The 5Cs: Business, Climate, Leadership Done Differently

New Series.  Refilling the Tank.  Today is Part One.  The Long Walk and the Price We Pay. A conversation about climate risk and business, business leadership and stewardship.Business, climate and leadership each run on their own well-worn scripts. Every leader who decides to go off script faces a rite of passage. It’s often called The Long Walk. It’s not a straight line, and it’s not easy. Most of the stories we hear skip the middle of it. This episode doesn’t. It names the hidden costs of The Long Walk.. Charlene brings back four voices from the show: Ernesto van Peborgh, who left the top of investment banking and ran seven marathons across the Atacama Desert; Nicola Robins, the Yale-trained scientist whose body shut down after an audit at a diamond mine in Australia; Ryan James Kemp, who spent fourteen years learning in close to sixty-five countries; and Kassandra Hamilton, whose life came apart at 27. Four very different walks, and the same messy middle. It's disorienting, it's lonely, it's expensive, and it takes far longer than anyone plans for.Then she turns the lens on herself: a six-month project, 80-hour weeks, and the truth about why she really checked in on her team.The point she lands on: The Long Walk never happens to just the leader. Your team pays the price with you, whether you tell them or not.This episode sets up the next two, where Kassandra Hamilton shares practical tools for refilling the tank while you're still in the middle.Three things you'll take away:Why going off script drains far more energy than the leap itselfHow a leader's worry, exhaustion and silence get passed to the teamThree questions to ask yourself about what your long walk is costing the people around youHave you checked out The Stewardship Table? The 5Cs Podcast connects forward-thinking executives who are building sustainable competitive advantages while driving positive impact. Think of it as an exclusive network of leaders who understand that stewardship isn't just good ethics - it's good business. Becausing addressing business stewardship climate risk and leadership together is in the highest good for all. Connect with Charlene Norman on LinkedIn, find her at her website, subscribe to our Substack for strategic insights, or download the full series on Spotify and Apple.

Series: The Other Eye Episode: You Can't Trojan Horse Your Way Into a Different FutureMost organizations spend huge amounts of energy and money solving the consequences of a worldview they've never examined. In the final episode of this series, Ryan gets practical about what to do instead.He starts with risk. Most organizations look at it in silos, one or two pieces at a time. Ryan sees it as connected: ecological, economic, health, technological and geopolitical risk all tangled together. Seen that way, risk becomes opportunity. He takes on the pushback every leader raises ("This will cost more time and more money") with a simple answer: you can do it now, or you can do it later for more. Blockbuster chose later.He also explains why he refuses to sneak these ideas in through the back door. He'd rather have lunch with someone who wants to have lunch with him. Then he walks through the four stages of his relational architecture process: building relational intelligence, immersive experiences for leaders, redesigning systems from values to virtues to systems, and long-term stewardship. He shares where it fits best (organizations between $25 million and $100 million) and closes with the one thing every leader has to do first.  You can find Ryan here, here and here.Three things you'll take away:The four stages of relational architecture, and why the goal is an organization that no longer needs outside help to keep doing the workWhy siloed risk is exposure, and connected risk is opportunityWhy honest entry beats the Trojan horse, and what happens to good ideas that try to sneak inHave you checked out The Stewardship Table?  The 5Cs Podcast connects forward-thinking executives who are building sustainable competitive advantages while driving positive impact. Think of it as an exclusive network of leaders who understand that stewardship isn't just good ethics - it's good business. Becausing addressing business stewardship climate risk and leadership together is in the highest good for all. Connect with Charlene Norman on LinkedIn, find her at her website, subscribe to our Substack for strategic insights, or download the full series on Spotify and Apple.

