Shifting to Ethical Systems

We have more powerful tools than ever. So why do so many leaders seem to trust their own judgement less?

In this episode of Shifting to Ethical Systems, host Esteban Fernandez Drovetta asks where intelligence actually lives in an organisation, a project, or an ecosystem. He keeps seeing the same pattern: the more we can hand the hard questions to a dashboard or a model, the less confident people are in their own thinking. He believes that is the wrong direction.

This is not an argument against technology. Esteban likes these tools, and used by people who ask the right questions and keep their own judgement, they can do a lot. The problem is substitution dressed up as progress. 

Where we stop asking our own questions because a system gives answers. Where we stop building relationships because a platform claims to manage them. Where we stop developing people because a tool promises to replace the need.

He also looks at where the money goes. Some AI valuations now exceed the economic output of entire countries, and by a wide margin the combined funding needed by the organisations working to regenerate people and planet. That is not a neutral fact. It is a choice about what we believe intelligence is, and where we think value lives.

This episode is for investors, funders, founders, and leaders weighing where their investment in people and technology should sit. It is for anyone being told the right tool will solve their hardest problems.

Key quote:

"AI without critical thinking is just faster confusion.

Psst… If you liked the episode, check out this one next: #9 Ethical Models | How Ecosystem Builders Share Power Without Losing Impact

Episode breakdown:

00:45 Where Intelligence Really Lives

Why the greatest asset in an organisation isn't technology, but the people who know how to think, question, and lead.

02:45 The Tension: Technology or Human Judgment?

How AI can amplify great thinking, but becomes dangerous when it replaces critical thinking.

05:03 Why We Keep Funding the Wrong Things

What investment conversations reveal about our bias toward platforms over people, and why community-led models are often overlooked.

07:09 AI Needs Human Judgment

Why critical thinking is the essential leadership skill in the age of AI, and why better tools cannot replace better questions.

08:59 Human Capacity Creates Lasting Resilience

Why organisations become resilient by investing in people, relationships, and judgment, not dependence on technology alone.

11:14 The Real Investment Gap

Why billions flow into technology while human capacity, community leadership, and regenerative systems remain underfunded.

12:41 Leading with Critical Thinking

How technology, investment, and ecosystem building change when leaders strengthen judgment instead of outsourcing it.

14:11 Building on the Intelligence That Already Exists

How JERICA begins every Catalyst Project by investing in local knowledge, collective intelligence, and human capability before introducing technology.

P.S. If you are weighing where your investment in people and technology should sit, or feeling the pressure to adopt AI-driven tools, we'd love to think it through with you. And if you are building an ecosystem and want human capacity as the foundation rather than an afterthought to the technology, let's talk. Visit jericaglobal.com for more information.

Credits:

Music: Under the Willow Tree by Vita Irrita, used with full permission from the artists.Podcast created with the support of Conscious Marketing Movement.

Most investors say they are patient. Far fewer have built the conditions that make patience real.

In this episode of Shifting to Ethical Systems, host Esteban Fernandez Drovetta goes past the idea of patient capital and into what it actually requires. Not as a philosophy, but as a set of conditions that either hold an investment relationship together or undermine it.

Building anything real takes time. Any company, any social enterprise, any community-rooted project. The most vulnerable years, when cash is short, the model is being tested, and the community is watching to see if you mean what you say, are exactly the years that need the most stable, least conditional support.

The trouble is that patient capital has become fashionable. It is on every investment office's website, which means it has also become something people claim without always practising. Investors say they are patient, until the second year is harder than projected, until a community process takes longer than the model assumed. So the real question isn't whether an investor calls themselves patient. It is whether the conditions of the relationship actually support patience, or erode it.

Drawing on JERICA's own position, as both investor and investee, Esteban shares three conditions that make patient capital real: respect as a structural condition, goal alignment as the investment thesis, and financial sustainability as part of the ethics rather than a compromise of them. He also tells the story of the significant investment JERICA walked away from, and what holding the conditions rather than chasing the capital built in its place.

This episode is for impact investors, funders, founders, and social enterprise leaders. Anyone who sits on either side of a funding relationship and wants it to hold when the work gets hard.

Key quote:

"Patient capital without the right conditions isn't patient capital. It's slow money with fast assumptions."

Psst… If you liked the episode, check out this one next: #14 Ethical Investing | Patient Capital vs Traditional Investing: How to Build Long-Term, Resilient Returns

Episode breakdown:

00:45 Patient Capital Beyond the Label

Why patient capital is more than waiting longer for returns, and the conditions that make it real.

