Humaning is Waysfinding.
How we navigate life through movement, attention, and becoming
The title of this post is a reference to the work of Tim Ingold. I love how he doesn’t speak of being human as a fixed state, but of humaning (verb) as something we do through movement, attention, and becoming.
And as we “human”, we inevitably encounter the unknown: in our work, our relationships, and those identity transitions that don’t yet have language.
Most of us try to navigate this uncertainty with tools built for predictable worlds: strategic plans, best practices, step-by-step guides, and maps.
But what if the answer doesn’t lie in finding new or better maps, but in remembering how to walk without them?
The good news: we’re already doing it. Whether you’re navigating a career change, making sense of AI, parenting a teenager, or guiding your team or company through a challenging week, you’re sensing, adjusting, and moving. You’re doing what I call waysfinding.
What is Waysfinding?
Waysfinding is the practice of feeling your way forward when there’s no clear path, trusting that the route will emerge as you move. Think of it like walking through fresh snow: you’re creating the path as you go, but you’re also discovering what’s possible with each step.
“Traveller, there is no path; the path is made by walking.”
– Antonio Machado
It’s not quite how we traditionally understand wayfinding (which might suggest there’s an existing path to find) and not quite pure improvisation (which some call wayfaring). It’s something in between: a way of moving through uncertainty that combines careful attention with courageous action.¹
Waysfinding is not about shaping or controlling our environment, but about deepening into coherence and attunement to our environment and life’s unfolding rhythms.
In an era where artificial intelligence is reshaping industries overnight, climate change demands radical adaptation, and social structures are transforming at breakneck speed, honing the human capacity for waysfinding has never been more critical.
We are all Waysfinders
Waysfinding isn’t a special skill reserved for a select few. From the moment we take our first steps, we create paths through our lived experiences. This isn’t just about getting from point A to point B. It’s about how we inhabit the world through movement, how we make meaning through our engagement with life’s terrain.
Whether you’re walking your familiar route to work, following GPS directions through an unfamiliar city, or leading your team through unprecedented challenges, you’re engaged in the same fundamental human activity. Making your way through the world.
Three ways we move through the world
1. Familiar Terrain: when the path feels automatic
Think of your daily commute. You know every turn, every shortcut. It feels automatic. Your mind is free to wander.
But even here, something deeper is at work. Your body continuously reads micro-signals: the quality of morning light suggests weather changes, the rhythm of pedestrian flow indicates optimal timing, and the subtle shift in a colleague’s posture tells you they’re open to conversation today.
This is embodied waysfinding, so integrated that we forget we’re still navigating. The familiarity isn’t about the terrain being fixed but about our attunement to its rhythms becoming so refined that we can feel our way through it without conscious effort.
The danger lies in mistaking this fluency for certainty, assuming that because the path feels automatic, it will always be available.
2. Mapped Terrain: when you have external guidance
Picture yourself in a new city, relying on a map or GPS. You’re still waysfinding, but now you’re shifting between external instructions and internal sensing. You respond to what the GPS doesn’t see: a road closure, a gut feeling about a safer route, a spontaneous turn toward a beautiful view.
This is where many leaders get trapped: either rigidly following external maps while ignoring their instincts, or dismissing guidance in favour of intuition alone. Skilful waysfinding means holding both, letting external tools inform without overriding the subtle intelligence of direct experience.
Remember: the map is not the territory. And the plan is not the path.
3. Uncharted Terrain: when there are no maps
In unfamiliar territory without maps or guides, we practice what Tim Ingold calls “feeling forward”, an embodied process of paying attention to our environment that allows the path to emerge through the walking itself. This is where wisdom traditions, such as those of the Polynesians and Inuit, are true masters.
This isn’t just problem-solving in the conventional sense. It’s about developing a different kind of intelligence: one that reads the environment through movement, discovers possibilities through engagement, and finds its way by walking. We might think of this as Waysfinding intelligence.
Consider Sarah, who found herself navigating her company through the early days of lockdown in 2020. No playbook existed. No best practices. No clear path forward. Traditional leadership wisdom — gathering data, analysing options, and making decisions — proved inadequate when the terrain was uncharted and shifting daily.
Instead, Sarah learned to “feel forward.” She noticed which team members thrived in virtual environments and which struggled. She sensed when Zoom fatigue was affecting creativity before productivity metrics showed it. She felt the subtle shift in company culture as informal conversations began to disappear, and responded by creating new spaces for connection.
She wasn’t following a plan; she was creating one through movement. Each small experiment, a walking meeting, a virtual coffee session, or a different approach to check-ins revealed new possibilities. The path emerged through walking, not planning.
This is how we parent, navigate identity transitions, and manage health challenges like long COVID or chronic fatigue.
This is conscious waysfinding in action: staying present to what’s emerging, trusting your embodied intelligence alongside analytical thinking, and creating the path through engagement rather than analysis.
The body knows before the mind
Waysfinding is never purely mental; it’s embodied. Our bodies read terrain in ways our minds cannot fully articulate. We sense obstacles before we see them. We feel momentum shifts before we understand their cause. We detect changes in group energy before we can name what’s happening.
