Future Fitness – From Coping to Thriving Amid Rising Complexity

One need not be a futurist, visionary, seer or fortune-teller to realize 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, 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/

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 .

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