Dancing with Change – From Coping to Thriving Amid Rising Complexity

Amid these times of continuous disruption and tumultuous change upon change, what defines a Future-fit Leader is the capacity to ‘dance with change’ rather than struggle against it.

The good news is that the wisdom we need to thrive amid rising complexity is all around and within us, accessible for free, at any time, and any place. No credit card, downloadable app, AI platform, monthly subscription or evening MBA course required. Only the ingenuity to embrace the wisdom innate within Life: aka ‘Nature’s Wisdom’.

This article seeks to convey the essence of what this ‘dancing with change’ capacity means for the Future-fit Leader, as it is a ‘critical success factor’ amid these increasingly volatile climes and times.

To listen to this article as a podcast see Leading by Nature podcast: https://pod.fo/e/31c94f

Ushering in a Different Consciousness from that which Created our Problems

Too many leadership development methods, business strategy frameworks and organizational transformation toolkits unwittingly make our ability to ‘dance with change’ worse rather than better.

All-too-often, we engage in practices, courses and approaches that distract us from what’s essential.  In the main, this is because so much of today’s Leadership & Organizational Development (L&OD) mindset is caught-up in the very level of consciousness that created our crisis of crises in the first place. So, these myriad frameworks (often purporting to aid ‘resilience’, ‘agility’ even ‘regeneration’) do little more than busy ourselves with shuffling the proverbial deckchairs on the Titanic.

This crisis of crises in our midst – this metacrisis – invites our metamorphosis into a new level of consciousness that’s no longer constrained, warped and imprisoned by the very Mechanistic Materialism that created the problems in the first place. As the genius Einstein knew, we can’t change the situation with the same level of thinking that created it. We have to endure a shift in consciousness, a shift in worldview no less. 

But we desire quick-fixes these days. No time for shifting consciousness in this always-on culture of quick-click titillation and sharp-shooting sound-bites.

So, it’s actually quite difficult to lure ourselves out of our present predicament. So imprisoned we have become.

Keep it Simple Stupid

While an enduring shift in consciousness is predicated upon a shift in worldview, which I’ve written about in my latest book Keys for Future Fit Leadership as a shift from Mechanistic Materialism into Quantum Complexity, there is a beautiful simplicity the other side of all this complexity: this shift in consciousness is a return into our true nature, a home-coming, that brings us into accord with how nature works.

While embodying a new level of consciousness requires many months/years of dedication, the Future-fit Key of ‘dancing with change’ is an immediate aid that instantly helps us flow as life flows.

‘Those who flow as life flows know they need no other force.’  Lao Tzu, sage

We can start to practice, test out and embody ‘dancing with change’ here-and-now, in-the-moment, for free. The day-to-day thick-of-it is the ideal learning-lab for us to practice. No evening courses or training budget required, and no more meetings to add to the already crowded cacophony.

Quite the opposite.

Life itself is the most exquisitely designed bespoke training platform for you. This training platform is simply waiting for you to consciously engage in the practice of ‘dancing with change’. Then, you start to become future-fit, as if by magic, and find what you’ve always been looking for.

Sure, a seasoned mentor/coach/sound-board (think ‘sherpa guide’) can help illuminate the path but the reality is, this path is unique to you, it’s your path, and only you can walk/dance into it.

Having guided many hundreds of leaders, coaches and change agents through their own unique metamorphoses, I’ve found that one of the most powerful tools available to us is really rather simple – the conscious act of ‘noticing’ our selves. 

Simply notice. It costs nothing and changes everything.

When we bring our attention to how we are being, doing, reacting, emoting in the moment, amid the conference call, webinar, email exchange, board meeting, difficult conversation, crowded train or soothing bathtime IS the work of ‘noticing’. Nothing more, nothing less.

Rather than ‘location, location, location’, we have ‘noticing, noticing, noticing’. Because the greatest voyage of our lifetimes (as the philosopher Marcel Proust knew) is not in the seeking of new landscapes, but in the seeing with new eyes.

‘The one who looks outside dreams. The one who looks inside awakens.’ Carl Jung, psychoanalyst

When coaching leaders, I use a simple model I call ‘Life Stance’ – the way we show-up, lean-in to, make-meaning and experience life in-the-moment.

The simple framing is of three Life Stances we experience life through: Assertive forward-learning, defensive backward leaning, or in-our-center (which I call the Aikido stance, after the 12^th century martial art philosophy).