03:14 The Tension: When "Patient" Investors Become Impatient

How pressure often appears during the most vulnerable years of a project, when relationships and trust need protecting most.

05:18 A Conversation That Changed Everything

Why JERICA chose to walk away from significant investment when respect for the community was missing.

08:10 Respect Is a Structural Condition

Why genuine respect shapes every investment relationship, long before contracts are signed.

10:24 Goal Alignment Beyond Shared Vision

Why aligned values are not enough. The real question is whose priorities prevail when difficult decisions arise.

12:51 Financial Sustainability Is Ethical

Why building financially viable enterprises is essential to creating lasting social and environmental impact.

15:15 Designing Better Investment Relationships

How investor behaviour, shared goals, and long-term financial planning change when patient capital becomes a set of conditions rather than a timeline.

17:42 Patient Capital in Practice

How JERICA designs Catalyst Projects around respect, goal alignment, and financial sustainability, attracting the right partners, not simply the nearest capital.

P.S. If you're building something where the conditions of investment matter as much as the amount, we'd love to talk. And if you're an investor who wants to understand what patient capital actually requires in practice, that's a conversation we're very glad to have. Visit jericaglobal.com for more information.

Credits:

Music: Under the Willow Tree by Vita Irrita, used with full permission from the artists.Podcast created with the support of Conscious Marketing Movement.

There is a version of strategy that happens in a room with the executive board, and a version that happens with everyone. Jeroen Kraaijenbrink makes the case for the second.

Jeroen Kraaijenbrink is a Dutch strategy consultant and the author of The Strategy Handbook. In this Humans at Work conversation, one of the special series episodes recorded between December 2022 and July 2025 and now sitting inside Shifting to Ethical Systems, he and host Jules Harrison-Annear work through what strategy is for.

His definition carries the argument: an organisation's unique way of sustainable value creation. Sustainable in both senses, commercially durable and within the boundaries of the planet. Put that at the core in place of competitive advantage, and the opening question becomes who this is for.

From there he goes somewhere less comfortable: flip the company a hundred and eighty degrees and treat employees as the primary customer. What is your value proposition for the people who work for you?

His first job at fifteen was carrying coffee round a bank, and what he liked was being inside the organisation without belonging to it, which is still how he consults. He stepped back from academia's publish-or-perish system on a fade in, fade out arrangement, then unlearned scientific writing to find a voice of his own.

This episode is for leaders and consultants whose strategy was written by a handful of people, and who wonder why the organisation never quite carries it.

Key quote:

"…humble leadership can still be this egocentric leadership because you want to be seen as humble so it’s still about you."

Psst… If you liked the episode, check out this one next: #18 Ethical Leadership | How Small Everyday Decisions Shape the Business You're Building

P.S. If your strategy keeps stalling between the document and the doing, it is worth asking who was in the room when it was written. Visit jericaglobal.com, or bring the question into our collaborative and advisory spaces.

Credits:

Music: Under the Willow Tree by Vita Irrita, used with full permission from the artists.Podcast created with the support of Conscious Marketing Movement.

Nina Field was asked to write a piece of strategy and had no idea what strategy was. Every experienced person she asked told her something different.

That gap became her work. Humans at Work, a special series recorded between December 2022 and July 2025 and now running inside Shifting to Ethical Systems, brings host Jules Harrison-Annear together with Nina Field, a business psychologist and former head of Navy psychology in Aotearoa.

Boiled all the way down, her definition is four words: linking actions to goals. Nothing you decide to do makes sense without one. Most people on her eight-week programme could already think this way and had no name for it, so what they leave with is confidence rather than capability.

Metacognition runs through the whole thing. Teams get stuck in what she calls the actions loop, circling should we do this or should we do that, without shifting up to the bigger picture. Jules adds the version she sees in decision-making: people walk into a decision without noticing they are in one, then treat the decision itself as the action.

A quieter story runs underneath. After a year that left her staggering towards the finish, she set two themes for the next one, balance and consolidation, and cut everything away except the programme. Then came COVID, and long COVID.

This episode is for leaders and senior specialists who keep having the same circular conversation about what to do next.

Key quote:

"You can spend all the time you like on a strategy and then something changes."

