Others arrive as confirmations.

This September, I will be joining the Land Art Collective’s Listening residency on Dartmoor as a guest facilitator.

For many years, I have been exploring a question that sits underneath much of my work:

What becomes possible when we learn to listen differently?

Not simply to each other.

But to place.

To memory.

To the body.

To the intelligences that exist beyond the limits of our inherited maps.

That question sits at the heart of Cartography is Not Home, my current artistic research project exploring soil, sound, ancestral intelligence, DNA, and the forms of knowledge that emerge when listening becomes practice rather than metaphor. The project asks what gets lost when we mistake the map for home, and what becomes audible when we listen back.

Dartmoor feels like an important place to continue that inquiry.

A landscape shaped by deep time.

A place where listening requires a different pace.

A different quality of attention.

I am looking forward to spending time alongside artists, writers, cultural practitioners and fellow explorers of the unknown, sitting with questions that cannot be answered quickly and learning from what the land might have to teach us.

16–23 September 2026.

Dartmoor.

Listening.

Perhaps the most important practice of all.

#ListeningPractice #AncestralIntelligence #EcologicalIntelligence #SoundArt #RelationalEcology #LivingSystems #LandArt #ArtistResidency #MoreThanHuman #CartographyIsNotHome

Three different disciplines.

The same pattern.

For decades, scientists referred to large sections of DNA as “junk”.

Material that appeared to have no purpose because we did not yet understand what it was doing.

Professor Ewa Grzybowska writes that what was once dismissed as genetic noise is now understood to be essential regulatory infrastructure. The old story of one gene, one protein, one function has begun to collapse. Proteins fold and unfold. Roles change. Function emerges through relationship.

The cell looks less like a machine and more like an improvising ensemble.

Around the same time, I found myself returning to the work of Dr. eMalick Njie, who describes DNA as our first language.

Not simply biological data.

Ancestral communication.

A form of inherited intelligence.

And I realised I had been sitting with the same question while writing Chapter 9 of Leadership Legacy.

Before algorithms, before data, before code as we currently understand it, there was genetic code.

Not a blueprint.

A conversation.

Not fixed.

Responsive.

Relational.

What interests me is not that these three perspectives agree.

It is that they arrive from such different places and still point in the same direction.

Molecular biology.

Global Majority AI.

Leadership and legacy.

Perhaps what we call intelligence has always been less mechanical than we imagined.

Perhaps what we called junk was always carrying meaning.

It simply required a different kind of listening.

#AncestralIntelligence #DNA #Genomics #Leadership

Saturday, a government directive reportedly led to one of the world’s most advanced AI models being switched off for non US nationals.

Overnight.

No public debate.
No collective decision.
No warning for the people and organisations who had come to rely on it.

Whether the restriction remains temporary or not is almost beside the point.

What stopped me in my tracks was the question underneath it:

Who gets to access intelligence?

We spend a lot of time talking about responsible AI.

Far less time asking who owns it, who governs it, who can withdraw it, and what it costs the land, water, energy systems, and communities that make it possible in the first place.

For years, I have been exploring this tension in my research, advisory work, and keynotes.

This week it became headline news.

Before the algorithm, there was mycelium.

Before the data centre, there was the mycorrhizal web.

More than 450 million years of distributed, adaptive, networked intelligence.

No one owns it.

No one can fence it.

No one can switch it off with a government directive.

Nature wrote the code first.

And now we find ourselves building increasingly powerful versions of intelligence that can be enclosed, controlled, restricted, and revoked.

Perhaps this is not simply a technology story.

Perhaps it is a story about power.

About access.

About memory.

About the assumptions we have inherited regarding ownership itself.

One of the ideas I return to often is that cartography is not home.

The map is not the territory.

The model is not the intelligence.

As we race towards ever more capable systems, I wonder whether the deeper challenge is not technological but relational.

What becomes possible when we remember that intelligence is not merely computational, but ecological?

Not linear, but circular.

Not exclusively artificial, but already alive around us.

What if future literacy requires us to learn from both?