Introducing The Stewardship Table. It's Time I Put My Money Where My Mouth IsFor four years, this podcast has been about a better way to do business, climate and leadership. In this solo episode, Charlene stops talking about it and builds it.Most of the tools that help people speak honestly, listen well and handle stress never reach business leaders. That's because most leaders would never walk into a therapist's office to fix a problem at work. Charlene shares the performance review where she stumbled onto one of those tools without knowing it, and the conversation with psychologist Deborah Borys, after their moral injury series on the show, that turned into a collaboration. The result is The Stewardship Table: a small, private group of senior leaders who meet online twice a month to solve real business problems together. One session each month is all business. The second goes deeper, using tools from psychology and neuroscience adapted for business. There are no recordings. It's a place to experiment in private, so you can win in public.Charlene also makes the case for something most leaders rarely get: time to think. Using a simple picture of a flat world that only ever sees slices, she explains why running a business on a share price or a quarterly target means mistaking the slice for the whole, and why sustainable business leadership starts with seeing differently.Three things you'll take away:Why tools from other fields, including therapy, may be the missing piece in your leadership toolkitHow The Stewardship Table works, who it's for, and what it is notWhy the answer to a hard problem is sometimes not pushing harder, but seeing differentlyJoin the free introductory session: Monday, November 16, 3:00 to 5:00 pm ET, on Zoom. No cost. Membership begins December 3. Save your seat   The 5Cs Podcast connects forward-thinking executives who are building sustainable competitive advantages while driving positive impact. Think of it as an exclusive network of leaders who understand that stewardship isn't just good ethics - it's good business. Becausing addressing business stewardship climate risk and leadership together is in the highest good for all. Connect with Charlene Norman on LinkedIn, find her at her website, subscribe to our Substack for strategic insights, or download the full series on Spotify and Apple.

Series: The Other Eye Episode: The Elephant Isn't the Problem. The Room Is. Business runs on three-month cycles. Decisions, budgets, performance reviews. The problems we're facing run on centuries. That gap is why climate science hasn't moved most business leaders.In this episode, Ryan gives his diagnosis. Everyone is studying the elephant in the room. Nobody is looking at the room itself: how it's designed, who is in it, and what language they're using to talk about the elephant. Until we look at the worldview we're working from, every new solution gets measured with the same ruler that created the problem. That, Ryan argues, is why so many transformation efforts stall.He explains why systems thinker Donella Meadows named worldview as the most powerful lever for change. He uses a plum pit to show that change isn't something we force; it's a blueprint revealing itself. And he tells a story about the women in his family that shows how the past keeps living in the present. Charlene adds the business version: we haven't changed our operating model since the assembly line.  Business runs on three-month cycles. Decisions, budgets, performance reviews. The problems we're facing run on centuries. That gap is why climate science hasn't moved most business leaders.In this episode, Ryan gives his diagnosis. Everyone is studying the elephant in the room. Nobody is looking at the room itself: how it's designed, who is in it, and what language they're using to talk about the elephant. Until we look at the worldview we're working from, every new solution gets measured with the same ruler that created the problem. That, Ryan argues, is why so many transformation efforts stall.He explains why systems thinker Donella Meadows named worldview as the most powerful lever for change. He uses a plum pit to show that change isn't something we force; it's a blueprint revealing itself. And he tells a story about the women in his family that shows how the past keeps living in the present. Charlene adds the business version: we haven't changed our operating model since the assembly line. You can find Ryan here, here and here.Three things you'll take away:Why "our approach is the problem" and what that means for how organizations spend on changeWorldview as the strongest lever for change, and why most systems work stops short of itHow a family habit passed down through four generations explains why the future keeps looking like the past The 5Cs Podcast connects forward-thinking executives who are building sustainable competitive advantages while driving positive impact. Think of it as an exclusive network of leaders who understand that stewardship isn't just good ethics - it's good business. Becausing addressing business stewardship climate risk and leadership together is in the highest good for all. Connect with Charlene Norman on LinkedIn, find her at her website, subscribe to our Substack for strategic insights, or download the full series on Spotify and Apple.

