I have spent much of my life working alongside people trying to change things.
People fighting for justice and building movements. People protecting land and water. People shifting systems that feel impossibly entrenched.
Across all of these spaces, I have seen a particular idea of leadership take hold: if you care enough about something, you carry it.
You stay late. You solve the problem. You hold the relationships. You anticipate what might go wrong. You push through exhaustion because the work matters and because there is always more of it to do.
I know this impulse intimately.
But I have started to wonder whether some of our exhaustion and burnout—and that growing sense that our efforts aren’t creating the movement we long for—comes from a misunderstanding of our place in the story.
One of my great mentors, a Mexica Elder who lives and works for justice in the US/Mexico borderlands, shared the story of monarch butterflies with me many years ago.
Every year, monarchs make an extraordinary migration between Canada and the mountains of central Mexico.
No single monarch completes the whole migration.
The butterflies that leave Mexico begin moving north and reproduce along the way. Their descendants continue. And theirs after them. Several generations live and die before monarchs reach their northern range.
Later in the year, another generation makes the extraordinary journey south to Michoacán, returning to forests they have never seen.
The migration belongs to all of them.
What would happen if we understood our work this way?
Many social movements I’ve been a part of already do. They’ve taught me that the rights, freedoms, institutions and ideas that many of us work with today exist because people we will never meet carried them part of the way. Our own work will remain unfinished. Someone else will inherit it. Our organizations are temporary expressions within much larger ecosystems of change.
Our leadership is a season within stories that began before us and will continue long after us.
And yet … we often lead as though we, alone, are supposed to finish the migration.
Part of this comes from the way in which conventional leadership places the leader at the centre. We are taught that leaders diagnose problems, create strategies, make decisions, manage risk and deliver outcomes. Even when our intentions are deeply collaborative, it is easy to absorb the idea that leadership means seeing enough, knowing enough and doing enough to move the entire system where we think it needs to go.
But what I’ve learned from my years living with the land, letting it teach me, and coming back to its teachings over and over again, is that living systems offer another way to approach leadership and our own roles in the stories of change we’re nurturing.
A watershed has no center.
Around the world, rain falls on forests, fields, streets and mountains that make up the different watersheds where we live our lives. Water gathers into streams and rivers. Wetlands slow and filter it. Roots hold soil in place as it flows through. Animals alter its course and transport nutrients. Human communities draw from the water and return it, changed. By the time water travels through the watershed and reaches an ocean, bay or other outflow point, it has been transformed by what has happened hundreds of kilometres away.
What happens upstream shapes life downstream. Watersheds are living systems, shaped over millennia through relationship, disturbance, adaptation, death and renewal. No single part controls the watershed, yet every part participates in what it becomes.
This way of understanding the world is also far older than contemporary leadership theory. Indigenous Peoples and local communities have maintained teachings of relationship, reciprocity and responsibility across generations. Black, queer and justice movements around the world have long built forms of collective survival and change rooted in interdependence.
There is wisdom here that dominant leadership cultures have often ignored, displaced or forgotten. So, perhaps some of what leadership needs now is remembering.
If I genuinely believe I am one participant among many, something shifts.
I can pay attention to patterns beyond the immediate problem. I can ask who else is connected to what is happening. I can share unfinished thinking or notice what is already emerging without my intervention. I can become more curious about unfamiliar ways forward—like water finding a new course around an obstacle, or new growth taking hold in a crack in the pavement or on the edge of a cliff. In time, possibilities that were difficult to see when I was focused on forcing a single path forward begin to reveal themselves.
I can also rest. Rest looks different when we understand ourselves as part of something larger. So does urgency. And responsibility. I believe that interdependence does not absolve us of responsibility. It simply helps us locate it.
There will be moments when our role is to intervene forcefully. There will be moments to protect, disrupt, build or repair. There will also be moments when our work is to listen, create conditions for somebody else to lead, or recognize that a change we care deeply about may take generations.
I am trying to practice this in real time.
I currently hold a role with more positional authority and responsibility than I ever have before. When I stepped into it, one of my first instincts was to learn how to do it “right.” I watched how the role had been held before me. I tried to absorb more information, anticipate more, hold more of the organization in my head. But somewhere underneath was a feeling that I needed to “catch up” quickly enough to pass as the leader my new title said I was.
I still feel that pull. But I have also been experimenting with what happens when I resist it.
Sometimes that looks remarkably small. I ask the question that reveals I don't know something, even when I think someone in my position is supposed to know. I share ideas before they are finished and let other people change them. I try to notice when I am stepping in because I am genuinely needed and when I am stepping in because being useful feels safer than allowing uncertainty. I ask myself what is already moving without me, and whether my role in this moment is to lead, make space, connect, protect, or simply wait.
None of this makes the responsibility disappear. In some ways, having greater authority makes it even more important to understand where my responsibility begins and ends. But it is changing my relationship to leadership.
Lately, our team at Spring has been thinking about leadership, and locating ourselves in our work through the image of a watershed.
If you imagined yourself inside a watershed of change, where would you be?
What nourishes you?
What flows through you?
What barriers are you noticing or carrying?
Whose work upstream made yours possible?
Who receives the consequences of what you release downstream?
And who might inherit what you leave behind?
These questions complicate the familiar picture of the leader at the centre of everything. They remind us that leadership is relational, ecological and temporal. We are connected to people we cannot see, places we may never visit, ancestors whose choices made our lives possible, and generations who will live with the consequences and learning of ours.
There is a tendency in leadership development to continually search for the next framework, model or toolkit. Instead, my work with leaders across Spring’s network is interested in a new path: remembering, re-rooting, and revealing:
꩜ Remembering teachings about relationship, reciprocity, interdependence and collective responsibility that have existed across cultures and movements for generations.
꩜ Re-rooting ourselves in the actual places and living systems of which we are part, and paying attention to what those systems might teach us about how to participate.
꩜ Revealing what becomes possible when we see our work from this different vantage point of interconnection: patterns we couldn't see before, choices we hadn't imagined, relationships we had overlooked, and ways forward that may already be emerging around us.
I like to think of this journey as a spiral. We return to enduring wisdom from a different point in history, carrying different experiences and facing conditions that previous generations could not have imagined. Each time around the spiral, an old question or old wisdom can reveal something new.
We know the ongoing challenges confronting us are enormous. Climate disruption, inequality, polarization and democratic instability will not resolve neatly within an annual plan, a strategic cycle, or any one person's tenure.
We do not have to finish the migration.
Perhaps the challenge of our times is to have the courage of the monarch: to carry our part, release what was never ours to finish, and trust the living systems that guide the way. We're never alone in this. The watershed is holding us, too.
Remember, Re-Root, Reveal: Leadership for Generational Change
Join Erin, Spring and guest teachers Sisonke Msimang, Denise Williams, Pramada Menon, Lucía Nader and Joanna Kerr in November and December 2026 for Remember, Re-Root, Reveal: Leadership for Generational Change, a global dialogue series exploring what it means to lead as part of the living systems we hope to transform.