Three learning journeys that have impacted my practice

And how these are shaping a set of design principles

As I shape the design of some new offers for next year, I’ve been reflecting on the learning journeys that have had the most impact on me. These have not been linear or instructional experiences. Instead, they’ve often unfolded through practice, inquiry, and embodied experimentation. Each has taught me something really important about how change really happens - relationally, through presence, reflection, and shared meaning-making.

Three learning experiences in particular serve as touchstones in this work: the Clore Leadership Fellowship, the Y Ö R Ü K Finding the Hearth journey, and the Wholeness Blueprint circle. Each has invited me deeper into myself while also expanding my sense of what becomes possible when we work from intuition, coherence, and connection.

Clore Leadership Fellows - Cohort 11, 2015

1. Clore Leadership Fellowship: Leadership as an Ongoing Practice of Becoming

As a Fellow in the 2014–15 cohort of the Clore Leadership Fellowship, I entered a learning community built on curiosity, humility, and the shared exploration of what leadership means in the creative and culturally industries. The Clore Fellowship does not teach leadership as a fixed skill set. Instead, it cultivates a practice of inquiry, as something lived and shaped.

The Fellowship is self-directed and deeply reflective. The curriculum holds form, but each Fellow shapes the content of their own development: asking what they value, how they work, what impact they want to have, and what kind of leader they are becoming. Through coaching, residential intensives, peer learning, secondments and exposure to a wide spectrum of cultural leaders, this experience led me to taking the leap into self-employment :)

From Clore, I carry with me:

• The importance of spacious, facilitated reflection

• Fellowship and learning with and from peers across different fields

• The courage to step beyond comfort and into experimentation

2. Y Ö R Ü K Finding the Hearth: Reweaving Creativity, Belonging, and Sacred Ecology

The Finding the Hearth journey led by artists Fourthland invited me into another form of leadership. One grounded not in organisational settings, but in myth, ecology, and the intimate work of tending an inner fire. Rooted in the seasonal arc from Samhain to Spring Equinox, this journey explored the symbolic and literal hearth as a place of creativity, nourishment, and orientation.

It’s hard to describe this experience to be honest. What I can say is that it was deeply transformational and I’m still feeling the ripples two years later. Through a series of journeys and gatherings, the work unfolded through ceremonial, intuitive, and craft-based practices, listening deeply and weaving inner mythology with the rhythms of the natural world. I learned that tending to inner fire is a necessary part of contributing to collective change.

Finding the Hearth also reminded me:

• That creativity is not a task; it is a way of being in relationship with myself

• That being witnessed is an essential part of peer learning

• That transformation is seasonal and cyclical, not linear

Image from a Y Ö R Ü K in person gathering.

3. The Wholeness Blueprint: Integrating the Parts into a Coherent Self

For the last two years I’ve been part of a beautiful community of practice called The Wholeness Blueprint convened by John Holmes. We meet every 4-6 weeks, taking it in turns to hold space for each other. It’s not a single programme as such, and the focus of our gatherings has emerged over time. In year one, we explored themes around Wholeness as an ongoing inquiry into how we live from alignment. This included a weekend ‘retreat’ of communial meals, workshops and a spontateous art-making project in nature.

Year two has taken a different direction and provided a safe space for us each to share new product, service or brand ideas that we’re working on.

From this journey I hold:

• Confidence in letting the focus of a programme emerge through shared inquiry rather than fixed design

• The power of receiving rigorous peer critique grounded in mutual trust and shared values

• The value of regular touchpoints and gentle accountability

  

  Dragon in the landscape - a collective art making moment

Towards a set of design principles

With these learning journeys in mind, I’m playing with five design principles that will shape some new offers that I’m developing for next year:

1. Emergence Over Prescription
The direction of the learning journey evolves in response to the curisoity, questions, needs, and insights that surface from the group. Structure provides safety; emergence provides relevance.

2. Collective Inquiry and Action Research
We learn by doing, testing, and making sense together. The experience functions as an action research community where ideas are explored and tested in practice through experimentation.

3. Slowness, Reflection and Meaning-Making
We build in spaciousness for pause, integration, and depth. Reflection is not a break from the work; it is the work that enables insight, grounding, and coherence.

4. Peer Witnessing and Relational Accountability
We grow in community. Participants are seen, held, and challenged by others who are invested in their development.

5. Cyclical and Seasonal Development
We recognise that transformation unfolds in rhythms and cycles, not linear steps. The experience honours pacing, timing, gestation, emergence, and renewal.

Delivering on these principles isn’t easy, but they feel important. So I’m going to keep reflecting on them over the coming weeks and see if I can weave them into an offer to help people practice emergent strategy. More to come on that :)

If you’re a space holder, facilitator, or experience designer, I’d love to hear which principles you use to design your learning journeys.