→ Speaking enquiries: adahparris.com

#AI #ResponsibleAI #AIEthics #FutureLiteracy #WhoOwnsIntelligence #NatureWroteTheCodeFirst #CartographyIsNotHome #GlobalMajority

People have asked why there was no book launch.

The honest answer is that I was tired.

Not the kind of tired that sleep fixes.

The kind that arrives after a long period of listening, writing, questioning, refining, and attempting to put language around things that are often difficult to name.

When I finished the book, I found myself in an unexpected place.

I wasn’t immediately ready to promote it.

I wasn’t ready to stand on a stage and celebrate it.

I wasn’t even entirely sure what it was.

The experience felt strangely similar to what some people describe after birth. You spend so long carrying something, shaping it, living alongside it, that when it finally arrives, there is a quiet emptiness where the process used to be.

The traditional rhythm would have been a launch. Events. Visibility. Momentum.

But something in me knew that wasn’t what was needed.

So I paused.

Not because the work wasn’t important.

Because it was.

And sometimes the most honest thing we can do after creating something significant is stop long enough to understand what has actually emerged.

#CreativeProcess #CreativeRecovery #ThresholdMoments #LifeAfterCreation

For a long time, my work lived in rooms.

Conversations. Keynotes. Advisory relationships. Questions held quietly between people trying to make sense of change while still carrying the weight of leading through it.

The founder navigating a success that arrived and felt strangely hollow.

The leader carrying a values conflict with no clean answer.

The person functioning, often exceptionally, while sensing that something important no longer fits.

I have spent years working at those edges.

The threshold between what was and what comes next.

The place where strategy stops being enough on its own.

Where what is needed is not more information, but a different quality of listening.

To the body.

To patterns.

To history.

To the intelligence already present, but not yet visible.

My new website is now live.

adahparris.com

It brings together the different strands of my work in one place: keynote speaking, Threshold Coaching™, strategic advisory, The Presence Lab™, and the questions that sit underneath all of them.

The question remains the same.

What type of ancestor do you want to be?

And perhaps, beneath that:

What becomes possible when we stop performing certainty and start listening for what the moment is actually asking of us.

If something here feels quietly familiar, you are welcome to explore.

#ThresholdCoaching #Leadership #FutureOfLeadership #LeadershipDevelopment #ExecutiveCoaching #SystemsThinking #KeynoteSpeaker #StrategicAdvisor #LeadershipTransitions #HumanFlourishing

Humans cannot flourish without the planet flourishing.

At some point, that has to become operational, not aspirational.

For some time, I have been sitting with a question:

What does it mean to build a business that leaves more behind than it extracts?

Not as philanthropy after success.

Not as a values statement placed quietly at the bottom of a website.

But as infrastructure.

As a way of deciding.

As an expression of responsibility.

The question feels particularly alive in a moment where so many leaders are being asked to navigate contradiction. Growth and extraction. Speed and responsibility. Profit and planetary care, spoken about as though they sit on opposite sides of a table.

I am not convinced they do.

Humans are ecological beings. Human. Humility. Humus. The same word returning to itself across centuries.

The listening crisis began when we forgot they were connected.

For several years now, I have quietly committed 1% of my earnings to community and planetary care. Not because I have resolved the question, but because I wanted the question to shape the business itself.

I have recently joined the Changemaker Network at 1% for the Planet, a community of organisations attempting to move contribution from afterthought to operating principle.

Not perfection.

Practice.

Not certainty.

Responsibility.

The question remains:

What type of ancestor do you want to be?

And what would change if your business had to answer it too?

#PlanetaryCare #EcologicalIntelligence #SystemsThinking #RegenerativeLeadership #Leadership #HumanFlourishing #FutureOfLeadership

He was twenty two.

And what he was trying to understand was what it feels like to live inside a nervous system like mine.

On Saturday 24th May, I stood on the Midlife Stage at the Mind Body Spirit Festival at Olympia to give a talk called Unmask at Midlife: AuDHD, Ancestral Intelligence and Authenticity.

I thought I was there to speak about the gap between what people see and what is happening on the inside.

