Embodied Intelligence for Leaders: How to Navigate Complexity Beyond the Brain

Our mind plays a vital role when we’re dealing with complex challenges where there are no known answers. Whether it’s consciously taking a balcony perspective to scan the situation, gathering and assessing information, or setting up experiments to move forward when the path is unclear, there are plenty of well-known analytical frameworks to support us. 

At the same time, our quest to predict and control the future can easily drive us to over-rely on mental effort and willpower, and act on simple stories which assume the future will mirror the past. When we’re facing complex situations, it helps to draw on all of our intelligence, not just what’s happening in our heads, to avoid these mindtraps.

Science has shown that intelligence is not restricted to our mind. Even single-celled organisms possess an inbuilt intelligence. Interacting with their environment, they seek nutrients, avoid threats, work together on projects, and, surprisingly, are even capable of decision making.¹

As humans, we’re vastly more complex systems than single-celled protozoa. Made up of more than 37 trillion cells, it should come as no surprise that our intelligence is distributed throughout our bodies. There’s now a growing body of research that points to the value of tuning into our heart, gut, and emotional systems, as well as the energetic fields within us, and the fields that connect us. These sources of information are rich and often overlooked, but they can help us notice things we might otherwise miss. 

Heart, Brain, Body and Emotions

For centuries the heart has been considered the source of emotion, courage and wisdom. Science is now validating those claims. As Amanda Blake points out in her book, Your Body is Your Brain: 

“Your heart is one of the essential organs of your distributed brain. It has its own intrinsic nervous system: Small clusters of nerve cells known as neural ganglia monitor blood chemistry and heart rate, sending nine messages to the brain for every one sent the other direction. ….. In other words, your heart is constantly talking to your brain …. in addition to taking its cues from the surrounding world, oftentimes your brain takes cues about safety and danger directly from the pace of your heart.”²

Our heart’s intrinsic nervous system enables it to act independently of our brain to learn, remember, make decisions and even feel and sense.³ Our heart is the most powerful source of electromagnetic energy in the human body. The magnetic field produced by the heart is more than 100 times greater in strength than the field generated by the brain and can be detected up to 3 feet away from the body, in all directions.⁴

Research also shows that when heart rhythms are in a state of balance and harmony, i.e. in coherence, messages are sent to the brain which helps create clarity of mind. This increases creativity and improves decision making, as well as influencing positive states of emotion, which in turn improve overall health.⁵

In addition to our heart, the nervous system in our gut is like a mini-brain in itself, sending many more signals to the brain than it receives. And it is the only known part of our nervous system that can override messages from the brain. Indeed, as science now shows, our intelligence is distributed throughout our body.⁶ 

From our current understanding of the elaborate feedback networks between the brain, heart, mental and emotional systems, it becomes clear that the age-old struggle between intellect and emotion will not be resolved by the mind trying to win out, but rather by increasing the harmonious balance between our mental and emotional systems – a synthesis that provides greater access to our full range of intelligence.⁷

Collective Systemic Intelligence

Energy Fields

Energy is the life force of living organisms – all cells must have energy to function and all cells release energy. All systems in the human being, from the atomic to the molecular level, are constantly in motion creating energetic resonance which subtly directs and maintains health and wellness.⁸

The idea that energy is the carrier of the processes of life and connects everything to everything else is not new. Since antiquity, life energy has been recognised with almost every culture having a name for this energy.⁹

We know that our energy field is not limited to our bodies – it can be measured and seen as it expands and contracts into surrounding areas.¹⁰ It is also clear that our energy field impacts those around us. For example, researchers have found that consciously directing positive emotional states towards another person has psychological and physiological impacts on that person.¹¹ 

Through a process we don’t yet fully understand, there is growing evidence we can access information from the energetic fields that connect us.¹² Whilst this idea may seem esoteric, and challenging to our logical minds, it is likely you have directly experienced this phenomenon – for example sensing when someone is observing you before you see them; simultaneously having the same thought, or sharing the same emotion as someone else; or if you are a parent, having a “sixth sense” that something has happened to your child before finding out that is indeed the case. Many of these experiences have been validated by research.¹³

How can we access our collective systemic intelligence when dealing with complex challenges?

We can gain insights into the relationship dynamics in a group, or organisation, through a mapping process whereby important parts of the system, and their relationship with each other, are spatially represented. This mapping process, often referred to as a “constellation”, draws on the metaphor of how constellations of stars, planets, moons and other celestial bodies interact with each other. 

After mapping the existing relationships, we can then experiment with different configurations to get a sense of what will help the system move forward in a healthy direction. 

This mapping process has been used effectively to help inform intervention decisions for complex organisational challenges, including those related to culture, structure, individual and team performance, morale and conflict patterns that are “stuck”. The process is increasingly being used to support decision-making about future actions, for example, testing whether to keep an existing product brand or explore possibilities for new ones.¹⁴

If you would like to know more, you can contact me by email: john@cultivatingleadership.com

John Sautelle coaches leadership teams and is the author of Choose Your Stories, Change Your Life. His work is featured in his TEDx talk Whose Stories are We Living?

1. Harvard Medical School: A Complex Hierarchy of Avoidance Behaviors in a Single-Cell Eukaryote. Current Biology, Volume 29, Issue 24, p 4323-4329.E2, December 16, 2019. ↩︎
2. Amanda Blake, Your Body is Your Brain, p.75 ↩︎
3.  Armour, J.A., Anatomy and function of the intrathoracic neurons regulating the mammalian heart, in Reflex Control of the Circulation, I.H. Zucker and J.p. Gilmore, Editors. 1991, CRC Press: Boca Raton. p. 1-37 ↩︎
4. Source: https://www.heartmath.org/research/science-of-the-heart/ ↩︎
5.  McCraty, R., Atkinson, M., and Tomasino, D. (2001). Science of the Heart: Exploring the role of the heart in human performance ↩︎
6.  Your Body is Your Brain, pp. 48-51. ↩︎
7. Source: https://www.heartmath.org/research/science-of-the-heart/ ↩︎
8. Source: Dr Christina Ross, biophysicist, Energy Medicine: Current Status and Future Perspectives, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6396053/ ↩︎
9. For a comprehensive list see: Hans Andeweg, Connect. Everything is Energy, Everything is One, Everything is Possible ↩︎
10. Source: Dr Konstantin Korotov, Professor of Computer Science and Biophysics, General principles of electrophotonic analysis. Proceedings of the International Scientific Conference, Measuring Energy Fields, Kamnik, Tunjice, 2007, pp. 87-92. ↩︎
11.  Tiller, W. and Dibble, W. (2009). What is information entanglement and why is it so important to psychoenergetic science? Published Computer Science. Published in Computer Science ↩︎
12. See Sheldrake, R., The Presence of the Past. London., Collins.1988, Chapter 6 and Rupert Sheldrake. Dogs That Know When Their Owners are Coming Home, New York, Three Rivers Press, Random House 1999. ↩︎
13. See Korotov, above. ↩︎
14. See Whittington, above. Also: Jan Jacob Stam’s book: Fields of Connection. ↩︎