Times they are a changin’, perhaps now more than ever, with so much volatility, challenge and opportunity.
Breakdown leads to breakthrough only if we see through challenges and tensions with a different quality of thinking than created them. Then the tensions offer new steps of change into new horizons, new beginnings. This is the wisdom life is trying to show us right now, whereupon our ‘polycrisis’ becomes a ‘metacrisis’ – a ‘moving beyond’ the status quo into a new dawn.
This article explores a shift in how we sense our own selves, and how this lies at the heart of the regeneration (r)evolution.
Mind, Psyche & Soul
While mechanistic reductive thinking has increasingly dominated Western (now near global) schools of thought over recent decades, there have been enduring currents of a deeper more animist and soulful confluence throughout Western history.
Take psychology, for instance.
It’s largely dominated by today’s mainstream mechanistic scientism that perceives the human psyche in a narrowed reductive way: Consciousness a mere epiphenomenon of brain activity.
We’re taught at schools and universities that the individual mind is the creation of brain activity between our ears; the psyche is a ‘thing’ or ‘ego’ formed from neurological activity. That we are discrete bubbles of self-created consciousness separate from the world around us, save for the physical interactions and exchanges we undergo to survive. This mindset assumes the ‘self’ reacts to outer-change in order to ‘fit-in’ to its niche. Its struggles to survive by adapting to a changing world ‘out there’, and this outer-change impacts the inner-psyche, like a one-way reaction. Inner-outer psychical co-creativity and interdependence are, at best, clumsily handled by this mainstream mechanistic science, largely sidelined even supressed.
In this regard, our psychology is debased – reduced to egoic urges, survivalism, functional utility and individualism. This has led to the consumerization of the ‘self-as-separate’. The egoic-mind becomes center stage, anything deeper dissolves, disappearing from daily awareness.
Unfortunately, this narrowed superficial (and essentially corrupt) view of the ‘self’ is inherent in the modern Western belief system served up through mainstream education today and promulgated through our economic and social patterning.
With this perspective reigning supreme, the human psyche lurches between individualistic egoic narcissism on the one hand, and collectivistic nihilistic humanism on the other. An extremification of me-versus-we forms.
We flip-flop between this polarity – either individualistic ‘me’ or collectivistic ‘we’. We fail to realize what lies beyond the dualistic tension of me-we, missing out on the polarity’s pearl of wisdom.
Terms like ‘true nature’, the ‘wisdom of life’ or ‘soulfulness’ come to be seen as pseudo-science or just mere wishful thinking for the dreamer or poet – a quaint relic left-over from earlier times when we lacked the sophisticated understanding of our present belief system.
Quite the opposite is true.
Our current thinking about our own selves falls far short of what ancient peoples had insight into. These earlier insights are not lost in our Western heritage and vestiges are here today, resurging even.
Enter: Depth Psychology, Archetypal Psychology, Spiritual Psychology, Ecopsychology and Psychosynthesis. Such approaches reach beyond the dualistic polarities inherent in mechanistic thinking and welcome-in inner realms where we find a soulful and holistic sense of the sacred providing connectedness to our own selves, each other and Life. Enter authentic individuality as part-and-parcel of wholesome community development. No longer a flip-flop of me-to-we but a me-and-we alchemy.
It’s our opening into the depth of life, and the depth of our own selves, our own psyches and souls.
This allows us to find our way home, into the heart of regeneration, for true community within this more-than-human world of immense diversity-within-unity. Far beyond exclusive in-crowds/out-crowds, group-think and an insecure need to fit-in while supressing our true nature.
Western Heritage
The sixties and seventies, in the West, were characterised by the self-actualization movement. While much of the counter-cultural movement became hoodwinked by the powers-that-be, hijacked by egoic self-as-separate, and consumerized by corporate forces, there was more to it than an ‘outer’ ego-urge for ‘self-realization’ (searching ‘out there’ for the ‘good life’). It invited a turn inward that returns our conscious attention to the depths of psyche, soul, nature and cosmos within and all around us.
This inner ‘re-turn’ was not a new adventure for the Western psyche, but rather an inherent hallmark of the West that’s often overlooked in our fashionable desire to critique anything ‘Western’ these days. For instance, Plato many centuries ago, emphasizes the ‘inner turn’ as a primary step to ‘knowing thy self’ – the journey of becoming soulful, connected, and in harmony with Life.
Modern scholars often make the mistake of judging Plato’s Forms/Ideas as abstract concepts that separate mind from matter, yet this is because we apply our modern mechanistic lens to something much deeper and more profound. Platonic Ideas/Forms are animistic archetypal aspects of an imaginal realm (a ‘Field’) pervading the physical world – psychical informing the physical, and immanence within transcendence.
For the ancient Greeks, knowing one’s own nature and soul was essential to becoming more fully human and living up to our name as Homo sapiens – beings who work with wisdom; beings who work their soul-craft in service of inner-outer nature. Many of the Pre-Socratic philosophers that informed the likes of Plato and Aristotle – such as Pythagoras, Empedocles, Heraclitus and Parmenides – were not the mechanistic thinkers they are often fashionably portrayed as today. No. Look deeper into their original works and one finds a cornucopia of panpsychic understanding (a ‘pantopia’) of Mind, Nature and Cosmos steeped in sentience, with the personal soul reverberating within the World Soul of Gaia’s interbeing. Every place a pantopia of heaven pervading earth. This chimes with ancient wisdom found elsewhere, from the Far East (Daoism) to the Indus (Tantric-Vedic) to Peru (Caral-Supe) to Egypt (Hermetic), to Crete in the Mediterranean (Minoan), to Northern Europe (Celtic), to the British Isles (Druidic), to the Middle East (Sufi & Kabbala), to the original peoples found the world-over (Indigenous Shamanism). This inherent belief of mind-matter, inner-outer, human-nature, heaven-earth, masculine-feminine, me-we alchemy is core to our humanity regardless of West, East, North, South.
This ancient animist understanding is now being verified by the frontiers of Quantum Complexity science. Enter the ‘quantum vacuum’ or ‘Field’, an all-pervasive presence, a sea of consciousness informing all form – inner informing outer, mind informing matter.
‘The Field is the only reality.’ Albert Einstein
It’s only the relatively recent rise of Mechanistic Materialism over the last couple of centuries in the West that’s abstracted mind (‘inner’) from matter (‘outer’) decoupling the psychical from the physical.
‘The whole philosophy of hell rests on the recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specifically, that one self is not another self… it means the sucking of will and freedom out of the weaker self into the stronger. ‘To be’ means ‘to be in competition.’ C. S. Lewis
This worldview of Mechanistic Materialism (MM) – the ‘philosophy of hell’ – corrupts our sense of self-other-world to such an extent that we de-sacralize and un-soul our experience of life. We rob ourselves of our own humanity. We get ensnared in self-as-separate egoic-bubbles bouncing around in a hyper-competitive nihilistic fear-filled world. But this is just a mindset, a way of seeing, that we have become inured in. It’s not actually how life really is. The time has come to take-off these threat-tinted glasses, and open to the creative potential of life in all its fecund fullness.
Moving Beyond Fear
It’s our own anxiety and fear that’s not just a symptom of the ‘philosophy of hell’ (our worry about the state of the world, what to do, what to fix, how to fit-in, how to plan, how to cope amid rising complexity) but also a cause, a catalytic-contributor, that twists us down pathways of over-achieving and outer-doing up-rooted from soul.
It’s our own minds, our quality of attention and intention, that breeds ontological deprivation, a loss of being-and-belonging, spawning fear and anxiety.
Rather than reaching down into the root of this deprivation, we all-too-easily grasp ‘out there’ for any form of connection and belonging we can find in today’s consumerized digitized society, further confusing our authentic becoming.
True belonging and authentic community depend on developmental integration of the ‘self’ beyond the recesses of the thinking mind, trending meme opinions, or the convenience of group-think echo-chambers.
When we’re insecure, we prioritize fitting-in to a ‘tribe’ over our own authentic being.
However, true community helps the ‘self’ sense insecurity, notice it, learn from it by leaning ‘in’ to it rather than suppressing one’s true feelings.
The insecure self-as-separate needs to see beyond itself to find the freedom and true belonging of the soul. The simplicity of stillness is a great antidote here. It costs nothing yet changes everything.
Beyond Transhumanism
The MM mindset asserts control over life because it fears change, unpredictability, and instability. In doing so, it started to tyrannize over our own selves, starving our souls and sickening society. To say society is ‘sick’ might feel harsh but take a real look at what’s going on in the world today in the name of ‘progress’.
Today’s infatuation with the ‘outer’ decoupled from the ‘inner’ creates weapons of mass distraction that siphon off billions of dollars and humongous levels of creativity, intellect, engineering prowess, rare-earth resources, and vital energy-sources in attempts to control life. Enter transhumanism. Often masquerading as helping us become more ‘sustainable’ or ‘resilient’ when in actuality taking us further away from our true nature, making us more lost, disconnected, dis-eased, fearful and anxious.
Let’s fix this polycrisis by making everything always-on AI-enabled, engineering our weather systems, nanotech biohacking our bodies, tracking and tracing every moveable part of society, gamifying a digitized metaverse, satellite imaging our every move, artificially molding our minds – all hallmarks of the insecure ego attempting to assert power over life, to control and commodify this life-experience.
This is a massive brain-drain. An utter waste of our humanity, leading to yet more pollution and exploitation of our inner-outer worlds.
The mechanistic-mind often prides itself on being efficient and effective. Yet it fuels a fragile insecure ego endlessly searching for security and certainty, producing woeful inefficiency. The vast majority of the workforce across our organizations today are disenfranchised, disempowered and demotivated.
We allow ourselves to succumb to technological titillation, digital distraction and commodified artificial connection because we have failed to come to terms with this inner lack.
None of these transhumanist, geoengineering, smart-grid or space-travel programs attend to the root problem of dis-connection at a soul-level. The MM mind simply can’t see beyond the need to control life when still wearing the threat-tinted egoic-glasses that warp its worldview.
Imagine if all (or just 50%) of this creative energy, investment, human ingenuity and infrastructure was re-siphoned toward encouraging a more soulful engagement with life, and deepening our connection with others and the world around us, creating regenerative futures, like regenerative farming, food production, energy systems, health, economics, wellbeing, nature connection, and life-affirming business. None of this is actually that difficult for us to do. The tools and technologies all exist, but the appetite is far too engrossed in outer infatuation ungrounded from inner connection.
Enter today’s malaise.
It’s a hard pill to swallow that our own minds might actually be THE problem.
Fail to deal with this crisis of consciousness at its root – by re-connecting to heart and soul – and initiatives directed toward economic, environmental and social regeneration, no matter how well-funded, become impotent. We busy ourselves shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic, too blind to what’s right before us – our own beingness, and our innate capacity to participate in (rather than gain control-over) creation.
As Iranian philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr notes, ‘The ecological crisis is only an externalization of an inner malaise and cannot be solved without a spiritual rebirth of Western man.’ This insight of Nasr’s applies not only to the ecological crisis but to all the crises making up the polycrisis now facing humanity. Try and deal with these crises without attending to Nasr’s ‘spiritual rebirth’, and our progress will be doomed from the get-go.
And to be clear ‘spiritual’ does not mean organized religion, signing-up to a cult, or engaging in anything particularly ‘woo woo’. It simply means being human, not some inauthentic mask-version, but connecting to our true nature; to be soulfully embracing this adventure called ‘life’. This invites an exploration—a journeying—into what deepens humanity in ways that respect diverse creeds.
‘To be human is to be spiritual; there is no separation between spirituality and life itself.’ Reginald Ray, Buddhist teacher
Without relying on anything overly spiritual or religious, my latest book Keys for Future-Fit Leadership is aimed at catalyzing such a rebirth right in the heart of our corridors of power. Leaning into the science available to us today along with the inherent desire of the entrepreneurial business mind to be future-fit, we uncover keys that welcome-in our deeper, truer humanity in-tune with Life.
Why is this of relevance for our business leaders?
Durable, sensitive connection to our own deeper natures, and the natures of our organizations, will be the critical success factor that separates leaders who struggle to cope with rising complexity from those who thrive. To thrive, you’ll need to embark on a death-rebirth journey. Period.
Isn’t it simplistic, naïve, or unrealistic to envisage the Western psyche enduring a rebirth?
The more we look into Western heritage we see that death-rebirth is woven into its collective psyche, and a ‘spiritual rebirth’ is a natural playing out of deeper mythic-archetypal forces already at play in us. It’s less a case of hoping for a rebirth than it is of becoming more attentive to what is really going on beyond the narrow confines of today’s ego-malaise. To start to see with a more attentive perspective and so recognize reality, beyond deckchair shuffling, hyperbole and PR propaganda.
Can we see beyond the weapons of mass distraction, amid so much fear, and sense reality in all its stillness?
Of course we can, it’s our human birthright. Sure, times are turbulent and the social waters are choppy which brings dissonance, but this can help wake us from our status-quo sleeping-pill slumber.