Instead, the talk became it.

Olympia is vast. Bright. Loud. Thousands of nervous systems moving through one shared space.

For someone with AuDHD and fibromyalgia, my body had already been receiving signals long before I reached the stage.

I had prepared slides. A structure. A careful arc.

And then, mid talk, I could no longer follow it.

So I stopped trying.

I spoke instead from inside the experience itself. About the electricity I hear humming through appliances at home. The way my body feels fizzy. What it means to inhabit a nervous system that notices more than the room knows what to do with.

Several people nodded while I spoke.

Not agreement.

Recognition.

I have thought about that father often this weekend.

Because the original talk was about masking.

About the distance between external competence and internal reality. About the cost of carrying an inner world that few people are equipped to see.

As I have rested this weekend, I have found myself thinking about how often this same pattern appears in leadership.

The founder praised for resilience while quietly overriding what their body already knows.

The senior leader carrying grief privately while certainty is expected publicly.

The executive navigating change faster than identity can keep pace.

People functioning.

Performing.

Delivering.

And carrying realities that remain largely invisible.

Perhaps this is why so many thresholds arrive disguised as exhaustion, disorientation, or a quiet sense that the old performance no longer fits.

I had not planned to demonstrate any of this.

But perhaps this is what unmasking sometimes is.

Not performance.

Presence.

My body has needed rest since. The sensory intensity of the weekend led to a fibromyalgia flare and I have spent much time in bed recovering.

People often see the stage and not what follows after. The visible moment and not the nervous system that carried it.

When you unmask, you free more than yourself.

And sometimes, what becomes visible in one room creates language for someone else to recognise themselves in another.

If something in this feels quietly familiar, perhaps the question is not what you need to push through.

But what part of you is asking to finally be heard.

#AuDHD #NeurodivergentLeadership #EmbodiedLeadership #Unmasking #Leadership #AccessibilityMatters #KeynoteSpeake

r

Why, despite everything we know about ecological breakdown, does meaningful action still struggle to move at the pace this moment asks of us?

We have data. We have evidence. We have increasingly sophisticated models of prediction.

And yet there remains a widening gap between awareness and action.

In June, I will be joining The Klosters Forum in Switzerland, a small invitation only gathering built around a question that feels deeply connected to that tension:

What role might culture play in ecological transformation? And in tackling the ecological crisis, have we overlooked it as a system level lever for change?

This year’s theme, The Cultural Turn: Centering Creative Forces for Ecological Change, arrives at an important moment. Because perhaps this is not only an environmental crisis, a policy crisis, or a technology crisis.

Perhaps it is also a relationship crisis.

An imagination crisis.

A listening crisis.

A crisis of separation from the more than human world and from the forms of knowing we have learned to marginalise.

What interests me about TKF is that it is intentionally small. Eighty people. Artists, scientists, environmentalists, technologists, storytellers, policymakers, investors, systems thinkers. Not gathered for performance, but for inquiry. A living laboratory for difficult conversations, deep thinking, and the kind of unexpected collaborations that systems change actually requires.

I will also be joining a panel conversation asking:

In tackling the ecological crisis, have we overlooked culture as a system level lever for change?

For me, this sits close to the work I have been doing across AI, leadership, ecology, and mental health for years.

Not simply asking what we know.

But asking what kinds of intelligence the moment now requires.

This is the work.

And I am looking forward to being in the room.

#EcologicalIntelligence #SystemsThinking #ClimateLeadership #RegenerativeLeadership #CultureAndChange #EcologicalTransition #CreativeLeadership #FutureOfLeadership #PlanetaryCare #Leadershi

p

For a long time, I had been asking myself: What type of ancestor do you want to be?

It is a powerful question. But I started to realise it didn’t go deep enough, because most of us, myself included, were still centring the human in the answer. Humans cannot flourish without the planet flourishing. That is not a footnote. It is the foundation.

And yet the AI ethics and governance conversations I was witnessing were still organised around human-centred design, a Global North lens, and a word I have grown deeply uncomfortable with: sustainability. To sustain means to maintain the same. We cannot sustain our way out of ecological and climate decline. We need different questions. And we need different people in the room.

