Leading from Connection and Kinship
Our times call for new ways of leading from connected consciousness that honors all of our relationships with care and reciprocity. Circle practice supports these new ways of leading, not only by bringing in diverse perspectives, but by co-sensing and co-creating in resonance with nature itself. Credit: Luminola, Getty Images
By Ginny Whitelaw
Originally published on Forbes.com on June 1, 2026.
What are the strategies of leadership in a timeplace of collapse? In Norma Kaweloku Wong’s important work, Who We Are Becoming Matters, deep listening and collective energy figure prominently, as do big leaps and keeping our eyes wide open. Otto Scharmer likewise emphasizes holding a steady gaze on this time of “civilizational rupture” as we feel into what future is waiting to emerge and what is it asking of us?
These are two of a growing chorus of wise voices sensing that the chaos of these times is signaling, not just a mess, but a transition in consciousness and a call for new ways of leading to pull through to the other side of it. Conventional ways of leading, based on the ego mistaking itself as separate, tend to consolidate power and resources around the most power-savvy egos. Such leadership simply cannot solve the crises it has created: from climate and collapsing ecosystems, to an AI arms race, to might-makes right power grabs and skyrocketing corruption.
Out of this evolutionary necessity, new ways of leading are emerging based on the consciousness of a connected self, that both embraces the ego and puts it in service of a bigger picture, a higher calling. These new ways of leading are based in the healing power and creative potential of relationships and honor those relationships with care and reciprocity. They give rise to a sense of kinship, belonging and responsibility. Such connected ways of leading invite a rethink of how we treat people and the earth, run meetings, make decisions and structure organizations. And lest we think these new ways of kinship leading are but a weak cousin to the power hierarchies creating today’s chaos, we’ll find the connected consciousness fueling them is better tuned to co-sensing and co-creating futures aligned with the larger forces of nature, including human nature.
Ancient Wisdom Enriched by Modern Science
In a sense, kinship leadership is not new. Indeed, it is one of the oldest forms on earth, deeply embedded in Indigenous cultures which recognized kinship with the human and non-human world. But what is new is its emergence in a post-modern world, as opposed to the pre-modern world of our ancestors. The flourishing of science and technology that gave rise to our Modern Age has technologically connected us, enabling speedy mobility, instantaneous communication and democratized knowledge. It has also given us rational ways to understand ourselves and our world more deeply, in particular, the relational, evolving nature of all beings and things. We have the science to show we are interpenetrating verbs, not corpuscular nouns.
Modern physics, for example, has shown us that nothing exists or arises on its own. Rather the forms of our world arise as resonances in the field of perception, revealing perception as an active (not passive) process that collapses a waveform of probability into a this or a that. Likewise, neuroscience has illuminated how we resonate with the fields around us, from our five senses to high frequency energies that stimulate the pineal gland, to getting on the same wavelength with others. We’ve learned that at certain frequencies head, heart and hara-centered breathing come into coherence (i.e., resonate in mutual amplification), which can be measured objectively in the field we generate, as well as felt subjectively as a sense of wellbeing. These are but a few examples of how science has illuminated how everything arises in relationship, as if preparing the ground for the relational stage of consciousness to come.
The downside of Modern Age rationality—and the root of the problems it causes—is that it puts us up in our heads, where the ego-I feels separate and cut off from a felt sense of kinship with the human and non-human world. As Ken Wilber articulates in Integral Theory, each stage of consciousness includes and transcends all that it evolved from. We can now embrace both ancient wisdom and modern science around the relational qualities of resonance, creating a more inclusive foundation for kinship ways of leading, that is both intuitive and rational, collectively and individually practice-able, and links what’s possible with who we can become.
Reimagining Organizations and Leadership
Frederic Laloux, a thought leader in Reinventing Organizations from a more connected stage of consciousness, offers dozens of practices and successful real-world examples of reimagined structures, work processes, and daily life in organizations. For example, organizations and their boards can be reoriented around serving an evolutionary purpose to which profits are secondary—some exemplars being Patagonia, FAVI, Morning Star and Sounds True. Hierarchical organizational structures can be reinvented into self-managed work teams, with traditional staff functions absorbed into the teams themselves. Performance appraisals can be flipped from a focus on individual performance by a superior to team performance, peer-based feedback and personal inquiry into one’s calling and learning journey.
