In the autumn of 2023, I found myself standing among the ancient stones of Avebury in the UK. The same stones that have held their place in the Wiltshire landscape for five thousand years. I had just said goodbye to the clients I’d been working with that day when something moved through me. Not a thought, not an insight, but a physical sensation. A message: an invitation is coming. I didn’t know what form it would take, only that I would say yes.
Within a day, a friend sent me information about a Kincentric Leadership retreat at Findhorn Ecovillage in Scotland. The event was full, but I applied anyway. I trusted the invitation would find its way. Weeks later an email arrived. A place had opened. I knew then that the invitation had found its way.
Findhorn: A Mirror of the Times
Findhorn had lived in my imagination for years. When I arrived, the whole landscape seemed to meet me: the dunes, the forest, the fungi, the dolphins. There was joy in seeing the whisky barrel houses, the gardens, the hall, and the meditation spaces. Every building carried stories I had imagined for decades. I was finally here. In that moment, I realised my long-held kinship with the idea of this place had also led me to the work that Justine and Anna created through Kincentric Leadership.
But beneath the beauty, something else was happening.
The community itself was in a profound transition. The Findhorn Foundation, after fifty years, had closed. Not from a single cause, but from the accumulated weight of fires, costs, Brexit, a pandemic, and the shifting ground of a changing world. The old structure had dissolved, and something new was struggling to emerge.
Our group was not immune to this atmosphere. In a week of silence, truth-telling, deep practice and unexpected covid, we felt the same tremor. It was a living lesson: when the ground shifts, our bodies notice. What once held us no longer holds. And we have to reach for each other and make something new.
This was the landscape in which kincentrism entered my life with equal challenge and beauty.
The Insight That Changes Everything: Interconnectedness and Kin
I had used the word interconnectedness in my work as a Regenerative Business Mentor for years because I fundamentally believe that everything in life is connected. Human and More than Human.
But what I struggled with in my noticing was that interconnectedness as an idea lived in people’s minds. People nodded. They understood. The information I was so passionately sure was the only path to life-affirming business landed as a choice, not an imperative.
The shift came when I began using the word kin. Something simple yet extraordinary happened. People softened. The word reached their hearts and bodies before their minds. The same thing had happened to me when I was drawn to the Kincentric Leadership retreat. I felt it in my body before my mind received the invitation.
Kin is an idea that touches people in their hearts. Bodies recognise Kin, not a concept, but as something ancient that is felt before they understand why.
As humans, we know what it means to belong to a family; this is how we know how to treat kin. We understand responsibility, reciprocity, and care in the context of family. We even know without thinking that you do not exploit your kin. You do not extract from your grandmother. You do not poison your cousins.
This is how kincentrism shifts interconnectedness from choice to necessity. We feel it as lived, relational and embodied, so it lands easier as knowledge. As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “Kinning with Grandmother Moon or with lichen on the roof is an act of resistance to commodification, and it brings joy.”
Kin moves understanding from the head into the body.
From abstraction into relationship.
From theory into behaviour.
This is the shift that redefines how we do business.
What Kincentrism Means for Leadership and Regenerative Business
As a regenerative business mentor, I have found the conversation on kincentrism to be a powerful integration into my work.
Kincentrism asks the question: What changes when we treat the living world as our relatives? It shifts our perception, our sense of responsibility and our place in the web of life.
Regeneration then asks, what do we need to restore so that life can thrive again? What must be repaired, renewed and redesigned so our work strengthens life instead of draining it? One gives us the orientation, the other gives us the pathway. So together they form a beautiful foundation for how we begin again in these times.
Together, these knowledge systems ask us to reassess in business the choices we make as leaders, the pace we work at, the products we create and the promises we keep to all life.
Together they move business thinking from extraction to contribution, from dominance to relationship and from appropriation to reciprocity.
What at first feels like philosophy soon shifts to the pragmatic conversations of supply chains, teams, resources and circularity in a mentoring session. This is where the real world change starts to be noticed.
Business stops being something we build on top of life.
It becomes something that participates with life.
Together, Kincentrism and Regeneration free business from the narrow world of efficiency and optimisation and bring it back into relationship with what supports it: land, water, community, culture, trust, meaning, and place.
The One Reflection Business Must Make Now
The essential reflection business must face in these times is simple but radical: Is our work strengthening life or eroding it?
For a century, business worshipped growth defined by speed, separation and extraction. For a time, it created the appearance of abundance and the comfort of progress. Yet beneath that promise, harm was quietly taking root. Some looked away. Others buried the evidence, trusting the living world was vast enough to absorb whatever we took. It was not.
That harm, long hidden and long denied, has now become the defining challenge of our age. We are not standing at the threshold of change. We are already living inside a crisis of extraction that has pushed us beyond planetary boundaries, and sustainability alone has not proved sufficient.
We are not approaching the turning.
We are already within it.
Just like Findhorn, when our macro worldview changes, everything built on it wobbles. So at a micro level, this affects the way we plan, the way we lead and the way we trade. It redefines value completely, and redefining value shakes the very foundations of what we understand as successful business. Not profit-centred but life-centred.
Kincentrism is now a central part of what I share as The 13 Wisdoms of Regenerative Business. The intersection of ancient and modern knowledge systems that give us a holistic and somatic knowledge base that is foundational for the era we are living through and the future we are co-creating.
Why Kincentrism Matters in an Era of Upheaval
We are living through a collective transformation. Old structures are dissolving faster than new ones form. Business, as we know it, sits on a worldview that is no longer capable of holding the complexity of these times.
Kincentrism matters because it meets this moment with what is most needed:
- grounded perception
- relational intelligence
- responsibility over extraction
- belonging over dominance
- trust over fear
It gives us a way to navigate without collapsing into overwhelm or nostalgia for systems that can no longer guide us.
Living the Shift: Kincentric Practice in Regenerative Business
Regenerative business is not a model to download. It is a practice.
It begins with simple, honest questions:
- Does my work give more than it takes?
- Who is affected by my decisions, seen and unseen?
- How do I honour the land, water, and community that support my livelihood?
- How do I listen for wisdom beyond human thinking?
- What does it mean to treat nature as a stakeholder, not a resource?
These questions cannot be answered in a day.
They reshape us over time as part of a conscious journey of practice as outlined in The Regenerative Business Compass.
Much of this learning begins outside, in what I call Nature’s Boardroom, where the trees and soil teach what boardrooms cannot.
We Are Already in the New Era
We are no longer preparing for a new era.
We are living in it.
The stones at Avebury knew this.
The seals at Findhorn knew this.
They communicated with my body before my mind heard the call to come.
I believe the organisations embracing kinship in leadership, charities, business and daily life are already shaping what comes next. They are thinking of the health of future generations, their own children and grandchildren, nieces or nephews. Regenerative Business is the pathway that brings us back into a relationship with the world that sustains us, and Kincentrism is a key way this makes sense.
So what is yours to do with this information? What is yours to know, feel and journey with? What is your action step?
What I felt among the stones at Avebury and later at Findhorn was not mystical in the way people often imagine. It was simply recognition. The body remembers something the modern world has encouraged us to forget: that we belong to the living world, not apart from it. Kincentrism gives language to that remembering.
When leaders begin to see rivers, forests, soil and species not as resources but as relatives, the questions we ask in business change. The pace of our work and our decisions change.
The invitation I felt that day among the stones was not only for me. It is arriving for many of us now.
Perhaps the question is no longer whether the world is asking us to change. The question of our times is whether we recognise the call when it reaches us.
Jannine Barron
