Leading and Acting from the Heart: Governance as a Condition for Transformation
Leading and acting from the heart is not a matter of style or intention; it is a governance choice.
Systemic transformation and the structural evolution of organisations are essential conditions for enabling wellbeing, dignity and collective resilience and for addressing coherently and effectively the challenges of today and tomorrow.
If human rights, environmental law and humanitarian law are to be fully implemented rather than rhetorically affirmed, how decisions are made, power is exercised and responsibility is shared must change.
Governance is not a neutral technical layer; it shapes outcomes, behaviours, incentives and ultimately impacts on people and the planet.
For gva4HR, meaningful change requires transforming governance patterns, not merely improving programmes within unchanged structures.
Without this shift organisations risk reproducing the same logics of exclusion, rigidity, silos and domination that underpin many of the violations and systemic failures they seek to combat.
From Crisis to Civic Contribution: Seizing Windows of Opportunity
The biological, climatic, ecological, economic, energetic, environmental, existential, political and social challenges of our time are often framed as threats.
gva4HR approaches them instead as windows of opportunity: moments where institutional habits can be questioned, governance re-imagined and civic participation expanded.
When approached through inclusive and adaptive governance, these challenges can become:
- sources of civic contribution and democratic participation;
- catalysts for political evolution and social innovation;
- foundations for a culture of togetherness, care and kindness toward oneself, others and all living beings.
This perspective is directly aligned with gva4HR’s Ethical Pillar of Care & Support and its insistence that protection, implementation and wellbeing are inseparable.
gva4HR’s Purpose: Studying, Training, Protecting, Implementing
Driven by protection and implementation, gva4HR supports stakeholders and policymakers to:
- shift strategies and visions;
- adapt and scale actions responsibly;
- enrich long-term plans through ethical, evidence-based and participatory approaches.
Training is understood as a protection tool and governance as an implementation accelerator.
This reflects gva4HR’s Strategic Pillars on Training & Capacity-Building and Implementation & Localisation, grounded in the conviction that rights cannot be realised through top-down compliance alone.
Why Governance Patterns Matter
Organisational performance, engagement and wellbeing are not primarily questions of individual motivation, but of governance design. Rigid hierarchies, opaque decision-making and siloed structures often undermine accountability, learning and trust, even in organisations with strong normative mandates.
gva4HR therefore promotes dynamic, sociocracy-inspired and horizontal governance practices as credible alternatives to overly centralised and top-down models.
These approaches enable what gva4HR describes as a “culture of common entrepreneurship”: shared responsibility, collective intelligence and distributed leadership.
This orientation directly supports the Transversal Pillars of participation, inter-institutional synergies and two-way learning.
From Extractive to Regenerative Governance
Many of the structural failures observed in human rights, environmental protection and humanitarian response are not accidental.
They are the result of extractive governance patterns: systems designed to maximise short-term outputs, concentrate power, externalise costs and draw value from people, communities and ecosystems without restoring what is taken.
Extractive governance manifests through:
- excessive centralisation of decision-making;
- instrumentalisation of people and knowledge;
- burnout of staff, volunteers and communities;
- project-based engagement without long-term responsibility;
- data, legitimacy and visibility being extracted without reciprocity.
These patterns mirror the same logics that underpin environmental destruction, social inequality and structural violence. When organisations fighting injustice operate through extractive governance, they risk reproducing harm internally and externally, despite progressive mandates.
gva4HR explicitly positions itself in contrast to this logic by promoting regenerative governance.
Regenerative Governance as an Ethical and Strategic Imperative
Regenerative governance is not an abstract ideal. It is a practical approach that seeks to ensure that every action taken by an organisation restores, strengthens or sustains:
- people (wellbeing, agency, dignity);
- communities (trust, cohesion, leadership);
- institutions (legitimacy, learning capacity);
- ecosystems (care, restraint, responsibility).
In a regenerative model:
- decision-making produces capacity, rather than depleting it;
- participation builds ownership, not dependency;
- accountability enables learning, not fear;
- care and support are treated as infrastructure, not as secondary concerns.
This directly reflects gva4HR’s Ethical Pillar of Care & Support and its insistence that protection without care ultimately becomes extractive.
Governance as the Site Where Regeneration Begins
Regeneration does not start with programmes; it starts with how power is exercised.