There is also a fracture we rarely name. The people training our AI systems, in India, in Africa, across the Global South, are often the same who are most harmed by the ecological damage caused by data centres, the energy consumption, and the mining that powers those systems. Those who are the ghosts in the machine, training AI for the Global North to use, are being destroyed by the very systems they are building. That is a perverse cycle. And the conversations were moving too fast to pause and actually see it.

I joined IEEE because I wanted to be part of a different kind of conversation. One that is genuinely holistic, that includes the human and the more-than-human, that references traditional ecological knowledge alongside Western academic frameworks, and that is not driven by capital or the logic of techno-feudalism.

The IEEE Global AIS Flourishing Initiative exists to do exactly this: to translate flourishing into practical frameworks, metrics and tools across the full lifecycle of AI systems, so that the technology we build measurably strengthens both human wellbeing and ecological sustainability. Not as an afterthought. As the whole point.

When I met Caro and Heather, who felt this just as viscerally, something clicked. What we are building together is not about getting diverse voices around a table. The table is still bound by the rules of those who created it. The question we are sitting with is: how do we co-create something new? Something intergenerational, epistemologically pluralist, rooted in the understanding that we are part of nature, not separate from it.

This is the work. And it is only just beginning.

Thank you, Iliana Grosse-Buening, for the introduction to IEEE, and thank you, you and Tamara Lechner, for co-chairing the IEEE Global Artificial Intelligence Systems (AIS) Flourishing Initiative, the canopy initiative for our sub-committee.

Sign up form: https://lnkd.in/eD-PjFgS

#ArtificialIntelligence #AIEthics #EcologicalIntelligence #PlanetaryCare #Leadership #SystemsThinking #HumanFlourishing #LeadershipLegac

y

The blank centre was not empty.

It held Matthew Henson, an African American man who almost certainly reached the North Pole first in 1909 and was erased from the record. It held four Inuit men: Ootah, Egingwah, Seegloo, Ooqueah. It held four thousand years of navigation the cartographers had no method for including. The blank was not absence. It was a choice about whose knowledge counted.

That same year, 1899, the Paris Arbitration drew the border over my family’s land in Guyana. A border Venezuela is now contesting at the ICJ, with judgment expected this year.

This map is the second in my Ancestral Cartography series. The first, L3b1a, was named after my maternal DNA haplogroup. It traces a line that begins in East Africa 70,000 years ago, moves through Egypt, West Africa, South India, the Iberian Peninsula, the British Isles, and arrives in Guyana, where William Gladstone’s father once owned sugar plantations and where my family’s land was drawn over by the Paris Arbitration in that same year of 1899. That work was acquired by the Gladstone family. What began as an artwork became a conversation. A debate. A salon. The kind of room where the uncomfortable questions finally had somewhere to land.

I am not speaking about these places from a distance. My DNA runs through every territory this map touches.

That is not a metaphor.

Iran. The financial system used as a weapon. Sanctions as algorithmic siege. This is a treasury and compliance decision sitting on your desk right now.

Gaza. Lavender, the AI targeting system, generated 37,000 names. This is the question your AI ethics board has not yet been asked to answer: what is your system authorised to decide?

Sudan. 12 million people displaced. Gold funding the algorithm that hides it. This is inside your supply chain.

Congo. Cobalt. 70% of the world’s known reserves. The mineral your devices run on. This is your procurement policy.

Bangladesh. 18 million people facing displacement from 50 centimetres of sea level rise. This is your climate risk disclosure.

Guyana. 11 billion barrels found by algorithm. My family’s land. 1899 still unresolved. This is what happens when extraction logic and inherited code run without question across generations.

Every one of these is a business decision. Every one sits inside a supply chain, a sanctions regime, a resource discovery, an AI system, a climate model.

The leaders I work with are navigating all of this simultaneously, in rooms where the frameworks available to them were built for a different moment. Not because they lack data. Because they are working with a narrower range of knowing than the moment actually requires.