Both the assertive forward-leaning and defensive backward-learning Life Stances are reactive, and when they become a default reaction (an unconscious habit) to change, challenge and tension we lose our future-fitness and erode our capacity to ‘dance with change’.

Unfortunately, we’ve often been trained and taught to achieve, fix, solve, sort-out and so move into a forward-leaning stance when change and challenge arise. Before we know it (as its habitual) we are reactive, impatient, assertive-defensive, grasping at life, like a clenched fist. We’ve narrowed and reduced our natural repertoire; physiologically and psychologically we become a thinner version of ourselves, like eroded top-soil after years of monocultural farming: high-beta brainwaves, overly dorsal and left-hemispheric neurological networks, cortisol and adrenaline pumping through our veins. Any possibility to ‘dance with change’ has left us for dust, and we’re stuck fighting against change, unmoored, uprooted from our own nature, tossed this way and that by egoic fears, desires, insecurities and needs to manage other’s impressions of ourselves.  THIS is the single biggest inefficiency in our organizations today, and it sure won’t be solved by more tech, whether AI-assisted or not.

Bearing in mind that life is full of change and tension, the sooner we get with the programme of dancing with change and learn to play with the tensions, the better. Not just for our own future-fitness, but for those around us and the systems we seek to become future-fit (aka ‘regenerative’).

Its not just the busy old-school corporate leader type that’s caught up in this ‘struggling against change’. Look around at the impact entrepreneur, environmentalist, social justice leader, evocative change agent, or passionate B Corp leader, we too may notice ourselves (regardless of role or mission) ensnared in the very same forward-backward flip-flopping over-achiever, fight, force, push and struggle against life. Impatience sets in, with our leadership team, our people, the markets, with our own selves, and with life itself.  Enter the real pandemic infecting our humanity, under the radar, dressed-up as the ‘anti-dote’ or ‘vaccine’ yet wreaking anti-life carnage.

Permitting this mentality and life stance of struggling against change to pervade our agendas and initiatives (whether directed as ‘sustainable’, ‘ethical’, ‘regenerative’, ‘conscious’, or pure profit maximization) invites in the very level of consciousness that created our problems in the first place. It invites in threat-tinted glasses that stymie the pursuit of novelty and opportunity. The very creative humanity we need in this hour of reckoning evaporates into thin air, so too the chance for future-fit teams, organizations, social systems, civilizations. We feel doomed, but it’s our own life stance that’s getting in our own way of seeing life as it really is.

Notice – Simply Notice

This is indeed a radical act.  As it gets the root of the matter.  And its (r)evolutionary. Because it shape-shifts how we attend to ourselves, each other and the world.

The radical and (r)evolutionary act of simply ‘noticing’.

That’s all I wish to convey here in this article.  Notice, notice, notice. 

Simply notice: notice ourselves getting reactive, getting triggered, getting out of our bodies and into our heads.  Notice the voice-in-the-head with its judgements, cynicisms, insecurities, urges and fears. Notice how this contracts us, limits us, imprisons us. Notice how the body feels, senses, intuits.

‘Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds.’ Bob Marley, singer song-writer

Notice our own flip-flopping, from forward stance assertiveness, and backward stance defensiveness. Notice when we feel threatened, when we withdraw, when we get over-excited, get depressed or downbeat. Notice the passive-aggressive tendency inside that feels morally superior and likes to judge yet is stuck in its own insecurity.

Noticing these patterns of thought, how the emotions arise and transform, and how the bodymind feels amid all this – THIS is the practice. Each time a tension arises, and our ‘comfort zone’ is challenged, a prime learning opportunity for noticing our own selves emerges. Life gifts us these myriad diverse learnings each and every day.

While assertive-defensive forward-backward leaning flip-flopping is very normal these days, our natural humanity lies beyond this duality. The new-normal is natural. The ‘third way’ beyond the duality of our own insanity. Enter Aikido.

Simply Opening into Life

Simply opening into Life as it really is: Life is ever-changing, Life is full of tensions, Life is relational and interconnected (these are the first three aspects of Nature’s Wisdom I unpack in Keys for Future Fit Leadership).

Rather than a forward-leaning stance of an assertive dominator-mode or backward-leaning stance of defensive protective victim-mentality, we have a rooted and centered yet agile and responsive stance that is able to dancewith life’s tensions and challenges. This is why I nickname this sense-respond stance the Aikido stance as the philosophy of the 12^th Century martial art, Aikido, is based on an inner-outer working with the flow of changing events rather than fighting against them. Muscle tension is reduced and freedom of movement is increased through an active-relaxed life stance enabling us to be less reactive and more responsive to change. Change is no longer something we manage, control, defend against or react to. Instead, it’s the vital dynamism that challenges us to dance, learn, keep fit, grow and realize our natural potential.