‘Understanding the illusion only comes after the understanding of reality, not before… Until we have the experience of reality, in all its stillness, we are still lost.’ Peter Kingsley
Sensing into our Soul-Consciousness
Today the word ‘soul’ has been largely overlooked by modern mechanistic-humanistic psychology, sidelined as something ‘religious’ that can’t be measured so seen as unscientific, nebulous, fanciful. Yet a resurgence of a more ancient holistic-humanistic/animistic psychology is bubbling-up once again. A ‘science of the soul’ is capturing the Western mind. Enter the exponential rise in consciousness studies, spiritual retreats, plant medicine ceremonies, vision quests and soul journeys.
What do we actually mean by the word ‘soul’?
‘You could not discover the limits of the soul, even if you travelled by every path in order to do so; so profound is its meaning.’ Heraclitus
The soul is frequently thought of as the spiritual essence of the individual, and yet the soul is more like a portal into the inner spirit realm rather than a ‘thing’ in itself. By naming it the ‘soul’ it is easy to objectify ‘it’ like a seed or kernel inside us. Instead, think of the soul more as an aperture into a soul-scape, like a frequency channel on a TV set, which is located in the bodymind (immanent-body) and yet extends beyond the bodymind (transcendent-mind), an immanent-transcendent bridge between the two worlds of outer-nature (physical) and inner-nature (psychical). When in soul-consciousness we perceive (know) life as inner-outer nature; we are open to inner-outer dimensions, we are more in-tune with ourselves, others, and life in general. With this quality of consciousness, we totally ‘get’ why we need to be regenerative and life-affirming, it’s a no-brainer.
‘Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
Where the soul lies down in the grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’
Doesn’t make any sense.’ Rumi
This field, land, or dimension beyond egoic-duality’s right and wrong, is the mythic ‘Promised Land’, or ‘Garden’, the one Life, conveyed in all the world’s great myths. Resonant and rhythmic, this soul-consciousness lies at the root of regeneration. It’s our way into an ever-flowing fecundity of sublime symphony that irrigates our nature and informs our knowing, far beyond facts-and-figures, or ‘me’ versus ‘we’ dichotomy.
Through soul-consciousness we can sense the transcendent, unlimited aspect of our own essence beyond space-time and we can sense the potent purposefulness of our unique soul journey in this lifetime, which is limited by space-time. The unlimited interfaces with the limited through the soul aperture within. We open our minds and hearts beyond the limited scarcity thinking that binds us to egoic survivalist separateness. We open ourselves into a different quality of consciousness than which created our crisis of crises in the first place.
The soul is the rhizomatic rooted fecundity that flowers diversity-within-unity. It provides our sense of belonging and meaning in this world. It unfurls purposefulness, enthusiasm, authenticity, integrity, true community, and hope in life-affirming futures.
The soul quests for depth, resonance and liminality. It dances through thresholds and plays with tensions. Uncertainty breeds novelty. Challenge brings opportunity. Adversity reveals genius. Conflict spawns creativity. This is soul-making: poiesis.
As Future-fit Leaders we embrace volatility with not-knowing – Zen’s beginner’s mind – a soulful curiosity that opens our hearts and minds to immense creative potential so that we dance amid rising complexity rather than struggle against the torrent of tumultuous change.
‘Never lose a holy curiosity.’ Albert Einstein
The ego wants to collapse tension into right-versus-wrong; the soul holds the tension just long enough for grace to enter. This is the act of rebirth at the root of regeneration found amid the learning vessel or our own selves. Mind-matter, inner-outer, masculine-feminine, me-we dualities become alchemic. Beyond duality we find trinity-in-unity. Enter the Field.
‘If we can stay with the tension of opposites long enough —sustain it, be true to it—we can sometimes become vessels within which the divine opposites come together and give birth to a new reality.’ Marie-Louise von Franz
If we invite in the stillness to listen to the soul then we can learn to sense dualistic polarities as signs that something is waiting to emerge – from the tension of the two, comes the third. This is the soul’s trinity-in-unity symbology right in the heart of everyday living. Turn the tension into the fertile landscape for novelty, then challenge becomes opportunity.
We let life open us, emancipate us. We walk through thresholds. Compost the trash-and-clash to upcycle developmental learning. Rebirth becomes a natural process of becoming who we truly are, working with the wisdom of life. A labyrinthine journey, not a set of principles or 10-step programs, but symbolic signs, synchronistic mythmaking way markers and gut-knowings for navigation beyond destination.
‘When you make the two into one, then you will become’ Jesus Christ
To Summarize
The adversity and tension amid the day-to-day provide opportunities for mini-rebirths. All the while – through adversity, challenge, change and volatility – we become more conscious of our own soul-making. No longer needing to control change and assert power-over life, we start to dance with change. The ‘metacrisis’ brings us through our own threshold of seeing with new eyes, becoming more human, whole and wise.
Our places of work, the organizations that we spend much of our lives in, can become places that stimulate our soulfulness if we so choose. Creativity, sense of purpose, developmental learning, innovation, entrepreneurialism and agility all exponentially rise when we unlock our innate potential. We become future-fit, and start to thrive amid rising complexity, while also becoming true to our nature. It’s simply good business sense.
HOT OFF THE PRESS – latest book: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 doesn’t just share his wisdom with the invigorating charm of a natural breeze—he embodies nature itself. He reminds us of our deep connection to the natural world, a bond we’ve neglected to our own detriment. Knowing Giles is like rediscovering the path back to nature.’ Lucy Cleland, Editorial Director, Country & Town House
Keys for Future-fit leadership can be found through major book channels or purchased directly from the sustainable/ethical publisher here: https://www.wordzworth.com/sales/authorbooks?ISBN=9781783243532
Next Deep-dive Immersion on Future Fit leadership is 8th/9th September – see more details here: https://thenatureofbusiness.org/2025/04/15/keys-for-future-fit-leadership-8th-9th-sept-immersion/
‘The nature immersion with Giles exceeded all expectations. This is real space to develop strategies fit for the 21st century.’ – Stephen Passmore, CEO, Resilience Alliance
This two-day overnight deep-dive is for leaders and practitioners who wish to gain an embodied experience of Future-fit Leadership and also apply tools for activating Regenerative Leadership Consciousness in their own work and lives. The immersion will provide advanced techniques and frameworks for your own work as a leader and for practitioners/coaches working with clients/leaders and Future-fit L&OD (leadership & organizational development).
‘Feel I’ve been with a real master. What beautiful profound lessons’. – Simon Milton, CEO of Pulse Brands
For more details see: https://thenatureofbusiness.org/2025/04/15/keys-for-future-fit-leadership-8th-9th-sept-immersion/
‘Giles is a visionary and guide for anyone exploring the journey toward Future-fit/Regenerative Business. He’s been called a wise medicine man for our time and a magician of consciousness. When you are with Giles you get why these words are apt.’ Jannine Barron, Founder of The Growth Experience
To book for 8th/9th September Immersion or explore 121 Coaching with Giles contact him via his website https://gileshutchins.com/
To sign-up for free content, newsletters & whitepapers go to https://gileshutchins.com/newsletter-subscribe/
You can watch a short 2min video about Keys for Future-fit leadership here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjQ6s80ewNU&list=PL4fiSooXivB7D83ut1Igssgg0xZcf-mGN&index=34
This is the Foreword to my latest book Keys for Future-fit Leadership. This Foreword is written by Andrew Dyckhoff, Founder & CEO of Strengths Unleashed
“Giles and I first met, many years ago, on a retreat with the theme ‘business and nature’. His speaker input opened my eyes to the possibility of a new way of seeing the world and thinking about leadership. Since then, we’ve become friends and colleagues aligned in the pursuit of a better way to do business.
After the retreat I met with Giles to explore our worlds and build friendship. He took me into nature on a balmy summer’s day to visit ancient trees and walk across sunny grassland. I shared about the work I do as mentor to support senior leaders in coping with their day-to-day pressures and stresses. Then out of the blue Giles said to me: ‘Might what you do simply reinforce the behaviors that are contributing to the destruction of our world?’
Stunned into silence (a rare event) I scrambled mentally to pick myself up from the proverbial floor and knew in that moment that he was right. As leaders and as the mentors of leaders we have a responsibility to find another way.
My ‘upbringing’ as a leader was pretty conventional. Chartered accountant, Finance Director (ten years) and onward to CEO of several organizations. In Myers Briggs terms I showed up as a full on ‘ENTJ’, driven to succeed and focused on financial performance.
The first inkling that there is more to business and leadership came when Dame Carol Black said to me: ‘You do realize that, as a CEO you can do more for the health and well-being of your employees than I can as a clinician.’ This inspired me to up my own game as a leader and led to our current work helping leaders be successful and lead fulfilling lives.
It was Giles’ intervention, though, that created a transformational shift in my focus, from individual performance to Future-fit Leadership, where leaders learn to ‘thrive amid complexity’ by drawing on insight from living-systems. Businesses and the people that lead them have power, capacity and resources to make a meaningful positive difference to the future of our world. This will only become reality if we understand how to make this happen.
And the world is increasingly complex. Working with the leaders of organizations across the world in a wide range of sectors I see this play out. This is not just a ‘VUCA’ world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) it’s become a ‘BANI’ world (Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear, Incomprehensible). Leaders and their organizations are having to continually reinvent themselves in the face of this onslaught.
The pressure is relentless. The challenges we have to deal with are mostly showing up as ‘wicked problems.’ Unlike ‘tame problems’ that can be taken off-line, dealt with and then forgotten about, wicked problems won’t go away, their timing and appearance is not of our choosing and causes/symptoms not obviously connected. Data’s limited, ambiguous or contradictory, there are many variables and stakeholders and critical interdependencies not obvious until they are broken. If we are to survive and thrive in this new reality, we urgently need a new way of thinking and acting.
Giles lives and works out of Springwood, a magical piece of woodland, part ancient, part Victorian and under his thoughtful custodianship, a place where transformation happens. When we started Strengths Unleashed, it was a natural next step to gather at Springwood. We launched in Autumn 2019 and like so many, had to immediately reinvent ourselves for a Covid and post-Covid world. It was only in the October that we were able to gather. We entered the woods as a disparate group of well-meaning individuals drawn together by our desire to make a difference in the world. We emerged with a deep sense of connection and community, which has underpinned our work ever since.
As a mentor I have come to appreciate the value in the discipline of reflection. In seeking to ‘practice what we preach’, Giles and I meet up every few months to walk and reflect together. For someone whose business is about facilitating insight and transformation in others, I am always conscious that I am a ‘terrible client.’ However, Giles is a supreme master in holding space. Wearing all of his wisdom and experience lightly, he listens and nudges, creating the ‘clearing’ from which powerful insight and understanding emerge.
The note from a longstanding CEO client of mine who recently came to one of Giles’ Leadership Immersion days speaks to the impact: ‘I wanted to thank you for an inspiring and transformative day in the woods. I got so much out of it and so much food for thought.’
When I first started to engage with Giles’ thought leadership it was as if all my favorite authors were mentioned (Graves, Laloux and Scharmer to mention but three). What stands out is the way in which he is able to synthesize this great thinking and turn it from disparate attractive theories into a cohesive and compelling framework. Continually evolving his thinking, Giles’ life and work is like a dance where theory is partnered with experience, and the constantly evolving context, leading to ever deeper insight.
And then most important of all. Giles has taken this insight and made it actionable. Keys for Future-fit Leadership is aimed at helping business leaders and practitioners like us. It creates a felt-sense of clarity and simplicity, beyond complexity and inspires the confidence to start (or continue) along this much needed path. Think Big, Act Small, Start Now!”
HOT OFF THE PRESS – latest book: 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 doesn’t just share his wisdom with the invigorating charm of a natural breeze—he embodies nature itself. He reminds us of our deep connection to the natural world, a bond we’ve neglected to our own detriment. Knowing Giles is like rediscovering the path back to nature.’ Lucy Cleland, Editorial Director, Country & Town House
Keys for Future-fit leadership can be found through major book channels or purchased directly from the sustainable/ethical publisher here: https://www.wordzworth.com/sales/authorbooks?ISBN=9781783243532
Next Deep-dive Immersion on Future Fit leadership is 8th/9th September – see more details here: https://thenatureofbusiness.org/2025/04/15/keys-for-future-fit-leadership-8th-9th-sept-immersion/
‘The nature immersion with Giles exceeded all expectations. This is real space to develop strategies fit for the 21st century.’ – Stephen Passmore, CEO, Resilience Alliance
This two-day overnight deep-dive is for leaders and practitioners who wish to gain an embodied experience of Future-fit Leadership and also apply tools for activating Regenerative Leadership Consciousness in their own work and lives. The immersion will provide advanced techniques and frameworks for your own work as a leader and for practitioners/coaches working with clients/leaders and Future-fit L&OD (leadership & organizational development).
‘Feel I’ve been with a real master. What beautiful profound lessons’. – Simon Milton, CEO of Pulse Brands
For more details see: https://thenatureofbusiness.org/2025/04/15/keys-for-future-fit-leadership-8th-9th-sept-immersion/
‘Giles is a visionary and guide for anyone exploring the journey toward Future-fit/Regenerative Business. He’s been called a wise medicine man for our time and a magician of consciousness. When you are with Giles you get why these words are apt.’ Jannine Barron, Founder of The Growth Experience
To book for 8th/9th September Immersion or explore 121 Coaching with Giles contact him via his website https://gileshutchins.com/
To sign-up for free content, newsletters & whitepapers go to https://gileshutchins.com/newsletter-subscribe/
With so much change in the air, what’s the best way to cultivate organizations that succeed amid rising complexity?
