mythcelium© in leadership training

Mycorrhizal Fungi

I have just completed the last session of a leadership course that I designed and delivered for Sensus here in Sweden. It was a complete joy and had an impact far beyond my expectations. I want to gently pull apart the roots of why it was so effective and what that means for those of us who design courses and deliver training.

So firstly, I designed the course around the concept of the 'Me,' 'We,' 'The' Story that I have spoken about before here. The idea came from the work of Father Richard Rohr and his work at the Centre for Action and Contemplation in New Mexico USA.

When I read his work it resonated with how I described the way I worked with stories - (personal, cultural and traditional) and so I wove the components of the two together and it has proved an incredibly powerful process on several occasions now. This design resulted in the participants from the Sensus training forming independent groups in order to continue working together after the course, exchanging contacts so that they can support each other and also believing in their vision of the future enough to start to manifest it. They recognised the need to co-create and support each other as leaders.

How utterly incredible.

I have written before about how I feel no real change can take place within groups until we start to deconstruct the stories that people are carrying with them.

Only then, can we start to share the mycelium of these narratives and identify connections and

only then, can we weave those connections into a support network that holds us safe while we weave a co-created path towards a shared vision of the future.

Too often leadership training is about creating a single rope between the leader and their vision and not a about creating a shared web of connections - this is why it often fails. It is easy to fall off a single rope and feel you have failed - when you have a web of support around you however, it is far easier to clamber back up, re-balance yourself and continue. It is at exactly the time that we as leaders are under the most pressure and stress, that we need to lift up our heads, check where we are going and stretch out our hands to those next to us, in order to become stronger together, in order to create the web. So why is this message not clearly shared when it comes to leadership training.....?

For me, this links back to the danger of the single narrative and the work of mythologist Joseph Campbell. His work and the resulting book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) introduced the idea of the monomyth—a universal narrative arc found in myths around the world. His model, often referred to as “the Hero’s Journey,” follows a linear path:

Departure

Initiation

Return.

This has deeply influenced popular storytelling, especially in Hollywood (e.g., Star Wars, The Matrix, Harry Potter), and later leadership and self-help frameworks that emphasise personal transformation through challenge and triumph. In my view, his framework was successful as it offered an accessible and compelling formula that resonated with Western audiences hungry for meaning, as such it became a dominant lens for interpreting not only stories but also personal development, leadership, and organisational narratives. What this framework lacks though, is complexity - and our lives are nothing if not complex.

His work has now come under scrutiny and been judged (I feel quite rightly,) for being overly reductionist and culturally biased. It only offers a Western, 'linear,' individualistic, goal-oriented model that doesn’t align with many indigenous, Eastern, or cyclical narrative traditions. His work is also very male-centric, mostly centring on a male protagonist and sidelining communal, relational, or ecological themes. It also reduces diverse mythologies to fit a single structure, stripping them of their local texture, spiritual depth, and socio-political nuance. He was known for 'cherry-picking' elements from diverse mythologies in order to fit into and support his concept.

Not good Mr Campbell!

What his work completely misses is the fact that most traditional myths were structured more like eco-systems, with cyclical time and repetition, (Demeter and Persephone,)

multiplicity of narratives that allow many perspectives and contradictions - (Táin Bó Cúailnge) and finally and possibly most importantly, relational ontologies - how we as humans fit into a much wider world of relationship, reciprocity and interdependence - (Gilgamesh and the slaying of Humbaba, Guardian of the Cedar Forest.) These myths offer us a webbed structure and are less about a hero overcoming the world and more about us participating in its living network, whilst recognising our own limitations and need for help.

In Biomimicry—the practice of drawing inspiration from nature’s designs - we are offered a powerful companion lens to these myths and to the exploration of what leadership is and what it means to be human. This is not surprising - I truly believe that all of the ancient myths came to us as a result of us being in relationship with the natural world. In ecosystems support is mutual, not hierarchical. Fungi, trees, microbes, and insects form vast interdependent networks (e.g., the “wood wide web” of mycorrhizal fungi). Resilience is developed through diversity and complexity - these are powerful features rather than things that need to be simplified. There is a constant state of liminality and there is really no central 'Hero.´ Within this truth, existence persists through collaboration, decentralisation, and adaptability.

So, in the same way old myths reflect these patterns, nature’s wisdom also teaches us to think in networks - not straight lines. What an incredible gift these two provide us with as people who design courses on what it means to be human.

So, based on tjis beautiful interconnectedness, I offer you the following prompts when you design your leadership training ....

Think of leadership as Web-Weaving:

• Beyond the Hero Leader: Rather than training individuals to be lone heroes, we need to cultivate leaders who can weave webs of support, enable others, and steward collective intelligence.

• Story as Ecosystem: Leadership stories should reflect interdependence, adaptation, and emergence, not just triumph over adversity.

• Myth-Inspired Models: Draw from mythic traditions that honor cycles, communities, and the more-than-human world to guide practices of collective care and resilience.

If you would like to discuss this more with me or if you have a group of people that you feel would benefit from this approach, please feel free to contact me and let us start to build a web together.

Katrice