Most of them can feel that gap. Even when they can’t name it yet.

The blank centre of that 1899 map is not history. It is the space inside your next strategy meeting where the most important intelligence in the room goes unnamed.

That gap is where I work.

If that question is already live in your room, my contact is below.

Leadership Legacy is published by Wiley.

lnkd.in/eKXUJakh

I’ve been sitting with it since. Not because it’s new. Because it named something I’ve been circling for years.

Radical pragmatism isn’t about being practical. It’s about being honest enough to follow what’s actually true, even when it doesn’t fit the framework you already have. Even when the room hasn’t agreed to look at it yet.

That’s the condition I keep encountering. Across organisations, sectors, levels of seniority. A persistent sense that something is being left out. Not a gap in data. A gap in the kind of intelligence the data can carry.

Here’s what I think is happening.

The word humility comes from humus, the Latin for earth and soil. So does the word human. We are, at root, earth-beings. We built systems that float. That extract without returning. That speak without receiving.

Human. Humility. Humus. The same word, returning to itself across centuries.

The listening crisis began the moment we forgot they were connected.

This is not a technology crisis. It is a listening crisis. And it is happening in the room where your most important work takes place.

I’ve been testing this thinking in real rooms. Earlier this year I gave a keynote at Arts University Plymouth, where the work on ecological and somatic intelligence met an audience genuinely building at those edges. I’ve also been running facilitated conversations with MBA students at LIS: The London Interdisciplinary School on AI and complexity, rooms where the questions aren’t settled and the discomfort is treated as data rather than something to manage.

I’ve concentrated two years of research behind Leadership Legacy into five talks.

The Ancestor Question — One question that changes how you make decisions. About technology, about the environment, about what you’re building and for whom.

The Listening Crisis — There are four kinds of intelligence available to us. Body, soil, DNA, algorithms. Most rooms are only using one. This talk is about what changes when all four are genuinely present.

Eclipse Navigation — When the world is changing faster than your plans can keep up with, this is for that moment. Not a map. A way of moving without one.

Power That Doesn’t Exhaust Itself — The exhaustion many people in leadership are carrying right now is not personal. It is structural. This talk names what performance-based authority costs and what replaces it. Not a wellness conversation. A governance argument.

What Soil Knows — Soil has been solving complex problems for 450 million years. What can that teach us about how we lead, build, and sustain things? More than we’ve been willing to ask.

All five are available as keynotes, extended sessions, workshops, and multi-day immersives.

The talk I gave for the The Portman Estate was the first public outing of this work. Speaking enquiries and bureau bookers: link in bio or DM me directly.

Leadership Legacy is published by Wiley.

lnkd.in/eKXUJakh

I don’t come with a neat professional category. I’m a futurist and a board chair and an artist and an author and a researcher who thinks in systems and works in rooms where the question matters more than the answer. I’ve sat at the intersection of AI governance, ancestral intelligence, regenerative leadership, and cultural transformation for two decades.

For a long time I read that as a liability.

In Chapter 3 of Leadership Legacy I write about curiosity as the antidote to fear. I wrote it as a leadership principle. I’m discovering it’s also a personal practice. Because the same conditioning that teaches leaders to stay in their lane, to not exceed their category, to be legible before they are useful, that’s fear. And it costs organisations enormously right now, when the problems don’t fit the categories either.

There’s another paradox in the book I keep returning to. Whether genuine vocational freedom requires a kind of privilege most people don’t have. The permission to occupy multiple registers at once. The security to say no to the rooms that would require you to be less. I’ve spent years navigating that tension, in organisations that needed what I carried but weren’t always sure what to call it.

I’m done performing legibility.

What’s true right now is that the organisations navigating AI governance, regenerative strategy, cultural transformation, and board accountability all at once don’t need another specialist. They need someone who can read the room before the room knows what it’s asking. Someone who has sat at those intersections long enough to see the pattern before it becomes the crisis.

That’s the work I’ve been doing for twenty years. I just haven’t always named it as available.

I’m actively exploring interim and fractional roles. Chief AI Officer. Chief Foresight Officer. Strategic advisor. Board-level thought partner.

