The Quiet Rebellion

On regenerative leadership, and what it means to lead toward growth when the system is designed to deplete you.

I want to start with something I cannot unsee.

The organisations I work with, humanitarian agencies, INGOs, philanthropic foundations, values-driven institutions exist to change systems. They challenge extraction, inequality, the logic that treats people and planet as resources to be consumed. This is their explicit purpose. It is what draws exceptional people into this work and keeps them there despite everything the work asks of them.

And yet, these same organisations largely run on the same operating logic as the systems they are trying to change. Overwork is normalised. Depletion is reframed as dedication. The people inside them are expected to give more as budgets shrink, to care more as burnout rises, to sustain others while quietly running on empty themselves. The irony is rarely named. It is simply the water everyone swims in.

I have spent over twenty-five years working inside and alongside these organisations. What brought me to this work, is a conviction that has only deepened over time: if these organisations genuinely want to create systemic change in the world, it has to start inside their own walls. And since organisations are made of people, it has to start with the people leading them.

What the system does to the people inside it

Most leaders who come to me are not struggling because they lack skill or commitment. They are among the most capable, most motivated people I know. They are struggling because the conditions they operate in are genuinely hard, and because few name what those conditions do over time.

The pressures are structural and cumulative. Missions that feel urgent and chronically under-resourced. The slow erosion of trust inside organisations that mirrors the fractures of the world outside. And for many, proximity to human and environmental suffering that most people are shielded from by distance and privilege.

What I cannot unsee

Last week my friend Omer, a senior communications leader at UNHCR, shared a video. He is Sudanese. He carries the story of Sudan daily, personally and professionally. In it he named Nidal, a woman who carried her mother on her back to safety. That image stays with me.

Not only because of what it said about Sudan, which the world has largely chosen not to see. But because of what I have watched Omer do with everything he carries. He keeps showing up. With grief, yes. And with a creativity and dignity that I find astonishing. He does it, because he has done the work of understanding what sustains him. Choosing to tend to that repeatedly and consciously.

What I have come to understand is that real change requires something more than adjustment. A different relationship to the work itself, to leadership, and to the self that is doing the leading. Not a tweak, a reorientation.

I want to be honest about how rarely that happens fully. The system is powerful precisely because it maintains itself. It rewards urgency and penalises stillness. It frames depletion as commitment and reflection as indulgence. Most leaders I work with can see this clearly enough when we name it together and still find it extraordinarily difficult to act against. The pull back toward the familiar, toward the pace the system expects is constant and real.

What I have witnessed in the few leaders who have genuinely moved through that resistance is not a dramatic transformation. It is something quieter and more durable. A growing capacity to notice the system's gravity before it takes hold. To choose differently. That is rarer than I would like it to be. But it is real. And I have seen enough of it to believe it is possible for more people to find their way to a different relationship to work, leadership and self.

What regenerative leadership actually means

I use the word regenerative carefully because it gets used carelessly.

In ecology, regenerative systems are ones that renew themselves; where tending one part of the ecosystem strengthens the whole, and where depletion in one place eventually shows up as damage everywhere. The opposite of regenerative is extractive: taking without replenishing, until the system can no longer sustain what it was designed to sustain.

Extractive systems draw down on the people inside them without asking what those people need to renew. Over time the ecosystem degrades in ways that are easy to explain away until they are not.

Regenerative leadership begins with understanding yourself as part of this ecosystem, not separate from it. What you bring into the room, your regulation, your presence, your capacity for creative thought, is not just personal. It circulates. It affects the health of everything around you and so does its absence.

It starts with regulation. Knowing your own inner weather before you become someone else's. Recognising the moment you are triggered and creating enough space between stimulus and response to choose differently. In complex, high-pressure environments this is not optional. It is the ground everything else grows from.

It deepens into rootedness. A connection to purpose and to people that holds when the ground shifts. Leaders who are rooted do not simply endure difficult seasons. They remain present and creative, able to hold others because they have learned to hold themselves.

It expands into reciprocal relationship. Understanding that we do not draw from community, but rather, that we participate in it. That the interconnection the sector writes into its mission statements has to be lived inside the organisation before it can be created outside it. The ecosystem of the organisation reflects, over time, the inner ecosystems of the people leading it.

This is the quiet rebellion. The quiet, daily, countercultural choice to tend the soil rather than exhaust it.

 What this looks like in practice

I want to be careful about what I claim.

I am not going to offer you a polished case study of transformation, because the honest truth is that this work is slow, non-linear, and still unfolding, in the leaders I work with and in myself.

What I can tell you is what I have begun to see, in early and partial ways, when leaders start to work with these ideas seriously.

A moment of pause where there used to be only reaction. A meeting that was held differently because the person leading it had taken ten minutes beforehand to notice their own state. A conversation that did not escalate because someone had learned to feel the trigger before acting on it. Small things. Barely visible from the outside.

And then, over time, less small. Teams that feel the difference without being able to name it. Decisions that come from clarity rather than depletion. A quality of presence that people lean toward rather than brace against.

A conversation starter

If the organisations that exist to create change in the world are running on the same extractive logic as the systems they are trying to transform, what does it actually take to lead differently from within? I do not think any of us has a complete answer to that yet. I think we are still preparing the soil.

What do you recognise in this? What feels true, what feels incomplete, what have you tried?

If you would like to explore this further, in writing or in conversation, I would be glad to hear from you.