PRECIOUS SPACE
“Between stimulus and response is space. In space is choice and in choice is freedom”
Precious Space is new type of learning-and-practice program for leaders working in increasing complexity and compounding crisis.
It will help you understand and manage stress and build the conditions to support sustainable high performance, enhanced cognition and healthy relationships under pressure.
PRECIOUS SPACE
Retain agency in your actions. Stop the stress response from hijacking your cognition and nervous system.
When we experience chronic stress, the space between stimulus and response collapses, undermining our cognitive capacity, creativity, relationships and resilience.
Overwhelm and burnout follow. As do long term chronic health impacts.
Precious Space is a four-week learning-and-practice program that helps you cultivate and protect the precious space you need to thrive in a world that won’t slow down.
Over 4 weeks Precious Space will help you change your relationship with stress, protect your attention, preserve your integrity and cultivate the space for sustainable high performance, enhanced cognition and healthy relationships.
Through a cohort based program of live online sessions, diagnostics, field observations and measurable experiments, you will build a practical operating system for thinking, working and leading in conditions of compounding pressure.
MORE STRESS NEEDS NEW SKILLS
Skills and tools to triage how stress enters and affects our lives.
Precious Space recognises that the volume of stressful stimulus in our lives - from the looming existential threats to the most mundane challenges of daily life - are compounding with the rapid pace of change in our economies, environments, communities and technologies.
The evolutionary stress response primes us to react to this stimulus.
It floods our system with cortisol and adrenaline to fight, to flee, to freeze.
It can amplify threat detection, narrow thinking, reduce working memory, increase reactivity, dampen creativity and reduce empathy.
Over time this can erode cognition, change behaviours, undermine relationships and distance you from your values and sense of self.
It has significant impacts on sleep, endocrine, mental, immune and reproductive health and is a major contributor to degenerative heart and brain diseases.
The good news is that we can learn the skills and practices to manage and mitigate the effects of chronic stress and build the conditions that support high performance and wellbeing within conditions of increasing pressure.
THE PROGRAM
Join us for a 4 week online program to learn how to manage stress and cultivate Precious Space within compounding crisis.
When people cultivate precious space, they don’t simply feel less stressed. They sustain better relationships. Think more clearly. Enhance creativity. Make better decisions. Lead with greater confidence. Learn faster. Recover more completely. Create better conditions for the people around them.
In a world that constantly asks us to do more, Precious Space cultivates the capability to decide what truly deserves your attention and to build a life and leadership practice that protects it.
Explore the modules below:
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Sense making & orientation
Learn to identify the indicators of chronic stress in yourself, teams and organisations before those pressures become burnout, conflict or poor decisions. Learn to create thresholds, filters and rhythms of Precious Space that protect your creative, cognitive and emotional resources in compounding crisis.
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Map your attack surface & protect entry points.
Understand and map where pressures are coming from. Redesign work and relationships by defining thresholds and gateways to deliberately decide what crosses boundaries, when, how and under what conditions.
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Build the critical infrastructure.
Reduce cognitive load by building external supports for memory, judgement and collaboration and design spaces where good thinking can emerge.
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Make it sustainable. Build it for others.
Turn Precious Space into sustainable practice by developing personal and team operating rhythms that enabled sustained clear thinking, learning and adaptation.
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Embedding practice for real impact.
A check in to review how your PSOS V1.0 is supporting how you work, think, recover and lead.
This final session ensures that you are actively using and updating your operating manual to support greater confidence leading through uncertainty, and a clear plan for continuous improvement.
THE IMPACT
Precious Space will help you:
Understand the impact. Learn how chronic stress impacts your brain, body, and behaviour, and how it flows through teams and organisations.
Notice pressure earlier. Before it becomes exhaustion, conflict, shutdown or a poor decision.
React less automatically. A deliberate pause gives you room to interpret what is happening and choose a response.
Reclaim attention. You identify the channels that create the most unnecessary load and put practical gates around them.
Reduce cognitive load. Scaffold cognition with external tools, people and routines to carry more of the memory and coordination burden.
Cultivate healthy relationships. Recognise where stress is eroding your connections. Build containers for thinking together, not just more activity.
Build recovery into the system. Instead of hoping it happens after everything else is finished.
Create capacity for others. Leadership becomes the practice of removing avoidable pressure and improving conditions.
FIELDWORK, NOT HOMEWORK
The Precious Space program includes:
1 x pre-program diagnostic
4 × weekly 2hr online sessions with like minded peers
1 × 90 day check-in to reassess
Precious Space does not demand that you overhaul your life or maintain a perfect routine.
Between each session you will be tasked with an observation and an experiment. You will be asked to notice a pattern, change one condition, observe the result and bring evidence back to the group. This makes the course practical, adaptive and grounded in the operating environment you are working within.
Because while stress compounds, space compounds too. A pause improves orientation. Better orientation improves decisions. Better decisions protect capacity. More capacity improves relationships, trust and recovery. The direction of the flywheel can change.
JOIN A COHORT
Precious Space is delivered as a 4 week online program and a half day masterclass. Accomodations will be made for timezones. Get in touch below to apply to join the next cohort.
GET IN TOUCH
Apply to join a Precious Space program here.
Also ask a question, share an idea or opportunity, or just say hello!
Feel free to reach out — we look forward to hearing from you!
EVIDENCE BASED. HIGH IMPACT
The conditions we are living and working through now demand an extraordinary increase in cognitive capacity and resilience against chronic stress.
