The Holos Story

Mark Thompson - Co-founder, Holos

Holos is an organisation that believes authentic leadership is the only superpower that will save the species. We work with leaders and organisations to achieve it. This is the story of how we got here...

The formation of Holos was not a straight line but one created from many sources and intentions that in many ways have coalesced over lifetimes. Holos is characterised by three things: its people, its clients, and its content.

The story started as all good stories do, with people.

In 2009, a group of itinerant leadership specialists were recruited by a global client to form a leadership faculty. They were a fierce bunch; independent-minded, experienced, and passionate about the power of leadership to effect change. There was something prescient about their recruitment, for in 2010 what began as a routine corporate development programme then became full-blown cultural remediation after a serious accident. For the five years following, across six out of seven continents, this faculty advised, assisted, and taught the officers of that company to navigate the difficult challenge of leading through steep, demanding, complex change.

Neil Crofts and I met during this work and formed a friendship based on their shared belief in the power of behaviour and authenticity to make this stuff stick. From Rio to Beijing, South Africa to Oslo, they observed not what separates us as peoples and cultures, but what we share as a species.

At this point, the story brings in its second characteristic: saving that species. This is no marketing jargon. Seeing the world and teaching people leadership sounds glamorous, and it is in some ways, but it is also tragic. The problems faced by people all over the world move into sharp focus, and they do not just stem from political corruption or poverty. In just 80 years or so, like it or not, big business has been key in raising our living standards as a species and generating wealth beyond most people's wildest dreams. Yet it has also created problems. The most demanding of which are now climate change, polarisation, and environmental degradation. None of these problems were inevitable; all of them are brought about through the decisions and actions of people. Authentic leadership genuinely has the power to change decisions and therefore change the trajectory of the planet.

Neil and Mark realised they saw a gap in the consulting market. This gap at its heart was, essentially, that the then accepted wisdom of 'managing change' was in fact a misnomer, and that the age of full-blown disruption was about to consume business entirely. If you were not becoming more conscious, and acting for the higher good, it was increasingly likely this would be spotted and then fined, regulated or shunned by an increasingly aware consumer base. If you were not leading change, you would be declining as a business or even going out of business. The complex skill sets required for this were - and remain - woefully inadequate in general, and the greater context was absolutely missing from leadership education.

The clients who get the best from working with Holos are the clients curious about how to bring all stakeholders sustained success in an emergent and chaotic context. By extension therefore, these are the clients willing to take on the demands of truly authentic leadership.

Holos Change was incorporated in 2014 and began work straight away using these valuable lessons, recruiting willing former colleagues to join as founding faculty.

So then arrived the third and final leg of our stool: the content. In 2018 Neil and Mark published a book entitled: 'Stealing From The Future (and how you can stop it)'. This is Holos' clarion call for leaders to take different kinds of action, and a manual on how: 

• First, examine your place in the context, using analysis of Megatrends and an understanding of how innovation actually works and impacts others. 

• Second, align your senior teams around this knowledge and principles. Develop different working approaches that separates work on change from work that maintains reliability, and allocate leadership of both according to strengths. 

• Third, develop an interdependent culture that thrives on experimentation, iteration, and collaboration, while keeping a sharp eye out for resilience factors and burnout.

Sadly, in 2021, I left Holos after, “I didn’t take my own medicine and burned out”. In 2022 June Boyle supported Neil as Co-Director and following her retirement from the role, in 2024 Angela Dellar joined the leadership team focussed on building enabling eco-systems within Holos for our sustained success as a much loved, resilient organisation that still, after over 10 years, has no offices and no employees!

Experimentation and iteration prevail in these conditions of change. Now, every one of our cherished, highly expert global faculty, and every client who has made the changes they needed, thrive as essential parts of that ecosystem. We are more than ever focused on our collective drive towards Universal Authentic Leadership.