adaptive Leadership for VUCA Environments

Leaders must navigate Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity with confidence. We develop your ability to make rapid, informed decisions while maintaining team cohesion and organizational purpose.

2. Leadership Excellence

Modern organizations thrive on diverse perspectives and psychological safety. Our programs build leaders who create environments where every team member can contribute their best thinking and performance.

3. Digital Transformation Leadership

As AI and automation reshape work, leaders need new skills to guide human-technology integration while preserving what makes teams uniquely human—creativity, empathy, and strategic thinking.

4. Regenerative Leadership Principles

Today's leaders must balance profit with purpose, creating value for all stakeholders while addressing environmental and social challenges. We help you lead organizations that regenerate rather than simply sustain.

Research Methodology and Partnerships

Our approach combines cutting-edge research with time-tested principles from high-stakes environments. We partner and have partnered with leading universities, military academies, and research institutions to ensure our methodologies reflect the latest understanding of human performance under pressure.

Our Research Foundation:

• Science-based coaching approaches validated through academic partnerships
• 20+ years of data from Fortune 500 transformations
• Military and first responder performance protocols adapted for business
• Cross-cultural leadership effectiveness studies
• AI-enhanced assessment and development tools

Meet our CEO and Founder, Jonathan Brown 

Jonathan brings over two decades of experience helping leaders perform under extreme pressure. His unique background combines personal experience overcoming significant challenges with deep research into elite performance across military, medical, and business environments.

Recent Achievements:

• One of the UK's most experienced coaches.
• Strategic advisor to fast growth companies
• Developer of the Stress-and-Success Performance Model
• Podcast host where he interviews top thinkers like Henry Mintzberg, Fred Harrison and Edi Bilimoria.

Jonathan's Evolution: After experiencing his own leadership crisis and recovery, Jonathan dedicated his career to understanding what separates leaders who thrive under pressure from those who merely survive. His research has taken him from studying fighter pilots and special forces operators to analyzing the decision-making processes of successful tech entrepreneurs and social change leaders.

"The leaders who will shape our future aren't those who avoid stress and uncertainty—they're the ones who transform these challenges into competitive advantages."

A picture of Jonathan with his family. He’s the one in the bowler hat – preparing for a life in the city!

Trust is now your Super Power

Research and experience show that if you want to move fast, you have to have trust between people.  Right now, leaders have a unique opportunity to reshape their organisations by capitalising on the trust gains that have come from all the changes your staff have made to deliver during a crazy year.  

In small family businesses, the importance of the leader’s values are seen every day. Our founder’s experience working for Procter & Gamble, then one the world’s most respected values based companies, deepened this understanding.

What’s particularly exciting is that the US military has done a great deal of research into character-based leadership in the last 20 years. This research that is literally battle tested informs the advice and support we offer you. We are sure it’s advice you’ll come to trust.

The best news about the work in this area is that you can move much faster than was previously believed. 

Save Time and Money Leveraging our Expertise

Challenging situations bring risks.  The answer to this risk cannot be excessive caution as that merely delays the turmoil. Instead, it has to be engagement, mastery and focus. You get that from learning and practicing with people who have relevant experience. At ALP, we can help you do that as a leader. Most profitably, we can help you create a culture dedicated to high performance and mastery.

“One of the reasons why I am so passionate about creating positive environments is the benefits I have gained from them. For example, in 1994, I moved to Tokyo to study Japanese. I played judo as a way to meet people and was fortunate enough to achieve my black belt (1^st dan) at a truly extraordinary judo club in Northern Tokyo. This was under a Yoda like teacher, Shimizu Sensei.  He was in his 80s when I met him and had reached the extraordinary grade of 8^th dan. This is two levels above the stage when your belt goes from black to red and white.  At the club, there were two 7^th dans and three 6^th dan judoka.   In the UK at that time, there was only one 6^th dan and he was the head of British Judo Association.

All the players were committed to helping each other ensuring their journey to mastery improved the lives of those around them. My teacher had what I’d now call “fingertip intuition.” He could feel where my feet were from the feeling in my shoulders and would repeatedly throw me and then laughingly ask why he had done it. He’d explain and then we’d go again. Purposeful, tough and supportive.  The essence of any culture that wants to develop sustained high performance. “

No one at ALP has 70 years of experience – yet! However, many of us have coaching since before there was a governing body. And as an organisation we have been specialising in what many call “resilience” since 2009. We have seen an empty field grow around us with people who decide they want to do the same. We have not moved from this specialty. Others have joined us. As Jonathan’s teacher will have told you, some things take time.  Our clients find benefit in this experience as they can translate it into significant savings of money and time.

