May 16, 2024 4 min read

Redefining Leadership for Our Regenerative Future

Originally published on my Mirror 10/2023.

We face a perfect storm of chaos, as a collective, that is in our face every single day. One need only open their news app and bear witness to a new reality of perpetual weather disasters as Mother Nature rebels against the pain we’ve inflicted upon the planet we call home.

For those of us in roles of leadership, this reality hits close to home on a daily basis. Our role is to support the humans in our organizations so they can thrive and accomplish their goals and our collective missions with ease and joy. How do we properly fulfill this role when the world around all of us is swirling in perpetual instability and chaos? Each human in our charge is facing a tsunami of situations beyond their control-- including us. How do we show up each day to support them, do our work and move our humans forward toward these collective goals?

Multiple leadership paths exist and they’re pretty straight forward. Business as usual, which embraces the short-term, ROI-only driven strategies designed to separate, extract, conquer and create profit. Simon Sinek calls this the Finite Game. This type of leadership thrives on separation and views human and natural systems as things to exploit or conquer. This leadership was prevalent in the 19th and 20th centuries and brought us some undeniable technological advances. But this style no longer serves humanity and has put us on a path to total ecological and societal destruction in just a few more decades.

The world we face now is radically different than previous decades-- volatile, chaotic, unstable and unpredictable. We need to redefine HOW we lead-- and we need to do it ASAP. Conscious leadership is my core approach to leading humans and it is grounded in just that-- consciousness. Kindness, empathy, compassion and love lie at the center of this type of leadership and as a an advanced yogic practitioner, this is a logical leadership style for me. I recently discovered the book from a twitter recommend titled Regenerative Leadership and the book is profound. While I’m only three chapters in, I wanted to share some key excerpts from the book to begin a dialogue about the leadership we need for the times we are living through.

Separation

Understanding the separation we all experience and understanding the roots of this separation are a key element to re-framing the lens of our leadership approaches. Chapter One dives into the concepts of separation in four main categories:

Human > Nature Separation
Feminine > Masculine Separation
Inner-Outer Separation
Left-Right Brain Separation

Understanding the impacts of such separations is key to identifying the dysfunction in our organizations and also for finding the methodologies to heal our groups by reconnecting these separated parts of our realities. I’ve included a few excerpts from Chapter One to give a little more context.

From Chapter One of Regenerative Leadership by Hutchins & Storm.

During my recent time at Naropa University, we studied these topics in depth and explored solutions through the lens of ecopsychology and yoga. Exploring our relationships with nature, the balance of feminine and masculine in our lives (from a gender-neutral lens), strengthening our inner landscape through wellness and contemplative practices like meditation and yoga and balancing our left and right brain strategic approaches to decision making and strategy.

None of this work happens overnight, but as we begin to redefine our leadership skills to match the time we’re living in, we can begin to shift the way we support the humans in our charge and how we move our missions forward.

I hope this is the beginning of a conversation about the type of leadership we desperately need in our web3 communities, organizations and beyond. Web3 Builders find themselves at the intersections of the metacrisis because the technology we use on a daily basis is also a prime tool for addressing multiple aspects of this metacrisis.

We stand at these intersections of the past and present in a rare and fascinating way and it falls upon the leaders in this ecosystem to redefine our approach to leadership so we can collectively move our communities forward with grace, compassion and resiliency.

More excerpts from Regenerative Leadership:

If you’re in a role of leadership or hoping to step into one soon, please snag a copy of this book or spend some time with the author’s website, research and content.