If that’s you, or if you know someone building that room, my contact is in the comments.

The person who doesn’t fit the category might be exactly who the moment needs.

Leadership Legacy is published by Wiley. Available wherever books are sold.

amazon.co.uk/Leadership-Legacy-Manifesto-Mindful-Thriving/dp/1394304609

#ConsciousLeadership #InterimLeadership #FractionalCXO #ChiefAIOfficer #AIGovernance #RegenerativeLeadership #ThePresenceLab #FuturistSpeaker #BoardLeadership #LeadershipLegacy #PowerParadoxPresence #TERRAMethod

I’ve been sitting with this all week.

Not as a thought. As a practice.

I’ve been working on a 1899 map. The North Polar Region. All longitude lines radiating outward from a blank centre that was depicted as empty, unknown.

It was not empty. The cartographers drew it blank because holding what they knew alongside what the system required them to say was impossible. That’s not ignorance. That’s fear doing what fear does. It forecloses. It makes you draw a blank where there is actually a centre.

The longitude lines on that map radiate outward and stop at the edge of the frame. I’ve been following them past the edge. Congo. Sudan. Venezuela. Gaza. Each one a place where the same logic that drew the blank centre is still operating. Each one a place where the cost of that blank is being paid right now, in bodies, in soil, in water.

I understand why organisations are retreating to the most familiar voice in the room right now. When everything feels unstable, certainty is seductive. Even borrowed certainty. I feel that pull myself sometimes.

But curiosity and fear can’t fully occupy the same space. And the questions this moment is asking don’t yield to certainty. They yield to the capacity to stay in the room with what’s actually there.

That’s not comfortable. I know that. I’ve sat in enough rooms to understand that when the mirror gets held up, the first instinct is to look away.

The question I keep returning to isn’t who has the answers. It’s who is willing to stay curious long enough to find them.

Is curiosity the antidote to fear — or is that itself a privilege?

That question wants a room. Watch this space.

Leadership Legacy is published by Wiley. Available wherever books are sold.

What arrived this time, in the way things only arrive when you have stopped moving, was this: I had been repeating a diminishing narrative about my own work. Not because it was true. Because I had heard it often enough, in authoritative enough places, that it had become the water I was swimming in. The story had more authority than the evidence.

I came out of that silence and read my friend Kamin Mohammadi’s piece in Truthdig.

Kamin is Iranian, an award-winning journalist who has covered her country for over 30 years, and one of the people I trust most to read the world honestly. She has spent 47 years in exile. When she appeared on BBC radio last week, she was not permitted to discuss the factual reality of the illegal war on Iran. She was redirected, repeatedly, to her feelings.

I recognised the mechanism immediately.

Not because my experience is equivalent to what is happening in Iran. It is not, and I want to be precise about that. But because the structure is the same. A diminishing narrative, repeated in the most legitimate containers, accumulates authority over time. Not through argument. Through repetition. Through who gets to speak and what they are permitted to say when they do.

Kamin writes that mainstream English-language media calls this illegal war a “conflict in the Middle East.” I want to pause on that term, because it is doing more than one kind of work.

Middle East. Middle of what, exactly? East of where? East to whom?

The term is colonial cartography, invented by Western imperial powers to organise the world relative to themselves. Its continued use is not neutral. It re-inscribes a worldview in which London and Washington remain the implicit centre, and everywhere else is defined by its distance from that centre. This is the same logic circulating in development sectors where people still speak of “developed,” “underdeveloped,” and “developing” nations. Sanitised language that quietly maintains the speaker’s power while appearing merely descriptive. The myth of the ego, dressed as objectivity.

When the media using this term also removes the perpetrators from the sentence, calling an illegal war a “conflict” as if the region simply decided to set itself on fire, that is not an editorial error. It is a consistent logic.

Who controls the narrative controls the trajectory.

I wrote that in Leadership Legacy. I did not write it as a metaphor.