Precious Space is not about escaping stress. Stress is part of any meaningful life and any impactful work.
The goal of this work is to share a set of skills, practices and tools to become more intentional about how pressure enters our lives, to understand how it influences our brains and bodies, how it moves through our teams, and how we design better conditions for ourselves and the people around us.
The Precious Space program draws on a broad body of research and practice from disciplines and domains that have spent decades learning how to make good decisions in environments where conditions are volatile, information is incomplete, time is limited and the stress and stakes are high.
These include:
stress physiology, somatics, psychology & neuroscience
emergency services, high-reliability organisations, military & defence
cyber security & risk, AI & human factors
systems design, ecology & environmental design
orienteering, arts, philosophy & hospitality
coaching, facilitation & bio-hacking
By connecting a solid evidence base to rich storytelling you'll discover that many of these practices have surprisingly practical applications in everyday life and work.
DELIVERED BY
BONNIE SHAW
Bonnie Shaw has spent nearly three decades in high pressure environments leading innovation and transformation across public, private, non-profit and start-up settings. Her work sits at the intersection of systems design, community engagement, place, health and behaviour change, technology and AI and public leadership. A designer by training, Bonnie has built a career around a deceptively simple question: how do we cultivate the conditions that make better thinking, behaviour, relationships and action more likely?
Precious Space grew from more than a decade of personal practice, team experimentation, teaching and dedicated academic research into the cognitive and behavioural effects of chronic stress in public-sector and for-purpose leaders. It brings together lessons from stress physiology, psychology and neuroscience, high-consequence environments and defence, systems design and technology, AI and cyber security, ecology, philosophy and the everyday realities of people trying to do good work under sustained pressure.
Bonnie has held professorial roles at Georgetown University, Melbourne Business School and RMIT University where she is currently an Honorary Professor in the School of Design and Social Context. She is on Faculty at the Australian and New Zealand School of Government and Chief Innovator and leader of the MAVlab at the Municipal Association of Victoria. Her work is widely awarded, she is in high demand as a public speaker and storyteller and is a trusted advisor to senior leaders in many sectors.
Bonnie leads Many & Few, a practice focused on creating the conditions for good thinking, collective sensemaking and orientation to enable meaningful change.
Online sessions for Precious Space will be delivered live by Bonnie.
Frequently Asked Questions
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It addresses stress and recovery, but its focus is broader. Precious Space is a cognitive-capacity and systems-design program. It helps participants understand how pressure moves through their environment and build practical structures that protect judgement, relationships and recovery.
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The classic Precious Space format is four live two-hour sessions online over four weeks, supported by pre-work, field observations, one small weekly experiment and a 90-day Operational Review.
Half day and weekend masterclasses and bespoke workshops are also available.
Get in touch for more details.
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The program is delivered via a live, cohort based 2hr online session over 4 weeks. This is followed by one 90min check in session with the cohort approx 90 days after course completion.
Allow approximately 1hr each week for observation, reflection and one practical experiment. The fieldwork is designed to fit inside real life rather than become another major task.
Additional materials may also be provided for optional reading/watching/listening.
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The Precious Space program is useful for anyone whose work depends on judgement, relationships and navigating competing demands.
It is particularly relevant to people who act as leaders, filters or stabiliser for others.
Cohorts will be organised into relevant peer groups wherever possible.
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You control of the information you share at all times.
The program uses reflection and peer learning in an online workshop format. Participants are asked to share experiences and reflect, but are not required to disclose private information at any time.
Online sessions are held under Chatham House Rule .
“The Chatham House Rule helps create a trusted environment to understand and resolve complex problems. Its guiding spirit is: share the information you receive, but do not reveal the identity of who said it.”
All participants will be asked to confirm that they understand these requirements before beginning.
Individual diagnostic data remains with the participant unless they explicitly consent to another arrangement.
The Precious Space online sessions will be transcribed and summarised for the purpose of providing tailored workbooks for each program cohort. These summaries will not reveal any individualised or identifiable data.
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No. The Precious Space Diagnostic is an educational operating-profile tool. It does not diagnose or treat a mental-health condition. Any use of validated clinical or psychological scales will be subject to appropriate permissions and clear boundaries.
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You can reach us anytime via our contact page or email.
We aim to respond quickly - usually within one business day.
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Program pricing is by individual or group. Pricing for bespoke programming can be negotiated.
Please reach out via the contact form to get in touch for details. Don’t forget to specify which program you are interested in.
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Precious Space may help you understand the conditions around you, but it is not crisis or clinical care.
People experiencing acute distress or health challenges should seek appropriate medical, psychological, workplace or emergency support.
The course should not be used to delay that support.
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Yes. Team and organisational formats add some additional modules to support shared situational awareness and collaboration. This includes a shared Common Operating Map, protocols and rituals , collective gate and meeting redesign, decision-rights work and a 90-day system-change plan.
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Current delivery of Precious Space is via the 4 week online cohort or masterclass programs.
Self-paced options and individual supports are in the works.
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Cancellations made at least 30 days before the course start date will receive a full refund. Cancellations made within 30 days of the start date will receive a credit toward a future Precious Space course.
If Precious Space cancels a course for any reason, every effort will be made to reschedule it at a time that suits participants.
Precious Space will not remove every difficult demand.
It will help you recognise what is happening, protect the capacity that remains, choose what deserves attention and redesign the conditions you can influence. That is not withdrawal from a demanding world. It is the practice of sense making and orientation within it.