Shifting to Ethical Systems

JERICA Global
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This is where leaders, businesses, and investors come together for change that truly matters. We share what we’re learning as critical friends — reflections, lessons, and practices for building systems that are ethical, inclusive, and regenerative. Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes it’s hopeful. Always it’s worth it! Tune in bi-weekly on Wednesday mornings (CET) for the latest learnings.

  1. 4d ago

    #41 Ethical Leadership | What a Just Transition Asks of Leaders: Who Benefits, Who Decides, What's Left Behind

    What does a just transition ask of leaders? Most of the big plans already exist: climate commitments, the Sustainable Development Goals, national strategies, corporate net zero pledges. What's often missing is follow-through. Who carries a plan from paper into a place, who decides what it looks like when it arrives, and who lives with the result? In this episode of Shifting to Ethical Systems, host Jules Harrison-Annear thinks out loud about the distance between a plan and the people the plan is for, and what ethical leadership asks of us in that distance.  Drawing on her work from Aotearoa New Zealand to Fiji to France, and her preparation to work with young leaders from across Africa, she names a tension many leaders carry. We need long-term vision and serious capital, usually organised from the centre. And we need the people living with the consequences to have real authority over how plans land in their place. This episode is for leaders, funders, investors and programme designers working on plans that have to land in real places with real people, and for anyone supporting young founders to lead themselves through the pressure. Key quote: "A plan with no route back from the people living with it can't learn, and it will repeat its first mistakes at scale." Psst… If you liked the episode, check out this one next: #6 Ethical Leadership | How Leaders Redistribute Power in Systems That Were Never Built to Be Fair Episode breakdown: 00:46 The Distance Between a Plan and Its People Why the big plans already exist, and why follow-through is the gap that matters most. 02:11 The Tension: Vision and Capital vs Local Authority Why long-term vision and capital tend to sit at the centre, and why the people living with the consequences need real authority too. 03:02 Holding Both in Constructive Tension What ethical leadership asks of us in that tension, and why young people belong in the conversation. 04:48 Insight 1: Follow-Through Is Where Ethics Becomes Visible Who benefits, who decides, and what's left behind when the money moves on. Plus why every plan needs a feedback loop. 06:21 Insight 2: A Just Transition Is a Leadership Question Three questions for any transition plan, and why systems shift through thousands of individual decisions. 07:55 Insight 3: Whose Place, Whose Plan? A facilitation approach built around local agency, and the story behind JERICA Global's Catalyst Kits. 10:06 What Shifts When You Lead This Way How planning, funding, partnerships, and your own decisions change. 11:23 Ethical Leadership at JERICA Global Leadership programmes, advisory work, and an invitation to people who work with founders. P.S. If you work with founders through an accelerator, an impact programme, a university innovation lab or a social entrepreneurship course, Jules would love to talk. Visit jericaglobal.com to find out more about our leadership programmes and to join our monthly newsletter. Credits: Music: Under the Willow Tree by Vita Irrita, used with full permission from the artists. Podcast created with the support of Conscious Marketing Movement.

    #41 Ethical Leadership | What a Just Transition Asks of Leaders: Who Benefits, Who Decides, What's Left Behind