What I want to offer here, to anyone whose daily life is far removed from Tehran or from any place where this mechanism is running, is a way of reading I use in my own practice. Three questions, applied to any news story, any organisational communication, any conversation that feels somehow off:

Power: Who benefits from this framing? Who has been removed from the sentence?

Paradox: What two things are being held as if only one of them is true?

Presence: What would I see if I slowed down enough to look directly at what is actually here?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are perceptual ones. The practice is in applying them honestly, to the news, to the room you are in, to the story you have been telling about yourself.

Kamin’s piece is the most precise demonstration of why this matters that I have read this year. I am linking it because reading it is itself part of the practice.

truthdig.com/articles/as-hell-rains-down-on-iran-western-media-turns-its-head

Not because I don’t have feelings about it. I do. What happened to Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo on that stage was another cut in a lifetime of cuts. The particular cruelty was not only the word. It was watching the empathy in that room flow toward everyone except the two men who had just been harmed by it.

I’ve been quiet because I’ve learned that there is a difference between reacting to an incident and listening to what it’s telling us.

And what I hear underneath this one is a leadership story. A threshold story.

In my work, I talk about the Threshold as the space between who you were and who you are becoming. The place where old identities shed and new ones haven’t yet formed. Where you are asked to stay present through the unravelling.

What most leadership frameworks don’t account for is this: for Black leaders and leaders of the global majority, the threshold is not only a personal passage. It is a structure that has been built around us. We are born into it. We are taught from childhood that composure is not a choice but a condition of safety. That anger, however justified, will cost more than it returns. That we must absorb, adapt, and continue.

Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo did not choose their threshold that night. They were placed at it, on a world stage, in front of a watching industry.

And they held it. With a presence that most leadership programmes will never be able to teach.

This is where Power, Paradox and Presence converge.

The Power dynamic was visible to anyone paying attention. A system that required two Black men to manage their own harm gracefully while the room processed its discomfort around them.

The Paradox is one we do not talk about enough. The mandatory resilience we celebrate in leaders of colour, the composure, the professionalism, the grace, consumes the very interior space where creativity and innovation live. You cannot ask people to spend their cognitive and somatic resources on survival and then wonder why organisations struggle to access the full range of their thinking. The load is not neutral. It has a cost. And that cost falls unevenly.

The Presence is what those two men demonstrated. The capacity to stay conscious inside an impossible moment. To feel what was happening in the body and not be destroyed by it. To lead from the threshold rather than despite it.

That is not resilience in the way the word is usually meant. It is something older and harder won. It is a form of intelligence that cannot be learned from a book or delivered in a workshop. It is forged through generations of navigating exactly this.

In Leadership Legacy, I argue that the leaders our world most needs right now are those who have been required to develop this capacity. Not because suffering is a qualification, but because the ability to hold complexity, stay present under pressure, and lead without losing yourself is precisely what this moment in history is asking of all of us.

The question for organisations is whether they are willing to stop requiring that intelligence to justify itself before they listen to it.

Leadership Legacy: A Manifesto to Create a Mindful Future and a Thriving Planet is published by Wiley in 2026.

Being part of this process is a reminder of the value of shared attention, how seeing and acknowledging what others make helps the whole community grow. It will be interesting to see what this year’s entries reveal.

#CreativePresence #AskingTheQuestions #PatternsInPractice #CreativeCommunity

I call it Ecosensual Intelligence™️.

Machines can process, correlate, optimise. But they cannot feel when a system is ready to shift. 

They cannot sense when a team has lost coherence. They cannot tell when the soil, or a culture, needs to rest.

You can.

I learned this not in a boardroom but on 4-hour walks with my dog, Echo. 15 kilometres. No agenda. He is called Echo because he reflects everything I put into loving and training him. A living reminder that what we give, we receive.

Something in my nervous system would reorganise on those walks. Patterns I could not see at my desk would surface. Decisions that felt impossible would quietly resolve.

That is Ecosensual Intelligence. Not a technique. A remembering.

It is the same faculty that tells you when a conversation is alive and when it is finished. The intuition that bridges data and empathy, foresight and embodiment.