Series: The Other Eye Episode: Hearts Only Have One ColourIndigenous elders are famously careful about who they share their knowledge with. So what made them trust a finance graduate from Boston?Ryan's answer isn't about anything he said. It's about how he showed up: curiosity with no attachment to the answer, humility, and a fire to serve something bigger than himself. He shares the lesson a teacher in Hawaii gave him every single day ("What do you want me to say? You already answered your own question.") and why most of the questions we ask in business aren't really questions at all.Then he names what he calls the unholy trinity of modern thinking: mechanization, reductionism and separability. It built the world we live in, from our computers to our hot showers. It also can't solve the problems it created. Ryan walks through the full picture of Two-Eyed Seeing and explains why chasing solutions one problem at a time keeps producing more problems. You can find Ryan here, here and here.Three things you'll take away:The question test: are you asking, or are you already answering?The three habits under most Western problem-solving, what they do well, and where they fall shortWhy getting to the root of a problem means you may not need a solution at all The 5Cs Podcast connects forward-thinking executives who are building sustainable competitive advantages while driving positive impact. Think of it as an exclusive network of leaders who understand that stewardship isn't just good ethics - it's good business. Becausing addressing business stewardship climate risk and leadership together is in the highest good for all. Connect with Charlene Norman on LinkedIn, find her at her website, subscribe to our Substack for strategic insights, or download the full series on Spotify and Apple.

Series: The Other Eye Episode: What Happens When You Stop Looking With One Eye ClosedWe have more data, more frameworks and more leadership development than at any point in history. The problems keep getting bigger. What if the issue isn't what we know, but the lens we're looking through?Ryan James Kemp grew up in Boston, earned a finance degree, and then spent the next 14 years in 65 countries learning from Indigenous elders, wisdom keepers, permaculturists and business leaders on six continents. In this series opener, he takes us to his first job out of university: a village in Cameroon, trying to find out why half the food in the country's breadbasket was going to waste. He went to teach sustainability to farmers. He had never planted a seed.From there, Ryan separates colonialism, the event, from coloniality, the patterns of seeing and deciding it left behind that still run today. And he introduces the indigenous concept of Two-Eyed Seeing. One eye holds measurement, data, models and prediction. The other holds relationship, place, story and reciprocity. Open both, and something new shows up.  You can find Ryan here, here and here.Three things you'll take away:Why Ryan draws a line between intellect and intelligence, and what a village in Cameroon taught him about the differenceHow coloniality works: the past isn't finished, and old patterns keep shaping business decisions long after the eventWhat happens when you open both eyes, and the third thing, depth perception, that neither eye gives you alone The 5Cs Podcast connects forward-thinking executives who are building sustainable competitive advantages while driving positive impact. Think of it as an exclusive network of leaders who understand that stewardship isn't just good ethics - it's good business. Becausing addressing business stewardship climate risk and leadership together is in the highest good for all. Connect with Charlene Norman on LinkedIn, find her at her website, subscribe to our Substack for strategic insights, or download the full series on Spotify and Apple.

Nicola Robins has walked us through a mine that spoke, a body that wouldn't let a strange experience go, and a hard refusal to be called a bridge between old knowledge and new. This episode brings it home to the question business people actually ask: does any of it work? Her answer isn't a case study with a tidy before-and-after. It's a distinction. The deliverable, the disclosure, the risk model, the box that has to get ticked, that can be done the ordinary way. What changes is the outcome underneath it. A team that starts trusting its own read on a value chain instead of overriding it with a checklist. A leader who understands why putting people first isn't soft, it's how you get the results the profit-first version keeps promising and rarely delivers. The episode closes with a practical exercise. No framework, no consultant required. Just a way to hold a hard problem loosely enough that something useful can actually surface.   Nicola Robins offers a radically human approach to sustainability transition in an era of uncertainty and AI. Her work sits at the intersection of sustainability, complexity science, and the indigenous Ngoma tradition, drawing on more than three decades of organisational practice across the continent. She co-founded the Cape Town–based consultancy Incite in 2005 and now works as an independent consultant while remaining part of the Incite network. Nicola teaches at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership and the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business.  You can find Nicola here.  She writes on Substack and is the author of Diviner Mind: How Organisations Can Learn from the Indigenous Science of Uncertainty. The Next Right Step is inspired by Dave Snowden The 5Cs Podcast connects forward-thinking executives who are building sustainable competitive advantages while driving positive impact. Think of it as an exclusive network of leaders who understand that stewardship isn't just good ethics - it's good business. Becausing addressing business stewardship climate risk and leadership together is in the highest good for all. Connect with Charlene Norman on LinkedIn, find her at her website, subscribe to our Substack for strategic insights, or download the full series on Spotify and Apple.

