When the System Fails – What Horses Know That Leadership Models Don't
- 5 days ago
- 7 min read
Danielle McKinon, Founder of Eat Sleep Ride, a rural-based charity in Scotland, and a certified Equine Leadership Coach. Part of the global TeachingHorse network, Danielle applies the Diamond Model of Shared Leadership to help individuals and teams lead with confidence through uncertainty.
I want to start with something I keep seeing, and I think a lot of people reading this will recognize it. People are shutting down. Not dramatically, not in ways that show up on a wellbeing survey. Just quietly going through the motions. Doing the job. Keeping the lid on, and at the same time, panic at the top, reactive decisions, reactive communications, reactive everything. Underneath both of those things, ordinary people, young people, families, communities looking for something real to hold onto.
I see it every week. I work with vulnerable young people in rural Scotland, and I run equine leadership programs for teams and organizations through Herd Dynamics. The gap between what people are presenting and what they're actually carrying has never felt wider to me than it does right now.
I keep coming back to the same question, what do we actually do, as leaders, when the system we're supposed to be operating within has stopped working?
The framework problem
Most leadership development assumes a functioning system underneath you. Models for conflict, models for decision making, competency frameworks, 360 reviews. All of it is built on the quiet assumption that the scaffolding holds. But what happens when it doesn't?
I'm not talking about a difficult quarter or a team that needs restructuring. I'm talking about real system failure, the kind a lot of leaders in education, social care, community organizations, and the charity sector are living in right now. Funding that disappears overnight. Teams stretched past their limits. Communities in crisis, and leaders trained to pull levers that no longer exist.
In those moments, external frameworks don't just become less useful. They fail entirely. What's left is the leader themselves, and what that leader carries in their body, their nervous system state, their capacity to stay regulated under pressure, becomes the most important leadership variable there is. Horses have known this for a long time.
What happened with Krista
Recently, I got a message from a client who had been coming for riding lessons. She had injured her back, a disc problem, the kind that had put her out of work for months before, and she couldn't ride. She wasn't sure when she'd be able to come back.
But here's what she wrote, "Would you consider doing a lesson with me doing groundwork and just generally helping me understand how to connect and communicate? I'd be gutted if I didn't come back for months."
It stopped me, because what she was asking for wasn't really a lesson. It was connection. It was, don't let me lose this. She went on to say that spending time connecting with the horses would be phenomenal, that getting more in tune, with my help, would be really special.
She had come in as a rider and discovered something she hadn't expected to find, a quality of being genuinely present and responded to, without pretense, without performance, and when that was threatened, her instinct wasn't to find a replacement activity. It was to protect the relationship itself.
That response is not unusual. In fact, it's one of the most common things I see. Because we are in a moment right now where people are hungry for something real. It's not toilet roll this time. People aren't panic buying in supermarkets, they're panic buying certainty, connection, the felt sense that someone, or something, is regulated enough to be trusted. That's the leadership need of the moment.
The horse doesn't lie
Here's what I've learned over years of working at the intersection of horses and human development. Horses don't follow the most senior member of the herd. They follow the most regulated one. Not the loudest. Not the most assertive. The one whose nervous system is signaling, I'm safe, and you're safe with me. That's who the herd moves toward.
They read it in the body, not the story. You cannot perform calm to a horse. You can walk in with your best professional composure, shoulders back, voice steady, everything managed, and the horse will feel what's underneath. The tight breath. The braced muscles. The body that is coping rather than grounded. It will respond to that truth, not the version you're presenting.
I've watched highly experienced, senior leaders come into a session and struggle to get a horse to take even a few steps toward them. Not because they lacked confidence or skill, but because underneath the projection they were running on adrenaline. I've watched people who had no idea what they were doing, genuinely uncertain, genuinely open, and the horse just turned toward them. Stayed. The connection landed.
The horse becomes a mirror, and the mirror doesn't lie. This is why Krista's instinct was right. The horse had given her something her other environments hadn't, real feedback, real presence, real co regulation. You don't forget what that feels like once you've felt it.
The science underneath it
This isn't mystical, it's neurobiological. Dr Stephen Porges's polyvagal theory describes how the autonomic nervous system operates in three primary states. The ventral vagal state, where we're safe, connected, regulated. The sympathetic state, activated, braced, in fight or flight. The dorsal vagal state, shut down, disconnected, going through the motions.
