Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Learn more about 5 Deep, the company Christopher founded, at https://www.5deep.net/.

Our host Maureen Metcalf posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI, or check out the Kindle version at https://amzn.to/44buVz8 . The audiobook version is now available at  https://amzn.to/4dTCleZ.

Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

• Growing Up and Out: Development for Modern Leaders with Mike Morrow-Fox
• Becoming a Better Leader: Daily Leadership Development with Ron Riggio
• Amplifying Human Potential with Seth Casden

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Sheila Cooke holds an MBA in International Business and a BA in Sociology/Anthropology. She spent approximately 20 years in international business, including five years as a general manager in Japan, before moving into facilitation, education, and organizational development. She is a qualified trainer with the Institute of Cultural Affairs and has designed and facilitated programs for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome. Today, Sheila serves as Director and lead consultant within 5 Deep Limited and leads 3LM (Land and Livestock Management for Life), the Savory Institute hub for the United Kingdom and Ireland. As a Savory Institute Accredited Educator and Field Professional, she advises farmers, organizations, and business leaders in Holistic Management and regenerative agriculture, helping them develop decision-making capabilities that align economic, ecological, and social outcomes.

Christopher Cooke is the founder of 5 Deep Limited, a consultancy focused on human development, leadership, cultural transformation, complexity, and change. He has worked internationally for nearly three decades as a consultant, coach, mentor, trainer, and change-management specialist.

Prior to founding 5 Deep, Christopher worked in the United Kingdom water industry, where he participated in major transformation efforts associated with privatization and organizational change. Through 5 Deep and 3LM, he has focused on helping individuals, organizations, and communities increase their capacity to navigate complexity through integrative and holistic approaches to human behavior, culture, leadership, and decision-making. His work spans business, agriculture, community development, and regenerative land management across multiple continents.

Transcript
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Maureen: [00:00:00] Hi, my name’s Maureen Metcalf, and today we’re talking to Christopher and Sheila Cooke. They’re focused on the release of latent capabilities to cope with complexity and forge a world that works for all life. Together, they lead Five Deep, a specialist training and advisory company that’s focused on thought leadership, innovation, and change. Their mantra is, “Stance matters,” and their business is enabling human emergence.

Sheila: Thank you, Maureen. The only thing I’d like to add is just a personal note of how Christopher and I actually met.

We met four years ago, and, I wanted to really understand at a much deeper level how it is that people change. I was working on a project in Korea, and a colleague of mine recommended that I look at Christopher and his online cultural assessment instruments. So I took one of those instruments for myself, and I hired Christopher as my [00:01:00] coach in order to really understand what the information meant.

And we were to have a 30-minute conversation to go over my data, but it went to two and a half hours, and I really fell in love with Christopher’s mind in that call. And we were married about six months later, and we work together, and it’s been just a real pleasure for me to learn every day with Christopher in our work and in our lives.

Maureen: Hmm.

Thank you, Sheila.

Thank you very much, both of you, for joining today and sharing your insights. You’ve talked about the question of soil and the challenge of soil, so let’s start with going in that direction. Why does this matter?

And then let’s talk about leadership so that we start the conversation from the context of what’s the problem that you’re using Solonix to solve, recognizing that it can be used for lots of other [00:02:00] challenges.

Christopher: In Australia in the 30-year drought, traditional agricultural methods fell over.

And I was fortunate to work with many farmers who’d been forced to innovate. And the key message from that community, that whole country, was that effectively we knew very little about soils before the drought, but as a consequence of the drought, they began to understand the significance of working with the microbiome.

It’s really the microbiology of the soil. And the statistic that Sheila and I love to quote is that for every half a ton of food produced, there is 20 tons of soil degraded to a point where it’s unusable.

Sheila: Desertification is happening. Good usable land is turning to desert, and that leads to problems that we see, for example, people leaving North Africa and the Middle East as refugees into Europe, really [00:03:00] because they have unhealthy soil or degraded soil.

And then secondly, healthy soil is able to sequester carbon.

What we’re doing with Solonix is really helping farmers to make that transition, that shift from conventional agriculture to organic or biological or holistic agriculture. It requires a shift in how people think. And that’s what we are able to achieve using Solonix.

Maureen: Help us understand a little bit more about Solonix and specifically as a leader, how is it gonna help me solve problems?

Christopher: Solonix provides a metaphor, into which we can understand any aspect of human development. We use the structures and the understandings of human stage development to bring insight into the particular ways and means, the particular biases of individuals [00:04:00] and organizations.

So I’ll give you an example. Uh, in Australia, the agricultural form being used was a very strive drive, success focused, where the measure was on agricultural yield and using chemicals, as one of my farmers used to say, “Like hundreds and thousands.” And even though they were putting more and more chemicals on, striving for success, suddenly the soil started to decline, and we’re seeing that similar decline now in most First World countries.

That model of being driven was starting to run out of appropriateness for the life conditions in which we’re emerging. The drought completely changed the life conditions and the interaction between the farmer and the soil.

