Creative entrepeneur had her start in music

Louisa Oliver-Barnum is a classical singer, executive coach, parent, consultant, international peace-builder and leadership coach, who begun as a Performance Music student at Victoria University of Wellington in 1991.

As CEO of Magenta Studios, she is focused on training leaders in how to co-create social change. She has worked in Zimbabwe, the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa, and South America. She and her business partner Jeff Barnum live in Sebastopol, California.

Louisa loves working with people and helping them with their personal development, helping them “build their superpowers for helping the world”.

She says she and Jeff observed that the issues which tended to destroy teams and projects stemmed from people “not knowing how to communicate, not having enough self-knowledge, and not knowing how to lead wisely in situations of social complexity. The big blind spot of social change today is the absence of creative capacity and know-how."

“We created online training programmes, which cover these issues and help leaders to use highly creative approaches to work with the spiritual and practical capabilities and desires already present in the folks living with the social problems. We call that work Social Sculpture after the famous post-war German artist Joseph Beuys.

“Social change doesn’t come from the latest shiny methodology or clever strategic plan, but by knowing how to engage with the actual problem owners on the ground in co-creative partnership,” says Louisa.

She believes she has her music background to thank for her career, as it has meant she knows the practicality of how you actually bring a new social reality to life. “That takes a very radical creativity.”

Louisa was drawn to the University in 1991, because she wanted to learn from the New Zealand String Quartet, who had just taken on teaching roles at the University. She studied a Bachelor of Music performance in violin.

“I loved my student experience! I loved my fellow students, with whom I had many adventures. I also enjoyed many performance opportunities—I didn’t learn until I left New Zealand that this was extraordinary. I was uniquely interested in modern music, so the composition students used me to perform their works, which gave me tons of opportunities.”

She wasn’t so keen on  the academic part of study, however, and she thinks conventional approaches to teaching and learning don’t always work.  “We need more experiential learning, more meaning, more depth. Fewer factoids, less learning for its own sake.”

The most valuable thing Louisa found with her study at the University was the fact it was so small and personal. “I knew and liked everyone.” She later went to a conservatory in Europe, and hated it by comparison because it was so impersonal, there were no performance opportunities she could find, and she performed once or twice in the two years she was there. “I was a cog in a big wheel.”

Louisa’s career path has been very varied. She has always been an entrepeneur, and over the years she has taken up classical singing, executive coaching, parenthood, consulting and training for social lab and transformative scenario projects, and international peace-building.

Her home town Sebastopol is about an hour north of San Francisco, and not too different to New Zealand, says Louisa. “Sebastopol and the surrounding area is very New Zealand-like. Rolling hills, beautiful, lots of farmland and forest. The cold, windy and rugged northern California coast is 20 minutes away. Spring is so gorgeous, the wild flowers are amazing and so colourful. I also get to have horses out here, and I’m a bit horse mad. I also get to include horses in my coaching sometimes which is really fun because horses mirror back to us our communication tendencies which is very eye opening!”

Asked what advice she’d give to her past self, Louisa says, “Jump into everything, hunt for opportunities to have experiences. Experiment, try new things, have new ideas. Some will bomb, be boring or appear to be a waste of time. Don’t buy it. Nothing is ever a waste of time, and as a young person your job is to get out there and gather learning and come alive. Be the great experimenter.

“It is all art, all good, and all learning, and none of it is ultimately about you at all. It’s actually about you becoming a finely tuned instrument of service for and to the world and others. That is where the meaning of life resides.”