Learning Session 6: Kincentric Leadership toolkit
Online learning sessions using dialogue to explore the workings, developments, (im)possibilities, and emerging insights of diverse approaches and praxes for Co-creation with the More-than-Human world
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This 6th learning session of the Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox in September 2025 explored the Kincentric Leadership Toolkit with Anna Kovasna, co-founder of Kincentric Leadership.
Launched in July 2025, the toolkit is designed to support communities, organisations, and movements in embodying leadership rooted in kinship with all life. Structured around eight core principles—ranging from Sacredness and Interdependence to Justice, Belonging, and Unravelling—it offers a combination of practices, indicators, reflective questions, and tools intended to guide both individual and collective transformation.
Rather than introducing the framework, this session focused on the realities of developing and applying such a toolkit: what it takes to translate relational and animist worldviews into something usable, where tensions arise, and how these principles hold up in real-world settings.
What follows is a synthesis of key questions, insights, and cross-cutting threads from the dialogue.
🌿 Learning Session 6 (September 2025) — Synthesis
Kincentric Leadership toolkit, with Anna Kovasna (Kincentric Leadership)
Can relational, kincentric worldviews be translated into practical tools without reducing their depth—and what happens when these principles meet the constraints and contradictions of real-world contexts?
1. How was the Kincentric Leadership Toolkit developed?
An emergent process rather than a top-down design
The toolkit did not begin as a fixed framework, but evolved over time through practice, collaboration, and ongoing engagement with communities working in different contexts.
Principles grounded in lived practice
The eight principles were not abstractly defined in isolation, but distilled from patterns observed across different initiatives, cultures, and ways of working with relational worldviews.
Translation as a central challenge
A key part of the development process involved translating ways of knowing and relating—often rooted in specific cultural or spiritual traditions—into forms that could be shared more broadly without stripping them of meaning.
🌱 Seed:
The toolkit is not a system imposed on practice—it is a condensation of practice that continues to evolve.
2. What tensions arise when applying these principles?
Human vs more-than-human priorities are entangled, not separate
The question of whether to prioritise human suffering or ecological wellbeing does not hold in practice, as the two are deeply interconnected. Attempting to address one in isolation risks reinforcing the very separation the work seeks to undo. In practice, this means that kincentric approaches do not “shift attention away” from human issues, but reposition them within a wider field of relationships, where social and ecological harm are understood as entangled rather than competing priorities.
Respect for life does not remove the need for boundaries
Principles such as Sacredness and Kinship do not eliminate difficult decisions, such as managing ecosystems, dealing with invasive species, or taking life. Instead, they require engaging with these realities more consciously and with greater accountability.
Authority and representation remain unresolved
Questions around who can speak for the more-than-human, and how, persist within the work. While the toolkit offers guidance, it does not fully resolve these tensions.
🌱 Seed:
Kinship does not remove complexity—it makes it impossible to ignore.
3. What challenges emerged in making this usable in real-world contexts?
From principle to practice is not straightforward
While the principles resonate with many people, translating them into daily decision-making, organisational processes, or strategy remains challenging. In practice, this often means that the tension is not conceptual but operational: how to remain in relationship when decision-making timelines, financial pressures, and institutional expectations pull in a different direction.
Risk of overwhelm
The richness of the toolkit—multiple principles, a handbook with capacities and practices, a benchmarking tool, and more—can make it a bit challenging for users to know where to begin. Rather than asking “how do I apply this?”, a more workable entry point is: what is the situation I am in, and which principle becomes immediately relevant here? This shifts the toolkit to a situational companion, allowing it to be used in sections without losing coherence.
Different entry points for different users
People engage with the toolkit from very different starting points, depending on their background, experience, and openness to relational worldviews.
📌 Practitioner takeaway:
The toolkit is not meant to be applied all at once—starting from one principle, question, or practice is often more effective than attempting to engage with the whole.
4. How are people responding to the toolkit so far?
Resonance at the level of values and principles
Many people recognise themselves in the language of kinship, interdependence, and relationality, even if they have not previously articulated it in those terms. However they frequently encounter friction when these principles challenge timelines, performance metrics, or decision-making hierarchies.
Challenges in sustained application
While initial engagement can be strong, integrating the principles into ongoing practice—especially within organisations—requires continued effort and support. The difficulty is therefore not primarily intellectual, but structural: the environments in which people are trying to apply these ideas are rarely designed to accommodate them, requiring ongoing negotiation rather than straightforward implementation.
Use across different contexts
The toolkit is being engaged by a range of actors, from grassroots initiatives to organisational settings, each adapting it to their own needs and constraints.
5. What happens when the toolkit is applied in practice?
From principles to practice
While the toolkit offers clear principles, applying them in real contexts reveals complexity. Situations rarely align neatly with frameworks, requiring adaptation, judgment, and ongoing reflection.
What breaks when applied
Certain assumptions embedded in organisations—speed, efficiency, control—can clash with kincentric approaches that require time, reciprocity, and relational awareness.
Context matters
What works in one organisational or cultural setting may not translate directly to another. The effectiveness of the toolkit depends heavily on the willingness of the context to engage wit
h its underlying values.
🌱 Seed:
A toolkit can open the door—but it is only through lived practice, friction, and adaptation that its deeper potential is revealed.
6. What would need to happen for broader uptake?
Alignment with existing systems and structures
There is a tendency to adopt tools at a surface level without engaging the deeper shift in worldview they require, leading to partial or performative implementation. For wider adoption, the principles need to find ways to interface with organisational, institutional, and policy frameworks.
Capacity building and facilitation
Supporting people in how to work with the toolkit—rather than just providing the resource itself—is critical for meaningful uptake.
Holding depth while scaling
Without sustained practice, the language of kincentricity can be adopted without the corresponding change in behaviour or decision-making. A central challenge is how to expand the reach of the toolkit without diluting the relational depth that underpins it.
🌱 Seed:
Broader uptake depends less on distributing the toolkit and more on supporting the conditions in which it can be meaningfully engaged.
Cross-cutting insight threads
Across the session, several deeper shifts become visible.
Framework → Practice-in-use
The value of the toolkit does not lie in the framework itself, but in how it is engaged, adapted, and lived in specific contexts over time.
Principles → Tensions in reality
Each principle—whether Sacredness, Justice, or Kinship—reveals tensions when applied in real-world situations, rather than providing straightforward guidance.
Access → Depth (unresolved)
While the toolkit is designed to be accessible, meaningful engagement still depends on people’s willingness and capacity to work with its depth.
Distribution → Embodiment
Making the toolkit available is only the first step; its impact depends on whether it becomes embodied in practice.
Closing
These sessions are not designed to arrive at fixed answers, but to surface how different approaches work in practice. Each conversation reveals not only how and where they hold, but also the tensions and questions that remain unresolved—and that continue to invite further inquiry.
Over time, these syntheses form a growing body of insights into what co-creation with the more-than-human world might require, across contexts and practices.
The Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox is a collaboration between The Repatterning Collective and Kincentric Leadership.
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