This isn’t mystical; it’s practical intelligence.² Your body processes thousands of variables simultaneously, micro-expressions, energy shifts, and environmental cues, and translates them into what we call “gut feelings” or “intuition.”
For leaders, this means learning to attune to subtle, intuitive, or embodied cues, as well as environmental patterns. “Internal” and “external” are entangled. How does a decision feel in your body? What shifts in team energy signal an emerging possibility? What emerging risk seems trivial but feels significant? These aren’t secondary considerations; they’re primary sources of navigational intelligence.
Waysfinders don’t just think their way through complexity; they feel their way through it, like crossing a river by feeling the stones.
Leading as path-making
In complexity, we’re not just navigating existing terrain; we’re creating new pathways. Our waysfinding doesn’t just get us from here to there; it creates possibilities for future movement.
This transforms how we understand leadership. Every decision, every action, every way of engaging with uncertainty creates new lines of possibility or catalyses new potential states (Bonnita Roy). Waysfinders don’t just discover opportunities; they make them.
Think about pioneering leaders in any field. They don’t just navigate existing markets or solve known problems; they create new territories of possibility. Steve Jobs didn’t just find his way to the iPhone; he created a new pathway that transformed how we relate to technology. Rosa Parks didn’t just find her way to justice; she created a new line of possibility that others could follow.
This is the profound responsibility and opportunity of conscious waysfinding. Each step we take doesn’t just move us forward; it creates the possibility for others to follow.
We never walk alone
We are never waysfinding in isolation. Our paths are entangled, woven through others’. Our decisions ripple across relationships. Waysfinding happens in webs of influence, care, constraint, and collaboration.
We tune to our surroundings. We adjust to one another. We co-create paths.
This is true in ecosystems and organisations alike. The attunement mechanism I use, STAR: Sense, Tune in, and from Awareness, Respond, isn’t just a mechanism for action; it’s a practice of attunement. Of sensing what’s alive. Of noticing the terrain, not just as it is, but as it could become.
Always already Waysfinding
We don’t need to “become” waysfinders; we already are. What we need is to remember, and to become more conscious of our waysfinding, to trust our embodied knowledge alongside our analytical tools, to remember that every step makes the path.
This isn’t about abandoning planning or embracing chaos. It’s about recognising that even our most strategic thinking is a form of waysfinding, a way of feeling forward through complexity, of discovering possibilities through engagement, of creating paths through movement.
The invitation is to become more aware of how we’re constantly waysfinding. To notice how our bodies read terrain. To trust the knowledge that emerges along the way. To recognise that leadership isn’t about having the right map but about developing the sensitivity to feel forward through uncertainty.
Why this matters
It softens the anxiety of the unknown. When we see unfamiliar territory not as a threat but as a call to awaken deeper capacities already within us, it changes the emotional texture of uncertainty. It helps us shift from fear to curiosity, from paralysis to movement.
It reminds us we’re not lost, we’re “feeling forward.” Many feel lost or behind in times of change, but we are all finding our way, making paths by walking, one small step at a time.
It calls us into agency. Knowing that we’re constantly co-creating paths, rather than waiting for them to appear, invites a more profound sense of participation and responsibility in our own lives and in the collective futures we shape.
It bridges the divide between mind and body. In a world that over-emphasises thinking and planning, we can get stuck in overthinking or decision fatigue. Waysfinding offers a liberating reminder: you can feel your way forward.
I end with a favorite poem by David Wagoner:
Lost
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
David Wagoner (1999) — From Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems. Copyright 1999 by David Wagoner. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.
Footnotes:
¹ This builds on anthropologist Tim Ingold’s concept of “wayfaring” — improvisational, responsive movement through the world where the path emerges through the very act of moving — and psychologist James Gibson’s work on affordances, the idea that we discover possibilities through engagement with our environment rather than abstract planning. Ingold reminds us that we’re engaged in “dwelling-in-movement,” continuously creating paths through the fabric of our lived experience. The “finding” in waysfinding isn’t like finding a lost object, but more like finding your voice or finding your balance, something that emerges through practice and movement.
² This aligns with what Ingold calls “embodied knowledge along the way” and what researchers refer to as “somatic intelligence.” Gibson’s key insight was that perception and action are closely coupled: we perceive opportunities for action (affordances) directly, rather than abstract properties that we then have to interpret. The Polynesians refer to “sphere intelligence”: tapping into multiple sources of information and perception, including cognitive, somatic, intuitive, cultural and spiritual
References:
· Ingold, Tim. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Routledge, 2011.
· Ingold, Tim. Lines: A Brief History. Routledge, 2007.
· Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
· Spiller, C., Barclay-Kerr, H., & Panoho, J. (2015). Wayfinding leadership: Groundbreaking wisdom for developing leaders. Auckland, NZ: Huia Publishers.
· Bonnitta Roy: https://thesideview.co/journal/complex-potential-states/