What started to emerge then was a new understanding, and today I would call this the ability of the individual not only to comprehend the complexity of our relationship, but start to work in a much more principle-based manner.

Maureen: That sounds significant. Can we give a practical example that would [00:05:00] help somebody who’s sitting in Columbus, or London? What does this really mean? What do I do with it?

Sheila: Something else that Christopher didn’t talk about yet but helps make it a bit more simple. There’s something called the six conditions for change, and these are the six conditions that, when they’re in place, enable a person to actually continue to emerge and to evolve.

And so I’m just gonna give you one example. This is with a farmer that we recently met in Ireland, and he experienced one of the six conditions for change, which is dissonance. He told the story about his son, and his son said, “Dad, either you sell your cattle or I’m going to sell your cattle for you, because you never have money and you never have time to spend with me.”

And this really hit the farmer hard because it turned [00:06:00] out he’d told that same story several times that evening, and that was creating huge dissonance for him. We did a number of exercises, and he noticed no matter what question we asked him, he always ended up in the worldview that we call strive drive.

And that is a worldview out of which modern-day agriculture springs. And it’s from this scientific understanding of the world that we have prescription farming, and that’s what he was doing. And he recognized that it’s very intensive, and he recognized that it’s stripping the soil of its ability to be fertile naturally.

And he told me, “I just don’t know what else to do.” In that moment, he was really experiencing a change state of, “I know something’s wrong. I know something needs to change. [00:07:00] I just don’t know what to do.” And so he was in this really perfect place of dissonance and of readiness for change.

Um, that’s just one tiny example of how an understanding of human change then we would know how to work with him to lead him to where he’s next naturally going. I hope that helps.

Christopher: The only thing I would add is that the Solonix gives him the essential insights and provides him with the means to make decisions where he can quickly discover how to create solutions that work for him.

In just in that short space of time we’re with him, he could start to imagine new solutions.

What we’re talking about here is, is putting in place a process of discovering how to make decisions that equip success in the present paradigm whilst anticipating significance in the next. And what we find when that’s in place, that the individual completely [00:08:00] outperforms, but it takes time. And part of our challenge in working with the farmers is that it’s a typical 12 to 18-month process to support them on a journey towards their new significance.

Maureen: Here I hear you saying during the process of change, I will become more effective as I’m building my foundation for the next layer of change. Did I get that right?

Christopher: Yeah. And I’d go even further. For me, what it releases is what I would call a magnificent process, where the individual is realizing they’re learning to utilize latent capacities that in many cases are laying dormant within them, and traditional education and leadership practices discard that.

So there’s this wonderful, magnificent process of discovery where they’re led by their own curiosity to see what’s possible. And one of the key challenges is to make sure they’re surrounded by peers and supported by individuals like us that can just [00:09:00] help them do things differently, and also legitimize the time, energy, resources to allow themselves to grow into the space that’s already grown.

Maureen: Part of why this is so effective is it is helping people recognize these latent capacities that are already within them. So we’re not building or, or changing them, but in fact allowing them to be more effective as they currently are. At the same time, that’s preparing them for the next step.

Christopher: So our second maxim, if I could offer this, is: remember that the change has already happened. You’re just learning to grow into it.

Maureen: That’s beautiful. It sounds a whole lot less scary. If we can give a concrete example, I think that may help make this more practical.

Sheila: Yes. I’m going to frame these worldviews from what we’re calling leadership intelligences. It’s just one of many ways that we could actually look at [00:10:00] these coping means that are within us. So the first level is what we would call a nurturing provider. That would be the leadership intelligence. And the leadership maxim might be to satisfy basic needs.

And a mother and a father are a great example of this type of leadership intelligence. The codename that we use for that is beige, and that might help us later on in the conversation. Next is traditional protector, and the leadership maxim is to assure safety and uphold traditions. Purple.

Respected boss is the third one, and this one is about getting respect and remaining on top. The shorthand for it is red. Then we come with rightful authority is the next leadership intelligence, and the maxim is to follow the ordained rules, and blue is the shorthand. And then strategic entrepreneur comes [00:11:00] next: win the game and strive to be the best, and that’s orange. Next is sensitive facilitator, and this means to enable the human potential, including my own. Green is the shorthand. And then systemic navigator is yellow. The maxim is do what I know is needed with awareness of the impact on all life. And finally, global catalyst is turquoise, and the maxim is to ensure that both humanity and planet thrive.

Maureen: So this is the group that is looking at doing what we know is needed and taking more of a systemic view.

Christopher: Yeah. And I’d just like to add here that one of the things I’ve discovered over the 18 years that I’ve been focused on this is that l- language is so important.

One really has to slow right down and translate or define every term we use. And over the last four years when we decided to go public with Solonix, we had great fun redefining these [00:12:00] terms and checking things out, and I’ll give you an example. So we talk about the global catalyst, this holistic thinking, this the capacity to sense what’s going on on the planet, and we use the term global catalyst.