  2. Oct 14

    #40 Ethical Leadership | Nobody Made It Alone: Dismantling the Self-Made Myth

    We love the story of the self-made person. The individual who built something from nothing, through sheer vision and will, owing their success to no one. It is a compelling story. It is also, in every meaningful sense, false. In this episode of Shifting to Ethical Systems, host Esteban Fernandez Drovetta takes that story apart, carefully but completely. Read any celebrated success closely and you find a web of people, relationships, timing, and circumstance that the headline version has compressed into a single protagonist. The mentor who saw it first. The supplier who extended credit when the numbers didn't justify it. The community whose trust made the work possible. The family member who covered the rent. This is not an argument against individual effort. The person who took the risk and held the line when it was hard did something real, and it counts. The problem is telling the story as though that was the only contribution. Because when you do, you hand other people a model they try to copy alone, and then tell them, when it doesn't work, that they simply didn't want it enough. Esteban shares what he would have to leave out to tell the clean version of his own story, and connects the self-made myth to the patient capital conversation from earlier in the series. Investors who believe in self-made success back individuals and wait. Investors who understand how success actually works back ecosystems. This episode is for founders, leaders, and investors who want a more honest account of how success is built, and who suspect the lone-genius model has been costing them more than it gives. Key quote: "The real question is not who made you, but who you're making it possible for." Psst… If you liked the episode, check out this one next: #13 Ethical Leadership | Why Ethical Leaders Feel Lonely (And How to Find Your People) Episode breakdown: 00:45 The Myth of the Self Made Leader Why the idea of the self made entrepreneur hides the relationships, communities, and ecosystems behind every success story. 03:01 Success Is Never Individual How the self made narrative distorts both success and failure, and why leadership is always built collectively. 04:02 The Tension: Individual Effort vs Collective Support Why recognising your ecosystem does not diminish your achievements. It reveals how lasting value is actually created. 05:07 An Honest Leadership Story Esteban reflects on the people, communities, and relationships that made JERICA possible, and why they deserve to be part of the story. 08:46 The Cost of the Self Made Myth How believing success is entirely individual creates isolated leaders, fragile organisations, and unhealthy cultures. 10:07 Why Ecosystems Create Value Why acknowledging the people behind success leads to stronger cultures, fairer recognition, and more resilient organisations. 12:16 Patient Capital Rejects the Myth How patient investors back ecosystems, relationships, and long term capacity instead of betting on individual heroes. 14:38 Leading with an Ecosystem Mindset How leadership, mentoring, and investment change when you recognise that success is built through relationships, not independence. 16:45 Building Honest Ecosystems at JERICA How JERICA designs Catalyst Projects, mentoring, and consortiums around community, trust, and shared leadership rather than the myth of the self made founder. P.S. If you are ready to tell a more honest version of your story, and to build in a way that reflects it, we'd love to be part of that conversation. And if you are an investor who is tired of backing myths and wants to understand what backing ecosystems looks like in practice, let's talk. Visit jericaglobal.com for more information. Credits: Music: Under the Willow Tree by Vita Irrita, used with full permission from the artists.Podcast created with the support of Conscious Marketing Movement.

    #40 Ethical Leadership | Nobody Made It Alone: Dismantling the Self-Made Myth

  3. Oct 7

    #39 Humans at Work | Who Are You Without the Job Title? Leadership, Identity and Love

    Do you want to have a meeting, or do you want to have a conversation? Kent Frazier put that to a leader heading into a performance discussion. The reply came by email a week later. Kent joins host Jules Harrison-Annear from Denver for this Humans at Work conversation, part of the special series recorded between December 2022 and July 2025 and now running inside Shifting to Ethical Systems. He is a coach whose company, Paradox Edge, works with leaders on holding two things at once. The company name is the thesis. As we grow, Kent says, we become more able to hold the edginess of two partial truths that seem to contradict each other and are also complementary. They stay a while with what happens when a title is taken away. Kent describes how much of his sense of enoughness he had folded into a work persona, and what it was like when that expression ended. Jules talks about designing roles around capability instead, and why the title is still the part people grieve. The leader in that performance discussion took the coaching. The formal process would have taken six months, reached the same outcome, and left everyone angry. Kent's children's book, Love Fiercely, carries the same thought in dragons who roar, then sit and listen when it is someone else's turn. This episode is for coaches, people leaders and anyone who has just lost a job title and is finding out how much of themselves was inside it. Key quote: "We’ve gotta relax all that stuff, because we can’t learn when we’re all trying to be liked, and be right, and know everything." Psst… If you liked the episode, check out this one next: #4 Ethical Leadership | Listening Beyond Ego: The Quiet Strength of Moral Courage P.S. If there is a meeting in your week that would go better as a conversation, you are welcome to think it through with us at jericaglobal.com. Credits: Music: Under the Willow Tree by Vita Irrita, used with full permission from the artists.Podcast created with the support of Conscious Marketing Movement.

