The Future of Leadership?
Intro to Conscious Co-Creation (2): For Emerging Corporate Leaders
Recently, I caught up on the research of Liz City, a senior lecturer at my alma mater, who spoke about strategic leadership beyond goal setting, emphasizing discernment, relationships, historic context, power dynamics and quickly iterating while meeting ambitious goals. She identified power dynamics as the key challenge to many leaders, inspiring my curiosity to dissect further and apply a different paradigm to understand power dynamics.
There's a deeper layer driving power dynamics that becomes visible through the conscious art of reading and responding to people’s energies. We often use terms like “read between the lines” or “you feel me?,” and although many professionals are allergic to bringing in anything intangible to a corporate board room, we couldn’t be more correct in our colloquial expression of how we interact and “read” one another.
We can effortlessly co-create spaces where authentic relationships can emerge, attract aligned partners and investors, and implement strategies that flow and adapt organically. But before we can effectively harness power or cultivate relationships, two of City's key strategic elements, we need to first form a deep understanding of who - and what - we are. Sound familiar?
Sensory Intelligence
When Liz City talks about the importance of discernment in her interview, "What It Really Means to Be a Strategic Leader," she touches on a critical aspect: the need to pause and sift through noise to understand what truly matters. What she identifies as pausing and sifting, I call deep listening: the practice of paying attention to what my body is assessing from the room - the energetic frequencies emitted from each person.
In last week’s post, I wrote about our body’s intelligence:
Our body is an amazing sensory organ that transcends any technologies we've ever created. Nature creates the best systems and organisms, and we often forget we are part of it.
In the context of work and leadership, each individual brings their own energy signature to any interaction—their personal and professional agendas, goals, anxieties, past experiences—all bundled into their current state of being. The ability to sense and work with these energies can determine whether an idea - in this case, strategy - grows, struggles or dies all together. It can also determine whether (and what type of) people will follow you as a leader.
The future of leadership requires an understanding of the human body’s capacity to read external stimuli - a key ingredient to discern, cultivate, and influence - not just aggregated analytical data produced from logos-driven searches. Given the right conditions, your body’s sensory intelligence can outperform any diagnostic tool - it’s ever so brilliant. You may notice yourself or others operating at this level at times, and many folks do so unconsciously. It’s certainly not taught at universities, and people are afraid of using terms like ‘energy’ or ‘intuition’ in professional settings.
And yet, our bodies are constantly providing real time information about our environments, people, thoughts and connections that our mind is unable to access. For some (probably many of you reading), this skill reaches across time and space, extending beyond the physical. For others, the silent accumulation of unattended information in the body becomes painful. Knowing your body in this way cracks open infinite abilities latent within humanity.
The Future of Strategic Leadership (That We Need Now)
There are many pathways to discover and embody this awareness. For me, it required experience-based, nonjudgemental self-observation. You’ve heard me prescribe curiosity and inquiry to access or understand frequencies (information), and it’s no different in business leadership. Those who cultivate this expertise consciously gain access to subtle cues, often described as gut instinct, that inform decisions, actions and relationships. Fluency born of trusting and listening to our body’s communication lead to accessing deeper sources of creativity, resilience, and authentic influence that serve the evolution of both people and planet.
It bothered me that sustainability ventures emerging from some of the most educated minds were continuing to develop from old paradigms. Conscious co-creative leadership operates from a fundamental recognition: we are not separate from nature but integral expressions of it. This leadership paradigm aligns decision-making with our essential nature as interconnected beings within larger living systems. Just as MBA programs train leaders to adapt to different leadership styles, the most effective leaders are mastering - or have mastered - different aspects of co-creation and adding it to their toolkit. They’ve integrated this paradigm to make decisions organically from being (and feeling) interconnected, creating outcomes that serve individuals, the collective, and our environment.
As we continue to navigate complex and unfamiliar territories (esp. here in the US), the leaders who create from this paradigm will be those who can work skillfully with the full spectrum of human experience—not just the rational, goal-oriented, technological aspects, but the emotional, energetic, relational and ‘superpower’ dimensions that ultimately determine whether strategies succeed or fail. And by succeed, I mean achievements that lead to enhancing nature and life.
The embodiment of sensory intelligence will become critical as tensions among nations rise, inequality widens, large-scale change becomes the new normal, and certain technologies like AI are adopted across industries (more on these later). Discernment becomes essential; for leaders, conscious discernment even more so.
The pause that City identifies as crucial for strategic leadership becomes more powerful when we use it not just to think more clearly, but to sense more deeply. In that pause lies the opportunity inherent in being present, backed by the energy of full potential to align our responses with our teams, to recognize and honor the strengths each person brings, and to create the conditions where authentic co-creation becomes possible.
Strategic leadership, at its deepest level, is about creating space for collective wisdom to emerge. And that requires leaders who can sense not just what needs to be done, but creates the energetic conditions where it can be done with integrity, ease and genuine care for all involved.