Indigenous Communities and Their Teachings About the One Thing Education and Leadership Cannot Afford to Lose

Blanka Pawlak

A few years ago I sat inside a sweat lodge for the first time not knowing what to expect.

It was dark, boiling hot everywhere but at the same time weirdly honest. In a blink of an eye I felt that everyone was equal - there were no titles, no credentials and certainly no hierarchy of academic expertise. Just people breathing the same difficult air  and responsible for each other's presence and safety.

I didn't understand what I had experienced until much later.

Community is not a feature. It is the infrastructure.

Education and leadership both love the word community. We build it into platforms, branding, and walk with it as our mission statements. We describe it as a benefit - something offered alongside courses, credentials, and content. 

Indigenous communities don't describe community that way. They do not offer it. They are it. Community is not a product of their learning but the condition that makes learning possible at all.

Year by year as my path crossed with many educators, leaders, and indigenous teachers it combined the reasoning which captures something I have not thought before: when knowledge lives inside individuals, it becomes property. Too often it can be hoarded, hierarchied, monetised, and maybe even lost. When it lives inside a community, being passed through stories, moments, ceremonies, dialogue, or shared experiences it becomes something else.

Resilient. Like old-growth forest after the fire. The trees that burn are not the end of the story, because the roots beneath them hold. A single educator's knowledge, lost, is simply lost. Knowledge woven into a community endures and can be carried forward by others, remembered differently, and kept alive in the retelling. 

Nourishing. A river does not lose itself by feeding the land it moves through. It keeps moving, and everything it touches grows. Every story shared inside a community works the same way. It does not diminish the teller. It multiplies and becomes someone else's permission to speak, or a framework for understanding. It can transform into someone’s courage to try. The more that flows, the more there is.

Transferable. Not portable but transferable. And there is a difference as portable means picked up and moved like cargo. Transferable on the other hand means it lands somewhere new, reads the conditions of that soil, and grows into something adapted to its context.

What you learned in your classroom or boardroom in London or Delhi or Toronto does not arrive unchanged in someone else's practice. It arrives as a possibility and becomes theirs. That is not a loss of the original but is the original fulfilling its purpose - the cycle.

Three things I learned from sitting in the circle

Elders often speak last. In many indigenous council traditions, the most experienced voices wait. They listen first, being fully present and not preparing any response, and only then speak. Not because their knowledge is less valuable - they know instinctively that without listening, even the deepest wisdom is just authority filling the silence.

How often do we design professional communities the other way around?

Knowledge is relational, not individual. What someone knows is inseparable from where they learned it, who taught them, and who they carry it forward to. There is no isolated expertise. There is only expertise in relation. The moment we forget this, we build systems that reward individual performance and quietly starve collective intelligence.

The circle has no head. Every voice belongs here - not equally weighted in every moment, but equally welcomed. Always. And that is the whole point.

The uncomfortable truth most communities avoid

Here is what too many professional communities, both in education and in business quietly avoid: they validate themselves. They ask trainers whether the training worked and participants whether they felt inspired. Might look effective at first.  However, too often they measure growth by the people least likely to see it clearly - the ones who designed the experience, or the ones still inside it.

The circle breaks this loop as accountability is distributed, continuously. You cannot hide your stagnation from people who have sat with you through it. And surely you cannot perform growth in a community that knows you. The evidence supports this: collective reflection - not just individual reflection, but shared, relational, and community-held reflection - produces measurable gains in commitment, wellbeing, and performance. It can look like a romantic idea but it is not. It is a structural correction to a system that has been failing educators and leaders for decades - rewarding individual performance while starving the collective intelligence that makes any of it sustainable.

What this means for educators and leaders

Look through the lens of the indigenous inner circle for a moment. Your experience in the classroom is knowledge. Your moment of doubt before a difficult conversation with a learner or an employee is knowledge. The decision you made that did not work, and what you did next - that is knowledge too. Not despite its imperfection but because of it.

