The 5Cs

New Series.  Refilling the Tank.  Today is Part One.  The Long Walk and the Price We Pay. A conversation about climate risk and business, business leadership and stewardship. Business, climate and leadership each run on their own well-worn scripts. Every leader who decides to go off script faces a rite of passage. It’s often called The Long Walk. It’s not a straight line, and it’s n...

Series: The Other Eye Episode: You Can't Trojan Horse Your Way Into a Different Future Most organizations spend huge amounts of energy and money solving the consequences of a worldview they've never examined. In the final episode of this series, Ryan gets practical about what to do instead. He starts with risk. Most organizations look at it in silos, one or two pieces at a time. Ryan sees it as co...

Introducing The Stewardship Table. It's Time I Put My Money Where My Mouth Is For four years, this podcast has been about a better way to do business, climate and leadership. In this solo episode, Charlene stops talking about it and builds it. Most of the tools that help people speak honestly, listen well and handle stress never reach business leaders. That's because most leaders would never walk...

Series: The Other Eye Episode: The Elephant Isn't the Problem. The Room Is.  Business runs on three-month cycles. Decisions, budgets, performance reviews. The problems we're facing run on centuries. That gap is why climate science hasn't moved most business leaders. In this episode, Ryan gives his diagnosis. Everyone is studying the elephant in the room. Nobody is looking at the room itself:...

Series: The Other Eye Episode: Hearts Only Have One Colour Indigenous elders are famously careful about who they share their knowledge with. So what made them trust a finance graduate from Boston? Ryan's answer isn't about anything he said. It's about how he showed up: curiosity with no attachment to the answer, humility, and a fire to serve something bigger than himself. He shares the lesson a te...

Series: The Other Eye Episode: What Happens When You Stop Looking With One Eye Closed We have more data, more frameworks and more leadership development than at any point in history. The problems keep getting bigger. What if the issue isn't what we know, but the lens we're looking through? Ryan James Kemp grew up in Boston, earned a finance degree, and then spent the next 14 years in 65 countries...

Nicola Robins has walked us through a mine that spoke, a body that wouldn't let a strange experience go, and a hard refusal to be called a bridge between old knowledge and new. This episode brings it home to the question business people actually ask: does any of it work? Her answer isn't a case study with a tidy before-and-after. It's a distinction. The deliverable, the disclosure, the risk model,...

Last episode, Nicola Robins spoke about how a health crisis sent her into four months of training in Ngoma, a South African knowledge system. This episode picks up where that left off: what happened when she tried to bring it home. It took her years. Not because the knowledge wasn't useful, but because divination, the method she found most relevant to business, doesn't come with an obvious way to...

This is the first episode of When the Land Talks Back.   Nicola Robins was auditing a diamond mine in northwestern Australia when she heard a voice that had no business being there. It told her the land was sacred, and that nothing could justify what was being done to it. She is a Yale-trained scientist. She decided it hadn't happened, and carried on with the job.   Her body did not carr...

Season Five of the 5Cs Podcast opens with the story behind the line you've heard at the end of every episode for four years: the only thing we can do is do better, for the highest good, for all. This season the 5Cs get a new order and a sharper edge: Clarity, Courage, Commitment, Compassion, Collective. The guests ahead will bring ideas without a track record yet, many rooted in indigenous and anc...

Season four closed with a three-part series that asked more of us than most of what came before.  Before diving into what's next, we're taking a short, deliberate pause. Three weeks, no new episodes, back on September 5th with a brand new season five, a fresh focus, and guests you haven't heard talk about business, climate, or leadership before. In the meantime, revisit the back catalogue. Nearly...

We Found Each Other. What We Build Now The season four finale. Charlene names what four years of this work has actually taught her, and retires the framing the show started with. Compassionate capitalism served its purpose. It no longer fits what this work has become. The 5Cs remain, but the words change. She explains the reasoning behind each one, names where she has fallen short of what the show...

