The Art of Mobilising People (and self) to Navigate Complexity and Change

What Adaptive Leadership & Storytelling Teach Us

“if we must
both
be right.
we will
lose
each other.”

          – exile

 ~Nayyirah Waheed (salt. 2013)

Participating in an in-person gathering is a feast for a Thinking Partner. We feel the place, the resonance of all the bodies and the words in the room. We see patterns, shapes in relationships emerge, vanish, return, transform. In the last week of November, crispy cold and soaked at times, I was honoured to step onto the Jesus College grounds in Cambridge for a full residential Academy Programme supporting the HP Cambridge Partnership for Education EdTech Fellowship.

On top of an intensive design thinking and prototyping schedule, this group of 25 Latin American and Caribbean Fellows focused on policy and innovation in education, immersed themselves in leadership sessions to weave movement, reflection, and connection for a transformative journey through systems, stories, and self.

From embracing change to explore how to tend to endings, participants explored Adaptive Leadership, collective intelligence, and mutual learning, cultivating fresh insights and reimagining their purpose amidst the rhythms of life’s transitions, institutional constraints and interconnected ecosystems.

Here’s a highlight of our thinking and embodiment activities:

(NB: References to the material and readings are located at the end of the article)

 

A Journey Rooted in Relational Practice

Adaptive leadership is not about having all the answers or solving complexity; it’s about feeling its weather and creating conditions to learn, co-create, and respond together.

To lay the foundation for our collective practice, we created Thinking Environments: Generative listening became our first shelter, through rounds and thinking pairs, carefully timed to ensure equal thinking time for all, clearing the mind, and offering a nest for psychological bravery, shielded from the extractive pressure of interruption.

A Warm Data Lab deepened this by inviting inquiry into relationships and contexts present in the life of participants and their stakeholders (Family, Ecology, History, Media, Culture, Politics, Economy, Health, etc.

). Patterns surfaced like low tide: assumptions exposed, connections reappearing and with these, the quiet truth that nothing exists alone. We looked at narratives from multiple perspectives and explored boundaries and their shape within a system, an approach that helps participants engage with adaptive challenges rather than bypassing them.

Brown Hummingbird - Descanso Gardens, La Cañada Flintridge, United States. Pic by Levi Jones on Unsplash

Generating Attention and Dismantling Assumptions that Drive Harm

Attention is a quiet pillar of Adaptive Leadership. Without it, the system wobbles and folds.
What we offer ourselves and others is simply the space to think well.

When the internal noises soften, attention becomes a portal for learning, for connection, for meaning that wasn’t available a moment before.

Attention ignites.

In our session on othering and belonging, we leaned toward what is emergent and different. We welcomed the mystery of not knowing,  noticed the untrue assumptions that distort our views, making room for true, alternative and liberating thoughts to take root.

Absorbing difference, rather than resisting it, strengthens adaptive leadership.
It helps us meet prejudice with clarity, challenge biases with courage, and loosen the beliefs that keep us small.
It opens pathways for inclusion, equity, and the rise of voices that systems too often quiet, including our own.

 

Collective Imagination and Adaptive Play

We created space for emergent thinking and shared sensemaking, unlocking creative responses to uncertainty.

We formed human “stuck sculptures” to explore partnerships that “support” but not “save”

Speculative futures gave us the soft permission to name what matters under pressure and to see how shared purpose emerges when singular expertise softens.

Tree Canopy - Olympic Forest Park, Chaoyang, Beijing, China - Ran Liwen on Unsplash

Reenacting Ursula K. Le Guin’s theme of “The World for Word is Forest”  (a fiction about a forest world colonised and exploited by humans, and the indigenous people’s struggle to defend their land and way of life), we explored our radical ability to embody values by becoming trees (and other critters). We remembered that leadership also has roots: slow, relational, fed by what we do not see. The forest we made held complexity without forcing it into shape.

 

Reconnecting with the wisdom of a Thinking Environment

We created a Time to Think council, a simple, steady space where listening could deepen and thinking could settle into its own rhythm.
A presenter spoke freely at first, letting the heart of their question rise at its own pace.

Then the council offered not solutions, not advice, but small, personal stories —
each one an “I,” timed, contained, clear enough to be held without overwhelm.
No one tried to influence the outcome.
No one needed their story to be chosen or proven.

The presenter received these stories the way roots take in water:
slowly, selectively, drawing from them what might nourish new thinking.

Together, we saw how the right conditions, attention, pace, and generosity can gently expand what becomes possible for a group, and for the decisions it must face.

Tending to Failures and Endings

“What if the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis?”

~Bayo Akomolafe

For a moment, we stepped into the Sámi ecology of philosophy and science, into Sápmi’s wide, wind-shaped territories across northern Norway, Sweden, Finland,
and the Kola Peninsula. We met the teachings of Goavvi, the pasture locked under the ice,
and Geabbil, the wisely adaptable and collaborative one, two ways of knowing shaped by land, weather, and movement.

Inspired by reindeer and the ancestral skill of their herders, we turned toward failure, disruption, responsibility, and collaboration, not as abstract concepts, but as living conditions of a world in flux.
Together, we reflected on our collective capacity to face crises and failure honestly
and to repair, with care.

Later, using the ecology of garden metaphor, endings as natural cycles of life arrived as teachers. We used the beautiful Tending to Endings card set, navigating complex personal, local, collective, or systemic transitions in today’s escalating crises, and found (or confirmed) ways to hospice old systems, behaviours, and ideas that no longer serve our communities or us. Fallowing, coppicing, composting, pruning, wormery, seed gathering…
We learned that letting something conclude is not surrender,
but a practice of care, a way of making room, for what is trying to be born.

Through all of it, adaptive leadership revealed itself not as mastery but as attention, a steady breath in turbulent weather.
A willingness to stay present, empathetic and warmly interested when the path dissolves, and must be sensed.

One step at a time.

One of the participants, Namrita Balani, Director, Science and Technology, at the Ministry of Education Culture, Science and Technology in Belize, said: “What really stayed with me was the humanity in the room. As a new leader, having the space to let my guard down, speak honestly, listen, and learn from each other’s stories meant a lot. This week, I also started seeing EdTech differently — not as “education” on one side and “technology” on the other, but as one ecosystem. A mindset shift.” 

References (selection)

About

I’m Servane Mouazan, Chief Exploration Officer at Conscious Innovation. I help Social Impact teams navigate complexity and rekindle relational aliveness, so thinking, feeling, and connection can come from a place that is no longer numb or collapsed. TimeToThink Teacher and Supervisor | Executive Team Coach | Warm Data Lab Host | NED | Incubation Programmes Designer | Servanemouazan.co.uk

 

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