This week, we welcome guest blogger Jax NiCarthaigh to explore what happens when we imagine our work as part of a living system.
At certain moments in life or leadership, we realise we have lost our sense of where we are. The team may still be moving forward. Your calendar may be full. Yet something inside asks: Where am I in the flow of things?
The River of Life, a commonly used facilitation tool, is one of the simplest ways I know to step back and understand where we are. It can illuminate our work, and also reveal wider patterns shaping our lives. Whenever I need to reorient myself, I return to this metaphor. Over the years, I have drawn many versions of my own river of life in my journal or on large notes I stick on my office wall. These are recognizably the same river, yet each time something changes—rapids for a rush of work, an island perhaps for a break.
The exercise itself is simple. Take a sheet of paper and draw two lines as a river flowing across the page. This represents your work or life. Add the features that feel true for you, such as headwaters, tributaries, rapids, wetlands, and long calm stretches. Include your history and your imagined (or planned) future. The drawing does not need to be artistic.
As you draw, you might add important people, events, ideas, or sources of support, like financial flows or other forms of sustenance that feed your river. Name or label each. Now step back and take a look.
Everyone’s river looks different. Everyone is at a different location on their river. Where are you in your river?
Recently, a client immediately placed herself in the delta. For her, where she was currently felt like an estuary. She had recently spent time kayaking in tidal rivers and estuaries, so the image felt completely natural.
Her drawing showed a place where currents meet and widen, where the fish are plentiful and the waters calm and warm. The connection between her river and her work was clear. Her children’s card game business, which she created to increase hope and acceptance among young people, was brimming with schools wanting to engage. Like the estuary she had drawn, it felt full of life and possibility.
Why rivers work so well
Rivers help us think in living systems, which is invaluable for leaders navigating complexity. Water moves, transforms, adapts. It may arrive as rain, rise through underground springs, or flow down from melting snow. In systems language, rivers are full of feedback loops. When rain increases, the river rises. When land is overused, the consequences travel downstream. It can flood or it can dry up, like our lives and our organizations.
When leaders draw their river, they begin to notice where energy flows easily and where it becomes blocked. They see the sources that nourish their work and the places where the current becomes stagnant.
Seeing a working life as a river
Over time, I began mapping my consulting practice as a river system. Some parts of the river became eddies—places where energy circulates for a while before moving on. Long-term clients or recurring projects often behave like this. Other parts appeared as tributaries, feeding the headwaters of the work: learning, creativity, reflection.
Then there is the downstream flow. Where does the work go once it leaves? Who benefits from it? What influence does it carry into the wider world?
When founders and businesses are different rivers
One founder realized something unexpected: she did not see herself in the same river as her business. Founders often feel deeply connected to the organizations they create, but the business itself is legally a separate entity.
I invited her to draw two rivers: first, her river of life, then the river of her business. Once both were visible, we could explore their relationship. What from her life fed the business? What flowed back from the work? Where were the currents healthy, and where were they exhausting? “Oh, the boring stuff!” she said when she included her administration as part of the river. Seeing the two systems side by side brought immediate clarity.
Rivers have their own intelligence
In some Indigenous knowledge traditions, rivers are understood as living systems that know how to find their path, even when humans attempt to redirect them. Where I study, there is a building that was erected in the path of a river. When it rains heavily, the basement floods. An Elder once told our class: “That river knows where to go, even if the humans don’t.”
Our lives and organizations may not be so different. Sometimes the most helpful step in leadership is not forcing the system in a new direction, but stepping back long enough to see where it is already trying to flow.
Reflecting on your own river
Once you’ve drawn your river, ask yourself:
- What tributaries feed my river with energy, ideas, or support?
- Where are the eddies where energy circulates for a while?
- Where does my work flow next? Who benefits downstream?
- What would make the river healthier?
Seeing our work as a river reminds us that we are part of larger systems of flow and relationship. And sometimes the simple act of drawing the river is enough to help us see the next bend.
Jax NiCarthaigh is a regenerative systems practitioner based in Australia. She is currently completing an Advanced Master of Applied Cybernetics at the Australian National University. Her work explores living systems thinking, regenerative leadership, and the relationship between humans, emerging technologies, and the wider living world.