This IS the question of the moment. As when we cultivate future-fit organizations, we allow our places of work to come alive and our people to thrive. We attract and retain high quality talent. We nurture cultures of trust and authenticity. We enable authenticity in our brand and value propositions. We bake-in agility and resilience across all aspects of the organization and its business ecosystem. We enable flourishing and learning amid adversity. We turn challenge into opportunity, and breakdowns into breakthroughs. We surf the edge of chaos with entrepreneurialism, creativity, ingenuity and novelty – the altogether human qualities that often get sidelines amid fear of change and a grasping for control and ego-power.
This is the question I asked myself as L&OD coach some fifteen years ago, and the inquiry is more pertinent now than ever – how to cultivate organizations that are life-affirming rather than life denying, and that unlock human potential, deepen authenticity, and stimulate the soul.
The short response/’answer’ to my on-going inquiry is: Future-fitness is predicated upon the authenticity and coherence of the organization’s inner-outer nature. As for the leader’s future-fitness, so too for the organization’s future-fitness. This necessitates the leader to see and treat the organization as a living-system, and working with its living dynamics, to cultivate future-fitness.
In this article I unpack what I mean by treating the organization as a living-system and how this ensures future-fitness, allowing the organization and its people to thrive amid rising complexity.
The Nature of The Living Organization
Many leaders now realize that there’s something desperately wrong about running their organizations like machines. With increasing levels of volatility, widespread employee disenfranchisement, customers’ trust in businesses at an all-time low, and civil society largely blaming business for the mess the world is in, to top it all off leaders themselves feel exhausted. The enormity of what lies ahead simply can’t be embraced with this exhausting machine-mentality and its incessant need for power, control, certainty and security.
More and more leaders are waking up to the need to up-stretch into a new way. A new way that cultivates cultural conditions that no longer dehumanize, drain and devitalize our working environments. Instead, enlivens the life-force of our organizations so that the working day actually enhances our humanity by challenging us to become more authentic, purposeful and fulfilled.
Across all ages and seniority in the workplace, there’s an exponential rise in the demand for meaning and purpose through work. Work that stretches and enriches us, while benefiting others and the wider world.
The developmental process of realizing our potential and becoming who we truly are involves pain, challenge, tension, struggle and journeying deep into our own fears.
The ego seeks strategies that keep us in the comfort-blanket of the status quo. It seeks ways to avoid hardship. In doing so, the ego’s fear of challenge stunts our growth.
The Fours Zones model illustrates the importance of overcoming our ego-fears and protection rackets in order to learn and grow. The four zones are: Comfort Zone, Fear Zone, Learning Zone, Growth Zone.
Each day is an opportunity to go through our own mini threshold-crossings of departing the safety of the Comfort Zone, enduring the anxiety of the Fear Zone and entering into the Learning and Growth Zones as we work through tensions and explore new experiences. Each time we go through these mini threshold-crossings, we can learn to become conscious of our own inner workings—what holds us back (our shadow aspects) and what impels us forth (our ambition, courage and soul-will). We can also learn to become conscious of others going through their own mini threshold-crossings and hold-space for them. Every day is the learning live-lab for realizing our potential and cultivating future-fitness.
A learning live-lab organizational culture that seeks future-fitness is one that creates conditions for everyone to be witnessing, experiencing and supporting their own and others’ navigation of the four zones. This is more developmental than what normal wellbeing-at-work or talent-management initiatives tend to support, and invites us to appreciate the psychodynamic intricacies of unlocking human potential right in the heart of the improvisational milieu of everyday interactions.
‘In organizations, real power and energy is generated through relationships. The patterns of relationships and the capacities to form them are more important than tasks, functions, roles, and positions.’ Margaret Wheatley, organization specialist
More and more leaders are waking up to the importance of cultivating the right value proposition not just for customers, but for employees. A value proposition that brings out the best in people, so people leave the work-day better for it, not exploited and burnt-out but challenged, empowered and enriched. Then, people don’t see the job as ‘just a job’ that only benefits their CV, bank account, status or lifestyle, like a trade-off for the enslavement the job brings. Instead, they realize that the job is an important part of their life-learning in helping them realize their potential, aiding them on their journey of becoming. This is what being a Regenerative Business means, creating better life-experiences, interactions, stakeholder relations, partnerships, products, services and value propositions that continuously cajole us through the four zones, and dare us to grow into what it really means to be human in this more-than-human world of ours by co-creating life-affirming futures. This involves seeing the living-organization as a learning (developmental) changing (emergent) and growing (evolutionary) system made up of complex responsive human relationships, with an inner-nature (culture) and outer-nature (stakeholder ecosystem, value propositions & brand).
This new way of working calls upon Living Systems Awareness—where leaders learn to work with (and thrive on) change, and where the organizational culture has adaptiveness baked-in. Rather than trying to control-manage tasks and teams, the Future-fit Leader senses the organization as an emergent energy system in a constant state of flux, with relational patterns, rhythms and flows that can be surfed with to encourage learning and enrichment for the individuals, teams and organization. Essentially, the living-organization is an exquisite live-lab of learning, and with Living Systems Awareness we simply start to see it for what it is, and so can better enable the live-lab’s future-fitness.
‘Get the beat…listen to the wisdom of systems.’ Donella Meadows, systems scientist
With this living-systems perspective, we can begin to see how the future-fitness of the living-organization depends on a culture that’s developmental, emergent and evolutionary—a DEE Culture: Developmental (ever-learning), Emergent (ever-changing), Evolutionary (purposefully life-affirming).
DEE Culture
Developmental (ever learning)
The living-organization is constantly creating, prototyping, adjusting, learning, growing, harvesting, releasing, renewing. And it’s important to emphasize that by ‘growth’ I don’t mean the maximization of scale, production, and profit. I mean psychological ‘inner-growth’ by becoming more integrated and authentic in our relationships—inter-personal, inter-team, inter-organization, inter-stakeholder—which contributes to the ‘outer-growth’ of the organization’s life-affirming value propositions, i.e. increased regenerative impact which enriches life’s flourishing. This calls for a greater understanding of authenticity and purposefulness for ourselves as leaders and throughout the culture. It’s what the organizational specialist Frederic Laloux refers to as ‘the journey toward wholeness’, and what Harvard professors Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey call ‘deliberately developmental organizations’.
Developmental organizations encourage our becoming more authentic and purposeful. Everyone in the organization has the opportunity to thrive. The culture celebrates learning. This requires an L&OD approach that nurtures a psychologically safe and developmentally challenging environment for everyone to learn and grow in ways true to themselves. This creates a tension that as leaders we learn to hold: on the one-hand creating psychological safety (where people feel safe enough to open up and work through fears, and honestly reflect, share and learn) yet on the other hand stimulating developmental challenge (where people are stimulated to move through the comfort and fear zone into the learning and growth zone). If we overly focus on psychological safety, we may unwittingly encourage people to stay in the comfort zone and not take responsibility for working through their own stuff in order to grow. Alternatively, if we overly focus on challenging people to grow, we may unwittingly encourage people to become inauthentic, manage others’ impressions of themselves, no longer sharing what’s really going on for them in order to look good. With the right holding of the tension, we cultivate a learning environment that allows for plenty of space to reflect, discuss, and share constructive feedback in ways that encourage high-performing teams with a growth mindset. There are many tools and techniques to help this cultivation of a developmental culture. Leaders can lean on deep listening, dialogue, coaching conversations, sharing circles, and group sessions away from the normal working environment, such as nature immersions where people can openly reflect and share, in order to hone-in on what to learn and how best to grow.
Developmental characteristics: reflection-in-action, coaching conversations, feedback
Developmental tension: psychological safety AND developmentally challenging
Emergent (ever changing)
Emergence is propelled by tensions. Tensions create the energy that stimulates and cajoles us out of the status quo. These tensions arise between the space of divergence (diverse perspectives, self-management, distributed leadership) and convergence (alignment around purpose and values, clear roles, responsibilities), and in the sweet spot between divergence and convergence, emergence is created. Too much divergence, and chaos ensues. Too much convergence, and rigidity forms.
The living-organization’s developmental culture is indispensable because it’s a psychologically safe yet demanding environment that permits everyone to embrace complexity and grow through tensions. The culture creates the right space for tensions to be held, observed, and allowed to unfold in ways that provide the right learning environment for diverse people with different stress and anxiety tolerances, thus becoming emergent. However, reduce anxiety all together and you take out tensions, and the organization loses the ability to adapt and evolve. One might recall the importance of going through the Fear Zone in order to learn and grow.
Our everyday conversations provide creative crucibles for noticing and reflecting inward (self-awareness-in-action) and outward across the system (systemic-awareness-in-action). By practicing listening inwardly (within our own selves) and outwardly (with others) we presence. The more we invite this different attitude into conversations at work, the more emergence flows. Gaining awareness of how we deal with our own and others’ anxiety in working through tensions (psychologically safe yet demanding environments) is a continuous work-in-practice each day, in every moment, where mistakes are opportunities to reflect, learn, and grow.
Emergence characteristics: tension-transmutation, self-management, dialogue
Developmental tension: divergence (chaos) AND convergence (order)
Evolutionary (purposefully life-affirming)
A living-systems perspective helps us notice that the living-organization is adjusting and adapting both within itself and with its external environment through myriad diverse relationships on an ongoing basis. Everything is in unceasing participation with everything else. We can ease out of feeling the need to compete, assert, control, and survive. We let-go of the personal will’s ego-orientated, achiever drive and awaken a deeper purposefulness within ourselves and with life itself, whereupon we find ourselves on our own inner journey.
But what’s relevant here is that this individual purposefulness provides a less acquisitive and ego needy ‘What’s in it for me?’ and a more vulnerable, sensitive, and open way to work with the purposefulness of the living-organization. As our dharma (our inner truth) starts to resonate with the purpose of the living-organization, we ask new questions.
How can I best help the organization become a truer version of itself?
Psychological energy that was consumed by the need to relentlessly achieve to better one’s career, status, salary, and personal ambition is now flowing into sensing-responding to what genuinely serves the organization and its purpose beyond hitting the numbers.
What is the organization here to do and be?
The more we become attuned with the systemic dynamics within the organization, the more we sense what best serves the evolutionary potential of the organization and the more we acknowledge what is holding it back from serving its life-affirming purpose. We increase the capacity to listen to what wants to emerge across the inner-outer system and what might be holding it back or arresting its development. The whole organization may be readying itself to go through a Fear Zone in order to find a new way of becoming, a next-stage of flourishing. We listen to a diverse range of stakeholders—investors, customers, suppliers, ambassadors, thought-leaders, advocates, social media networkers, regulators, partners, even competitors—for insights on how the market is emerging from their perspective, providing useful insight on evolutionary pathways ahead.
Evolutionary characteristics: Sensing across the ecosystem, listening to the living-organization’s evolutionary purpose
Developmental tension: individual purposefulness AND organizational purposefulness
In Summary:
The Future-fit Leader senses the organization as an emergent energy system in a constant state of flux, with relational patterns, rhythms and flows.
The living-organization can be seen as an exquisite live-lab of learning. Where each day makes up the learning journey toward future-fitness.
Continual change demands that we regularly move through our own Comfort and Fear Zones.
Each of us is at the front-line of the organizational milieu, and our life stance contributes to systemic ripples and repercussions. (For an article on Life Stance – Dancing with Change – see https://thenatureofbusiness.org/2025/05/20/dancing-with-change-from-coping-to-thriving-amid-rising-complexity/
By embracing a living-systems approach to L&OD we create developmental, emergent, evolutionary (DEE) cultures that can thrive amid rising complexity.
We begin to engage with life and the living-organization in a subtly (yet profoundly) different way; one that seeks to work with and serve life rather than control and exploit it.
As discussed on this recent podcast with Founder & CEO of Strengths Unleashed, Andrew Dyckoff, the critical success factor facing and leaders and organizations these days is the capacity to lean-in to and embrace change, and cultivate cultures that thrive amid rising complexity.
This is what is unpacked in detail in my latest book Keys for Future Fit Leadership.
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 doesn’t just share his wisdom with the invigorating charm of a natural breeze—he embodies nature itself. He reminds us of our deep connection to the natural world, a bond we’ve neglected to our own detriment. Knowing Giles is like rediscovering the path back to nature.’ Lucy Cleland, Editorial Director, Country & Town House
Next Deep-dive Immersion on Future Fit leadership is 8th/9th September – see more details here: https://thenatureofbusiness.org/2025/04/15/keys-for-future-fit-leadership-8th-9th-sept-immersion/
‘The nature immersion with Giles exceeded all expectations. This is real space to develop strategies fit for the 21st century.’ – Stephen Passmore, CEO, Resilience Alliance
This two-day overnight deep-dive is for leaders and practitioners who wish to gain an embodied experience of Future-fit Leadership and also apply tools for activating Regenerative Leadership Consciousness in their own work and lives. The immersion will provide advanced techniques and frameworks for your own work as a leader and for practitioners/coaches working with clients/leaders and Future-fit L&OD (leadership & organizational development).
