K Bradford Brown

 

Founder 
K Bradford Brown PhD (1929–2007) was the creator of Attitudinal Intelligence™ and co-founder of Interaction.  A psychologist whose life’s mission was to advance transformative learning, his legacy is a unique, robust and enduring methodology destined to serve individuals, corporations, and nations for generations to come.

Brad was born of humble origins in Nevada, USA. He left high school to start up in business in Berkeley, California, and within a few years had developed a network of dry cleaning franchises, married, become a jazz band leader, returned to university, completed a PhD in Psychology, immersed himself in the early civil rights movement, and undertaken a fellowship at the University of Oxford.  He studied under Carl Rogers, Viktor Frankl and Alan Watts, three major contributors to the philosophy and practice of psychology in the last century.

In the mid-1970s Brad founded the Institute for Family and Human Relations in Los Gatos, California, with his wife Dr Anne Brown. By 1979 he had evolved the new methodology Attitudinal Intelligence™, a deceptively simple skillset that for the first time answered the vexing question ‘Yes, but how?’ when applied to human transformational change.

The growth of Attitudinal Intelligence™

Attitudinal Intelligence™ was not initially named as such and the term is not found in the literature in this area. Brad considered it something that could not and should not be ‘categorized’ or even described – only experienced. Instead, he educated others in the methodology, seeing it grow rapidly in the 1980s to reach thousands of individuals across four continents.

In 1994 Brad joined Sophie Sabbage to bring Attitudinal Intelligence™ to the corporate world. Organizations his work has reached include top retailers, banks, airlines, penal institutions, domestic violence shelters and national leadership programmes, from the Mandela Rhodes Foundation in South Africa to the Prince’s Trust in the UK and to school and university programmes on both sides of the Atlantic.

A servant leader in many ways, Brad grew a cadre of other trainers to take the work forward. He resisted being in the limelight and steadfastly refused to write ‘the book’, claiming that reading about Attitudinal Intelligence™ would be counter-productive – it could transform only through practice. Brad travelled widely and was a voracious reader and prolific journal writer whose work has been excerpted and published by others wanting it to be shared. Much of his methodology is also supported by written, audio and filmed material.

Brad died on 10 August 2007, survived by his wife Anne, their children and grandchildren. His legacy lives on through the unique and powerful work he shared with the world.