Deep inner work is essential for navigating turbulent external circumstances
Writing Nicholas Janni & Amy Elizabeth Fox
Recently, we witnessed what we call next-practice leadership inside an industry that many consider ultra-conservative. For two hours, a top team worked through complex financial analysis on a high-priority project. At key moments, the CEO paused to name what he was feeling. His team followed suit. It was a simple yet powerful act, and one that radically elevated the quality of the team’s final decision. But it was not a move that most teams would naturally make – certainly not before creating the psychological safety and context for such honest disclosure.
When we first encountered this team, their meetings were fractious and counterproductive. Now, they are energized, open, and capable of accessing greater synergistic intelligence and creative outcomes. When fears, frustrations and hopes are voiced and unconditionally welcomed, a team activates a higher intelligence. As one third-party told them: “We don’t know what it is about you, but we love collaborating with your organization – the work you produce is three steps ahead of all the rest.”
This points to something more fundamental. When people reconnect to themselves and others on a deeper level, they are free to collaborate intellectually and relationally in novel and intimate ways.
The invisible architecture of next-practice leadership
We believe that at the heart of this shift are two streams of executive maturity.
Healing Integrating the emotional layers and life experiences that drive reactive patterns. Without this, leaders regress under pressure, defaulting to control or defensiveness.
Awakening Expanding awareness and perceptual capacity. As leaders sense more – within themselves, between people, and across systems – they access far more than the rational mind alone can know.
Together, these form the foundation for a more profound form of leadership: one that moves beyond linear thinking, relentless execution and disembodied ways of being we have long prized and normalized, which leaders admit are no longer working.
Why inner work has become urgent
We are living through a period of sustained upheaval, not temporary complexity. While often described in very abstract terms, today’s polycrisis is deeply personal. It walks into your meetings day in and day out. We see it when people feel overwhelmed, exhausted, disoriented – and when they become brittle or numb. Silos deepen. Trust erodes. What appear as performance issues are symptoms of something deeper.
Beneath many organizational challenges lies unaddressed emotional history, and a way of working that has cut us off from our bodies, relationships and sense of meaning. This has always been true, but collectively, we are experiencing a level of strain and adaptive demand that is unprecedented – and that triggers much of what is unresolved in people. We can no longer ignore the deep disconnections.
And yet there is a second truth at play. The goldmine beneath the conference-room table is our hardwired human longing to contribute to something meaningful – to feel connected to ourselves, others and the wonder of life itself.
A radical revisioning of leadership
These realities call for next practice leadership. Inner work is no longer optional; it is essential if we are to be future-ready. This is not about better tools or new frameworks. It is a fundamentally different way of leading, grounded in deeper wisdom from which a distinct set of capacities begins to emerge. The ability to think clearly under pressure; greater cognitive flexibility and openness; deep relational trust and collaboration; a willingness to experiment, iterate and learn; and the capacity to sense-make in complexity.
Through this work, leaders develop foundational qualities: coherence, groundedness and adaptability. This unlocks often-exponential levels of vitality and imagination, enabling aligned action and the mobilization of collective intelligence across the organization.
The challenges we face – within organizations and across all of humanity – are not incremental. They are systemic and catalytic. They require leaders who perceive beyond the cultural architecture in which we operate to imagine fundamentally different futures.
How to begin
This shift toward next practice begins not with one grand transformation, but simply with where we place our attention. This is one of the most underdeveloped superpowers that leaders have.
For example, we invite you to pause now as you read these words. Bring your attention to your breathing – not to change it, but just to notice it. Drop your awareness from your head to your body. Spend a moment there. What sensations do you become aware of?
When leaders regularly devote even a few minutes to such a simple practice, they report being less reactive, more present, and more able to listen and respond effectively. The field of conversation changes – and with it, the quality of decision-making.
The business case for deep inner work
Businesses speak about the need for collaboration, innovation and adaptability. But these organizational outcomes rely on inner conditions. True collaboration, for example, requires generosity. Innovation asks us to stay curious rather than remain sealed off in our own expertise and opinions. People must believe it is genuinely acceptable, if not welcome, to try and fail. Adaptability demands a wide zone of tolerance for uncertainty or what is known as ‘productive disequilibrium.’
The alternative is also clear. Without this maturity, organizations will remain gripped by a pandemic of superficiality that keeps silos intact and makes discomfort, defensiveness and dysfunction inevitable. When leaders draw on all their intelligences – body, heart, mind and spirit – while learning to rest in a deeper inner stillness, they become a steady presence amid the storm. Inner work is no longer a luxury. It has become indispensable for leading in an age of chaos.
Nicholas Janni and Amy Elizabeth Fox are the authors of Leading in Chaos: A Clarion Call to a New Future from Two Pioneers in Leadership Development and Transformational Change (LID Publishing)