From egoic reactivity we find coherent co-creativity which fuels future-fitness.

‘The world is a sacred vessel and it not something that can be ruled. Those who rule it ruin it; those who control it lose it.’  Lao Tzu, sage

The living-organization’s future-fitness depends less on reacting to outer change and more on an inner-outer dance with change—a co-creative living-systems stance—where the inner-nature (culture) is connected to its sense of purpose, and people are empowered to make effective decisions at the local level, continuously sensing-responding to change.

The living-organization is not a ‘thing’ to be managed but a coherent conglomeration of entangled systemic patterns born out of the everyday improvisational milieu making up the emergent cultural hive. Both leadership development and organizational development are processes of becoming immersed within the context of life’s ever-changing always-becoming nature.

‘Only becomings are.’ Ilya Prigogine, complexity scientist

But let’s stay with ourselves for a moment longer, albeit with our impatient urge to ‘fix the system’.

With this simple embodied shift into Aikido stance, we align with inner-outer nature. We align with a deeper center of gravity (soul-essence) inside ourselves and align with the awesome ocean of interconnectedness and infinity potential (the Field) all around us.

In Aikido stance we become attuned to, and intimate with, our own bodymind perturbations, constrictions, stuckness, releases and sensations. We enter into an immense sea of wisdom that puts us in accord with our deeper purposefulness and life-gifts. This is an embodied felt-sense, a centeredness, not a purpose-statement or bullet-point values charter. It’s an intimacy inside our own selves beyond the grasps of the thinking mind.

Practically, this Aikido stance is an active-relaxed state that involves a simultaneous surrendering and sensing into the aliveness of what is unfolding in our midst. We learn to welcome-in stillness amid movement, and realise that to dance with life – as any professional dancer knows – we need to be still while still moving.

‘Stillness is love

Movement is life.

To be still, yet still moving, that is everything.’ 

Do Hyun Choe, Japanese Teacher

With bodymind coherence practices we aid our Aikido stance, and with practice this becomes a new habit, a new-norm, far beyond the limitations of backward-forward assertive-defensive flip-flopping.

Sure, we still get triggered and off-center, but our ability to right ourselves is stronger, and the way we make meaning out of life’s tensions and challenges subtly deepens.  We invite in a different quality of consciousness than which created the problems in the first place. 

No longer are we shuffling deckchairs on the Titanic, we’re actively engaged in the front-line of becoming future-fit, right at the heart of it, in-the-moment.

There are a whole host of practices to aid this dancing with change Aikido Stance that I share in my latest book Keys for Future Fit Leadership, along with a multitude of illustrations and frameworks for cultivating this life stance.

Lest we forget, we effortlessly danced with change as children, as we also did for the vast majority of our human history. It’s baked into us. It’s our true nature. The last 400 years of Mechanistic Materialism have shrouded our natural capacity to thrive amid complexity. We’ve forgotten what it means to be human. Yet the metacrisis might just be what wakes us up.

Enter the emerging science around Quantum Complexity to feed that part of our mind that needs ‘hard science’, facts and figures, papers and evidence that ‘prove beyond reasonable doubt’ how life really works when we see through the confines of our imprisoning mechanistic mindset.

To Finish

Time is not on our side, yet there is a spaciousness right here at our finger-tips if we so choose to see with new eyes. This radical and (r)evolutionary act of Aikido – being still yet still moving – can save our humanity.

Becoming acquainted with our bodymind – more intimate with our own unfurling somatic energetics – is to tie into the life-force that rights us from today’s dis-eased distractions and consumerized titillations.

As we notice our own selves and sense-in, we quieten the grasping grip of the thinking mind, and cease our impatient urge to dive off into different directions (merely shuffling deckchairs, like busy fools, spraying all sorts of inefficiencies about the place). We invite in stillness amid movement, and welcome in the bodymind’s wisdom on what’s right before us, so we glean a deeper knowing about which turning to take and path to make.

We develop a depth of panoramic systemic awareness that lessens our sense of separation and brings us into the rapture of reality, informing our right-relation of self-other-world. This is regeneration at its most radical, and we start to curb the incessant trampling under-foot of life’s flowering gifts amid the busi-ness of the day-to-day.

