Nicholas Janni & Amy Elizabeth Fox: What Comes After Human-Centric Leadership

Nicholas Janni and Amy Elizabeth Fox, authors of Leading in Chaos, explain why human-centric leadership has hit its ceiling, and what comes next.

For fifteen years, leadership development meant one thing: build emotional intelligence, train empathy, create psychological safety. It worked, until it didn't. Some of the most self-aware, emotionally intelligent leaders on the planet are still freezing under pressure, still overcorrecting in a crisis, still making the wrong call. Not because they lack empathy. Because empathy was never the missing piece.

Nicholas Janni has spent over 25 years advising CEOs and senior leadership teams worldwide and teaching at top business schools, including IMD. His book Leader as Healer won UK Business Book of the Year. Amy Elizabeth Fox is Co-founder and CEO of Mobius Executive Leadership, and has spent two decades running trauma-informed, transformational leadership programs for Fortune 500 executives and professional services firms. Together they wrote Leading in Chaos, their account of what leadership requires in a world stuck in permanent crisis.

📖 About the book Leading in Chaos:

Portals to a New Future argues that today's polycrisis, institutional fragility, and sustained uncertainty demand more than better tools or best practice. Janni and Fox call it next practice: a shift from control to coherence, from speed to presence, and from purely cognitive leadership to a wider, embodied intelligence. Drawing on decades of work with senior teams, the book blends vertical development and trauma-informed practice into a practical case for how leaders can regulate themselves well enough to lead clearly through chaos.

In this conversation, Ivan Palomino asks them to define what actually comes after human-centric leadership: a deeper form of consciousness built on vertical development, trauma-informed leadership, and nervous system regulation, not just more empathy training.

In this episode:

Why fifteen years of emotional intelligence training plateaued, and what CHROs got wrong measuring its impact

The real difference between a leader who is calm because they are regulated, and one who is only suppressing panic

Why the average person spends just 5 percent of their day in a state of flow, and what that reveals about modern workplace culture

What vertical development and trauma-informed leadership actually look like in practice, without a single hour on a therapist's couch

How hyperarousal and hypoarousal quietly hijack a team's best decisions under pressure