Last episode, Nicola Robins spoke about how a health crisis sent her into four months of training in Ngoma, a South African knowledge system. This episode picks up where that left off: what happened when she tried to bring it home.It took her years. Not because the knowledge wasn't useful, but because divination, the method she found most relevant to business, doesn't come with an obvious way to walk into a boardroom. Bones and shells on a conference table don't translate. It took a detour through complexity science, and a mentor named Dave Snowden, before she found a way to bring the substance of the work without the ceremony.Along the way she says something a lot of well-meaning sustainability people won't say out loud. The popular version of indigenous knowledge, the circular, harmonious, everyone-loves-everyone version, is a romanticized fiction. And when Charlene calls her a bridge between the old way of knowing and the new, Nicola pushes back hard. A bridge implies safe passage. What she's offering isn't safe. It's a river, and you're going to get wet.Nicola Robins offers a radically human approach to sustainability transition in an era of uncertainty and AI. Her work sits at the intersection of sustainability, complexity science, and the indigenous Ngoma tradition, drawing on more than three decades of organisational practice across the continent. She co-founded the Cape Town–based consultancy Incite in 2005 and now works as an independent consultant while remaining part of the Incite network. Nicola teaches at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership and the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business.  You can find Nicola here. She writes on Substack and is the author of Diviner Mind: How Organisations Can Learn from the Indigenous Science of Uncertainty. The 5Cs Podcast connects forward-thinking executives who are building sustainable competitive advantages while driving positive impact. Think of it as an exclusive network of leaders who understand that stewardship isn't just good ethics - it's good business. Becausing addressing business stewardship climate risk and leadership together is in the highest good for all. Connect with Charlene Norman on LinkedIn, find her at her website, subscribe to our Substack for strategic insights, or download the full series on Spotify and Apple.

This is the first episode of When the Land Talks Back.   Nicola Robins was auditing a diamond mine in northwestern Australia when she heard a voice that had no business being there. It told her the land was sacred, and that nothing could justify what was being done to it. She is a Yale-trained scientist. She decided it hadn't happened, and carried on with the job.   Her body did not carry on so easily. In this episode, Nicola tells the story of the health crisis that followed, and how healing from it meant four months of training in Ngoma, a South African knowledge system with roots going back four thousand years, built for making decisions under uncertainty long before anyone called it sustainability. She talks about colonial entanglement, about sickness as a signal that something bigger than one person has come out of balance, and about the name she is known by in that world. It is not Nicola.   Nicola Robins offers a radically human approach to sustainability transition in an era of uncertainty and AI. Her work sits at the intersection of sustainability, complexity science, and the indigenous Ngoma tradition, drawing on more than three decades of organisational practice across the continent. She co-founded the Cape Town–based consultancy Incite in 2005 and now works as an independent consultant while remaining part of the Incite network. Nicola teaches at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership and the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business.  You can find Nicola here. She writes on Substack and is the author of Diviner Mind: How Organisations Can Learn from the Indigenous Science of Uncertainty. The 5Cs Podcast connects forward-thinking executives who are building sustainable competitive advantages while driving positive impact. Think of it as an exclusive network of leaders who understand that stewardship isn't just good ethics - it's good business. Becausing addressing business stewardship climate risk and leadership together is in the highest good for all. Connect with Charlene Norman on LinkedIn, find her at her website, subscribe to our Substack for strategic insights, or download the full series on Spotify and Apple.

Season Five of the 5Cs Podcast opens with the story behind the line you've heard at the end of every episode for four years: the only thing we can do is do better, for the highest good, for all. This season the 5Cs get a new order and a sharper edge: Clarity, Courage, Commitment, Compassion, Collective. The guests ahead will bring ideas without a track record yet, many rooted in indigenous and ancestral ways of understanding our relationship to each other and the planet.  Charlene explains why she's done being polite about a model that isn't working.  None of us gets out of this alone. And frankly, we've all got to do better. For the highest good. For all. The 5Cs Podcast connects forward-thinking executives who are building sustainable competitive advantages while driving positive impact. Think of it as an exclusive network of leaders who understand that stewardship isn't just good ethics - it's good business. Becausing addressing business stewardship climate risk and leadership together is in the highest good for all. Connect with Charlene Norman on LinkedIn, find her at her website, subscribe to our Substack for strategic insights, or download the full series on Spotify and Apple.