In my work with leaders and in my own ancestral sound practice, I have found that when we listen through relationship rather than hierarchy, intelligence multiplies.

The question is not can we teach empathy to machines.

It is can we remember how to feel like ecosystems again.

#EcosensualIntelligence #RelationalLeadership #LeadershipLegacy #HumanAdvantage

When people are given permission to slow down, and when listening is done with them rather than at them, insight reorganises itself.

Tasks can be delegated. Processes can be accelerated. But meaning doesn’t reorganise through speed. It reorganises through presence.

In these sessions, I don’t arrive with an agenda. My role is attentive presence:

mirroring back what I’m sensing so people can hear their own thinking more clearly, holding silence long enough for something real to emerge.

Through deep listening, people begin to notice patterns they hadn’t seen: how old narratives are still shaping current decisions, where external validation has quietly replaced internal direction.

What matters to me is that insight arises from the client, not from me.

This kind of listening isn’t new. It’s ancient.

Before language, there was resonance. Before words, there was vibration.

Sound is the oldest technology. It carries information faster than thought.

In leadership, listening is our most undervalued instrument. Not listening to reply, but listening to participate: to feel what the system is saying through tone, silence, rhythm.

Every organisation has a sound. Every team a frequency. Every decision a vibration that ripples forward.

The leaders shaping what comes next aren’t the loudest in the room. They’re the ones who can hear beneath the noise.

When someone feels truly heard, they don’t need to be pushed toward change. They find clarity on their own terms.

The futures you can’t yet see, you might still be able to hear.

If this kind of reflective space would be useful, I’m opening a small number of advisory conversations this season. The Sensemaking Questionnaire is a good place to begin: https://forms.gle/zNenepkDiYwsxWY69

#ListeningAsLeadership #DeepListening #LeadershipLegacy

The sensitivity you’ve been taught to manage isn’t a weakness.

It’s intelligence.

You’ve felt it: tension before anyone speaks, fatigue after meetings that “went well,” the subtle mismatch between what’s said and what’s true.

For years, I thought my body was the problem. Too porous, too reactive.

Then I learned to listen.

Sensitivity is data.

The body is a field instrument, reading coherence and disruption long before the mind can explain it.

Your nervous system isn’t malfunctioning.

It’s perceiving the invisible architecture of relationship.

Leaders who can read that field, who sense what’s shifting beneath the metrics, hold an intelligence no dashboard can replicate.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand about why this matters now.

Systems that move faster than human sensing can follow, whether markets, platforms, or governance structures, create a specific condition: people stop trusting what they feel and start deferring to what they’re told.

Speed rewards certainty. Certainty displaces listening. And when enough people lose access to their own embodied feedback, harmful decisions meet less resistance.

This pattern isn’t new. History shows it clearly. And it’s accelerating.

I’m not writing this as theory.

I’m running it as an experiment.

I’m organising my advisory practice around seasonal rhythm and body-led timing rather than linear productivity logic alone.

I want to know what happens, in real terms, to mental health, creativity, decision quality, and governance when the body is allowed to guide timing, not just absorb the consequences of bad timing.

Because I think embodied intelligence isn’t a wellbeing initiative.

It’s infrastructure for discernment in a world that’s making discernment harder.

The question I’m sitting with:

Who still has the capacity to feel when something is wrong, and the authority to slow a system before harm becomes policy?

That’s the work.

It’s what my book Leadership Legacy is about https://amzn.eu/d/0iu59mhi.

And it’s what I offer through one-to-one advisory work: reflective sensemaking for leaders navigating transitions, complexity, or decisions where the data is clear but the direction isn’t.

I’m opening a small number of spaces this season. If this resonates, you’re welcome to begin with the Sensemaking questionnaire https://forms.gle/zNenepkDiYwsxWY69

#TheBodyIsAField #SomaticIntelligence #LeadershipLegacy #EmbodiedLeadership

On Wednesday 28 January, I attended their fifth annual Friends and Family Impact Day. A gathering of organisers, ambassador artists, partners and sponsors, sharing the individual and collective impact of our work together.

What struck me was not the…

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