    #39 Humans at Work | Who Are You Without the Job Title? Leadership, Identity and Love

  4. Oct 7

    #38 Humans at Work | Adaptive Leadership: Why One Style Is Never Enough

    Postscript moment: Diane White returns to Humans at Work, the special series inside Shifting to Ethical Systems recorded between December 2022 and July 2025, a year on from her first conversation with host Jules Harrison-Annear. She is a Melbourne-based consultant to not-for-profit organisations, and has spent the year in a workplace leadership development programme. That gave her room to think, and what she landed on is uncomfortable. Knowing the style that comes naturally to her is the easy half; the people it does not reach need something from her anyway. Jules offers a phrase for what consulting actually asks for: peer leadership, where clients want neither a boss nor a subordinate. Diane takes to it immediately, then describes switching styles inside one conversation. They test an idea about the artificial boundaries organisations hold while sharing customers, ministers and funding. Diane likes it and pushes back in the same breath: those boundaries also tell people what to focus on and what to ignore. On AI she expects the tools to outrun her own scanning soon, and still doubts they can carry trust. This episode is for consultants and team leaders who know their default style and can name the person it never reaches. Key quote: "I've got my happy place or my preference and where I feel most comfortable in the style of leadership. That works for a certain number of people, but there are other situations and other people that need something quite different from me." Psst… If you liked this episode, continue the conversation with episode #21 Humans at Work | Why Unclear Boundaries Get Exploited (And How to Name Power at Work). This episode builds on many of the ideas explored there. P.S. If you are working out which style a person needs from you rather than the one you prefer, that is worth a mentoring conversation. You are welcome to start one at jericaglobal.com. Credits: Music: Under the Willow Tree by Vita Irrita, used with full permission from the artists.Podcast created with the support of Conscious Marketing Movement.

    #38 Humans at Work | Adaptive Leadership: Why One Style Is Never Enough

  5. Oct 7

    #37 Humans at Work | How Boards Reward Short-Term Stunts (And What Long-Term Governance Needs)

    A board chair once explained to Melissa Clark-Reynolds, very slowly, that a board is more like cricket and she should stick to her specialist slot. She spent the rest of her governance career avoiding chairs like that. Melissa is a New Zealand futurist, company director and former tech chief executive who runs a foresight practice. Host Jules Harrison-Annear meets her for this Humans at Work conversation, one of the special series recorded between December 2022 and July 2025 and now running inside Shifting to Ethical Systems. She is unusually candid about governance. The older idea of a board seat as a reward for a career well played. The jockey and horse metaphor she came to detest, and her own replacement for it: the board wins when the chief executive wins. She wants share packages that cannot be cashed for ten or fifteen years, because short horizons reward what she calls stunts. She left a chief executive role herself once the board lost its nerve on the growth strategies her incentive package depended on. Then come the numbers a futurist cannot leave alone. A Pākehā median age of fifty-four against a Māori median age under twenty. Migrant workers whose visas tie them to the single employer who brought them over, so losing that employer means losing the right to work at all. This episode is for directors, chairs and people who can recite their organisation's values, and are less certain the board is held to them. Key quote: "If the present isn’t handled, you don’t buy the right to play with the future." Psst… If you liked the episode, check out this one next: #14 Ethical Investing | Patient Capital vs Traditional Investing: How to Build Long-Term, Resilient Returns P.S. If your board is measuring activity and calling it impact, or building incentives for a payoff nobody in the room will be there to collect, we would welcome that conversation. Visit jericaglobal.com to book a discovery call. Credits: Music: Under the Willow Tree by Vita Irrita, used with full permission from the artists.Podcast created with the support of Conscious Marketing Movement.