‘Feel I’ve been with a real master. What beautiful profound lessons’. – Simon Milton, CEO of Pulse Brands
For more details see: https://thenatureofbusiness.org/2025/04/15/keys-for-future-fit-leadership-8th-9th-sept-immersion/
‘Giles is a visionary and guide for anyone exploring the journey toward Future-fit/Regenerative Business. He’s been called a wise medicine man for our time and a magician of consciousness. When you are with Giles you get why these words are apt.’ Jannine Barron, Founder of The Growth Experience
To book for 8th/9th September Immersion or explore 121 Coaching with Giles contact him via his website https://gileshutchins.com/
To sign-up for free content, newsletters & whitepapers go to https://gileshutchins.com/newsletter-subscribe/
Video on Future-fit Leadership
Keys for Future-fit Leadership can be purchased directly (and shipped globally) from the ethical/sustainable publisher: https://www.wordzworth.com/sales/authorbooks?ISBN=9781783243532
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.
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 12th 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 12th 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.
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 doesn’t just share his wisdom with the invigorating charm of a natural breeze—he embodies nature itself. He reminds us of our deep connection to the natural world, a bond we’ve neglected to our own detriment. Knowing Giles is like rediscovering the path back to nature.’ Lucy Cleland, Editorial Director, Country & Town House
Next Deep-dive Immersion on Future Fit leadership is 8th/9th September – see more details here: https://thenatureofbusiness.org/2025/04/15/keys-for-future-fit-leadership-8th-9th-sept-immersion/
‘The nature immersion with Giles exceeded all expectations. This is real space to develop strategies fit for the 21st century.’ – Stephen Passmore, CEO, Resilience Alliance
This two-day overnight deep-dive is for leaders and practitioners who wish to gain an embodied experience of Future-fit Leadership and also apply tools for activating Regenerative Leadership Consciousness in their own work and lives. The immersion will provide advanced techniques and frameworks for your own work as a leader and for practitioners/coaches working with clients/leaders and Future-fit L&OD (leadership & organizational development).
‘Feel I’ve been with a real master. What beautiful profound lessons’. – Simon Milton, CEO of Pulse Brands
For more details see: https://thenatureofbusiness.org/2025/04/15/keys-for-future-fit-leadership-8th-9th-sept-immersion/
‘Giles is a visionary and guide for anyone exploring the journey toward Future-fit/Regenerative Business. He’s been called a wise medicine man for our time and a magician of consciousness. When you are with Giles you get why these words are apt.’ Jannine Barron, Founder of The Growth Experience
To book for 8th/9th September Immersion or explore 121 Coaching with Giles contact him via his website https://gileshutchins.com/
To sign-up for free content, newsletters & whitepapers go to https://gileshutchins.com/newsletter-subscribe/
Keys for Future-fit Leadership – 8th/9th Sept Immersion
It’s a fascinating yet challenging time to be a leader. We are in the midst of an old system dying and a new one being born, all amid unceasing transformation – change upon change upon change is the new-norm.
Through over a decade of working on Future-fit Leadership, regenerative business and nature-based coaching – and author of seven books in this space – I have developed a range of practices, coaching-frames and processes that aid the journey of becoming a next-stage Future-fit Leader – one that can work with and thrive amid complexity, and journey toward becoming regenerative for self and system.
On Monday and Tuesday 8th/9th September, I will host a special nature-based leadership immersion providing an embodied experience of what it means to become a conscious, future-fit, regenerative leader
‘The nature immersion with Giles exceeded all expectations. This is real space to develop strategies fit for the 21st century.’ – Stephen Passmore, CEO, Resilience Alliance
Two-day Deep-dive – Monday 8th /Tuesday 9th Sept – price £800 per person
This two-day overnight deep-dive is for leaders and practitioners who wish to gain an embodied experience of Future-fit Leadership and also apply tools for activating Regenerative Leadership Consciousness in their own work and lives. The immersion will provide advanced techniques and frameworks for your own work as a leader and for practitioners/coaches working with clients/leaders and Future-fit L&OD (leadership & organizational development).
‘Feel I’ve been with a real master. What beautiful profound lessons’. – Simon Milton, CEO of Pulse Brands
Two-Day 8th/9th September Deep-dive Immersion Logistics – £800 per person
10.15am Arrivals Monday 8th September– refreshments upon arrival. Immersion commences at 10.30am
Overnight camping – either bring own tent (or there are some basic bivvy structures if do not wish to use a tent) 14hr solo experience immersed in ancient woodland
Tuesday 9th September – 3pm Departures
By Car – RH17 6HQ Springwood Farm
By Train – Come to Three Bridges station for no later than 10.15am, a cab will meet you there.
Cost: For two-days £800 – To confirm your place either Direct Message Giles on LinkedIn or contact him via his website https://gileshutchins.com/
‘Your deep immersion into nature opened our minds, opened our souls, to deeply connect with our place and purpose in life. With love and deep appreciation for your inspiration.’ – Sue Cheshire, Founder of the Global Leaders Academy
Pre-reading or preparation: Once you have paid, you will be sent some preparatory material and guidance. More information will also be sent near the immersion with further preparatory information.
“Giles’s Springwood is not just about being in an ancient woodland—it’s about being with him. The energy of the forest has taken hold of him and you will get to appreciate the calm wisdom of being close to nature through his leadership programmes. A modern sage!” Courtney Holm, Vice President, Sustainable Futures, Cap Gemini
You will form part of a small group of like-minded yet diverse leaders and practitioners, and will be facilitated by Giles Hutchins for the entire two-days, and the time includes a 14hr solo in nature for intentional work and reflection on your life-work/self & system. Here are some of the things you can hope to experience:
- Specific Keys for Future-fit Leadership, drawn from Giles’s latest book Keys for Future-fit Leadership
- Specific practices to work with the essence & emergence of your living-system/organization/practice
- Energy cultivation and somatic practices carefully crafted for future-fit leadership
- 14hr solo in private ancient woodlands with pre-and-post reflection processing
- Tools, processes and techniques to aid the journey toward future-fit leadership
- Tools for working with intention, intuition, insight and Nature’s Wisdom
- Peer-sharing and facilitated group dialogue sessions
- Pre-reading material and guidance before the workshop
- A signed copy of any of Giles Hutchins previous six books, plus the seventh and latest Keys for Future-fit Leadership is provided to participants for a special price of £50 (RRP £59.99)
- Organic meals and refreshments throughout the two-days
- Follow-up reading material post immersion
- A Future-fit Leadership Academy certificate for your attendance
- A special 30% discount on 121 coaching sessions with Giles Hutchins
‘Powerful and provocative. The best leadership event I’ve ever attended!’ – Ian Ayling, Director, The Soil Association
About Springwood Farm: a mix of semi-ancient and ancient woodland with wildflower meadows, 60 acres in total, private and secluded specially designed for advanced leadership coaching work, see some pictures here: https://www.leadershipimmersions.com/gallery
The immersion at Springwood was very powerful, thought-provoking, energising and soul-touching. I’m still strongly feeling the ripples from our time, many days after, and have already started some conversations which could be life-changing as a result. Thank you Giles! Highly recommended! Jules O’Donnell, Founder of Talking CAT consulting
HOT OFF THE PRESS – latest book just out: Keys for Future-fit Leadership
“Unless living in oxygen tents on Mars is your idea of the future, then our realignment with nature is essential. Giles Hutchins is growing in significance and channeling existential knowledge to help this essential realignment. His work has had a profound impact on me as CEO, countless individuals across our business, and massively on our wider organizational culture.” Galahad Clark, CEO & Co-Founder, Vivobarefoot
“It’s very clear that Giles is here at this epochal moment in human history to help leaders tap into their inner truth, courage, and wisdom; to help them cross the threshold that will allow a collective metamorphosis. With his unique was of holding space for executives, Giles enables leaders to tap into a new level of consciousness—a consciousness that we can all access, regenerative leadership consciousness.” Laura Storm, co-author of Regenerative Leadership & Founder of Regenerators
For more on coaching with Giles, visit his website here.
To sign-up for free content, newsletters & whitepapers go to https://gileshutchins.com/newsletter-subscribe/
To book for 8th/9th September Immersion – either Direct Message Giles on LinkedIn or contact him via his website https://gileshutchins.com/
“Having been ‘leadership development-ed’ up to my eyeballs in my corporate years, Giles Hutchins brings a unique mix of skills and techniques to coaching for these transformative times.” Jayne Mayled, CEO & Founder, True Story
Activating Regenerative Leadership Consciousness – NATURE WORKS
A book review of Nature Works by David Lorimer.
David Lorimer is a visionary polymath who is Programme Director of the Scientific and Medical Network, Editor of Paradigm Explorer, and Chair of the Galileo Commission.
NATURE WORKS – Activating Regenerative Leadership Consciousness, by Giles Hutchins
Wordzworth, 2024, 446 pp., £25.99, p/b – ISBN 978-1-78324-31-2
Giles has written a series of important books on leadership and consciousness, and this is his most comprehensive, while also remaining accessible. He works as an executive coach, senior advisor and keynote speaker on regenerative leadership and what he calls future-fit business, facilitating formative experiences in nature with his clients.
In one of the four Forewords to the book, Dr. Carolyn Eddleston writes about her own journey and the crucial importance of spending quiet, undistracted, still time in nature that enables real connection to take place. Returning to a business context, this can enable leaders to encourage people to come from the heart and soul rather than simply the mind. They realize that they are ‘part of an intricate web of interconnected living systems; nature becomes their teacher in a living classroom.’
The 12 chapters begin with exploring the worldview shift and the journey towards regeneration, then understanding how Nature works in terms of living systems, and finally journey into right relation. The fundamental need, as many readers will agree, is for a revolution in consciousness that transcends our current limited ways of thinking as well as our sense of separation, ‘which is the very hallmark of the Western mindset that dominates business, politics, and society through much of the world today.’
In addition, Giles remarks that ‘we have entered the area of transhuman materialism and surveillance capitalism, offering counterfeit connection through commercialism,’ meaning that we are sleepwalking into what he calls technospheric totalitarianism – I agree entirely. With many diagrams and charts, Giles clearly articulates the fundamental shifts required from Mechanistic Materialism to Quantum Complexity, from self as separate to self as participatory, from organisation as machine to organisation as living system, and from a leadership dynamic of control-manage to sense-respond. Hence, our future relies on our capacity to revolutionise our consciousness and adopt a genuinely regenerative view of right relation, including sensing the inner dimension of Nature.
Giles explains the evolution of the western world view, so as to better understand our current situation dominated as it is by Mechanistic Materialism that dispensed with the Anima Mundi that we urgently need to recover – he calls this returning to Inner-Nature, and throughout the book shows an impressive grasp of key thinkers and trends. He argues that the achiever needs to become an awakener and regenerator within the business context, while also explaining the seven levels of leadership consciousness within the spiral dynamics model and drawing on other adult developmental models. We need to see through three lenses – the voice in the head, our deeper nature, and opening into the Field where Nature’s Wisdom can be directly sensed; this involves finding our bodymind coherence and opening the eye of the heart. Giles clearly explains the steps and processes involved, enriching his text with many inspiring quotations and practices.
It is essential, as he argues, that we come to understand how nature actually works, so here he explains the nature of living systems and the three levels of living systems awareness. Nature is in ceaseless transformation and relation, with permeable boundaries as well as diverse rhythms and tensions, from which emergence can arise. Giles has coached many regenerative leaders through death – rebirth metamorphoses, incorporating learning from Nature, participating within Nature, then attuning with Nature – seeing with new eyes. He expounds how we can learn from the logic of life’s seven principles, coining the term ‘panarchy’ to evoke the rhythm of life.
Nature’s Wisdom involves the three esoteric aspects of receptivity, where life is both immanent and transcendent, creativity and the interpenetration of inner and outer, and finally synchronicity where life is working with a correspondence of above and below. Overall, this involves letting go, opening in (surrender) and bringing forth or manifesting in a process or rather a journey of becoming, so that we can truly embrace life and right relation.
This takes us on to the third part of the book, embodying the mythological journey of departure, disintegrate-reintegrate, and return. We not only need an open mind and heart, but also an open will whereby through an alchemical process we can re-emerge to serve the whole – all this corresponds to the passage of the seasons, also explained symbolically. We then come to the 4 D foundational pillars for regenerative living and leading – dedication, discernment, discipline, and devotion. This is followed by the 5 E dynamics of the process of becoming: essence, energy, emergence, evolution, and enthusiasm. Giles also proposes four soul virtues of regenerative leadership in terms of balance, patience, courage, and purposefulness. We also need to cultivate soil conditions involving respect, spontaneity, gratitude, and listening.
It is an epic journey, with Giles acting as an inspirational guide, reminding us that the revolution starts in our hearts and souls, not in our heads, with how we perceive and attend to life. Aspiring leaders in all walks of life will benefit greatly from this comprehensive and very well-informed handbook.
