The Leadership Journey: Transforming Lenses, Transforming Organisations
Why authentic leadership experience is the foundation of transformation that matters for culture, employees and customers
Why leadership needs a new lens
Leadership is under more pressure than ever. Artificial intelligence, hybrid work and shifting social expectations are reshaping how organisations operate and what people expect from those in charge. Many companies have already embraced Customer Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX) as critical to strategy. Yet there is a third dimension, still largely missing from mainstream leadership thinking, that we call Leadership Experience (LX).
At Holonomics, we take a different view. LX is not just about what leaders know, but about the lens through which they experience the world: their mental models, attitudes and values.
Our approach is informed by the significant body of psychology research referred to as phenomenology and its concepts of lived experience and the lifeworld. These highlight how the same reality and context can be experienced in profoundly different ways by different people. Two executives may face the same market data, the same cultural challenges, and the same organisational structures, yet their interpretations, decisions and ability to inspire others can diverge completely.
The implication is clear. Developing leaders is not simply about adding new tools to a toolkit. It is about transforming the lens of perception itself. When leaders surface and question their assumptions, they begin to see their organisations, their employees and their customers with greater clarity. This expanded awareness creates the conditions for authentic dialogue, trust and transformation at scale.
From customer and employee experience to leadership experience
Most companies are now fluent in the language of CX and EX. They map journeys, analyse touchpoints, and invest heavily in technologies and processes to improve satisfaction and engagement. But our work reveals a third and often overlooked dimension: LX.
Just as CX and EX are essential to strategy, so too is LX. It is not only about skills or knowledge, but about how leaders interpret and inhabit their worlds. When LX is neglected, organisations fall into what we call ‘knotworks’: networks dominated by ego, politics and misaligned agendas. Knotworks undermine trust, block innovation and erode customer focus, no matter how sophisticated the external systems may appear.
By complementing CX and EX with LX, organisations gain the missing dimension that enables authentic transformation. It is a dimension that begins with the inner world of leaders and scales to culture, strategy and customer value.
The Leadership Experience Journey
In Designing Customer Experiences with Soul, we describe a mapped-out Leadership Experience Journey. This is a path leaders can follow to develop higher levels of consciousness, empathy and authenticity. It is not a linear hierarchy but a set of interwoven dimensions of awareness that allow leaders to transcend narrow viewpoints and see the whole organisation.
Our Leadership Journey programmes guide leaders through this developmental arc, connecting inner growth with practical organisational outcomes. Leaders who engage with this journey are better able to:
- perceive and address the cognitive biases shaping their decisions
- create coherence between what they say, what they mean and what they do
- nurture authentic relationships that transcend politics and silos
- align their organisations with universal human values
Tools for transformation
Since publishing Holonomic Thinking in Harvard Business Review Brasil in 2014, we have been developing and refining practical frameworks that help leaders shift their perception and act more systemically. What began as an articulation of the Ladder of Seeing, a way to uncover the assumptions shaping leadership behaviours, has now evolved into a comprehensive suite of tools for transformation.
- The New 4Ps: a sensemaking framework — Platforms, Purpose, People, Planet — that enables leaders to develop a systemic understanding of their industry and wider ecosystem, moving beyond narrow strategic models.
- The Ladder of Seeing: a diagnostic framework that reveals how leaders’ mental models and cognitive biases shape their ability to interpret complex realities.
- The Holonomic Circle: a systemic framework that links authenticity, tools and techniques, and transcendental values, enabling leaders to design customer experiences with soul.
- The Leadership Experience Journey: a structured map that helps leaders develop higher levels of consciousness, empathy and authenticity, connecting inner transformation with cultural coherence and customer impact.
- The CEX Strategic Relationships Canvas: a practical tool that helps leaders map and strengthen the relationships that underpin strategy execution, ensuring alignment across stakeholders, functions and geographies.
- The Customer Centricity Strategy Framework (CCSF): an integrative framework that combines many of our core tools — from the New 4Ps and Elevated Value Propositions to the Empathy Action Plan — enabling organisations to embed customer-centricity into strategy in a structured, coherent way.
- The Empathy Action Plan: an instrument we have deployed at scale, including during one of Brazil’s largest corporate acquisitions, helping leadership teams embed empathy into strategy and execution.
These tools are designed to work across functions, divisions and geographies, and to complement existing methodologies inside global organisations. By focusing on the inner world of leaders as much as the external processes of strategy, they enable transformations that are both systemic and future-fit.
Leadership archetypes: breaking the cycle of dysfunction
Through years of consulting with global enterprises, we identified seven Leadership Experience Archetypes. Some are dysfunctional, such as the ego-trapped, blinkered or predatory, while others, like the holonomic archetype, enable dialogue, wholeness and authentic collaboration.
These archetypes provide leaders with a mirror. By recognising patterns of behaviour that undermine trust and coherence, organisations can consciously shift towards cultures that elevate purpose, innovation and performance.
Universal human values: the foundation of authenticity
Our frameworks are grounded in five universal human values: peace, truth, love, righteousness and non-violence. Far from being abstract ideals, these values provide practical anchors for culture, decision-making and resilience. They ensure coherence between what leaders say, what they mean and what they do.
Authenticity, therefore, is not a by-product of leadership. It is the centrepiece. Without authenticity, purpose risks becoming just another slogan. With authenticity, leaders create the conditions for sustainable transformation.
From insight to impact
We deliver these concepts through our Leadership Journey programmes, workshops, mentoring and short courses. This range of formats means we can support both large-scale transformations in multinational enterprises and more targeted development in smaller organisations that may not have extensive training budgets.
Across all formats, our aim is the same: to move leaders beyond rational analysis into an integrated practice of knowing — thinking, sensing, feeling and intuition.
Leaders who master this expanded awareness are able to:
- manage complexity with confidence
- navigate change with empathy
- design elevated value propositions that resonate with customers, employees and wider society
Transformation that matters
The strapline of Holonomics is transformation that matters. For us, this means working with the whole organisation, not just the top of the hierarchy. Our projects with some of the world’s largest brands demonstrate that when leaders transform their own lenses of perception, they unlock cultural coherence, employee engagement and customer experiences with soul.
In a business environment where many leadership programmes remain transactional, the Leadership Experience Journey offers something deeper: a systemic, values-based transformation that scales from the individual to the enterprise.
This is the work we began more than a decade ago with Holonomic Thinking in Harvard Business Review Brasil — and it continues today as we help leaders and organisations everywhere embark on their own Leadership Journey. To explore these ideas in more depth, see Designing Customer Experiences with Soul: How to Build Products, Services and Brands that People Genuinely Love. You can also learn more about how these tools integrate in practice in our article on the Customer Centricity Strategy Framework. Further details on our programmes and approaches are available at Holonomics.
