Leading from Being Episode 36: Landscapes of Being - Wayfinding
Wayfinding once meant discovering one's path through never-before-encountered territory, step by experiential step — the opposite of its modern meaning, which is following signs through spaces already fully mapped. This inversion becomes the episode's animating question: what have we lost when we stopped reading the intelligence of living territories and started looking for the right playbook?
The conversation moves through Wade Davis's writings on dead reckoning, the Polynesian navigators who learned the speech of the Pacific through wave color and wind, and Andean farmers who read astronomical conjunction to time their planting. These examples ground a larger exploration of wayfinding as dialogue — the same capacity applies to how a new CEO might listen to the living speech of an organization rather than adjusting its rule book. The episode concludes with both hosts reflecting on what it means to find our way rather than the way: an orientation toward living in connection.
Todd's Potentialities essay "At the Threshold" extends this into the territory of risk, tracing two forgotten etymologies — the reef navigators had to track and the gift of providence that comes through genuine exchange — and finding in the figure of Hermes a guide who moves with uncertainty rather than eliminating it. For leaders caught between recklessness and paralysis, this episode offers a more fundamental shift: restoring connection with the territory itself brings us all toward home.