    #37 Humans at Work | How Boards Reward Short-Term Stunts (And What Long-Term Governance Needs)

  6. Oct 7

    #36 Humans at Work | The Seven Generations Test: How to Make Decisions That Outlast Your Term

    Jay Naidoo's neighbours had a plan for the baboons: cull the lead males. He heard a human problem answered as an animal one. Jay is a South African elder, a former general secretary of COSATU and a minister in Nelson Mandela's cabinet. In this Humans at Work conversation, part of the special series inside Shifting to Ethical Systems recorded between December 2022 and July 2025, he talks with host Jules Harrison-Annear about power, systems change and what he believes has broken. He speaks from an off-grid house in the Magaliesberg mountains, introducing himself as a grandfather before anything else. The history arrives anyway. Evicted from a Durban home at four for being the wrong colour on the wrong side of the street. In a meeting with Steve Biko at fifteen. Underground after Biko was murdered in 1977. What he says about now is harder. Democracy captured by vested interests. COP after COP with the emissions curve still rising. Of the 36 million South Africans who had the right to vote at the election he describes, 18 million voted, and those who stayed away were young and black. He is candid about the collapse that took him to an ashram in India in March 2020, where lockdown kept him  for five months. He offers the Iroquois seven generations principle, decided by the grandmothers, as a test for any decision. Since this conversation was first recorded, Jay and the wider team have established the Calabash Regeneration Centre in the Magaliesberg, South Africa—a living experiment centred on regeneration, Indigenous knowledge and Ubuntu. The Centre brings together regenerative agriculture and food sovereignty, ecological restoration, healing and medicinal plants, an Ecoversity for intergenerational learning, and spaces where elders, Indigenous knowledge holders, young people and practitioners can gather and exchange knowledge. This episode is for people in governance, philanthropy and climate work who suspect their frameworks were never built for the timescale of the problem. Key quote: "We live in an ecosystem that is circular. You can’t have an economy that’s linear." Psst… If you liked the episode, check out this one next: #12 Ethical Leadership | How Power Shapes Systems (And How Leaders Can Challenge It Ethically) P.S. If you are making decisions whose consequences arrive long after your term ends, bring the question to jericaglobal.com. Our advisory spaces are built for thinking that outlasts a strategy cycle. Credits: Music: Under the Willow Tree by Vita Irrita, used with full permission from the artists.Podcast created with the support of Conscious Marketing Movement.

    #36 Humans at Work | The Seven Generations Test: How to Make Decisions That Outlast Your Term

  7. Oct 7

    #35 Humans at Work | Understand It, Adopt It, Adapt It: How Boards Should Approach AI and Risk

    Craig Pattison grew up in a railway community where every family grew vegetables together and gave them away for free. He has worked in risk, governance and ethical decision-making ever since, still starting from that lesson. Humans at Work is a series inside Shifting to Ethical Systems, recorded between December 2022 and July 2025. Here host Jules Harrison-Annear talks with Craig Pattison — a New Zealander who has lived and worked in seven countries, advising businesses and boards on risk, governance and AI. He grew up in Porirua in the early seventies, in a neighbourhood where police were carrying out dawn raids on his Pacific Island neighbours. What that left, he says, was a sense of fairness, and a habit of listening from both sides of a conversation rather than for a win or a loss. Years later he read that life expectancy in Fiji was 55 and could not leave it there. Put New Zealand's secondary agricultural fleet into containers, ship it over, support an academy growing vanilla and taro by traditional methods. A hand up rather than a hand out. Then the talk turns to risk, and to why Craig names material risks rather than operational or strategic ones. On AI he asks three questions in order: understand it, adopt it, adapt it. This episode is for directors and advisers deciding about technology they are still learning, inside organisations that measure success one person at a time. Key quote: "Rather than having our measure as individual success, have our measure as collective or community success cos then everyone gets to have some value." Psst… If you liked the episode, check out this one next: #34 Ethical Models | Critical Thinking in the Age of AI: Why People Are Still the Investment P.S. If you are working out which risks in front of you are the material ones, that thinking goes better in company. Visit jericaglobal.com, or book a discovery call and we can look at it together. Credits: Music: Under the Willow Tree by Vita Irrita, used with full permission from the artists.Podcast created with the support of Conscious Marketing Movement.

