Letting Go of the Shore: Leading into the Unknown

Xiao ZhangXiao Zhang
6 min read

You can’t discover new oceans unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.
— André Gide

In uncertain times, we instinctively reach for something solid:
a clear path, a familiar map, a good plan.

But what if leadership today isn’t about clinging tighter to what we know…
but learning to move with what we don’t?

Wayfinding Wisdom

In Aotearoa and across the Pacific, indigenous leadership is shaped not by conquering the unknown
It was about relating to it.

Polynesian navigators once journeyed thousands of kilometers across open ocean,
not with maps,
but by reading stars, swells, winds and ancestral wisdom.

They didn’t wait.
They moved.

With rhythm.
With trust.
With presence.

That same wisdom has shaped my own path.

At 22, I moved from mainland China to Hawai‘i.
Later, with my young family, I crossed again to Aotearoa.

At the time, I thought I was chasing a lifestyle.
Looking back, I see I was seeking something deeper:
A way of being that’s more intuitive, responsive, and grounded.

In both places, I kept encountering the same quiet truth:
Great leadership doesn’t always speak the loudest.
It listens.
It moves with rhythm.
It stays close — to people, to purpose, to place.

The deeper I look, the more I see a shared thread:
Leadership begins in relationship:
with others,
with land,
with the stories we carry, and ones we carry forward.

And sometimes, that relationship is remembered through the stories.

For my daughter, it’s Moana.
For me, it’s the realisation that these stories aren’t just fiction.
They’re echoes of older truths.

Her favourite character?
Heihei—the wildly unqualified chicken who somehow completes the voyage.

And honestly, I don’t fully get it.
But somehow, I do.

Moana’s journey resonates not because she’s chosen,
but because she chooses.
She lets go of the shore not because she knows exactly where she’s going,
but because something inside her knows she must.

This is the essence of leadership in uncertain times:
Not control, but courage.
Not knowing, but answering the call.

The Age of AI Calls for More Human Leadership

Across studies from the World Economic Forum, Harvard Business Review, and MIT Sloan, a powerful truth keeps surfacing:

The most valuable leadership capabilities today aren’t technical.
They’re deeply human.

Think:

  • Emotional intelligence

  • Systems thinking

  • Learning agility

  • Collaborative decision-making

These aren’t “soft skills.”
They’re the sharpest tools in tomorrow’s leadership toolkit.

In a world driven by automation, leadership may matter less in how quickly we act,
and more in how wisely we move.

Rhythm Over Control

Traditional leadership frameworks were built for predictability.
They favoured control, stability, and clear cause-and-effect thinking.

But AI doesn’t simplify.
It multiplies complexity.
It challenges assumptions.
It accelerates ambiguity.

Trying to lead today with yesterday’s models?
It’s like steering a canoe backwards into a rising storm.

What if what’s needed now isn’t more command but a different rhythm altogether?

Rhythm is the steady pulse between sensing and responding.
It’s moving in time with what’s happening—not forcing it to fit a plan.

Like breathing.
Like walking across shifting sand.
Like navigating by starlight, adjusting to every swell and shift.

This shift—from predict and control to sense and respond— is the heart of modern leadership.

The Orion Adaptive Leadership Model

At Orion, we’ve been exploring a framework for this kind of leadership.
It’s built around four living, dynamic capacities.

My colleague Chris Rosato has unpacked these four capabilities in more detail on his blog.
What follows is the distilled rhythm we return to again and again in our work.

  • Self-Mastery: The hardest leadership work happens inside. Emotional intelligence, clarity under pressure, and staying grounded in uncertainty.

  • Collective Leadership: Collaboration isn’t chemistry. It’s a shared practice, cultivated through psychological safety, relational awareness, and mutual ownership.

  • Systems Thinking: In complexity, cause and effect don’t travel in straight lines. Leadership here means sensing the patterns beneath the noise and knowing where to place your weight.

  • Leading Change: Change doesn’t start with a plan, it starts with a pulse. Leadership here means turning vision into movement, through empathy, narrative, and adaptability.

These aren’t just skills you learn once.
They’re capacities that evolve through practice,
grown in motion, cultivated through relationship, and sustained by rhythm.

A Leadership Model That Grows in Relationship

These four capabilities don’t stand alone.
They interact, reinforce, and expand one another.

Our approach draws inspiration from Integral Theory and Spiral Dynamics —
frameworks that help us think more holistically about human development.

From Integral Theory, we explore:

  • The inner work of presence and self-awareness

  • The outer work of impact and action

  • The individual path of growth

  • The collective field of relationship and culture

From Spiral Dynamics, we appreciate that development often moves in spirals.
It circling through complexity with greater integration over time.

Leadership development, for us, isn’t a stright line.
It’s a living system.
Grown through relationship, reflection, and motion.

That’s why our Leadership Labs aren’t quick fixes.
They’re multi-year journeys that spiral through these capacities—building depth, breadth, and resilience.

Some leaders start with collective practice.
Others with self-mastery.
The entry point matters less than the commitment to the journey.

Letting Go as Leadership Practice

Letting go of the shore isn’t about drifting.
It’s about releasing rigidity, perfectionism, and the illusion of control.
It’s about sensing the current—and moving with it.

For leaders navigating AI transformation, that could look like letting go of:

  • Waiting for the dust settles—because it won’t.

  • Adding new tools to outdated systems—and expecting different results.

  • Clinging to the comfort of familiar failures.

And instead, leaning into:

  • The courage to move with rhythm

  • The trust to co-create collective intelligence

  • The humility to keep unlearning and adapting

In Chinese philosophy, there’s a concept called Wu Wei (无为).
It is often described as “non-action”.

But it isn’t passivity.
It’s presence.

It’s knowing when to move,
and how to move,
without forcing.

This wisdom mirrors Pacific wayfinding traditions.
Sometimes, the strongest leadership isn’t about setting a course.
It’s about reading the current and moving with the rhythm already in motion.

The Courage of Getting Lost

In Moana 2, we meet Matangi.
She sings just one unforgettable line:

Get Lost.

It isn’t a command.
It’s a kind of invitation.

A reminder, perhaps, that wayfinding never begins with a map.

It begins with letting go,
of the old story,
of the old shore,
of how it was supposed to go.

And it listens,
for a rhythm that hasn’t fully arrived yet.

That, too, is leadership.

Because the future isn’t shaped by those who cling to the shore.
It’s written by those willing to move together into the unknown.

Join Us

If this rhythm resonates,
If you’re leading through uncertainty and listening for something deeper,
We’d love to walk beside you.

Let go of the shore. Step into the unknown.

Explore the Orion Leadership Model.
Join Leadership Labs - free for two weeks.
Subscribe to our newsletter for reflections, resources, and rhythm for the road ahead.
Follow us on LinkedIn to stay connected.

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Leadership in the Age of AIadaptive leadershipFutureofworkleadership developmentWayfinding

Written by

Xiao Zhang
Xiao Zhang