Innovations usually happen where different domains meet, and this one is no exception. The St. Michael’s Experience came out of three threads in my own life that had no business being connected, and that turned out to belong together.

A Stained Glass Window

Some of my earliest and fondest memories are from Holy Angels, the Catholic church and school I attended as a child. The windows were enormous and full of the images most people recognise regardless of what they believe. The Guardian Angel steadying children across a bridge on a stormy evening. Gabriel, in the Fra Angelico pose, bringing his message to a young girl and waiting for her answer. Choirs of angels singing.

The one that held me, and left me a little in awe, was the Archangel Michael.

The window borrowed from the Reni painting, with Michael sword in hand and his foot on the devil’s head. It is a dramatic, action-packed image, and yet his face is completely calm. Strong, confident, entirely at peace in the middle of the fight.

Over the years that stopped being about a religious figure for me and became something closer to a standard. The capacity to face a genuinely difficult thing with strength while staying calm, curious and grounded is not a common trait in leadership, and it is the one I find myself looking for most.

Complexity, Networks and How We Think

The second thread arrived through my training. Complexity science, network science and cognitive science have a great deal in common when you apply them to business, particularly the non-linear connectivity of dynamic systems and the way information moves through them, encoded in words, numbers, behaviours, technologies, symbols and even natural systems.

In their simplest form, these sciences are about two things. Learning to read the stories that are being formed and told inside a system, because those stories drive decisions and behaviour. And then using human wisdom, alongside material affordances like technology and finance, to co-author better ones. Better meaning stories that create financial and other kinds of value, that let businesses and people grow toward their potential and put down deeper roots for whatever comes next.

What trips those stories up, and leaves them unfinished or with unhappy endings, is when narrow strands of knowledge, experience, expertise, fear or ego get treated as little gods, and nobody reads the web of connections holding the system together and keeping it healthy enough to grow.

Friends With Tough-Nut Problems

The third thread was simply the people around me. Clients and friends across a range of industries who kept bringing me ambitious growth goals and genuinely hard problems, the kind that were never going to yield to a business-as-usual approach.

The best of these leaders did not behave as though they had the answers. They behaved like explorers, carrying more questions than conclusions and building connections that crossed people, functions, companies, industries and domains.

What can NASA learn from a regenerative farmer? What can ExxonMobil learn from heart surgeons? What can Amazon learn from a moat? What can a physicist learn from a priest?

The answer in every case is a great deal, and often to the point of breaking through a mindset, an unquestioned process, or a question that had been framed far too narrowly.

What Happens There

Those three threads converged into the St. Michael’s Experience, which is designed to surface, use and weave together new value from both the usual and the unusual places. Childhood passions. Getting our hands dirty helping something in nature grow. Reframing business model assumptions borrowed from several industries at once, because risk-sharing looks nothing alike in energy and in pharma. Cooking meals together, and cooking up action plans with real follow-up afterwards from me and from the group.

It is time away from business as usual, but it is not the usual retreat that leaves the learning and the entertainment at the door once Monday arrives. That distinction matters to me more than almost anything else about it, because breakthrough on its own is the part that comes relatively easily. Participants here also work out how their innovation gets woven back into the business, which is precisely the point where most new growth quietly falls away.

It is deep, creative, practical, thought-provoking and genuinely good fun, and it builds a guild of like-minded leaders from across domains who keep turning up for one another long after the week ends. It is for people who already know that business as usual is no longer enough, and who want to find out whether business as unusual can work in their world.

What It Asks of You

Coming back to the original Michael for a moment. Getting real value out of this requires humility, and the capacity to still be in awe of something.

It also requires a willingness to do small things daily rather than only large things occasionally, in order to lead your business and the people invested in it toward new growth, while keeping the soul of that business, and your own, calm, strong, peaceful and in order.

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