    #35 Humans at Work | Understand It, Adopt It, Adapt It: How Boards Should Approach AI and Risk

  8. Sep 30

    #34 Ethical Models | Critical Thinking in the Age of AI: Why People Are Still the Investment

    We have more powerful tools than ever. So why do so many leaders seem to trust their own judgement less? In this episode of Shifting to Ethical Systems, host Esteban Fernandez Drovetta asks where intelligence actually lives in an organisation, a project, or an ecosystem. He keeps seeing the same pattern: the more we can hand the hard questions to a dashboard or a model, the less confident people are in their own thinking. He believes that is the wrong direction. This is not an argument against technology. Esteban likes these tools, and used by people who ask the right questions and keep their own judgement, they can do a lot. The problem is substitution dressed up as progress.  Where we stop asking our own questions because a system gives answers. Where we stop building relationships because a platform claims to manage them. Where we stop developing people because a tool promises to replace the need. He also looks at where the money goes. Some AI valuations now exceed the economic output of entire countries, and by a wide margin the combined funding needed by the organisations working to regenerate people and planet. That is not a neutral fact. It is a choice about what we believe intelligence is, and where we think value lives. This episode is for investors, funders, founders, and leaders weighing where their investment in people and technology should sit. It is for anyone being told the right tool will solve their hardest problems. Key quote: "AI without critical thinking is just faster confusion. Psst… If you liked the episode, check out this one next: #9 Ethical Models | How Ecosystem Builders Share Power Without Losing Impact Episode breakdown: 00:45 Where Intelligence Really Lives Why the greatest asset in an organisation isn't technology, but the people who know how to think, question, and lead. 02:45 The Tension: Technology or Human Judgment? How AI can amplify great thinking, but becomes dangerous when it replaces critical thinking. 05:03 Why We Keep Funding the Wrong Things What investment conversations reveal about our bias toward platforms over people, and why community-led models are often overlooked. 07:09 AI Needs Human Judgment Why critical thinking is the essential leadership skill in the age of AI, and why better tools cannot replace better questions. 08:59 Human Capacity Creates Lasting Resilience Why organisations become resilient by investing in people, relationships, and judgment, not dependence on technology alone. 11:14 The Real Investment Gap Why billions flow into technology while human capacity, community leadership, and regenerative systems remain underfunded. 12:41 Leading with Critical Thinking How technology, investment, and ecosystem building change when leaders strengthen judgment instead of outsourcing it. 14:11 Building on the Intelligence That Already Exists How JERICA begins every Catalyst Project by investing in local knowledge, collective intelligence, and human capability before introducing technology. P.S. If you are weighing where your investment in people and technology should sit, or feeling the pressure to adopt AI-driven tools, we'd love to think it through with you. And if you are building an ecosystem and want human capacity as the foundation rather than an afterthought to the technology, let's talk. Visit jericaglobal.com for more information. Credits: Music: Under the Willow Tree by Vita Irrita, used with full permission from the artists.Podcast created with the support of Conscious Marketing Movement.

    #34 Ethical Models | Critical Thinking in the Age of AI: Why People Are Still the Investment
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This is where leaders, businesses, and investors come together for change that truly matters. We share what we’re learning as critical friends — reflections, lessons, and practices for building systems that are ethical, inclusive, and regenerative. Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes it’s hopeful. Always it’s worth it! Tune in bi-weekly on Wednesday mornings (CET) for the latest learnings.

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