There is a moment in a horse’s canter when all four feet leave the ground and the animal hangs, for a fraction of a second, entirely unsupported. Riders call this a flying lead change, and it is what a horse does when the ground beneath it changes shape and the balance it has been relying on no longer serves. To turn, it must let go of the leg it has been leading with, commit to a moment of free fall, and land leading with something else entirely.
I cannot think of a better description of where most leadership teams find themselves at this moment in time.
That metaphor belongs to Kelly Wendorf, and she is my guest on the latest episode of Impactful Teamwork. Kelly is the founding partner of EQUUS, an equine-inspired leadership organisation based at Buffalo Spirit Ranch in Santa Fe, and the author of Flying Lead Change: 56 Million Years of Wisdom for Leading and Living. I have been reading her work for years, and it was a genuine pleasure to unpack it with her.
Disruption is not the problem — it is the mechanism
Kelly brings the adaptive cycle into this conversation, a framework biologists use to describe how living systems evolve. It runs through four stages — new beginnings, growth, consolidation, and endings or letting go — and every species moves through it repeatedly.
What is worth pausing on is that the thing which turns the cycle is disruption. Summer does not become autumn because the trees decide it is time; the light shifts, the temperature drops, and the leaves fall. Disruption is the catalyst rather than the catastrophe. As Kelly puts it, the species that respond differently evolve, and those that carry on exactly as before do not survive.
Which raises an uncomfortable question for those of us leading through climate volatility, artificial intelligence and a workforce that is quietly exhausted. The topography has changed, so are we willing to leave the ground for a moment in order to land differently, or will we keep cantering on the same lead and hope the corner never arrives?
Why the horse is worth studying
Kelly makes a case for horses as a leadership model grounded in longevity rather than sentiment. The horse has existed for around fifty-six million years, surviving tectonic shifts, climate spikes and the arrival of humanity. Of all the species that have ever lived, roughly one per cent remain, and the horse is one of them.
So if you are asking how to build an organisation that lasts five hundred years rather than twenty, the sensible thing is to study something that already knows how. Kelly’s work points towards horse culture resting on five core premises: safety, connection, peace, freedom and joy. The lead mare earns her position not through dominance or force, but through her ability to keep those five conditions intact for the herd, and she does it through care and presence.
Hold that list against your own leadership team for a moment. Are your people genuinely connected to one another, or merely engaged with the same set of tasks? Do they have real choice? Is there any joy in it at all? Those five things are precisely what every team member is quietly asking for, whether or not they have the language to say so.
Care and presence are not soft skills
Both Kelly and I get rather animated on this point, and I make no apology for it. Care, as she describes it, is robust; it has strong boundaries, and it has teeth and hooves when the situation requires them. What it does not have is the performance of authority that so many organisations mistake for leadership.
Her argument is that the power-over model is comparatively recent, emerging perhaps six thousand years ago, and that it is a distortion rather than an inevitability. She also points out that the word appearing most often in Darwin’s research was not competition but love.
The messy middle, and why leaders lose their nerve
The part I suspect will land hardest is what happens when a leader actually commits to changing direction. First comes tribal shaming, a phrase coined by Dr Mario Martinez, which is the predictable reaction of a group whose primitive wiring feels threatened by someone doing things differently. Then, after the letting go and before the new beginning, comes what Kelly calls the messy middle.
This is the snake shedding its skin, and it is not pretty. Things get tumultuous, people get frightened, and the leader who initiated the change is suddenly answering for the mess. What separates those who make it through from those who quietly revert is whether one person understands the cycle well enough to say, with conviction, that this is exactly where we are meant to be.
Rewilding is not reinvention
We close on rewilding, a word we both use and which is rapidly being flattened into a meme. Kelly’s definition is the clearest I have heard: rewilding is not about becoming wild, because we already are. It is about dismantling the fences and inherited constraints that keep us from our intuitive, creative and adaptive selves. A returning, rather than a building.
You can find out more about Kelly’s retreats and online courses at equusinspired.com, read her monthly essays at equusinspired.com/essays, and pick up her book Flying Lead Change at equusinspired.com/flc.
There is far more in the episode than I can do justice to here, including Kelly’s account of how the horses effectively refused to let her ignore this work. My invitation to you this week is simple: choose one of the five principles — safety, connection, peace, freedom or joy — and ask yourself honestly whether it is intact for your team right now. Then tell me which one you chose, because I would very much like to know.
Show Notes
00:50 Meet Kelly Wendorf
01:58 Calling And Origins
05:01 Coaching With Horses
06:47 Service And Adaptability
10:08 Presence Over Engagement
11:58 Adaptive Cycle Explained
14:34 Flying Lead Change Metaphor
19:22 Horse Culture Principles
22:20 Care Over Dominance
23:14 Darwin and Power With
24:49 Trauma Shifted Leadership
26:30 Care Is Not Soft
27:36 Regenerative Business Model
29:57 Courage to Change
31:26 Messy Middle Cycle
35:26 Rewilding Leaders Defined
38:25 Book and Next Steps
You can connect to kelly on LinkedIn here and on her website here.