And I was in South Africa recently, and, and a leading academic turned to me, he said, “Christopher,” he said, “I realize you use the term catalyst.” He said, “But I seem to remember that a catalyst remains unchanged when it interacts with the world around it or as part of a chemical reaction.” And I said, “Ah, the word I would really like to use is global inoculant, but I can’t use that word yet because many aren’t ready for that conversation.”

And the difference between a catalyst and an inoculant, for example, is an inoculant changes when it actually comes into contact with the soil or the particular environment in which it’s being applied. So we’re into a conversation here where we’re looking at the close [00:13:00] interaction between how we think and the environments in which we find ourselves, and I sometimes call that working with the dance of all life.

Maureen: So my understanding is not only do I as the leader need to change, but I also need to recognize that systems go through these levels and that I can’t create an orange system or a green system if we’re in beige.

And my example from some travels in Africa: we’re traveling with my guide and he had a small farm, and he was paying bribes or payoffs or whatever you call it to the local police to protect his farm plot so that when he went back, the vegetables he had grown for his family would be there.

In that environment, introducing human rights isn’t gonna stick because people are trying to meet basic needs of food and safety and security. So human rights are a [00:14:00] nice-to-have, but really until I have enough food and security for my family, it’s just not something I have the capacity to understand.

Once I have stable legal structure, then I can introduce more commerce. And then once I have stable commerce that provides for all of my needs, then I worry about human rights, so that it’s a building process. And if we get them in the wrong order, they are unlikely to stick.

Is that an accurate perception?

Christopher: That is an accurate perception, and it also reinforces that when we’re working here, when we’re talking about the coping means that create these codes and patterns that we map out as stage development, we’re working with the biological, psychological, cultural, and social systems expression of those coping means.

So this is where I think some of the, the real initial challenge in this work comes to the surface because these are intelligences that speak through us, that influence [00:15:00] all that we do, say, and think.

So these stage development frameworks take us to an understanding of these intelligences that influence not only how we think, but as we think in that way, we design systems that are reflections of the biases, the natural biases and attributes of those intelligences as they influence all that we do, say, and think.

Maureen: So I see a problem. Uh, we don’t have enough water in a community somewhere in Africa. I can’t implement an advanced solution in an environment that isn’t ready to absorb that kind of solution.

I really have to, and it sounds so reasonable as I say it, but I have to meet them where they are. If the issue is people are walking two miles to a creek with baskets of water that they put on their heads and walk back, and because of that, because that’s a woman’s job, young girls aren’t getting education, then inserting a pipeline [00:16:00] to pump water won’t necessarily address the cultural issue of women in education.

Christopher: Let’s use that little example you’ve given. We can give you a case study from a community we visited in Zimbabwe recently, where, yes, many technological solutions have gone in place to extract more water from groundwater, drilling wells, and traditional technological solutions.

But the real solution that we’re witnessing is when they learn how to interact as a community with their environment.

Sheila: Right. So I spoke with Precious, who was the trainer at the Sizinda community, and I asked her, “Did you run into any obstacles when you first started introducing holistic management into this community of 47 families?”

And she said, “Yes.” And it was really overcoming the notion they had that any problems on their land were [00:17:00] created by their ancestors trying to get at them for something bad that they had done. And so it was kind of a superstitious belief, and that’s really coming out of the second worldview, the purple tribal bond worldview: believing in the spirits or the ancestors creating the problems they face…

Which made it impossible for them to actually do anything about the soil degradation that they were experiencing. And she worked actually for several years with the tribal leader and with the tribe to help them see that actually it was their own human action that led to the degradation on their land.

Once they got through that barrier, they finally were able to start learning about holistic management, and they applied it magnificently, and to the point where they’re having huge success, and the success can be seen in the [00:18:00] effective water cycle. So when they first arrived at Sesende community, their water in their river would dry up only a couple months after the rainy season ended, which is about a six-month rainy season and a six-month dry season.

So you can imagine that’s a long time to have a dry river. Now that they’re practicing holistic management, their water flows all year round. They now have an effective water cycle. So that is a really great example of how a worldview can prevent the adoption of a new way of thinking, a new technology.

Christopher: So what we’re seeing, also hearing, in this story, Maureen, is that integral awareness sees in a new way, and comes up with solutions that outperform the present paradigm.

Maureen: Awareness brings about solutions that we had not seen before?

Christopher: Yes. It’s the essence of our innovation, and [00:19:00] it’s an innovative form that leads to an elegant simplicity. We see that’s the path for inspiration.

Maureen: We’ve talked about water in Africa, but the same framework is also helpful in corporations where many of our listeners are working. This granularity and understanding of movement across levels, and that many of the constituents in our organization may be at some of these earlier levels while some of our leaders are at later levels.

So we’re designing solutions that aren’t aligned with our participants, and because of that misalignment, we’re creating solutions that can’t effectively deliver the results we’re trying to deliver. So again, thank you.