Research interests

At the core, my research centers around the exploration of consciousness and power dynamics. I explore the decolonizing aspects of bringing the body into the office, valuing emotion in decision making and acknowledging non-human consciousness as teacher(s) in our lives. You’ll hear me talk about dismantling the myth of the lone hero, embodied wisdom, and reciprocity to counter extractivism.

I’m currently working on a PhD with the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). My inquiry is centered in the mixing of psychedelics, business transformation and equine-facilitated learning – the experiences that have shaped me as a leader in business.

Some labels I choose for myself:

Ecofeminist – While my views align strongly with ecowomanism, as a pākehā of settler ancestry in Aotearoa, I recognise that aspect of lived experience of women of color, embodied within ecowomanism, which does not match my own. I hold this label as a sign of respect, in an attempt to honor difference of experience with congruency of intention.

Anti-capitalist – This gets gnarly. Yes, we operate within a capitalist society. No, that doesn’t mean we have to comply wholeheartedly. We can choose to navigate society’s normative paradigms, while we also actively seek and explore alternatives.

Activist-scholar – My research interests enable me to write-into spaces for social change. I walk a tightrope of cognitive dissonance between agitating for change, while also holding firm to a belief of not trying to change others. I often ask if I’m actually making change, or simply upskilling oppressors to make deeper harm. It’s complicated. Navigating is a word I use often.

Day tripper – Yes. High dose LSD or ayahuasca are my jam, generally in alpine rainforests.

Journeys we might take together

Psychedelics, business transformation and equine-facilitated learning. It’s a lot to take in. I like to think of a rich and complex landscape that mimics our own sense of escalating complexity in business, or what Peter Vaill called a sense of “permanent whitewater“.

The shorthand version of my own experience is that horses taught me interaction, while psychedelics taught me the structures to support non-dominator relations (a world in which all is achieved, yet no one is “in control”). There’s a lot we can learn from our non-human teachers that apply to the way we conduct ourselves in business. I don’t consider myself a guide, instead my superpower is the integration of insights into learning, action and being in the world after an experience (psychedelic, equine, or otherwise).

These journeys are my own ongoing exploration, and woven into the fabric of both retreats and coaching offers for others:

From uncertainty to indeterminacy

In business we hear a lot about building tolerance for uncertainty, but have you ever considered the origins of these concepts? Karen Barad’s constellation of ideas around what they call Agential Realism has emerged from their background in physics, and arguably a distinction between what Heisenberg termed uncertainty and Bohr’s concept of indeterminacy.

• Heisenberg offers the concept of uncertainty, which suggests that we may not fully know the context or situation – but this stance is predicated on the idea that there is an underlying (singular) reality of which we are trying to make-certain of.
• Bohr’s indeterminacy offers that there is no underlying, objective reality. Instead, Bohr suggests reality is yet to be determined, is malleable by what Barad terms our intra-actions with it.

Conceptually, this shifts us from seeking “the” answer, towards a way of working with(in) emergent problems of our shifting business landscape. I still like Snowden’s Cynefin Framework for sense-making in complicated, complex and chaotic systems. To me, Barad and Bohr’s work underpins the deeper, embodied move into effective being and doing within what Snowden terms chaotic systems. These are the foundations of co-creation, collaboration, and exponential thinking. This stance gives me hope in the overwhelm.

Rest as resistance

Learning from the work of Patricia Hersey, Sonya Renee Taylor and others has helped me to center rest and self care in the work of transformative practice in organizations. Both Hersey and Taylor challenge the idea of fighting for social justice, instead compelling us to seek change from the place of a regulated nervous system. In a world that continually stresses us mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually, a grounded and calm nervous system in ourselves is an act of defiance and non-participation.

I hardly need to say that when we are under stress, we make different decisions to when in a more calm, relaxed state. The place where I work most often with executives is in understanding the physical definitions of chronic stress and recognizing that our work environments perpetuate the release of stress hormones that mean we are unconsciously carrying an influence on our decision making.

From competition to partnerism

Our world is imbued with a sense of competition, of hierarchy and an attachment to the myth of control. From Darwinian theories of evolution, Cartesian senses of order and logic, and an underlying paradigm of scientism as the way to approach the world, being within a business environment demands we think, act and respond in certain ways – whether for our own survival, or in an effort to thrive.

My own approach to leadership seeks to redefine these paradigms – the way we think and feel about reality, and our sense-making and knowledge-making within the world. Hold tight, this next bit moves quickly.

• Eisler’s work on partnerism, specifically non-dominator leadership is foundational reading for those exploring related concepts of transformative leadership, servant leadership, distributed decision making and agile (responsive) methodologies. She poses the archeology of a world in which competition was not our central paradigm.

Eisler’s work validated in me, my own sense of leadership which comes from a place of believing that no one person is worth more than another. Once you make it there, it’s a relatively small move to acknowledging that no one life is worth more than another. This is the place of decolonizing our bodymind, the place of intersection of interspecies, interconscious, relational praxis. (I still have to Google these words myself too – see also “onto-epistemological” shifts).

• Critical posthumanist philosophers such as Rosi Braidotti explore the decentering of human experience as anchor, truth (singular) and preferred, or more important, more real, more credible than other-consciousness.

• My thinking harmonizes with various indigenous concepts of “personhood” – which extends beyond only-human, acknowledging the agency, wisdom and reciprocity of the ecosystem around us. Deslaurier’s Reciprocal Embededness echos the deep wisdom that we are all alive, and we are all related.

These foundations weave together for me to explain what has always been my felt sense of leadership. The reasons why I’ve gravitated towards disruptive creativity and transformative practice – These ideas underpin my belief that while humans will always need to organize at scale, we can move from traditional motivations of fear, coercion and exploitation towards love, compassion and reciprocity.

And for those who need the empirical evidence, these beliefs can be validated through the work of Sisodia, Sheth and Wolfe’s Firms of Endearment, Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations and The Beyond Budgeting Institute.

Change methodologies

Acting from a place of principles, of beliefs and particularly in a belief in co-emergence necessitates choices in the way we approach transformation – of ourselves, and the world around us.

• Bartlett, Marshall and Marshall’s concept of Two-Eyed Seeing offers a way for us to walk between worlds – one eye on our beliefs, one eye on translating the world around us. Fun fact – equines have eyes on the side of their heads, and an incredibly narrow overlap in their vision. Their two-eyed seeing is such that in teaching new concepts, we work on one side of the animal and then need to go to the other side and start all over again. Equine’s ability to translate from one side to another is largely derived through human interaction.
• Graeme Hingangaroa Smith beautifully highlights the dissonance many of us feel when he talks of Strategic Concessions within change making contexts. He offers a questions for all change-makers. In particular, his question for me has manifested moment-to-moment as “How much coercion might I use to implement a collaborative environment?“
• You’ve likely heard of Lean, and Agile methods from which I certainly draw lineage. I would add to big names like Toyota the work of John Seddon and The Vanguard Method as well as David Kantor’s Structural Dynamics. These approaches are methods of systems thinking adapted for manufacturing, services businesses and interpersonal communications which help us make decisions about how we shift perspectives, and do so in manageable moments that bring others with us along the journey of sustained, long-term, transformative change.

If you’d like to learn more, have questions, or you’re interested in collaborating, please reach out and I’d be happy to talk