Giles’ book Nature Works – Activating Regenerative Leadership Consciousness can be found on Amazon here https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nature-Works-Activating-Regenerative-Consciousness/dp/1783243112 as well as other book providers and all good book shops, and directly from the publisher here: https://www.wordzworth.com/sales/authorbooks?ISBN=9781783243112
“Nature Works by Giles Hutchins is a profound journey into the soul of leadership and life itself. With the wisdom of nature as a guide, it invites us to slow down, reflect, and realign with the deeper rhythms of the world around us. This book is more than a read, it’s a spiritual awakening that transforms how we see ourselves, our work, and our place in the collective whole.” Veronique Letellier, Co-Founder of Butterfly School, Head of Culture & Innovation, AXA Climate
‘This is so much more than a book! Its wisdom in text, conveying a richness of life beyond words. Truly profound – in fact, life-changing. Read it!’ Independent Amazon review
In reading Nature Works one is daring to enter the dark places of wisdom. To not only grapple with the root cause of our schizoid society which is carcinogenically corrupting our humanity, but to heal it. To renew and revision humanity’s relationship with wisdom, and ensure our regenerative endeavours are rooted in the rhizome of real Life.
For more on coaching with Giles, visit his website here.
To sign-up for free content, newsletters & whitepapers go to https://gileshutchins.com/newsletter-subscribe/
To take part in a special 2-day Immersion at Springwood Farm on 12th/13th May with Giles, see https://thenatureofbusiness.org/2025/01/11/future-fit-leadership-for-a-transforming-world-two-day-deep-dive-leadership-immersion-12-13-may-2025/
Feedback from a recent immersion with Giles:
‘The immersion at Springwood with Giles was very powerful, thought-provoking, energising and soul-touching. I’m still strongly feeling the ripples from our time, many days after, and have already started some conversations which could be life-changing as a result. Thank you Giles! Highly recommended!’ Jules O’Donnell, Founder – talking CAT consulting
About Giles Hutchins –Thirty years of professional advisory & leadership experience, formerly Director of Business Transformation & Head of Practice with KPMG, and Global Director of Sustainability Solutions for multinational Atos (150,000 employees across 42 countries), last 12 yrs as Executive Coach, thought leader and advisor on future-fit leadership. Author of six critically acclaimed leadership books and several leadership papers. His coaching work has been called ‘life changing’. Clients include Unilever, P&G, Deloitte, McKinsey, AXA, McCain, Vivobarefoot, Ella’s Kitchen, Pukka Herbs, PwC, Coop, Budgens, Sainsbury, Cook, B Lab, Fairtrade, Rabobank, Impact International, World Benchmarking Alliance, Aviva, BBC, BP, Angel Investments, BNP Paribas, Cap Gemini, Chloe, Richemont, Cambridge University, EQT, INSEAD, Hult Business School, HEC, Lang O’Rouke, IKEA, Bahlsen, BMW, Grant Thornton, HSBC, Sky Media, and many more. Find out more about his coaching here https://gileshutchins.com/coaching/
From Disembodied ‘Coping’ to Embodied ‘Thriving’ Amid Rising Complexity = Future-fit Leadership
When you think about it, it’s rather odd that while business likes to pride itself on being innovative cutting-edge and future-ready, most in business still promulgate and proliferate an approach to leadership development that creates disembodiment and disconnection which undermines organizational future-fitness.
Advances in neuroscience, adult developmental psychology, cognitive studies and consciousness research point to a massive ‘complexity gap’ in mainstream leader development. Most of today’s leaders are ill-equipped for the rapidly rising complexity coming downstream.
Current approaches to leadership development (at best) aid a level of ‘coping’ amid rising complexity, leaving the ability for the leader (and the organization) to actually ‘thrive’ amid rising complexity desperately wanting.
Its patently clear – on all counts, across all radars – that the emerging future landscape for any leader of any organization is one of massively increasing complexity. The new-norm is ‘permacrisis’ – interlocking crises feeding off each other bringing a long period ahead of rising complexity, volatility and uncertainty.
Why then, with this obvious backdrop, are we failing to upgrade our leadership development? Why do we still draw upon an outdated 400-year-old paradigm (aka Mechanistic Materialism – ‘MM’ for short) the very mindset that created the permacrisis in the first place, and which actually undermines future-fitness?
The quick and easy-to-digest answer for this woeful lack across mainstream leadership development/adult education lies in Einstein’s truism – you can’t change today’s problems with the same level of consciousness that created them.
I’ve had the real pleasure of guest lecturing, speaking, facilitating and partnering with many of the world’s leading business schools, management consultancies and leadership service providers over the years. No doubt about it, these institutions and organizations are full of bright people switched-on to what’s happening in the world and passionate about what they do. Yet, time and again, the ones making decisions on leadership development approaches, client interventions and service provision, are driven by the very level of consciousness that created the problems in the first place.
It’s asking rather a lot of these leadership providers to design and deliver developmental journeys that reach beyond the level of consciousness that they themselves operate at.
Even now in 2025 (which sounds futuristic to those of us who were business leaders back in the nineties) it’s rare to find leadership development providers who deeply understand adult psychological development, quantum and complexity science, living-systems thinking/being, vertical leadership development, regenerative leadership and business, consciousness and neuroscience, immersive embodied developmental experiences and transformative/threshold-crossing developmental journeys. Without an understanding of these areas, leadership development fails to be future-fit.
Yet, times they are a changin!
There’s a number of interesting developments, at the edges, where institutions are forming unconventional partnerships and programs. Also, new leadership development offerings and adult education programs are on the rise. By example, see – Ubiquity University, Presencing Institute U School, The Green School, The Regenerators Academy, Coaches Rising, The Butterfly School. Thankfully there are more initiatives like these emerging by the day. Yet, mainstream leadership development, which serves the many thousands upon thousands of today’s leaders (who are at the front-line of manifesting our futures) further ingrain wrong behaviours that exacerbate organizational fragility.
The problem goes deep.
Because the very MM mindset we need to move on from to become future-fit has an insidious carcinogenic characteristic that kills-off anything that might threaten its domination. Much like in the beginning stages of metamorphosis, the caterpillar’s immune system suppresses the imaginal cells trying to become the butterfly, in perceiving them to be a threat to the status quo.
The new-norm permacrisis is forcing our paradigm on leadership development to transform, to metamorphose. There’s simply no way that today’s mechanistic approach to leadership will navigate teams and organizations through the rising complexity ahead.
Yet, the problem goes even deeper.
We’re creatures of habit who’ve been generationally accultured into routines that now tyrannize over us. We’ve imprisoned ourselves with mechanistic ways, including how we approach ‘learning’.
From early on in our lives, we’re taught that ‘learning’ is largely a head-based rote activity. We sit in classrooms and in front of screens programming our heads in disembodied ways.
It’s all-too-easy to carry on this routine. Today’s leadership programs tend to revolve around talking heads, digital presentations and screen content feeding a disembodied, disconnected ‘head-learning’. I am reminded of the philosopher Ken Wilber’s evocative phrase ‘brains on a stick’.
We need to realize that this way of learning is part of the problem. It’s rooted in the very level of consciousness we’re trying to move beyond.
So, it’s not just ‘what’ we’re learning, but also the ‘way’ we’re learning, that needs to metamorphose.
Not only do our leadership development providers need to become savvy in quantum complexity, living-systems, vertical development, neuroscience, consciousness, regenerative, circularity, etc., they also need to integrate a different order of being/knowing.
The whole way in which we learn needs to radically up-stretch by becoming far more expansive, experiential and embodied for it to enable future-fitness in our leaders and organizations.
I was recently asked on a podcast interview to define what ‘learning’ meant for me.
To do this justice and respond to it in a way that also calls forth future-fitness is an act of learning in itself. And this is the very essence of regenerative learning – each step in life, each interaction, question, challenge, constriction, reaction, tension, experience and inquiry is a crucible for learning. Life IS the learning. The organization IS the classroom, beyond the conventional four-walls.
So, one could respond to the question ‘What does learning mean for me’ with: ‘Learning is life embodied consciously’. Then, we start to see that ‘learning’ depends on the ‘way’ we engage in life as a learning experience – how embodied, conscious and present we are to emergent learning experiences throughout the busy working day is our developmental learning-edge.
This approach to life is not limited to the work-day, it’s a way of living and leading that pervades all our lives and aids a threshold-crossing out of MM into a new stage of meaning-making. A level of leadership consciousness that appreciates life as a richly woven inner-outer learning experience. This goes hand-in-hand with realizing that the organization is not a top-down hierarchic machine but a complex adaptive learning living-system.
To uncover and reveal what form of ‘learning’ is required for Future-fit Leadership Development is to necessitate a process of unlearning-surrendering-remembering-reembodying-renewing-relearning. In other words, learning as a radical act of regeneration. No longer can ‘learning’ be limited to the narrowed rational-analytic head-based disembodied learning that’s a product of the mechanistic consciousness that created our problems in the first place.
For ‘learning’ to enable our future-fitness it has to bring us forth across a threshold – a death/rebirth process – in order to embrace a new relationship with reality, a new level of existence.
‘It’s not merely a transition to a new level of existence, but the start of a new movement in the symphony of human identity.’ Clare Graves, developmental psychologist
A Future-fit Leader is someone who cultivates conditions for their team, living-organization and stakeholder ecosystem to thrive amid rising complexity. And by ‘thriving’ I mean ‘life-affirming’ i.e. creating conditions for all life to thrive. This is not a wishful dreamy utopia or overly-ambitious ‘north star’, it’s an inherent human capacity that happens in-the-now, and depends on our meaning-making, our conscious capacity to embrace life.
This ‘life-affirming’ way of leading is corroborated by latest findings on consciousness studies, neuroscience, adult developmental psychology, complex adaptive systems theory, systemic and regenerative leadership. Its also reinforced by ancient wisdom traditions found the world over, and by anthropological-sociological-archetypal-mythological patterns.
There’s simply no other way of learning, leading and living that’s going to enable our organizations (and wider civilization) to deal with the rising complexity coming downstream. That fact that so many leadership development providers are slow-on-the-uptake to this necessary new-norm is symptomatic of how inured we’ve become in today’s dominant yet dying MM paradigm.
During my near three-decades of exploring the psyche of leaders in all manner of organizational settings across the globe, I’ve come to see that what’s innate in the leader’s psyche is no different from what we find in all humans regardless of acculturation and belief/creed. Granted, there are idiosyncratic sophistications related to culture, creed, background, life-experience, etc. that need to be taken into account for any transformative developmental process, but the underlying psychology of the leader’s ego-stage development contains a core pattern.
When we unpack each of our acculturated baggage, there’s a ‘soulfulness’ (aka ‘essence’, ‘true nature’, ‘dharma’) that seeks to learn, and seeks life-affirming ways – instinctively, emotionally and intuitively. It’s essential to our nature as Homo sapiens.
But – and this is quite a BUT – life has thresholds built-in to its learning experience. To learn, one needs to cross thresholds: ‘micro’ ones every day, ‘meso’ seasonal rhythms over the months, and ‘macro’ life-stage ones over multi-years.
Put simply, to enter the ‘Learning Zone’ one needs to move out of the ‘Comfort Zone’ and endure the uncomfortableness of the ‘Fear Zone’, or we fail to learn, adapt and evolve. Enter the insidious carcinogenic anti-life tendency in today’s dominant mechanistic mindset. Because today’s mindset seeks security, safety and certainty through quick-fix remedies, pre-packaged content and outsourced solutions. In-part, this is why so many of us find it easy to sign up to an on-line program and sit in front of a screen for hours at a time with talking heads, but then struggle to effect meaningful transformation in our lives.
We’re caught up in mechanistic tendencies that undermine future-fitness, and warp the innate learning process baked into life. Self-awareness of this blind-spot is an important aspect of the developmental learning process.
This is why ‘unlearning’ is an important part of any future-fit learning process, because we’ve got caught up in layers of acculturated psychodynamic stuff that needs sifting through, so we can see through it, into our deeper truer nature within and all around us. Because its right ‘in here’ – in our hearts and souls – we find the keys for future-fitness that open the doorways into our natural ways of knowing to thrive amid complexity.
This is what the ancient Greeks meant by ‘education’ – educere meaning to ‘draw out’ or ‘bring forth’. And why the ancient Greeks were so keen on ‘self-awareness’ – Know Thy Self – as this metacognitive capacity allows us to unlearn/relearn, to be able to see reality beyond our own bias, and learn to adapt, grow and evolve in life-affirming ways that are true to our nature.
It’s also what the German philosopher Martin Heidegger meant by ‘poiesis’ – being-in-the-world by ‘drawing forth our potential’ to be who we truly are, in-the-moment. ‘Poiesis’ is an ancient Greek word meaning ‘to create’– to embrace life as a creative learning adventure, to become who we’re born to be.
This ‘bringing forth’ of our inner essence while engaging authentically in-the-moment to what arises around us, is an inner-outer co-creative dance which is soulful, somatic, sensorial, empathic, intuitive, embodied. Sure, some facts and figures, graphs and pie-charts, power-point slides and website links, can aid this learning process, but to make head-thinking the centre of this learning experience is part of the problem NOT the solution.