The same is true for you, dear leader. The failure you navigated or the room you read wrong (which happened to all of us). Or the team you almost lost but somehow you didn't. These are not footnotes to your professional story but are what the circle needs.

Every story matters. And one is none. A few years ago it became one of my favorite statements.  

It might feel like a motivational phrase or a structural truth. However a single voice, in whatever manner brilliant, or hard-won, remains fragile in isolation. It can be ignored, forgotten, or simply never reach the person who needed it most. Yet stories in relation, ones that answer and challenge each other, stories that simultaneously build on each other like Lego bricks - those become something a community can actually stand on.

Every school leader navigating change, trainers refining their practice or early-career teacher finding their footing - each carries something the circle needs. It is the same for the leader choosing between the familiar and the necessary, or the frightening unknown. The circle needs it all and not when they have figured it all out. Right now, exactly as they are. With people who embody these.

Future leaders step into a world that no single framework can explain, moreover no single culture can navigate alone. The most rigorous leadership research now identifies self-reflection as a core competency for navigating exactly this - not a personality trait some people happen to have, but a skill that can be built, practised, reflected on and deepened in community with others. The circle teaches them something no competency model does: that leadership is not a position you occupy - it is rather a quality of attention you bring to others. From indigenous wisdom, they learn to listen before they speak, to hold competing perspectives without collapsing into one, and to lead without dominating the space.

Strength is not about having the answer but about creating the conditions where the right answer can emerge from the people in the room.

In a world shaped by complexity, plurality, and systems that are quietly failing, these are not soft skills. They are essential survival skills. And they have been practised and passed down in circles for longer than any leadership programme has ever existed.

Most leaders avoid this. I do not believe because they show lack of care but because looking honestly at what you did might be uncomfortable. Research confirms it: many senior leaders believe reflecting on past actions is a waste of time, and many actively avoid self-analysis because it surfaces emotions they would rather not sit with. The paper trail of our assumptions is not always flattering. Harvard Business School study found that even a few minutes of daily reflection is enough to improve performance. It does not have to convert into a retreat, or 5 days workshop - it can simply be an honest looking back at the end of the day. The circle has always known this and the data is finally catching up.

My advice to young aspiring leaders is simple, and it begins before any course, any credential or framework. Practice the deliberate kind of observation. Every day. Notice what is happening in the room before you decide what it means. Build the habit of reflection: not a journal exercise you do once a month, but a daily discipline of asking yourself what you saw, what you assumed, and what you might have missed. Ask questions - more than feels appropriate, and long after you believe you already know the answer. Especially then. Think about your own thinking and form a habit out of it, your unique ecosystem. Catch yourself mid-assumption and step outside your own reasoning. Ask whether the lens you are using is the right one for what you are actually looking at. These are not skills you develop alone. You slowly build such dispositions, whether in circles, in conversation, or in the honest company of people who will tell you what you could not see on your own.

Where we are going - together

This is not a destination but a cycle.

You arrive with your story then find someone else's story that shifts something in you. Next you grow and in growing, you contribute something new to the circle. That contribution reaches an educator or a leader on the other side of the world sitting with exactly the question your experience can answer. They move forward, so do you. What is more - the circle turns.

This is not a metaphor for what we hope to become. It is a description of how learning and leadership have always worked at their best - not as a pipeline from expert to novice, but as a living ecosystem where inspiration flows in every direction. Where belonging is not earned through qualifications but through simply showing up, and no meaningful voice goes unheard.

We desperately need an honest place to grow. The one that sees and recognizes. And a place to belong.

So come as you are and bring what you know. The circle is already turning.

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VOC - Voices of Change and Rononiti Eclectic Leadership Design Lab & Advisory share a common belief: that the most powerful professional growth happens not inside one’s fortresses of expertise, but at the intersections - where educators and leaders from different contexts, cultures, and disciplines meet, listen, and build something neither could build alone.

Connect with Blanka Pawlak

• For English Sake Founder & CEO

• Voices Of Change Co-Founder

• Educast International Academic Consultant & Events Coordinator