Resources
Click on the links below to download a copy of our brochures, popular articles and book chapters.
Without magnetic compasses, sextants, or maps, and long before European ships had entered the Pacific, Polynesian voyagers were finding their way across 25 million square kilometres of ocean. Over time they discovered and settled a vast number of widely scattered islands, including Aotearoa New Zealand, using navigation techniques, such as reading star paths, swell frequencies, and cloud formations, that were handed down through generations. The feats of the Polynesian navigators have been likened, relative to the technology and knowledge of the times, to the modern moon missions.
Wayfinding provides the basis for a powerful approach for taking a fresh perspective on leadership in a world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). Wayfinding teaches us how we can increase our response-ability, the ability to respond and avoid reactivity, especially in the face of great challenges. For the wayfinder leader a challenge is an invitation to achieve mastery. This article explores Papa Mau Piailug’s code to wayfinding: Love, Light and Frequency.
The Catalyst’s Way: A Handbook for People Who Want to Change the World by Dr. Chellie Spiller is an inspiring guide for those committed to creating meaningful, values-driven change in their communities, organisations, and the world.
Drawing from Chellie’s time as Leader-in-Residence at the Atlantic Institute (Oxford University), the book weaves together Indigenous wisdom, global storytelling, and deep personal inquiry. It features insights from changemakers across the world — activists, educators, artists, and leaders — who share lived experiences of navigating complexity, holding courageous conversations, and leading with heart and integrity.
This groundbreaking research project centres whānau as catalysts for resilient, flourishing Indigenous futures. It explores how Māori families navigate work and livelihoods while nurturing a wellbeing-based economy grounded in te ao Māori. Through powerful insights and lived experiences, the study reveals the strength of grassroots, whānau-centred approaches. It shows how reconnecting with traditional values – kaupapa, tikanga, and collective leadership – can drive economic transformation from the inside out. At its heart, this project is a celebration of whānau innovation, self-determination, and the enduring potential of Indigenous knowledge systems to shape economic transformation that is equitable and sustainable.
Care is at the heart of the Māori values system, which calls for humans to be kaitiaki, caretakers of the mauri, the life-force, in each other and in nature. The relational Five Well-beings approach, based on four case studies of Māori businesses, demonstrates how business can create spiritual, cultural, social, environmental, and economic well-being. A Well-beings approach entails praxis, which brings values and practice together with the purpose of consciously creating well-being and, in so doing, creates multi-dimensional wealth. Underlying the Well-beings approach is an ethic of care and an intrinsic stakeholder view of business.
Organisations are searching for innovative business approaches that deliver profits and create shared value for all stakeholders. We show what can be learned from the relational wisdom approach of Māori and reframe the prevailing economic argument that has seen companies profit and prosper at the expense of communities and ecologies. We develop an ethic of kaitiakitanga model premised on Māori values which holds the potential to enrich and further humanise our understanding of business. The Māori economy is a globally connected, prosperous, and profitable sector of the New Zealand economy. By drawing on Māori values, we present a wisdom position through an ethic of kaitiakitanga or stewardship to emphasise and illustrate the interconnectedness of life in a woven universe. Through practicing kaitiakitanga, organisations can build businesses where wisdom is consciously created through reciprocal relationships. In this worldview of business, humans are stewards endowed with a mandate to use the agency of their mana (spiritual power, authority, and sovereignty) to create mauri ora (conscious well-being) for humans and ecosystems—and this commitment extends to organisations.
Attending to the life-energy of an organisation is an important, yet often overlooked aspect of management and leadership. Ignoring energy dimensions in an organisation can lead to dispirited, dysfunctional workplaces. In this chapter, we explore how nourishing different life-energies can revitalise relationships within the workplace and with communities to support organisational thriving. A central premise of this theoretical enquiry is that organisations which cultivate healthy, thriving life-energies offer added value for their stakeholders, including employees, customers, social and cultural communities, and the environment. We focus on indigenous Māori conceptualisations of life-energies and offer a series of touchstones, drawn from theory and our management and research experience, to guide sustainable business practice with the kaupapa, intention, of bringing new life and dignity into dispirited modern enterprise.
An ‘I AM’ Indigenous consciousness approach encourages a move from the measurable self to the immeasurable expansiveness and mystery of our own becoming. It is to step beyond the lines drawn around the ‘true self’ or the lines that others would have us draw. I AM consciousness reflects an ancient Indigenous thread that echoes through millennia and reminds humans that we are a movement through time, and each person is a present link to the past and the future, woven into a fabric of belonging
An exercise you can use to explore diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Often the “exterior” of a person belies a rich and dazzling interior life—just as the pāua has a hard coat on the outside and stunning layers of color on the inside. The leader’s task is to release the potential in people by helping individuals better understand their layers, including thought, feeling, and behavior. This story also emphasises the importance of providing ongoing learning and growing opportunities so that people in the workplace can keep adding to their layers, and self-actualise.
The story of the ancient Polynesian navigators provides insights for modern organisations who wish to navigate their journey toward wisdom. This story highlights the importance of developing perception skills to better see what is really going on. It offers organisational leaders an opportunity to encourage their staff to be open to perceiving and understanding the world beyond their personal frame. By allowing us to examine our perceptions and be open to new ways of seeing, this story provides a pathway to becoming a wise organisation.
This report presents the findings of a research project with a group of Māori managers. We wanted to find out about their unique practices of Māori management, with a particular focus on human resource management. Through these rich in-depth conversations we developed a better understanding how tikanga and mātauranga shape Māori approaches to HRM. Māori managerial approaches – like other aspects of organisational behaviour among Māori, from whānau to hapū to iwi – are steeped in a sense of community and civic obligation. In this report we document how such leaders and managers use ancestral leadership strengths and narratives of recognition to develop the people in the organisations they work for. We have also included a range of practices, the five touchstones, from an earlier work on attending to the life-energy of an organisation. Our intention for this report is that it is short, simple, positive and relatable.
