Dr Aiden Thornton

Dr Aiden M. A. Thornton is a leadership scientist, management consultant, amateur epistemologist, and entrepreneur.

As a leadership scientist, I hold an interdisciplinary PhD in leadership, complexity, and cognition from The University of Western Australia.  I have an academic role 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 that was established to commemorate the life and achievements of Sir Robert Menzies, Australia’s longest serving Prime Minister.  My role focused on undertaking scientific research, delivering educational programs, and executive development courses in complexity leadership.  

As a management consultant, I have over 25 years of international experience across Australia, Asia, Europe working with top-tier management consulting firms and a variety of blue-chip organisations e.g. Booz  Allen Hamiltion, PwC, and ANZ Bank.  I currently lead my own consulting practice that focuses on leadership development, change management, and organisational culture. 

As an amateur epistemologist, Aiden is in interested in two main fields of enquiry — theory of truth, and the ethics of belief.  Theory of truth enquires into the nature of truth, its importance, and methods of establishing it.  Ethics of beliefs enquires into the possibility that we may have a moral obligation to seek the greatest number of true beliefs and the least number of false beliefs to be effective agents of change in the world.  Aiden is in the process of bringing Street Epistemology, which is a structured approach to Socratic dialogue, to Australia to facilitate converastions about challenging socio-political topics.

Finally, I'm in the process of establishing a psychometrics company.  To put it simply, our incredibly lofty goal is to provide world-class measures of leadership so we can identify and develop the types of leadership that are required in the 21st century.

Bachelor of Arts (Social Science), Bachelor of Social Science (First Class Honours), PhD

• Leadership (in general terms)
• Leadership metatheory
• Leader and leadership development
• Complexity leadership
• Developmental psychology
• Adult development
• Cognitive development
• Ego development
• The Model of Hierarchical Complexity
• Cybernetics
• General Systems Theory
• Complexity Theory
• Systems thinking, practice, and approaches
• Metrology
• Psychometrics
• Multivariate statistics
• Structural equation modelling