Being in the Room Where it Happened.

The second extraordinary environment was P&G (UK) in 2001-2004.  Jonathan found himself leading P&G’s efforts to improve coaching and people management standards.  This introduced him to one of the most important business trends of the last 20 years – research based coaching and people management.

At the time there were very few companies that specialised in it. The best was Performance Consultants who were the pioneers of business coaching in Europe. It was founded by Sir John Whitmore, psychology pioneer and former European Racing Car Champion, David Hemery, Olympic gold medal winner and David Whitaker, the gold medal winning coach of GB men's hockey in 1988, the first world title for a UK based team since England won the World Cup in 1966.  It was an amazing time and delivering sessions with the founders had a massive impact on Jonathan’s coaching performance.

In 2004, Jonathan left P&G to found ALP. Early 2005, he joined Performance Consultants as a partner with a view to taking over the firm. However, fate had other ideas.

Jonathan’s first coaching program in 2002 with David Hemery and Sir John Whitmore - his future business partners. Mind expanding in everyway!

Learning the Hard Way so You Don't Have To 

Whilst becoming business partners with the founders of coaching sounded good, the reality wasn't so great. When Performance Consultants was split up in 2006, he went back to running his coaching business and running a property business.  This was to offer Jonathan life changing lessons.

“In 2008, I suffered a burn out and near total collapse as I struggled to handle the effects of the Global Financial Crash. This is a picture of how I looked shortly before the crash.  I was mentally and physically unwell – being depressed and weighing 240lb (111kg).

I realised that most of the conventional performance advice fails when you are in a genuinely turbulent situation.  I had to find the right way to bring me back so I had the idea to research how people handle actual life and death situations.  I then figured out how to make those ideas work in my (non-lethal) context.

In 18 months, I had completely reversed the damage I had done; lost an eye watering 30 kg (5 stone or 70lb in old money); recovered from a severe depression and set up my business for the next decade. To demonstrate and celebrate the recovery I completed two triathlons in a week raising $5500 for Great Ormond Street Hospital. (Picture two)"

Our Unique Battle Tested Approach to Corporate Stress

Jonathan’s unique insight – study the most extreme situations and then scale that back for day-to-day situations is the opposite of most other consultancies. Most suggest special actions for difficult situations. There’s no evidence to support this approach.  The ALP approach means that when stuff gets real, your approach gets even better because it’s returning home. 

This was the topic of Jonathan’s first book, Stress and Success – Fast Fixes for Turbulent Times published in 2013.  The book articulated our unique approach to corporate stress – a way to build resilience, agility and high performance. It received a satisfying amount of critical acclaim. Tom Peters, the world’s first truly global management guru, and author of In Search of Excellence, said it was “extraordinarily provocative and excellently researched.”

Esports- the test bed for a hyper competitive world

In 2016, Jonathan had just completed his second book.  Wrestling with the challenge of preparing his children for this much changed landscape,  he stumbled across the emerging field of esports- professional video gaming-particularly a game called League of Legends.

This began a wild 2.5 years that was as crazy as it was successful. He became the World's first esports Performance Director at the LG Dire Wolves in Australia. They won four successive Oceanic Championships making it to Worlds and the Mid Season Invitational Tournament twice. 

And in 2019, now working back in Europe, he joined Fnatic as a trouble shooter and helped them make it to the Quarter Finals of the World Championships.

The problems in esports were massive and, unable to get organisational buy in for systemic change, he returned to business full time. 

He looks back on that time as incredibly useful preparation for the problems now facing mainstream businesses. 

ALP's 2030 mission: Help 100000 People Bounce Back Better! 

In 2021, Jonathan delivered a critically acclaimed podcast series to help people tackle the challenges of the COVID era by applying battle tested research to solve their day to day problems. 

These podcasts will soon be re-released with summaries and updates. Reassuringly, the work Jonathan was doing back then still stacks up today as innovative and helpful. 

In 2025, Jonathan will be running two complementary podcast series. One will look at how to bring ethics back into business and economics. 

The other will focus on how to deliver sustainable performance in increasingly chaotic and challenging situations.

Looking Ahead

Whether you’re leading a global enterprise or a growing team, we’re here to help you shape the future of your organization.