This is a surrendering and emancipating movement within stillness where we move beyond the need to know, to achieve, to fix, to attack or defend, into a third way. Because, as the ancient proverb notes:

‘Those who know don’t know, and those who don’t know know.’   

When stuck in the thinking head we narrow down our capacity to dance with change; we struggle to truly ‘know’ (our intuition and insight about the right next step dissipates, and we get distracted by the voice-in-the-head). 

When we move our awareness into the bodymind and draw upon somatic intelligence, as well as integrating our emotional, rational and intuitive intelligences, we activate our super-nature and find the Aikido stance of not-knowing, surrendering into the flow – an active-relaxed state. 

This ‘not knowing’ is what the poet Keats referred to as ‘negative capability’, where through the spaciousness between the tension – to dwell in the not knowing, the pregnant pause – novelty, creativity and insight emerges.

It’s also what the Japanese term AIDA points to, a relational tensive depth beyond ‘betweenness’. A fecundity in the Field of interconnectedness within and all around us that spawns gnosis – a deeper order of knowing.

Then we begin the new dawn, the new movement of humanity, through our relationality, with the tensions as crucibles for creativity.

We dance with change, and thrive amid rising complexity. Not fearing this crisis of crises, but courageously (open-heartedly) welcoming-in the metacrisis that wakes us from our status quo slumber into the songlines of our soul-reality.

‘Working with Giles over the past three years has been a deeply transformative journey. In his presence – whether walking through the ancient woods in Springwood, sitting by the fire, or in quiet conversation online – I found a safe space to grieve, unlearn, reconnect with what matters most, and integrate new ways of being. Giles gently holds space for paradox and for my own deeper truths to surface. The path is never straight, and what I value most is having someone who’s walked it before – holding space with wisdom and experience across business, spiritual, energetic, and the natural world. This is very unique in Giles and shaped not only my work with clients, but also the way I live, lead, and see myself as part of the living world. I can wholeheartedly recommend working with him if you are embarking on your soul journey.’ Christina Peters, Founder, Art of Self

To listen to this article as a podcast see Leading by Nature podcast: https://pod.fo/e/31c94f

HOT OFF THE PRESS – latest book just out: Keys for Future-fit Leadership

‘Keys for Future-fit Leadership is nothing short of revolutionary—a compass for our times, providing the formula humanity urgently needs to navigate the seismic shifts we face.’   Marc Buckley, Founder ALOHAS Regenerative Foundation

‘Giles’ book – Keys for Future-fit Leadership – is impressively comprehensive and very generous. With a large amount of frameworks, tools, and visuals, it acts as both a reference work and a source of daily inspiration. It can be read cover to cover or dipped into as needed. The book also features a selection of guest chapters with real-world stories from leaders applying these ideas in diverse industries and contexts. This brings his insights to life, grounding them in lived experience. It’s not just about insight — it’s about practice. In short, Keys for Future-Fit Leadership is not just another leadership book. It’s a distillation of 30 years of inquiry, practice, and deep listening to what our times require. It invites us to move beyond surviving the future — and instead, to co-create it through presence, wisdom, and alignment. I highly recommend it for leaders, coaches, and practitioners working at the edge of business, human development, and systemic change.’ – Elisabet Lagerstedt, Founder & Director, Future Navigators

To explore 121 Coaching or Immersions with Giles contact him via his website https://gileshutchins.com/

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‘Giles is a unique being. He is far more than a regenerative leadership coach, and has been walking with me on my multidimensional journey to full expression in this lifetime. For the past three years, he has lovingly and patiently stayed steady whilst I found my non-linear soul-path. He has a vast toolbox of techniques to enhance navigation towards embodied transformation personally and professionally. He is sharp, funny, light and wise and exudes passion, enthusiasm and vitality. He is willing to adapt to the person in front of him and has the ability to shapeshift from the linear explanation of the earthly human experience to a much broader experience of the unseen and mystical realms that become possible when leading from inner-outer nature. I thoroughly recommend working with Giles (remotely, as I have done) and also experiencing the unique woodland immersions at Springwood that integrate his teachings at a cellular and soul level.’    Carolyn Eddleston, Founder, Cycles of Change

‘I have been most fortunate to have Giles as my coach over the last few years as Chief Executive. His supportive, kind, and engaging style has helped me traverse unprecedented challenges both personally and professionally.  Having my back, being there when I needed him, offering his wise counsel and sensing into my past, present and future, wrapped around with his regenerative leadership principles, has been like medicine to me!  I can’t imagine anyone else doing what he does!’ – Sinead Butters MBE, CEO, Aspire Group