Indigenous Leadership is by Nature part of Collective Action

In line with the requirement of a new reality leadership is a capacity?of an organization to collectivelly sense and shape the future. We can learn how to build this capacity from indigenous leadership as it is collective, distributive and relational.

Indigenoeus leadership flows out of a belief in sacret kinship with all creation and deep sense of belonging in an interrelated woven universe. At the heart of indigenous leadership is a spiritual core - a belief in co-evolution whereby humans did not evolve only in relationship to each other, but that all of creation co-evolved in a symbiotic spiritual exchange, and we are all connect to a shared origin.?Leaders serve their communities and there is a strong commitment to being a caretaker of the wellbeing of others, including ecological communities, wrote Chellie Spiller, Hotuora Barclay-Kerr and John Panoho in their book 'Wayfinding Leadership, Groundbreaking Wisdom for developing leaders'.

‘Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi engari he toa takitini’

This Maori thought is translated as 'I come not with my own strengths but bring with me the gifts, talents and strengths of my family, tribe and ancestors'.

Wayfinding Leadership builds on the special from of intelligens, on the sphere intelligence. The sphere belongs to a multidimensional world, a world of interiority as well as exteriority. It provides us with greater ability to see the whole and obtain a well rounded perspective. Chellie Spiller listed the following charactersistics of sphere intelligence:

• ?recognition of multiple ways of knowing,
• ?roundedness and holism,
• ?appreciaton of a process of unfolding and a cyclic approach,
• ?capacity to be with uncertainty, mistery and the unknown,
• attention to the process, and
• understanding the relationships between things.

Effective wayfinder will tap into multiple sources of knowledge and information. And nowadays we?need to be wayfinders, trailbalzers and pioneers, co-creating a new world that we want to live in. That is why it is key to build relational capacity and sphere intelligence to provide a well-rouned and holistic perspective on our relationships with each other, with communities and ecologies, and with how to keep our spirits strong.?