Wayfinding Leadership: Groundbreaking Wisdom for Leaders

The Five Waypoints: Principles of Wayfinding Leadership

The competencies of wayfinding are not taught in conventional professional training and typically do not appear in ongoing professional development. Drawing on many years of research, studying and working with master wayfinders, Chellie and her co-authors Hoturoa Barclay-Kerr and John Panoho have developed a wayfinding leadership programme for all leaders.

To guide your wayfinding leadership journey they have created a five point framework called ‘The Five Waypoints’. Waypoints are reference points for the purpose of navigation and have long been used for journeying. Each of our waypoints metaphorically relates to a part of a double-hulled oceangoing waka. The five waypoints are:

  1. Orientation on how to lead: relates to the whole waka as a needle and introduces key principles of orientation in wayfinding and leading.
  2. Implementing values: relates to the hulls of the waka and presents guiding values to orient the leader.
  3. Human dynamics: relates to the rudder, mast, sails and mauri stones of the waka and covers identity and self-knowledge, alignment, collective will and wellbeing
  4. Deepening practices: relates to the cross beams on the waka and is about the planks of connectivity that connect values with practices to support a holistic view that secures interpersonal relationships.
  5. Exploring and discovering destinations: speaks to the island where the end is a new beginning; this section explores new worlds of possibilities for leaders.

The benefits of being a wayfinder leader include:

  • Tapping into a broader and deeper repository of intelligences and eliciting more choices and potential solutions, having more frames of reference to assess a situation
  • Deepening discernment about what is really going on and be more response-able to change, subtle shifts and nuances, as well as see the whole. In other words, see the wood and the trees
  • Developing wisdom individually and in the group
  • Developing integrative thinking and perceptiveness, and seeing connections between things that possibly others don’t see, making sense of complexity
  • Developing personal grit and courage and helping others develop their own grit
  • Honing the ability to work with resistance, shed rigid mental models and enter new paradigms
  • Developing a more humanistic, lived experience of leadership that counters the prevailing reliance on abstract systems and decision by numbers
  • Experiencing greater relaxation, presence and calm, especially in adversity
  • Experiencing feelings of awe and wonder in the leadership journey
  • Creating and growing wellbeing across multiple dimensions, such as personal, social, environmental, cultural and spiritual dimensions.

In our workshop we go beyond the book. Following is a sample of what we do:

1 hour
The keynote. This has been delivered around the country to many different kinds of organisations and to people at all levels. It includes two short exercises and a 6min video. There are three key aspects (1) Step into your Rangatira Space (2) Call the Island to You (3) Embrace the Unknown.
3.5 Hours
An interactive and deeply reflective workshop that goes through the keynote with enquiry exercises at 3 points and a de-brief. This is the most popular workshop and goes deeper into each of the aspects (1) Step into your Rangatira Space (2) Call the Island to You (3) Embrace the Unknown. We get great feedback about this workshop because it supports people to understand their own rangatira space better, how they work as teams, what island they are calling to them, signs that call the island, and their relationship with change.
Full day workshop
This is the 3.5 hour workshop followed by a waka experience - they meet the crew (and hopefully Hoturoa and John) and go out on the harbour for a 1.5-2 hour sail. This adds an experiential dimension to the learning and is exciting for people from all levels of the organisation. 


You can buy the book online at Huia Publishers

The University of Auckland bookshop has copies you can buy at the bookshop: Student Commons Building, 2 Alfred Street, Auckland Central 1010. Tel +64 9 306 2700 Email: enquiries@ubsbooks.co.nz. Or, you can also order online

You can also buy an e-book from Amazon

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