The survey respondents do not speak of learning a new model of leadership. They speak of a return to ancient wisdom; recovering a way of seeing that has been covered over by the busyness and mechanistic language of organizational life.
This reflects a genuine phenomenology of development that wisdom traditions across cultures have named consistently: that maturity is less an acquisition than an uncovering. The capacities most needed (presence, care, discernment, the ability to hold complexity without collapsing it) are inherent possibilities, waiting beneath layers of urgency and performance logic.
While 74% of respondents say earlier wisdom traditions, from Stoic reflection to Buddhist practice, from contemplative Christianity to indigenous ecological thinking, shape how they lead, many note that in technical or corporate environments, drawing on that inheritance openly remains risky. One respondent put it plainly: expressing such beliefs can lead to “not being taken seriously.” The legitimacy problem is not only institutional. It is linguistic.
The habit of using mechanistic language treats organizations as machines, leaders as operators, and human complexity as a problem to be engineered away. The language of modern business is populated with metaphors from both wars and machines: must-win battles, bullet points, deadlines, execution, the engine of growth to name but a few.
Part of the shift toward legitimacy involves recovering the original meaning of a word we have been too quick to set aside: Spirituality. The root of the word is ‘spiritus’, which means breath. To be spiritual, in its most elemental sense, is simply to be a living, breathing being: present, animate, in relationship with the world. The yearning that surfaces across this survey, in the overall findings, the open-text responses, the reflections on crucible moments, is a desire for organizations that honour the full humanity of those within them.
As mentioned earlier, almost every senior leader who participated already seeks, in private, the model of leadership that values service over self-interest, long horizon over short, integrity over image, inner development as the foundation of outer effectiveness. Beneath this lies something older than management theory: a deeply human movement that has quietly endured across generations, waiting for conditions in which it can come forward and take its rightful place beside power. The problem is not conviction. The problem is legitimacy. And it can only be resolved when those who already hold this model find the language, the community, and the institutional courage to say so in public.
The long arc of leadership leads people to a recognition that what was forgotten was never truly lost. As the survey shows, 93% of these leaders already engage in some type of reflective practice. This is why so many of them, when given space to speak, describe a journey not toward something new, but toward remembering, recovering, and reawakening what is already known.