Sociocratic and horizontal governance patterns enable regeneration because they:
- distribute authority and responsibility across Circles;
- slow down decisions just enough to integrate ethical reflection;
- value lived experience and relational knowledge alongside expertise;
- create feedback loops that prevent silent harm and cumulative exhaustion.
By contrast, top-down and opaque governance systems often accelerate extraction by:
- prioritising speed over coherence;
- rewarding visibility over substance;
- separating decision-makers from consequences.
gva4HR’s governance principles—Consent, Circles, Two-Way Link and Election without a Candidate—function as regenerative mechanisms. They ensure that decisions do not merely “work”, but that they leave people, systems and relationships stronger than before.
Regeneration, Risk and Responsibility
Regenerative governance does not eliminate risk; it redistributes and metabolises it responsibly.
By fostering safe-to-fail environments, shared responsibility and continuous evaluation, gva4HR ensures that:
- risk-taking does not become reckless extraction;
- experimentation does not shift costs onto the most vulnerable;
- innovation is accompanied by ethical containment and care.
This is particularly critical in human rights and humanitarian contexts, where communities are too often treated as sites of intervention rather than partners in regeneration.
Why This Distinction Matters
The choice between extractive and regenerative governance is not symbolic. It determines whether organisations:
- exhaust the very people they rely on,
- replicate colonial or managerial patterns under progressive language,
- or contribute to long-term resilience and systemic transformation.
For gva4HR, changing governance patterns is a precondition for changing the world. Regenerative governance is the means by which struggles for justice do not consume those who carry them and by which protection, implementation and care become mutually reinforcing rather than mutually draining.
Governance Rooted in Ethics
gva4HR’s governance approach is grounded in:
- non-violent communication and tolerance;
- affirmative consent and social justice;
- mutual trust and accountability;
- solidarity, support, diversity and inclusion.
These are not abstract values; they are operational principles shaping how decisions are made, conflicts are addressed and power is exercised.
The governance model is articulated around four foundational principles:
- Consent – decisions are taken in the absence of reasoned and relevant objections, ensuring legitimacy without paralysis.
- Circles – organisational structures aligned with functions, enabling autonomy, responsibility and coherence.
- Two-Way Link – double representation between circles to ensure information flow, accountability and integration.
- Election Without a Candidate – role allocation based on collective discernment, legitimacy and consent rather than competition.
Together, these principles increase agility, learning capacity and responsible risk-taking in environments that are traditionally risk-averse.
Leading by Example: Culture as Infrastructure
gva4HR considers leadership behaviour as a form of governance infrastructure.
- Leading from the heart is recognised as a strength, not a vulnerability.
- Sharing experiences of mistakes and setbacks is encouraged as a source of institutional learning.
- Individual and collective responsibility are cultivated to enable long-term impact for people, the planet and future generations.
This approach directly supports a safe-to-fail, learn-fast culture, where experimentation is understood as a prerequisite for innovation rather than a deviation from seriousness.
Learning, Evaluation and the “Grey Zones”
Continuous evaluation is welcomed as a tool for improvement, not control. gva4HR develops short, agile feedback mechanisms to:
- ensure factual, critical and constructive learning;
- strengthen coherence across Circles;
- accelerate adaptive responses.
Recognising that organisations often become siloed, gva4HR deliberately works in the “grey zones” between structures, facilitating dialogue, cooperation and cross-sectoral learning. This bridging function is essential to systemic change and aligns with gva4HR’s role as an inter-institutional connector.
Patterns, Not Blueprints
gva4HR adopts a pattern-based approach to organisational change. Patterns are modular, adaptable practices discovered through real-world collaboration and problem-solving. They are not imposed models, but evolving responses to recurring challenges.
Key pattern domains include:
- sense-making and decision-making;
- evolving organisations;
- peer development;
- enablers of co-creation;
- building resilient institutions.
This approach reflects the understanding that when habitual ways of operating fail to deliver intended outcomes, governance itself must evolve.
Why This Matters
If organisations fighting injustice, inequality and exclusion do not transform their own governance patterns, they risk replicating the very dynamics they oppose. For gva4HR, changing governance is therefore not an internal reform exercise; it is a political, ethical and strategic necessity.
Transforming governance is a condition for transforming reality.