Supporting these and many other shifts of reinvention is a change in the quality of relationships, dialogue and decision making from transactional to something deeper, capable of connecting with the evolving the form of things—i.e., transformational. Circle practice, thanks to the Indigenous traditions that have preserved it, is growing as an excellent way to foster this depth, enabling better co-sensing, better convergence and co-creation, all held within a field of belonging. It is a natural way to build teams or islands of coherent action, which the science of living systems tells us is exactly the way in which higher level order evolves out of chaos. Moreover, the wellbeing we experience from inner coherence becomes outer coherence in the form of thriving systems and human flourishing. Leading from connection is to lead from love; it feels good inside and it creates good in the world.
Tuning the Circle
Circle practice came into our earliest programs at Institute for Zen Leadership (IZL), initially as a way to check in on people’s condition, what they were learning, or what commitments they were living into going forward. We started with a simple form: listening wholeheartedly, speaking one at a time, with each person passing to the next until all had a chance to be heard. That’s an easy enough practice to apply to virtually any group or team of less than 20 people, and it works well.
Yet thanks to our collaborations with Indigenous elders and other sources, our circle practice evolved in the depth of conversations it could hold and the questions it could address. We learned the importance of creating the space for circle practice with better ground rules and “setting the table” by reading them at the start. The circle guidelines below were compiled by the late Yupi’k Elder, Rita Blumenstein, as shared and edited by Yael Zeligman and Ilarion Merculieff and used with permission:
· Circle does the talking; we do the listening.
· Listen from the heart; let the Circle speak; feel into what’s between words, what’s unspoken.
· Respect yourself and others in the Circle with your time and attention.
· This is a potluck of offerings—not everything will resonate but may help someone else. No need to object to someone else’s offering but simply put yours alongside it. Offerings are completing not conflicting.
· Listen as if for the first time—as a child.
· Speak from the heart; stay clear of titles, agendas, fixing or advice; we’re not here to teach or prove you or anyone right or wrong.
· Don’t interfere with others’ sacred path or words.
· Speak your own truth: speak for yourself and about yourself from your own lived experience, which can be different from that of someone else, but just as valid. Expand to contain another’s truth, or a drop of it that speaks to your heart, even when it is uncomfortable, so something truly new may emerge.
· Speak if and when the words ripen.
· Each voice has the chance to be heard at least once and you don’t have to speak at all if you choose not to.
· Respect confidentiality; things arise in Circle that don’t belong anywhere else.
After the host reads the guidelines, people can suggest changes which are discussed until there’s consensus.
A third wave of growth in our circle practice at IZL has emerged through more intentional listening and speaking, not just from heart, but also from the vital center in our lower abdomen, hara. Hara is a center of consciousness—a brain in its own right—that evolved before our sense of a separate ego and can sense the rhythms and ways of life as a part of them. We’re now more intentional about bringing hara-tuning practices into the opening of a circle, to hone our hara as a more sensitive antenna, one-with the ground of being. Such tuning practices also create coherence in head, heart and hara, which brings our whole self into the circle, better able to seed coherence within it.
Into circles like these we can drop important questions, such as those suggested by Wong and Scharmer: What strategies do we need at this time? What future is waiting to emerge and what is it asking of us is? We can play with variants, such as reserving a seat in the circle for nature to listen or speak. Some organizations include an empty chair representing the evolutionary purpose of the organization. Any person can change seats and listen or speak from the perspective of the whole organization. Some circles encourage silence, not as a time to squirm, but as the most generative time for listening.
While circle practice is more emergent than linear, more intuitive than logical, the science of resonance gives us reason to trust its effectiveness in sensing, amplifying and acting in resonance with the larger field connecting us all. It is central to new ways of kinship leading because it accomplishes what ego-based leading cannot do: strengthening reciprocal relationships of belonging and commitment in the very process of co-sensing what’s true around an important matter and co-creating a collective response.
How might we unleash the power and creativity of relationships to help people get to the other side of these messy times? What is our evolutionary purpose and how might we rethink our structure, processes and decision making aligned with it? Throw questions like these into a well-tended circle and discover what’s ready to happen through your connection and kinship.
Ginny Whitelaw is the Founder and CEO of the Institute for Zen Leadership.