Exploring Forgotten Perspectives

Contour Lines 039

Sep 01, 2025

Good Monday morning everyone,

I hope wherever you are, you are having a good start to the week, here in the U.S. it’s Labor Day weekend so many people have off. I’m doing a little work today, but also planning to have a cookout with family later.

How are you doing? A few of you have checked in, and it means the world that you have. The support and interest in my musings on all the intersections I see between things is very encouraging, so thank you.

I’m very excited to be digging into some extremely eclectic fields of study for some upcoming workshops on leadership I’ll be doing later this year. Here’s the little teaser I’ll give you so you know what I’ll be up to the next few months. I mentioned in Creativity is the New Commons that:

systems thinking is modern animism for the corporate world.

Now, some of you may know what systems thinking is, but I’m not sure (I’d love to be proven wrong) that animism is a familiar concept - it’s something I’ve only begun to study in depth recently.

Animism is a belief system wherein everything (rocks, trees, places, animals, etc) is perceived as having a spirit, or person-hood.

Now, the extent and validity of that specific perspective of that is debatable (the academic interpretation of indigenous beliefs that everything has a spirit can be seen as a colonial-era generalization meant to make indigenous and pre-organized religion faiths look uncivilized), but in modern scholarly research it’s certainly true to say that in animistic belief systems, some other-than-human things are believed to have a spirit.

So, I’m sure you’re thinking this is a fun little anthropological rabbit-hole, but what does it have to do with leadership?

What do the following have in common:

the Nike symbol?
Commercial jingles you remember from being 4 years old?
Workplace Culture?
The infectious energy of a startup founder?
An authentic leader?

They are all amorphous, intangible, and felt. It’s something that effects your mind and body, evokes a memory, catalyzes action, keeps you stagnate. They are something that roots you to a time and place without being in it.

Even if the concept and understanding of animism hasn’t extensively been used to explore leadership, I’m not alone in thinking the intangible, relational aspects of culture and leadership can be viewed in such a way. Shortly after I started exploring the connections, I came across this article from Ranjay Gulati through the Harvard Business Review that I’ve gifted to you so you don’t have to pay: The Soul of a Start-Up

The thing that intrigues me in the most, is the way that an animistic perspective might allows leaders a perspective on how to relate to each other and their environments in a regenerative way.

Note that I didn’t say a new perspective.

While much of the modern world doesn’t use this ontology, we still have indigenous peoples all over the world that do, and we can learn from them as well as dig into our own history and anthropology to remember ways of relating and leading that kept our species going for much longer than the modern ways have.

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