We Found Each Other. The Map Of The Distributed Knowing. Charlene started this podcast wanting to blame someone. A generation, an industry, a set of executives. What she found instead, across four years and dozens of conversations, was harder to sit with: a system so embedded in laws, institutions, and how we teach children to think that most people inside it don't know it's there. This episode wa...

The Girl from the Town of Twenty Thousand  Before the podcast, before the platform, before she had words for any of it, Charlene knew something was wrong. This episode goes back to where that knowing started: a small town, a business career that took her from internal audit to the C-suite, and a moral bind she tried to ignore for thirty years while working in chemicals, plastics, and industries sh...

Clear Eyed; Not Hopeless This is the finale of the five part series Shell Shocked: Moral Injury and the Leaders Carrying It   With special guest Dr. Debra Borys , a clinical psychologist licensed in California with long-standing interest and concern for nature and the environment. She is co-founder and co-chair of the LA County Psychological Association Eco-Psychology Special Interest Group, an ac...

The Business of Not Giving Up The most committed people in any room are often the ones closest to the edge. This episode is about what leaders can actually do about that. Before it's too late. With special guest Dr. Debra Borys , a clinical psychologist licensed in California with long-standing interest and concern for nature and the environment. She is co-founder and co-chair of the LA County Psy...

From Moral Injury to Moral Realignment With special guest Dr. Debra Borys , a clinical psychologist licensed in California with long-standing interest and concern for nature and the environment. She is co-founder and co-chair of the LA County Psychological Association Eco-Psychology Special Interest Group, an active member of the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America and a trained Climate C...

The Poly-Crisis Is Not a Climate Problem With special guest Dr. Debra Borys , a clinical psychologist licensed in California with long-standing interest and concern for nature and the environment. She is co-founder and co-chair of the LA County Psychological Association Eco-Psychology Special Interest Group, an active member of the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America and a trained Climate...

Shell Shocked: Moral Injury and the Leaders Carrying It There's a name for what you've been carrying. And it isn't burnout. In this first of five episodes, host, Charlene Norman draws a distinction most leaders have never heard between moral injustice (the event that hits you) and moral injury (what it leaves behind). Drawing on three decades inside extractive industries, her own 2008 recession st...

The Leader of Tomorrow In this episode with Rashmir Balasubramaniam of https://rashmir.net/ we bring the series home with the question that has been sitting underneath every conversation: what does the leader who can actually do all of this look like? Rashmir names five roles the leader of tomorrow needs to be able to play. We end with a reframe of leadership built not on authority, not on vision,...

The Seven Principles of Regeneration In this episode with Rashmir Balasubramaniam of https://rashmir.net/ we discuss the framework at the heart of regenerative practice. Carol Sanford's seven principles of regeneration and what it actually looks like to apply them inside real organisations and systems. Rashmir walks us through each principle clearly and without jargon, grounds them in concrete exa...

Masculine, Feminine, and the Danger of Overfocus In this episode with Rashmir Balasubramaniam of https://rashmir.net/ we discuss the broken balance between masculine and feminine ways of operating. Not as opposites to set against each other, but as complementary forces we have allowed to fall dangerously out of alignment. Rashmir offers one of the most unexpected and clarifying metaphors I've enco...

The Inner Work Nobody Talks About In this episode with Rashmir Balasubramaniam of https://rashmir.net/ we discuss what it actually takes to move from where most leaders are operating right now toward something genuinely different. And why the answer is not a strategy, a method, or a roadmap. Rashmir introduces a parallel framework for understanding how we relate to the world, from feeling like a v...

From Stewardship to Co-Creation In this episode with Rashmir Balasubramaniam of https://rashmir.net/ we discuss what it actually means to move from a force-based to a flow-based way of leading — and why that shift matters more right now than any strategy, tool, or methodology. Rashmir introduces the distinction between stewardship and co-creation, unpacks two very different schools of thought on f...

How We Got Here; What We Can Do completes the series of You're Playing Someone Else's Game: The Operating System Underneath Business In this final episode, Simon Mont of Harmonize ends this series with more provocative thinking. From monarchies to neoliberalism. And where the game actually changes. You can also find him on Instagram and YouTube . The key highlights are: -The straight line from med...