Psst… If you liked the episode, check out this one next: #1 Ethical Leadership | Leadership as Contribution, Not Control

P.S. Most of us have no slot in the week where thinking is allowed to happen, and it rarely appears on its own. Visit jericaglobal.com or book a discovery call, and we can begin with what you're trying to achieve.

Credits:

Music: Under the Willow Tree by Vita Irrita, used with full permission from the artists.Podcast created with the support of Conscious Marketing Movement.

Fear is a blunt word. Break it apart and the butterflies turn out to be partly excitement, the dread about letting someone down.

Humans at Work is a series within Shifting to Ethical Systems, drawn from conversations recorded between December 2022 and July 2025. In this one, host Jules Harrison-Annear talks with Andy Longley, a performance psychologist on the Tutukaka coast of Northland.

Andy was trained to treat objectivity as the whole of sound decision-making, and his colleagues joked about anyone who claimed to go on gut instinct. He reads it differently now. Sit with the question, notice whether it lands as a knot or as excitement, and ask again periodically to see whether it gets louder. Listen, too, for the word "should" in your answer.

Underneath sits his argument about purpose: even in an organisation with a genuinely good reason to exist, the people inside do not automatically share it.

Two weeks into a carefully chosen job at a Berlin tech company, Andy realised he no longer cared. Jules had her own version, months in the fog before a beach walk gave her this podcast.

They land somewhere useful: leaders almost never ask a team member what they felt after a difficult presentation, when a parent would go there naturally.

This episode is for leaders and mentors whose strongest performers are the ones nobody checks on.

Key quote:

"There’s not an athlete in the world or a leader or a professional person that doesn’t have self doubt and fear leading up to a performance moment. Doesn’t exist."

Psst… If you liked the episode, check out this one next: #11 Ethical Leadership | Grief Is Part of the Work: How to Feel, Think & Act with Integrity

P.S. If there's a decision in front of you and you can't quite name what you feel about it, that is worth slowing down for. Visit jericaglobal.com or bring it to a mentoring conversation where the words come first.

Credits:

Music: Under the Willow Tree by Vita Irrita, used with full permission from the artists.Podcast created with the support of Conscious Marketing Movement.

Ask a group of senior leaders to introduce themselves and you get the LinkedIn line on autopilot. Ask them to draw it and something unfiltered arrives within minutes.

Tom Cotton is a psychotherapist and executive coach in Northwest London who once directed music videos. In this Humans at Work conversation, part of the special series recorded between December 2022 and July 2025 and now inside Shifting to Ethical Systems, he talks with host Jules Harrison-Annear about masks.

His research led him to Phersu, an ancient Etruscan word for mask wearer sitting at the root of the word person. Wearing one is how any of us meets the world. Trouble starts when somebody mistakes the presentation for everything they are.

The Breakthrough Process is his answer: four intensive days up a mountain in France, where people arrive with a challenge and leave with a plan. The changes he finds most interesting are the ones nobody aimed at. One participant came to work on her ego as a leader, and months later her boss had noticed she was asking sharper questions.

Tom's own route ran through punk bands, a locked psychiatric ward, and a screenplay Working Title held for two years before judging it too weird.

This episode is for leaders whose professional self has drifted a long way from what they feel inside, and who sense the distance is getting harder to hold.

Key quote:

"…we're constantly masked because we need to be, because if you take all of that off and you reveal all the inner workings, it would be complete chaos."

Psst… If you liked the episode, check out this one next: #13 Ethical Leadership | Why Ethical Leaders Feel Lonely (And How to Find Your People)

P.S. Examining your own mask is hard to do on your own, and most of us try anyway. If you're at a transition point, visit jericaglobal.com or book a discovery call. You don't have to do this alone.

Credits:

Music: Under the Willow Tree by Vita Irrita, used with full permission from the artists.Podcast created with the support of Conscious Marketing Movement.

Marketing is part of the problem. That is Claudia Guerreiro's verdict on her own industry, and she nearly left it.

Humans at Work gathers the conversations Jules Harrison-Annear recorded between December 2022 and July 2025, now running as a special series inside Shifting to Ethical Systems. Here she sits down with Claudia Guerreiro, a Portuguese conscious marketer based in Dresden.

What stopped her was finding others who felt the same discomfort: the two-spots-left countdowns, the fear of missing out, the sell that implies something is wrong with you if you don't buy. Carolyn Tate's book gave the alternative a name. She stayed, and now works organically, through storytelling and community.