If we’re brutally honest with ourselves, we might see that today’s leadership development approaches are largely inured in yesterday’s mechanistic logic. Whether it’s applying ‘mindfulness’ as a technique to make us better achievers by ‘coping’ with stress, or wellbeing-at-work initiatives that espouse ethics, values and behaviours like clothes to put on and take off à la mode while leaving the underlying ethos and level of consciousness of the organizational system unchecked. Most leadership development these days is mainly ‘horizontal development’ and too light-touch on ‘vertical development’, thus failing to change the very paradigm that creates the problems we’re trying to move beyond.
Whereas ‘horizontal development’ informs what to know by acquiring new skills and capabilities within the same stage of meaning-making, ‘vertical development’ transforms how we know by up-stretching us into a new stage of meaning-making – inviting in a different quality of consciousness from that which created our problems in the first place. An individual’s vertical development stage (stage of consciousness) significantly affects how a leader functions in work and life, not just the tools and skills we have but the way we embrace complexity and guide the up-stretch of the organization toward future-fitness.
Let’s use the metaphor of filling-up a cup, as indicative of horizontal development. We pour into the cup more skills and content through courses, training, papers, seminars, webinars, masterclasses, books. Nothing wrong with this, as it equips us. Yet, if the cup is shaped by today’s dominant mechanistic worldview, then our learning and development will be limited by the constraints of machine-mentality – the size of the cup. Finding a bigger cup, bucket, swimming pool, ocean even, is indicative of vertical development. We significantly expand the amount of knowledge and embodied wisdom we can hold and work with. We call upon far more wisdom for navigating complexity, and our worldview expands. No longer are we limited by the level of consciousness that created our problems in the first place.
This is why Future-fit Leadership Development (and also ‘Regenerative Leadership Development’) is an embodied transformative undertaking that calls upon all of our natural ways of knowing, a process which I call ‘activating our super-nature’.
While I’ve written books about what’s entailed in activating regenerative leadership consciousness, the punch-line is: a lived embodied experience that evokes our somatic, emotional, intuitive and rational ways of knowing, in doing so, opens the mind-heart-will to life-as-learning beyond MM’s illusion of separation, and so emancipating our true nature.
‘The greatest illusion in life is the illusion of separation.’ Albert Einstein, genius
During a recent interview with a journalist, I was asked why I take people out in to nature on Leadership Immersions when its far more common these days for people to teach Regenerative Business on-screen. For the same reason that when I coach leaders and practitioners on-line (as many of them live across the globe, and can’t always attend an immersion in-person with me) that I enfold consciousness-raising embodied practices in to the everyday living and learning experience for my clients, because without this embodied experience the developmental learning falls short on future-fitness.
Sure, it would be ‘easier/more packaged’ for me to teach content in a push/head-based way, but that feeds the wrong kind of leadership development.
With my clients – which include leaders, non-exec directors, middle managers, change agents, practitioners and coaches, across all continents – I hold-space for multi-year-long journeys of transformation which involve threshold-crossings, embodiment practices, advanced consciousness modalities and vertical development, with applied experience drawing on living-systems, complexity, systems change, developmental psychology, business transformation and leadership development. For example, the exec team of a global NGO is engaged in a multi-year developmental program that involves on-line and off-line sessions along with Leadership Immersions in nature, and bespoke reflective ‘homework’ throughout the whole process for the individual and the team together. Ditto for a consumer goods company, food retailer, professional service provider, and more – the sector or size is not important here, it’s the appetite to embark on a transformative learning journey over many months that reaches beyond head-based learning and integrates different ways of knowing.
Today’s dominant paradigm IS the problem. Its what’s undermining future-fitness. Containing leadership development within the current paradigm may (at best) allow for slightly better ‘coping’ within the current paradigm but not future-fitness. Of course, we need to work within the current paradigm while transforming beyond it. But, until we address the underlying sense of disconnection from self, from system and from life itself, we are but lost in this crisis of crises, frantically attempting to slow down the inevitable car-crash.
Find the way into reality first, then one has the embodied keys to learn to both cope/survive AND thrive/evolve amid the volatile times ahead.
‘The dominant epistemology of our times fundamentally reduces learning and knowing to exercises of a disembodied intellect. This way of knowing is at the heart of the huge crisis humanity is facing right now. A deep and lasting transformational learning requires in each of us a shift in the dynamic coherence of our linguistic, embodied and somatic being.’ Julio Olallo, management consultant
For those of you serious about Future-fit leadership Development, there is another step: ‘learning’ has to be playful, convivial and enchanting in order to allow an open mind-heart-will threshold-crossing. In other words, regenerative learning is laced with wonder.
Rekindling our connection with self-other-world is ‘learning-as-wonder’ beyond method, pedagogy and program. Its spontaneous, improvisational and experientially idiosyncratic. This demands the facilitator/teacher/space-holder themselves to be enchanted by the subject-matter they teach/work with.
I realize this may feel like a step-too-far for many in the leadership development profession (or just ‘icing on the cake’ to still others) but it’s not, it’s foundational. This wonder, conviviality and enchantment creates the fertile soil and fecundity for enthusiasm that enables thresholds to be crossed with care and love. Afterall, as the leader becomes future-fit they fall back in love with life. A ‘re-membering’ and ‘re-turning’ back into real life that enables thriving amid complexity to become second nature.
In Summary:
What lies before us, amid this epochal hour, is a metamorphosis of our own psyches’, upgrading how we see ourselves within the world, aka ‘vertical development’.
Vertical development, infused with latest findings in neuroscience, consciousness studies, adult developmental psychology, living-systems, complexity and quantum science, and regenerative business, brought together in to a pedagogy that evokes an embodied learning experience which activates our super-nature and expands our meaning-making, enables Future-fit Leadership Development.
The best, quickest and most psychologically safe way I have found to help leaders and practitioners gain an embodied experience of activating one’s super-nature, and sense real connection beyond MM’s illusion, is with Leadership Immersions in nature.
This is why my seventeen year-inquiry into future-fit/regenerative/life-affirming/conscious leadership (and near three-decades of professional business advisory) forms around three core areas of research and learning – Nature, Consciousness, Business.
And it’s why I regularly run one-to-one immersions for my coaching clients, and team immersions for intact leadership teams.
A couple of times a year, I offer special ‘open’ immersions for anyone (whether or not an existing client) to gain a sense of this embodied experience applied to next-stage leadership development, and also to see how Leadership Immersions can be embodied in practice.
The next ‘open’ Leadership Immersion at Springwood Farm is on 12/13th May, £800 per person for a special two-day/overnight embodied experience for leaders, practitioners and change agents interested in Future-fit Leadership, including supplementary learning material. See here for more info about 12/13th May immersion, and feel free to Direct Message Giles Hutchins on LinkedIn or contact him via his website if interested in attending this immersion or exploring coaching with Giles.
‘Giles has been called a wise medicine man for our time and a magician of consciousness. When you are with Giles you get why these words are apt. When you choose a coach in your life, choose someone that will challenge you to be better than you are. Thank you, Giles, for doing that for me this year.’ Jannine Barron, Founder of The Growth Experience & Regenerative Business Mentor
‘Last year, I chose Giles Hutchins as my coach, and I continue this year. I chose him because I had read all his books slowly and found them to be brilliant. I wanted to work with the leading regenerative leadership coach in the world, and I think it’s Giles. Working with Giles provides great support, expansion and DEEP WISDOM during a challenging period for me, and now supporting me into my next chapter. He creates an incredibly safe space, so I share anything. Giles’ energy is so powerful that I leave each session feeling completely recharged and inspired. Thank you, Giles, for the guiding light in my work and life.’ Jenna Robertson, Founder of Gaia’s Wisdom & Regenerative Leadership Coach
‘For anyone looking for a unique coaching experience with a material pact on individual, and team, growth journeys, I highly recommend getting in touch with Giles. My sessions with Giles are always deeply impactful, but also enjoyable, light, and fun!’ Russell Smith, Major Capital Projects Executive Advisory & Director of This Is Agency
Photo Credit: Jonathan Perugia, Gaia Visual
From as early as he can recall, Giles has felt a deep sense of connection with and love for nature. Having experienced a number of out-of-body altered-state experiences, by his early twenties he made a decision to dedicate his working life to exploring how business could best contribute to life-affirming futures. Over the past thirty years, he’s worked across diverse sectors, advising blue-chip corporations, successful start-ups, family businesses, public sector departments, pioneering B-Corps, and a range of international charities. Giles has occupied several senior leadership positions including Director at KPMG Consulting and Global Director at Atos International, led large multinational teams, delivered complex multi-year transformation programs and held multi-million P&L ownership. He became one of the first wave of Global Sustainability Directors in Europe over fifteen years ago, and is a recognized global thought leader on Future-Fit Leadership (aka Regenerative Leadership), coaching leaders and practitioners across all continents. He hosts the podcast series Leading by Nature, is the author of several books and leadership papers, and his coaching work has been called ‘life changing.’
For more on Giles Hutchins visit https://gileshutchins.com/
“Unless living in oxygen tents on Mars is your idea of the future, then our realignment with nature is essential. Giles Hutchins is growing in significance and channeling existential knowledge to help this essential realignment. His work has had a profound impact on me as CEO, countless individuals across our business, and massively on our wider organizational culture.” Galahad Clark, CEO & Co-Founder, Vivobarefoot
“Giles’s Springwood is not just about being in an ancient woodland—it’s about being with him. The energy of the forest has taken hold of him and you will get to appreciate the calm wisdom of being close to nature through his leadership programmes. A modern sage!” Courtney Holm, Vice President, Sustainable Futures, Cap Gemini
‘Simply the best leadership course I’ve ever attended.’ Ian Ayling, Director, Soil Association
Giles’ latest book Nature Works – Activating Regenerative Leadership Consciousness from Amazon here https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nature-Works-Activating-Regenerative-Consciousness/dp/1783243112 as well as other book providers and all good book shops, and directly from the publisher here: https://www.wordzworth.com/sales/authorbooks?ISBN=9781783243112
For more on coaching with Giles, visit his website here.
To sign-up for free content, newsletters & whitepapers go to https://gileshutchins.com/newsletter-subscribe/
Future-fit Leadership For a Transforming World – Two-Day Deep-dive Leadership Immersion 12/13 May, 2025
It’s a fascinating yet challenging time to be a leader. We are in the midst of an old system dying and a new one being born, all amid unceasing transformation – change upon change upon change is the new-norm.
Through over a decade of working on Future-fit Leadership, regenerative business and nature-based coaching – and author of six books in this space – I have developed a range of practices, coaching-frames and processes that aid the journey of becoming a next-stage Future-fit Leader – one that can work with and thrive amid complexity, and journey toward becoming regenerative for self and system.
On Monday and Tuesday 12th /13th May 2025, I will host a special nature-based leadership immersion providing an embodied experience of what it means to become a conscious, future-fit, regenerative leader. We shall be drawing upon the research domains of Future-fit Business, Living-Systems/Nature, Consciousness (Adult Developmental Psychology, Neuroscience & Wisdom Traditions).
Two-day Deep-dive – Monday 12th /Tuesday 13th May – price £800 per person
This two-day overnight deep-dive is for leaders and practitioners who wish to gain an embodied experience of Future-fit Leadership and also regenerative leadership consciousness. The immersion will provide advanced tools and techniques for your own work as a leader and for practitioners/coaches working with clients/leaders and Future-fit L&OD (leadership & organizational development).
‘Giles is an excellent teacher, facilitator and host – it’s been a tremendous honour to learn with him.’ – Simon Jones, Founder, Thrivemind Body & Whole
‘The nature immersion workshop with Giles exceeded all expectations. This is real space to develop strategies fit for the 21st century.’ – Stephen Passmore, CEO, Resilience Alliance
‘What an inspiring time in the woods Giles, a great balance of talking, contemplation, meditation, being in nature – Thank you so very much!’ –Participant, CEO of non-profit organization
‘Feel I’ve been with a real master. What beautiful profound lessons’. – Simon Milton, CEO of Pulse Brands
Two-Day 12th/13th May Deep-dive Immersion Logistics – £800 per person
9.45am Arrivals Monday 12th May– refreshments upon arrival. Immersion commences at 10am
Overnight camping – either bring own tent (or there are some basic bivvy structures to keep out the rain, if do not wish to use a tent) 14hr solo experience immersed in ancient woodland
Tuesday 13th May – 3pm Departures
By Car – RH17 6HQ Springwood Farm
By Train – Come to Three Bridges station for no later than 9.30am, a cab will meet you there.
Cost: £800 – To confirm your place either Direct Message Giles on LinkedIn or contact him via his website https://gileshutchins.com/
Pre-reading or preparation: Once you have paid, you will be sent some preparatory material and guidance. More information will also be sent near the immersion with further preparatory information.