We think best, relate best, and lead best from that first state. From there, we can hold complexity, stay present with people who are struggling, and make decisions that aren't just reactions to threat.
When systems around us fail, and our nervous systems respond accordingly, we shift into the other two states. We become reactive, controlling, avoidant, or numb. We make worse decisions. We rupture relationships. We lose access to exactly the qualities that leading through crisis actually requires.
The thing that matters most right now, regulated leaders co regulate others. Not by performing calm, but by actually being it. A dysregulated leader in a room full of stressed people makes the stress worse. A regulated one creates the conditions for others to come back to themselves. That's what the herd does. That's what we see every day with the horses.
The girl who wouldn't be quiet
There's a young person I've been working with recently who I keep thinking about when I consider what regulation actually looks like when it shifts.
She came to us already confident with horses and in outdoor environments. That wasn't the gap. The gap was that in larger environments, school, social situations, anything with more noise and unpredictability, she couldn't regulate. Her nervous system had learned that bigger spaces weren't safe.
After a few sessions, something started to change. Nothing dramatic. It was in how she held her body, less braced, more open. She started chatting. Asking how we were. Making easy, natural conversation that had simply not been available to her before.
Her family noticed. They started commenting on her confidence, and what they kept saying was, she won't be quiet. Not in an exasperated way, in a delighted way. Something had come unstuck, and the real version of her was taking up space.
There's still work to do, there always is. But what happened in those sessions was that her nervous system got to rehearse safety. In the presence of a regulated animal, in an environment that didn't demand performance, her body learned what it felt like to be okay, and that travelled with her.
That's what good leadership can do too. It doesn't fix the broken system. It creates the conditions inside which people can find their footing again.
Self regulation is not a soft skill
I want to push back gently on the way self regulation gets talked about in leadership circles, usually tucked under "wellbeing" or treated as a personal responsibility, separate from "real" leadership work. It isn't separate. In conditions of system failure, it is the work.
A few things I know to be true from practice:
Body awareness is the starting point, not mindset. Most leadership development targets thinking. But regulation is a somatic skill. It lives in the body. The first practice is noticing, where am I holding tension? What is my breath doing? Am I braced for the next thing to go wrong? This isn't navel gazing. It's information.
The situation and your state are not the same thing. The system may genuinely be in crisis. That's real. But your nervous system's response to that crisis is a variable. Developing the gap between stimulus and reaction, naming "this is difficult, and I notice I'm moving into threat response," is one of the most practical leadership tools there is.
Co regulation requires investment. Leaders in failing or high pressure systems need people and spaces where they can genuinely come back to themselves. Not to be advised or problem solved, but to be in the presence of regulated others. Supervision, trusted peers, time in nature, time with animals. These are not luxuries. They are infrastructure.
Finally, the people you lead can feel the difference. They may not have the language for it, but they know, in their bodies, whether the person at the front of the room is actually okay or just performing okay. Just like Krista knew. Just like the horses know.
Shared leadership is a nervous system practice
Shared leadership, at its best, is not a structure or a model. It's a culture of mutual regulation, where people feel safe enough to lead from wherever they are, and trusted enough to pass leadership across without ego or anxiety.
That culture cannot be mandated. It can't be built by policy or framework. It grows outward from the nervous system, from leaders who have done enough inner work to stay grounded when the ground disappears.
The herd doesn't elect a leader. It gravitates toward whoever is most regulated, and when that horse moves, the others follow, not because they've been told to, but because something in them recognizes safety and leans toward it.
We're in a moment of genuine global instability. People are looking for that signal. The question for leaders isn't whether to have a strategy for it. It's whether you're doing the inner work that makes you someone worth following when the frameworks have failed. Horses have been asking that question for fifty million years. Now might be the time to answer it.
Read more from Danielle McKinnon
Danielle McKinnon, Equine Leadership Facilitator/ Social Entrepreneur
Danielle McKinnon is the founder of Eat Sleep Ride | Rural-Based Charity in Scotland, a rural charity using horses, nature, and coaching to support disadvantaged and neurodiverse young people. She is a qualified equine-facilitated learning practitioner, coach, and licensed facilitator of shared leadership, working locally and globally to build brave spaces for change. Her work is rooted in lived experience, community care, and the wisdom of the herd.
To explore Danielle's leadership programmes, visit the Leadership at Eat Sleep Ride page at Herd Dynamics | Equine Leadership and Personal Development these programs support Eat Sleep Ride.
