Nature Has the Best Models for Leadership— our leadership lab brings them to life
A Lab for Leadership and Work, Inspired by Nature
We don’t need more heroes. We need ecosystems. Leadership isn’t just about visionaries pulling us forward. It’s about networks, resilience, adaptation—the same forces that sustain forests, rivers, and soil.
Soil and Shadow is a Leadership Lab that turns to ecosystems to understand what makes systems thrive, adapt, and regenerate. Because leadership, like nature, isn’t static. It evolves. And in a world defined by uncertainty - visceral, gut-wrenching uncertainty - leaders and teams must become more like ecosystems—resilient, dynamic, and deeply interconnected. The best models for leadership don’t come from boardrooms. They come from ecological wisdom. Microbiomes teach us how to collaborate. Biodiversity teaches us resilience. Soil health principles show us how to sustain long-term growth. We take these insights and apply them—in coaching rooms, executive teams, classrooms, and conference halls.
For over a decade, we’ve been designing new ways of leading and working. We’ve published papers that push the climate sector forward, partnered with universities to teach what we’ve learned, and shared our research from national and international stages. With executive coaching and consulting we’ve applied our mix of innovation and best practices in real-world settings.
Our purpose-driven sectors need spaces where bold ideas are tested, where new ways of leading are designed, and where leaders are inoculated with the mental toughness, emotional stamina, and skills to pull hopeful futures into reality.
Our Leadership Lab is that space.
Work With Us
At Soil and Shadow, we help leaders and teams cultivate connection, adaptability and renewal through coaching, facilitation, and professional development training designed to regenerate workplaces from the inside out. Just as healthy ecosystems rely on biodiversity and symbiotic relationships, resilient organizations depend on trust, clear communication, and structures that nourish their people. Whether we’re facilitating executive teams through connective conflict, supporting women leaders in executive coaching sessions, training teams on feedback and implicit bias or embedding regenerative practices through fractional People Operations and HR services, our work is rooted in one truth: thriving workplaces, like thriving landscapes, don’t happen by accident—they are intentionally cultivated.
Engage and Learn
Ritual, Rigor, and Rest
The world is changing at breakneck speed, and those of us leading movements for environmental justice, food sovereignty, and economic transformation are feeling the weight. We're toggling between keynote speeches and late-night caregiving, raising millions for climate action while trying to make it home for dinner, holding space for our teams while feeling stretched thin in our own lives. The old coping strategies of pushing through and compartmentalizing simply aren't working anymore.
Ritual, Rigor, and Rest was created for leaders who are ready to root more deeply and build more resilient containers for the work ahead. This transformative experience helps you develop language for what you're carrying, deepen your relationship with the parts of you that already know how to survive great change, and walk away with practical systems to hold yourself in an increasingly unstable world. You'll discover a more nuanced relationship to rest, practice remembering your own resilience, and most importantly, remember that you don't have to hold it all alone.