You will form part of a small group of like-minded yet diverse leaders and practitioners, and will be facilitated by Giles Hutchins for the entire two-days, and the time includes a 14hr solo in nature for intentional work and reflection on your life-work/self & system. Here are some of the things you can hope to experience:
- Specific practices to work with the essence & emergence of your living-system/organization/practice
- Energy cultivation and somatic practices carefully crafted for future-fit leadership
- 14hr solo in private ancient woodlands with pre-and-post reflection processing
- Tools, processes and techniques to aid the journey toward future-fit leadership
- Tools for working with intention, intuition, insight and Nature’s Wisdom
- Peer-sharing and facilitated group dialogue sessions
- Pre-reading material and guidance before the workshop
- A signed copy of any of Giles Hutchins six books, the latest being Nature Works
- Organic meals and refreshments throughout the two-days
- Follow-up reading material post immersion
- A certificate for your attendance
- A special 35% discount on future coaching sessions with Giles Hutchins
‘Your deep immersion into nature opened our minds, opened our souls, to deeply connect with our place and purpose in life. With love and deep appreciation for your inspiration.’ – Sue Cheshire, Founder of the Global Leaders Academy
‘Powerful and provocative. The best leadership event I’ve ever attended!’ – Ian Ayling, Director, The Soil Association
‘Giles’ immersion at Springwood had a profound effect on me as CEO.’ – Galahad Clark, CEO, Vivobarefoot
About Springwood Farm: a mix of semi-ancient and ancient woodland with wildflower meadows, 60 acres in total, private and secluded specially designed for advanced leadership coaching work, see some pictures here: https://www.leadershipimmersions.com/gallery
The immersion at Springwood was very powerful, thought-provoking, energising and soul-touching. I’m still strongly feeling the ripples from our time, many days after, and have already started some conversations which could be life-changing as a result. Thank you Giles! Highly recommended! Jules O’Donnell, Founder of Talking CAT consulting
“In these challenging times, Giles offers those of us in the ‘business as usual’ world both hope and the opportunity for deep connection with nature, spirit and ourselves. I highly recommend joining Giles for one of his immersion journeys of reconnection for a beautiful perspective on how we might do business differently and better.” – Will Adeney, Management Consultant & Nature Connection Mentor
Latest Book by Giles Hutchins – Nature Works, Activating Regenerative Leadership Consciousness
“Nature Works by Giles Hutchins is a profound journey into the soul of leadership and life itself. With the wisdom of nature as a guide, it invites us to slow down, reflect, and realign with the deeper rhythms of the world around us. This book is more than a read, it’s a spiritual awakening that transforms how we see ourselves, our work, and our place in the collective whole.” Veronique Letellier, Co-Founder of Butterfly School, Head of Culture & Innovation, AXA Climate
‘This is so much more than a book! Its wisdom in text, conveying a richness of life beyond words. Truly profound – in fact, life-changing. Read it!’ Independent Amazon review
NATURE WORKS is now available direct from the publisher here https://www.wordzworth.com/sales/authorbooks?ISBN=9781783243112
And from Amazon here https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nature-Works-Activating-Regenerative-Consciousness/dp/1783243112 as well as other book providers and all good book shops.
For more on coaching with Giles, visit his website here.
To sign-up for free content, newsletters & whitepapers go to https://gileshutchins.com/newsletter-subscribe/
To book for 12/13th May Immersion – either Direct Message Giles on LinkedIn or contact him via his website https://gileshutchins.com/
Hope for Humanity – From Permacrisis to Metacrisis
What a fascinating yet challenging time to be alive, when so much we thought we knew is open for question. So much change in the air. So much potential for breakdown/breakthrough. It’s a metamorphic moment.
Because it’s not just one or two black swans coming over the horizon symbolizing the odd catastrophic event, it’s a whole flock of black swans unleashing interlocking crises that feed-off each other. Rapid rising complexity is the new-norm. Are you ready for this? Is your organization future-fit?
The term ‘permacrisis’ has recently entered the business lexicon to describe a long period ahead of rising catastrophic disruption, a new-norm of unceasing transformation, with a maelstrom of motives contributing to this sea-change. Yet, this time of immense upheaval might just be what wakes us up from the schizoid society of dis-ease, distraction and digital titillation we’ve become so inured in.
The question of our times is not ‘how to fix the broken system’ but rather, ‘how to shift our leadership consciousness in to ways the serve rather than corrupt life on Earth’. If we are able to shift our consciousness, then the permacrisis becomes a metacrisis, bringing us beyond crisis-fixing, in crossing the threshold of our own death-rebirth, awakening us to lead and live in ways that no longer starve the soul, nor degrade our relationships with others and the world at large. Instead, to work with, rather than against, the grain of nature. Life is simply waiting for us to wake-up and get with the program of life.
This is what our humanity amid this epochal hour has been waiting for. Not a heroic saviour or apocalyptic event, but our own waking-up from the slumber of status quo machine-thinking we’ve become so inured in.
Is ‘adapt or die’ the harsh reality humanity is now facing in to? How do we move from merely ‘coping’ to truly ‘thriving’ amid rising complexity? How might the worlds of business and nature come together synergistically? How to enable organizational future-fitness?
These are some of the inquiries explored in this special twenty-minute end-of-season Leading by Nature podcast – listen here:
OR
As the Hopi Prophecy presciently knew, this is a supreme moment. It’s no longer the Eleventh Hour but now is the Hour, the time of our human reckoning where many will struggle amid a torrent of change and catastrophe, yet when a new way will be born.
“Then he clasped his hands together, smiled, and said, ‘This could be a good time! There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly. Know the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water… All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
The crisis facing our humanity is fundamentally a crisis of consciousness. Are you ready to unfurl into what it really means to start living and leading with a new level of consciousness? All it really means is starting to get back in-tune with how life works.
This is why I have written my latest book NATURE WORKS which explores – indeed activates – future-fit leadership consciousness, to help us embody the wisdom of life amid these challenging times, so we don’t merely ‘cope’ but ‘thrive’ amid increasing complexity by learning to flow as life flows.
In reading Nature Works one is daring to enter the dark places of wisdom. To not only grapple with the root cause of our schizoid society which is carcinogenically corrupting our humanity, but to heal it. To renew and revision humanity’s relationship with wisdom, and ensure our regenerative endeavours are rooted in the rhizome of real Life.
“Nature Works by Giles Hutchins is a profound journey into the soul of leadership and life itself. With the wisdom of nature as a guide, it invites us to slow down, reflect, and realign with the deeper rhythms of the world around us. This book is more than a read, it’s a spiritual awakening that transforms how we see ourselves, our work, and our place in the collective whole.” Veronique Letellier, Co-Founder of Butterfly School, Head of Culture & Innovation, AXA Climate
‘This is so much more than a book! Its wisdom in text, conveying a richness of life beyond words. Truly profound – in fact, life-changing. Read it!’ Independent Amazon review
NATURE WORKS is now available direct from the publisher here https://www.wordzworth.com/sales/authorbooks?ISBN=9781783243112
And from Amazon here https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nature-Works-Activating-Regenerative-Consciousness/dp/1783243112 as well as other book providers and all good book shops.
For more on coaching with Giles, visit his website here.
To sign-up for a special one-day immersion with Giles at Springwood Farm on 13th February 2025, see here for more details.
To sign-up for free content, newsletters & whitepapers go to https://gileshutchins.com/newsletter-subscribe/
Future Fitness – From Coping to Thriving Amid Rising Complexity
One need not be a futurist, visionary, seer or fortune-teller to realise that what lies ahead for every organization (regardless of sector or size) is rapidly increasing complexity and volatility. This is what the recent addition to the business lexicon ‘permacrisis’ conveys – a long period ahead of systemic upheaval due to interlocking crises. Already well-heeled business phrases like ‘future-ready’, ‘anti-fragile’, ‘future-fit’ and ‘future-proof’ speak to the organizational need to adapt to a new-norm of increasing change and uncertainty.
I like the term ‘future-fitness’: the leadership and organizational capability to embrace an uncertain future full of rising complexity. This term ‘future-fitness’ conveys a lived dynamic, a capacity that needs cultivation and practice, which provides for a progressive developmental vitality – a living learning fitness.
This future-fitness starts with a quality of leadership consciousness – Regenerative Leadership Consciousness – which informs how we attend to life itself. It’s a way of attending that doesn’t blindly react to change and challenge with a narrowed defensive-aggressive control-manage parent-child fight-flight-freeze stance (of the ‘achiever leader’) but rather responds to and co-creates with change and challenge by cultivating a sense-respond adult-adult participative stance (of the ‘regenerative leader’). Once the leader and team have begun to cultivate this sense-respond life-stance then we embrace each challenging event as a learning opportunity to further develop future-fitness.
The point of the journey is not to arrive, it’s the journey itself; the way we work through challenge and tension is the very practice that cultivates our future-fitness. Rather than struggling, fighting, controlling against change, one starts to learn to flow with the ever-changing nature of the organization and business ecosystem amid this rising complexity.
Instead of forcing our ego-will against life’s ever-changing nature in a stressful energy-consuming manner, we start to work with life. As a result, we align with deeper forces within ourselves, the organization and wider life. These inherent forces within life (from our own innate nature, team dynamics, organizational relationality, market rhythms, sociological and ecological dynamics) start to work with us rather than against us. We open into more of our deeper potential, true nature and intuitive wisdom. We become more conscious, coherent and connected to who we truly are as we open into more of how life truly is. Likewise, the organization no longer protects and battles against the ever-changing context of rising complexity, instead it adapts, morphs and evolves through change, realizing opportunities and value-creation potential as markets morph at pace.
For the leader, this can feel like an emancipation from the narrowed constricted need-to-know must-remain-in-charge control-manage tendency that suffocates our natural potential and breeds inauthenticity, impression management, stress and guardedness, reducing down the intuitive intelligence than arises through us when we are in-flow.
For the organization, this opens up the culture, decision-making processes and day-to-day relationality from top-down hierarchic disempowerment into starting to perceive and work with the organization-as-living-system. Then, our Leadership and Organizational Development (L&OD) approaches pivot from an obsessive fetish with control mechanisms and bureaucratic measures toward cultivating agility, learning and responsiveness to change (‘Regenerative L&OD’). The living learning future-fit organization starts to work as nature works. Afterall, nature and its diverse array of living-systems has been thriving amid immense complexity for some 3.8bn years. Thriving amid complexity is an inherent life-stance irrespective of how much money we chuck at AI tech-platforms.
Future-fitness demands nothing more, nor less, than our natural human capacity to open into how life really is.
Life is Unceasing Seething Change Upon Change
Every living-system has the natural capacity to not simply react to change but actually respond, adapt and evolve through change upon change. This is the very nature of how life lives. As Charles Darwin famously noted, ‘It’s not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most able to adapt to change.’
To be clear, what I mean by ‘future-fitness’ is the leader’s and the organization’s capacity to not just adapt to change but thrive amid the rising complexity of change upon change upon change. Future-fitness is not survival-oriented (coping, reacting, holding-on, hunkering-down, managing-controlling change) but thrival-oriented (creating, learning, evolving, participating with change). It’s a life-stance shift from managing against change to dancing with change.
I’ve been exploring Leadership and Organizational Development (L&OD) through the lens of living-systems for coming up to twenty years now. Over that time, I’ve found that organizational future-fitness is predicated on leadership future-fitness, which is determined by the mindset, stance and developmental maturity of leaders across all levels of the organization. This is where future-fitness begins and ends, in the hearts and minds of the people. So, it’s a core quality (one might say the essential ingredient, or ‘secret sauce’) of organizational culture and future viability. Without it organizations are doomed to failure amid the volatile times ahead.
An ’Adapt or Die’ Supreme Moment Invokes the Necessity to Shift Leadership Consciousness
Whether in the boardroom, C-suite, middle management, team leader or single self-managing operative, ‘Regenerative Leadership’ is less about title or function. It’s more about a quality of consciousness – the way we listen, perceive, attend to, and work with each other and problems as they arise. Regardless of how tech-dependent we become, the reality is, business depends on human relationality with each and every one across the organization engaged in this relationality. Therefore, we might see that we all participate in Regenerative Leadership irrespective of the number of direct-reports we may have, because we are attending in ways that determine how things unfold through our responsive ways of human relating.
So, when I say organizational future-fitness is predicated on leadership future-fitness, what I am really saying is future-fitness is cultivated by everyone within the organization regardless of seniority or role. We are all in this together. Future-fitness is as much about culture as it is about strategizing and innovating, and its simultaneously an individual and collective endeavor.
Future-fitness is an inherent capacity pervading all levels of life, from the cell, to the organism, to the ecosystem. Likewise, we find it in all aspects of our own lives, from running daily errands at the weekend to sitting in the office or behind the screen. It’s a life-stance we embrace life with amid each unfolding moment; an openness and readiness to embrace life’s tensions and challenges. It’s a purposeful presencing of life, in the now, fully available, ever-ready to flow as life flows.
‘Those who flow as life flows know they need no other force.’ Lao Tzu
Rather than a forward-leaning stance of an assertive dominator-mode or backward-leaning stance of defensive protective victim-mentality, where we either seek to assert our will over life or retract into our shell against life, we have a rooted and centered yet agile and responsive stance that is able to dance with life’s tensions and challenges. I nick-name this sense-respond stance an ‘Aikido-stance’ as the philosophy of the 12th Century martial art, Aikido, is based on working with the flow of 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 very vitality of life that challenges us to dance, learn, keep fit, grow and realize our natural potential.
