I spent time recently at the Caux Palace in Switzerland — an extraordinary place, perched above Lake Geneva, with a view that quite literally changes your perspective. It has been a place of dialogue and reconciliation since the 1940s, and something about it still holds that quality: a sense of spaciousness that is not just physical.
I was there for a seminar on leading with humanity in the age of artificial intelligence. And what struck me most — more than any of the conversations about technology, more than the debates about AI and its implications — was something simpler. The relief that the participants felt at being somewhere where they could actually think. Where they did not have to react. Where they were not, for a few days, being managed by their inbox.
Leaders today are extraordinarily busy. They are managing complexity that previous generations of leaders could not have imagined — not just in their organisations but in the world around them. The polycrisis of climate, inequality, technological disruption, and geopolitical instability is not something that happens outside of leadership. It lands on their desks, in their teams, in the decisions they have to make every day.
And yet we give them almost no time or structure for the kind of inner work that would actually equip them to navigate it. We give them frameworks and strategies and dashboards. We give them data and KPIs and leadership competency models. We almost never give them silence. We almost never ask them: who are you, underneath the role? What do you actually believe? What are you afraid of? And what does that have to do with how you lead?
The separation we cannot sustain
There is an assumption embedded in most professional culture that I think is both false and damaging. The assumption is that our professional selves and our personal selves are, or should be, separate. That what happens in us — our fears, our values, our sense of meaning, our relationship with uncertainty — is private, and therefore irrelevant to how we lead.
My research and my practice have convinced me that this assumption is wrong. Not just philosophically wrong, but practically wrong. The inner state of a leader shapes everything about how an organisation functions. A leader operating from fear builds a culture of fear. A leader who cannot tolerate uncertainty trains their team to hide uncertainty from them. A leader who has never examined their own assumptions cannot recognise those assumptions operating invisibly in the decisions they make.
Nearly two-thirds of Swiss SMEs are affected by mental health-related absenteeism — at a cost of CHF 19 billion annually. These numbers do not come from nowhere. They are, in significant part, the product of organisations where people do not feel psychologically safe. Where they cannot say 'I don't know' without it counting against them. Where the culture has been shaped, often unconsciously, by the unexamined inner life of whoever is at the top.
The good news is that this is changeable. Not quickly, and not easily. But it is changeable. And the starting point is always the same: the leader's willingness to look inward.
"I think places like Caux help us remember that we also have an inner voice and an inner life. We cannot separate our professional selves from our personal selves. Our professional lives are, or at least should be, grounded in our personal values."
What inner development actually looks like
I want to be concrete about this, because inner development is a phrase that can sound vague or precious. What I mean by it is specific and practical.
Inner development is not therapy, and it is not a personality programme. It is the deliberate cultivation of the capacities that make it possible to lead well under pressure — when the situation is ambiguous, when the stakes are high, when the easy answer is not available. It begins with self-awareness: the ability to observe your own reactions, to notice when fear or habit rather than judgment is driving a decision, to recognise the gap between who you intend to be as a leader and how you actually show up on a difficult Tuesday.
From that foundation, it extends outward. It includes the capacity to think in systems — to see how the parts of a problem connect, to hold complexity without collapsing it into a simple narrative. It includes genuine relational skill: not the performance of empathy, but the willingness to be actually changed by what another person brings. And it includes the ability to act with integrity under uncertainty — to move forward without all the answers, grounded in something more durable than the quarterly results.
These capacities develop through practice, not through knowing about them. They develop through dialogue, through reflection, through encounters that push us beyond our existing frameworks. They develop, often, through difficulty — through the experiences that crack open our assumptions about how things work and who we are. What structures like peer learning, coaching, and retreats offer is a container for that development: a space where the cracking open can happen deliberately, with support, rather than only in crisis.
What places like Caux — and practices like dialogue, reflection, and peer learning — provide is a container for this development. A space outside the daily reactive mode where leaders can encounter their own inner voice again. Can remember, as I often put it, that their professional life is or at least should be grounded in their personal values. Can ask the question that the spreadsheet never asks: what am I actually trying to build, and why?
What gives me hope
I am asked sometimes, given the complexity and severity of the crises we are facing, what gives me hope. My answer is consistent: the fact that so many people are waking up to the possibility that perhaps we need to return to fundamental human values. Not as a nostalgic retreat but as a foundation for genuine innovation.
I see it in academia, where there is a growing body of engaged, activist-oriented research that refuses to separate knowledge from responsibility. I see it in the quiet movement of leaders — many of them women, many of them in SMEs, many of them at some kind of crossroads — who are choosing to build differently. Who are insisting that simplicity, at the local level, in the specific relationships that actually make up an organisation, is where real solutions live.
Globalisation promised a great deal and has not delivered what it promised. The complexity of the world will not be solved by more complexity. It will be solved, I believe, by people who have done enough inner work to act from genuine clarity — who know what they value, who understand their own biases, and who can build organisations that reflect something worth building.
That work does not happen in a meeting. It happens in the spaces we have the courage to create — for ourselves, and for the people we lead.
Research Foundation :This blog draws on : AXA Switzerland (2022) on mental health costs in SMEs; Inner Development Goals framework (innerdevelopmentgoals.org); IofC Caux Foundation — seminar 'Leading with Humanity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence', October 2026 (iofc.ch/lead-with-humanity-ai); IofC interview with Dr. Eleftheria Egel, September 2026.
If you want to explore what inner development looks like in practice — for you or for the leaders in your organisation — I would welcome that conversation. . NavigatingTransformation@amfortas.eu — Dr. Eleftheria Egel, NavigatingTransformation