Her clients are mostly women building early-stage businesses without a marketing budget, and the job is moving their digital presence from chaos to clarity: off every platform at once, onto the one place their community actually is. She measures the work by whether they stop needing her.

Both social entrepreneurs have been through burnout, and neither calls it ordinary tiredness. Claudia now builds her week around her own energy rather than a nine-to-five she argues was designed around men's testosterone levels. Her day opens with a walk by the river with Dante, then breakfast, then colouring, and work around ten.

This episode is for founders and marketers uneasy about the tactics they were taught and unsure what to put in their place.

Key quote:

"I love helping others genuinely and the less it feels like marketing, the more it’s you."

Psst… If you liked the episode, check out this one next: #27 Ethical Leadership | Rest as Resistance: Why Sustainable Leadership Requires You to Stop

P.S. If you're spread across five platforms and none of them sound like you, that is a values question before it is a marketing one. Visit jericaglobal.com or book a mentoring conversation to work out what your presence would look like on your own terms.

Credits:

Music: Under the Willow Tree by Vita Irrita, used with full permission from the artists.Podcast created with the support of Conscious Marketing Movement.

This one will land somewhere uncomfortable for a lot of us: rest as resistance. 

In this episode of Shifting to Ethical Systems, host Jules Harrison-Annear makes a case for rest that has nothing to do with productivity. 

Not rest as a hack. Not rest as strategic recovery so you can perform better next week. Rest as a genuine, non-negotiable part of ethical leadership, and as a form of resistance against the extractive systems we are trying to change.

The dominant culture of hustle, scale, and always-on is itself an extractive system. So if you are building a regenerative business and running yourself into the ground to do it, there is a real irony. You are applying the logic of the extractive system to yourself, in the service of replacing it. You cannot build regenerative systems on a depleted foundation.

Jules is honest about the tension. The problems are urgent, and the urgency is real. But burned-out leaders make worse decisions, depleted founders take shortcuts, and when we model depletion as the price of caring, we teach everyone around us that this is what leadership looks like. Through three reflections she argues that depletion is not a badge of honour, that rest has to be structural rather than occasional, and that stopping is how you actually hear yourself think.

This episode is for leaders, founders, and ecosystem builders who care deeply and have been quietly running on empty, and for anyone who knows they need to rest but doesn't feel they have earned it yet.

It connects to #20 Ethical Leadership | The Art of Saying No, since protecting your capacity starts with boundaries, and to #11 Ethical Leadership | Grief Is Part of the Work, which introduced the Feel, Think, Act framework this episode draws on.

Key quote:

“Rest isn't just recovery. It's where insight lives.”

Episode breakdown

00:45 Rest as Ethical Leadership

Why rest is not a productivity hack, but a non negotiable part of leading ethical, regenerative systems.

01:50 The Tension: Urgency vs Sustainability

Why leaders feel they cannot slow down, even when exhaustion undermines the very change they are trying to create.

03:09 Depletion Is Not Commitment

How chronic overwork narrows thinking, reduces empathy, and leads to poorer leadership decisions.

05:34 Rest Must Be Built Into the System

Why sustainable leadership requires designing work around regeneration, not treating rest as an occasional reward.

07:34 Rest Creates Better Thinking

How slowing down creates the space for reflection, creativity, and the clarity needed to make difficult decisions.

10:01 The Permission to Pause

Why many leaders, especially those carrying responsibility for others, struggle to believe they have earned rest.

11:09 Regeneration Starts With You

Why protecting your own capacity is not selfish, but an essential part of stewarding ethical systems.

12:15 Mentoring for Sustainable Leadership

How mentoring creates the space for leaders to step back, reconnect with their values, and build a way of working they can sustain for the long term.

Credits:

Music: Under the Willow Tree by Vita Irrita, used with full permission from the artists.Podcast created with the support of Conscious Marketing Movement.

When someone offers to pay for the change you're trying to make, what does that actually mean?

In this episode of Shifting to Ethical Systems, host Jules Harrison-Annear turns to one of the most quietly important skills in ethical business: reading the funding on the table. 

Money is never neutral. It comes from somewhere. It was accumulated somehow. And it arrives carrying intentions, sometimes stated, sometimes not.

The language of ethical funding has never been more widely used: impact investment, purpose-driven capital, responsible philanthropy, ESG, B Corps, and more.

Sometimes that language reflects real commitment. And sometimes it's simply rebranded extraction: the same agenda presented differently. Your job, as someone building something that actually matters, is to tell the difference.