From fearful reactivity we find courageous co-creativity that provides for responsive reciprocity fueling future-fitness.
This future-fitness allows for the inner-nature of the living system (whether inside the organism, the inner-nature of the leader or the culture of the living-organization) to learn and grow in-tune with the outer-nature of the living system (the organism’s surrounding environment, the individual’s challenging situation, the organization’s morphing market).
With this perspective, we may see that life is less about reacting to outer change and more about an inner-outer dance with change; a co-creative dance that drives evolution. This perspective of embracing inner and outer adaptiveness provide for conscious co-creativity, aiding our process of becoming who we truly are and opening into how life truly is.
This is life-affirming and regenerative. It provokes a philosophical yet deeply practical inquiry into who we truly are, how life truly is, and what our sense of purpose is. This ‘sense of purpose’ is a lived dynamic I call ‘purposefulness’ as its not a static neat-and-tidy mission statement but a ‘way of becoming’ in our lives; a practical, moral, ethical and soulful imperative that informs how and why we create and deliver value through our enterprising ventures. This purposefulness is what breeds our creativity and entrepreneurialism by working with our inner essence and outer adaptiveness. As scientist David Bohm noted, “creativity must start from an impulse that is genuine and comes from deep within”, then it’s authentic and flows with the current of our dharma.
This life-affirming co-creative sense-respond stance lies at the heart of regenerative business and involves a radical change in our perception of business and of our work ethic: from it being a means to an end, a vehicle for paying the bills and acquiring power, control and material wealth, in order to protect ourselves against a hostile world; to our dedicating our time, resources and creative energy to initiatives and value propositions that enrich our life-stance, realize our deeper potential and serve life.
As we journey toward this life-affirming leadership dynamic we also begin to realize that this journey involves catalyzing a shift beyond machine-mentality into ways that work with the rhythms, patterns and wisdom we find innate within our human nature and the natural world around us. This is the regenerative leadership journey of a life-time. Beyond a fixed externalized destination. The destination becomes the learning journey itself – the lived experience every day.
From Fearing Change to Celebrating Change
Machine-mentality dominated 20th Century L&OD but is no longer fit for purpose for the immense complexity unleashing during the 21st Century. Regenerative L&OD invites in a living-systems mentality that sees the world as an exquisite live-lab of learning, full of heaving change, innately relationality and interconnected all the way down.
‘Any company designed for success in the 20th Century is doomed to failure in the 21st.’ David S. Rose
Change is what ignites learning which spawns development and growth. Change is not to be feared, rather its to be celebrated. Our life-stance becomes one of celebrating life, rather than fearing or controlling it. This is a subtle yet profound shift in our leadership dynamic from control-manage to sense-respond.
This involves a creative and collaborative inquiry of noticing and letting-go of one’s control-manage reactive tendencies while finding a more rooted, coherent and authentic sense-respond stance with life. This requires working on oneself (self-awareness-in-action) while also working relationally across the system (systemic-awareness-in-action) by noticing control-manage tendencies in our team dynamics throughout the organization and encouraging the fostering of sense-respond dynamics. This involves genuinely listening, sensing, and sharing with others to creatively explore and empathically understand tensions as they inevitably arise amid increasing challenges, opportunities and complexities. Rather than ‘conflict resolution’ we seek ‘tension transmutation’. Developmental practices like 360-degree feedback, dialogue, coaching conversations, standups, regular check-ins, off-sites that encourage authentic sharing, world cafes, etc. all help here, but essentially it starts with learning to truly listen to one’s own inner-nature and to the relational nature of what’s arising in the system: self-and-systemic-awareness.
Hence, when people ask me what the top three regenerative leadership capacities are, I respond with: Listening, Self-awareness, Systemic-awareness. The good news is, we can practice these capacities amid each and every interaction during our working day. This practice costs nothing. No expensive management consultants or training programs required. The working day IS the practice, and the organization IS the living learning lab for future-fitness.
As well as sensing what is arising in the moment, we are also continually scanning the unfolding landscape, learning to read the emerging future. We are responding to the unfolding systemic dynamics and their patterns of behavior while identifying potential opportunities and challenges that may lie ahead. This capacity to be simultaneously presencing here-and-now in the moment and sensing-in to the emerging future is something we learn to cultivate as our systemic sensitivity deepens during the regenerative leadership journey. Yet, let’s not forget that it’s a completely natural and innate human capacity we’re all born with, had as young children, and historically attained for the vast majority of our human history. Its only a quite recent period, since the mid-17th Century, that we’ve become increasingly obsessed with machine-mentality to such an extent that business leaders have started to lose touch with the innate capacity to sense systemic emergence across complex ever-changing systems.
Enabling the Living Organization to Thrive
The living-organization is in a state of constant flux, full of complex responsive processes of human relating. It’s emergent by nature. These energetic relationships participate and inter-relate across the system. Small interventions in one part of the system can have influence on other parts of the system, just as releasing stuckness through acupuncture enlivens not only the localized area that was stuck but unblocks the flow of energy throughout the whole body. When engaging with the organization-as-living-system we apply systemic approaches like ‘organizational acupuncture’ that are far more cost-effective and beneficial for future-fitness than the machine-mentality’s desire for top-down change management programs.
Upon learning to recognize the organization-as-a-living-system, we cultivate our capacity to navigate its emergent systemic dynamics while transmuting arising tensions into adaptation, innovation, and growth. Rather than communicating through power and control-based bureaucracy, we learn to work with the rhythms of the living-organization by cultivating a DEE Culture: Developmental, Emergent, Evolutionary.
We no longer fear change, but recognize that change and tension are what impel development, growth, and opportunities. Rather than viewing different organizations with caution, hesitancy, and a need for self-protection, we can become more open, curious, and collaborative with others. Let’s challenge the need for overly controlling and managing partner relations through lengthy contracts that can never hope to cover every eventuality and only constrict creativity. Instead, how about shared statements of intent, where we explore and agree on an underlying shared purpose and general direction of travel while acknowledging an unknowable future full of divergent flexibility, creativity, exploration, and innovation. As the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, the I Ching, notes,
“Whatever is flexible and flowing will continue to evolve, whatever is rigid and blocked will wither and die.”
This is the real genius of Regenerative Leadership, understanding and working with not just creative tension but its inevitable companion, emotional tension. The emotional tension we experience, along with the insights from the self-and-system and the courage and practice needed, all allow our future-fit visions to manifest into reality.
In cultivating DEE conditions, we create organizational spaces that can hold these tensions while welcoming our whole selves to work—now a place where we can learn, grow, explore, and experience together. Entrepreneurial energy is focused on aspirations that align individual purpose with organizational purpose, and this unlocks extraordinary creativity and relational energy across the living-organization and its wider ecosystem.
In Summary:
Control-manage reactivity to change retards our ability to adapt, and undermines future-fitness.
Sense-respond responsivity to change fuels our learning with life, and cultivates future-fitness.
A machine mindset perceives the organization-as-machine which disempowers self-managing autonomy, creates bureaucracy and breeds organizational fragility, undermining future-fitness.
A living-systems mindset perceives the living-organization as a learning live-lab where people are empowered to co-create with change at the local level. This breeds organizational future-fitness.
For the leader, future-fitness begins and ends with a life-affirming stance, a purposeful-presencing active-relaxed flow-stance which dances with tensions, and embraces change.
For the organization, future-fitness begins and ends with a Developmental, Emergent, Evolutionary (DEE) cultural mindset that thrives amid rising complexity.
None of this is necessarily easy for the leader or the organization. We’ve been acculturated and programmed in a machine-mentality that resists the flow of life, so it takes dedication and practice to unlearn old ways and then relearn natural ways of flowing with life. The good news is, this sense-respond living-systems dynamic is how we naturally embraced life as young children, and perhaps often how we are in our personal lives or while on holiday, and it’s also how the vast majority of human history has been, in-tune with the way nature works. This unlearning and relearning is THE task of our time. Our very future-fitness depends on it.
‘The major problems in the world today arise from the difference between how nature works and the way people think.’ Gregory Bateson
This is why I have written my latest book NATURE WORKS which explores – indeed activates – regenerative leadership consciousness, to help us embody the wisdom of life amid these challenging times, so we don’t merely ‘cope’ but ‘thrive’ amid increasing complexity by learning to flow as life flows.
Book reviews for NATURE WORKS:
‘This is a fascinating read which will challenge your approach to life and the way you consider every action. I loved reading this because it didn’t just throw out a statement or idea and expect you to merely react. It guides you through each thought, consistently delving deeper… This isn’t a light read, but then I wasn’t looking for that, I wanted my perceptions to be challenged and to expand my mind. This delivered on that front and I cannot recommend this enough. It will change how you look at life.’
‘This book will open your mind and heart and transform the way you live and lead. Giles is a wonderful writer with an ability to weave scientific, spiritual, natural and practical threads into compelling narratives that illuminate a pathway towards the harmonious relationship between humanity and nature that we so urgently need. Underpinned by his decades of real-world experience as a regenerative leadership coach and consultant, this book combines cutting-edge scientific findings with ancient wisdom to show us a path forward that is more integrated, wise and healthy for all the planets creatures and systems. Highly recommended!’
‘The worldview shift described in “Nature Works” invites us all to embark on a profound, personal, and collective transformation, recognising that healing from separateness to interconnectedness is crucial on our pathway. “Nature Works” is not just a book but an experience that will have you thinking, feeling, and most likely challenged. Certainly curious. It is part philosophy, business, and regenerative frameworks and touches the edges of a psycho-spiritual journey. It is a must-read for those committed to leading in harmony with nature.’
‘This is so much more than a book! Its wisdom in text, conveying a richness of life beyond words. Truly profound – in fact, life-changing. Read it!’
NATURE WORKS is now available direct from the publisher here https://www.wordzworth.com/sales/authorbooks?ISBN=9781783243112
And from Amazon here https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nature-Works-Activating-Regenerative-Consciousness/dp/1783243112 as well as other book providers and all good book shops.
For more on coaching with Giles, visit his website here.
You can also sign up to his newsletter here.
To sign-up for a special one-day immersion with Giles at Springwood Farm on 13th February 2025, see here for more details.
Feedback from a recent immersion with Giles:
‘The immersion at Springwood with Giles was very powerful, thought-provoking, energising and soul-touching. I’m still strongly feeling the ripples from our time, many days after, and have already started some conversations which could be life-changing as a result. Thank you Giles! Highly recommended!’ Jules O’Donnell, Founder – talking CAT consulting
You can also sign up to his newsletter here.
About Springwood Farm: a mix of semi-ancient and ancient woodland with wildflower meadows, 60 acres, private and secluded specially designed for advanced leadership coaching work, see some pictures here: https://gileshutchins.com/springwood/
About Giles Hutchins –Thirty years of professional advisory & leadership experience, formerly Director of Business Transformation & Head of Practice with KPMG, and Global Director of Sustainability Solutions for multinational Atos (150,000 employees across 42 countries), last 12 yrs as Executive Coach, thought leader and advisor on future-fit leadership. Author of six critically acclaimed leadership books and several leadership papers. His coaching work has been called ‘life changing’. Clients include Unilever, P&G, Deloitte, McKinsey, AXA, McCain, Vivobarefoot, Ella’s Kitchen, Pukka Herbs, PwC, Coop, Budgens, Sainsbury, B Lab, Fairtrade, Rabobank, Impact International, World Benchmarking Alliance, Aviva, BBC, BP, Angel Investments, BNP Paribas, Cap Gemini, Cambridge University, EQT, INSEAD, Hult Business School, HEC and many more. Find out more about his coaching here https://gileshutchins.com/coaching/
His Leading by Nature podcast can be found at https://gileshutchins.com/podcast/ which interviews a selection of his coaching clients with a couple of coaching feedback provided here:
‘Having been ‘leadership development-ed’ up to my eyeballs in my corporate years, Giles Hutchins brings a unique mix of skills and techniques to coaching for these transformative times.’ Jayn Mayled, CEO, True Story
“Giles is like a lantern: he meets you where you’re at and illuminates the path ahead along side you. He brings an excellent blend of business acumen, emotional intelligence, and spiritual attunement. He works with your whole person, partners with you to help your natural abilities emergence and develop.’ Lisa Dittmar, Strategy Consultant, Deloitte
“Giles has been invaluable on my journey into better leadership and being a CEO who can connect better with himself/life and with others. His intuition and sensitivity to each individual’s unique situation is remarkable and comes with years of experience learning from both business and living-systems/nature. Anyone looking to develop their leadership for these challenging times would benefit from Giles’ wisdom.”Paul Hargreaves, Founder & CEO, Cotswold Fayre & Flourish
‘We moved more in our sessions with Giles than we did in years with others.’ Alastair Sawday, Chairman & Founder, Sawdays Travel
For more on coaching with Giles or to register for the one-day immersion, visit his website here.
Feel free to join the Leadership Immersions LinkedIn Group here https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13767578/
The Nature of Business 