Living Connections: Authentic Leadership as Relational Practice

Kizuna's Fall 2025 Open Encounters Pathway

Hello Everyone,

As promised, I have some news I’m very excited to share with you today. I’ve been hinting at some events scheduled for later this year, and everything is now ready for the announcement.

---

I am the Invited Voice for Kizuna’s fall 2025 Open Encounters pathway, taking place virtually, November 18th through December 30th!

Kizuna is a cultural-philosophical house, the world’s first ecosystem for Existential Leadership™; a fluid ecosystem of study, composition, experiences, and encounters focused on re-grounding leadership, creativity, and culture in the discipline of Kizuna Existential Literacy™.

It’s an honor and I am humbled to be a part of this ecosystem that spans philosophy, art, ecology, pedagogy, and leadership through an original cross-disciplinary and lateral approach in order to sustain a living world and a re-imagined future.

---

As you read in my last newsletter, I work in leadership ecology guiding leaders through an animistic lens.

Animistic Lens Applied to Leadership:

Animism, as a worldview, is older and wider than any single lineage or model of leadership. It holds that the world is alive and in relation. Meaning emerges between beings, not imposed by or on them, something that many people in the workforce appear to be realizing.

• It allows us to remember that systems, whether rivers or organizations, are not machines but living beings.

• The lens can be personal, constructed, or revived, available to all who relate ethically to each other and the world around.

• It is a pathway to deconstruct assumptions and identities that do not allow our full humanity to flourish.

• It helps us grow and understand our position in ecosystems without centering ourselves in them.

I’ve been exploring and nurturing this animistic lens of leadership for many years, and the founder of Kizuna, Grace Aimoto, has been generous enough to offer the space for me to bring my approach to a wider collective of like-minded leaders seeking to address the fractures in our organizational and societal compacts between leaders and their people.

This is exciting for me personally, as this will be my first opportunity outside of a 1:1 setting to offer this lens as a way to collaboratively understand how leaders shape meaning and create thriving cultures, a truly animistic dialogue that will benefit from the diversity of perspectives that matches that of the world we live in.

For me, many of the conversations surrounding leadership development have grown stale, repetitive, and performative, with everyone being on the same page about the challenges we face yet unable or unwilling to come up with new paths forward.

That is why I chose the questions you’ll see in the information below. In order to envision new ways of leading and understanding, we must start with our own view of the world, ourselves, and how we relate to it.

---

---

Open Encounters is Kizuna’s pathway for live inquiry, and this season, Kizuna examines leadership as a continuously shifting, living principle.

We invite you to engage with fellow emerging thinkers, creative practitioners, and those navigating new forms of leadership to an exploration through two modalities that can be engaged with separately or together:

OpenThread is a live experience (Tuesday, November 18th, 2025, at 12 PM EST, 9 AM PT). In this catalytic, 90-minute dialogic session, we will explore the question:

How does our understanding of authentic leadership change when we reframe it from a cultivated inner trait to a relational conversation between entities?

OpenArc is a sustained, cross-disciplinary, and asynchronous. The Encounter I am an Invited Voice for will be taking place between December 2nd and 30th. OpenArc extends the conversation by introducing a second question for participants to engage with through layered modes of creative response:

How do we co-create authenticity in the liminal space between self and collective across scales and contexts?

---

I encourage you to experience the full Encounter, which is the most immersive pathway to engage with the question of authenticity at the level of interconnection, understanding, and shared agency between leaders and collectives.

Community Tier Pricing:

• Application Only.

• Will close Saturday, November 15th, at 11:59PM PST (Sunday, November 16 at 2:59AM EST)

All Other Tiers:

• Open until Sunday November 16th, 5PM EST, 2PM PST

You can learn more and Request Entry here, and feel free to contact me with any questions.

Hope to see you there,

Chris

---

Welcome to this space, and thank you for your presence!

I am a leadership ecologist rooted in Appalachia, raised through environmental respect, military service and Western educational institutions. I use an animistic lens to better understand the relationship between individuals, organizations, and systems.

When working with leaders and organizations, my approach not one of doctrine, but of guidance and tending to: to memory, to culture, to systems and people. I believe leadership is not a fixed role, but a living, relational practice.

My work draws from my lived experience and research into myth-making, insurgency and business strategies, regenerative philosophies, creative works, the landscape I inhabit, and the mundane, because the ember of humanity is often nurtured in and between those spaces.

---

---

If something resonates, leave a comment, or reach out to chat - I always love hearing people’s stories.

You are always welcome to book a free call to either get fresh perspective or see if we’d work well together in cultivating your capacity to lead.

I offer a variety of services, 1:1 coaching, group programs, leadership training development, and culture consultation.

Cultivar Leadership Solutions, 2025