Plus the questions JERICA asks of every opportunity: Who benefits if this succeeds? Who holds decision-making power? What can't we say if we take this?

Key quote:

"The question isn't just whether you can afford to be selective about who funds your work. It's whether you can afford not to be."

Psst… If you liked the episode, check out this one next: #14 Ethical Investing | Patient Capital vs Traditional Investing: How to Build Long-Term, Resilient Returns

Episode breakdown:

00:44 The Hidden Complexity of Ethical Funding

Why funding is never neutral and why understanding where money comes from matters.

01:31 When Ethical Language Masks Old Patterns

How the rise of impact investing and purpose-driven capital has created both genuine progress and new challenges.

02:12 The Tension: Do Good with the Money or Become Complicit?

Why ethical leaders often face difficult decisions when funding comes from imperfect sources.

03:19 Follow the Conditions, Not the Language

Why the true test of alignment lies in what funders expect, not what they say.

04:18 The Power of Unwritten Conditions

How subtle expectations can gradually influence what organisations are willing to say, challenge, or change.

05:37 The Cost of Invisible Influence

Why missions rarely disappear overnight, but can slowly become quieter over time.

06:03 Legitimacy Is Not the Same as Alignment

How reputation and credibility can create a false sense of values alignment.

07:00 Whose Success Is Being Optimised?

A critical question for understanding whether a funder's goals truly match your own.

07:47 Trust Is Built Through Behaviour, Not Credentials

Why communities often judge partnerships based on actions rather than reputation.

08:14 Transparency Changes the Relationship

How honest conversations about expectations can reveal more than extensive due diligence.

09:26 What Difficult Conversations Reveal

Why a funder's response to transparency can be one of the strongest indicators of genuine alignment.

09:58 The Personal Cost of Misaligned Funding

How managing the gap between your values and a funder's expectations creates hidden exhaustion.

10:49 Why Alignment Is Also a Sustainability Issue

How patient capital and steward ownership support long-term impact in ways misaligned funding often cannot.

11:29 Questions That Keep You Honest

The practical framework Jerica uses to evaluate funding opportunities and partnerships.

12:16 Building Trust That Lasts

Why values-led funding decisions often create deeper impact than the most attractive opportunities on paper.

13:00 Can You Afford Not to Be Selective?

A closing reflection on the long-term consequences of who funds your work.

P.S. If you're navigating a funding decision right now, trying to work out whether the money on the table is aligned, visit jericaglobal.com. That's exactly the kind of conversation our mentoring sessions are built for.

Credits:

Music: Under the Willow Tree by Vita Irrita, used with full permission from the artists.Podcast created with the support of Conscious Marketing Movement.

Two per cent in BP and Shell. One per cent in tobacco, one in weapons. Dan Sherrard-Smith found all of it in his own pension.

Host Jules Harrison-Annear meets Dan in this Humans at Work conversation, the special series recorded between December 2022 and July 2025 and now running inside Shifting to Ethical Systems. He is founder and CEO of MotherTree, based in Bratislava.

Earlier there was Good Company, a loneliness charity. The idea was invented in a meeting room and defended for eighteen months. When it did not work they gave ninety-five per cent of the funding back. Dan remembers crying on the kitchen floor, then realising the only thing bruised was his ego.

MotherTree takes its name from Suzanne Simard's finding that trees of different species feed each other: oak passes beech the nutrients it needs, and beech returns the favour. He took it as instruction: be the connector.

The company started with The Climate Challenge, his wife's idea: groups of about eight taking on thirty challenges in thirty days. Going vegan for a day and dropping single-use plastic were the straightforward part. Looking at their bank and their pension is what woke people up, and a money carbon calculator followed. It closes on Jules's point: system change starts by building somewhere better before asking anyone to leave what they depend on.

This episode is for founders and leaders in ethical business who want the money they hold, and the money they take, to match the work.

Key quote:

"Insurance is fascinating because a coal mine could have all the funding it needs to get going but if it doesn’t get the insurance, it’s not gonna happen."

Psst… If you liked the episode, check out this one next: #2 Ethical Investment | When Finance Serves Life: Impact Investing

P.S. If you have never looked at where your pension or banking sits, that is an afternoon well spent. Visit jericaglobal.com, or bring what you find to a discovery call and decide what to move first.

Credits:

Music: Under the Willow Tree by Vita Irrita, used with full permission from the artists.Podcast created with the support of Conscious Marketing Movement.