Author: MN.VENIS

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Collaboration and trust

This morning I came across below quote:

We have become “prisoners of reason” […] trapped in a world where optimal strategy and cutthroat competition have crowded out cooperation and trust.

  • Prof. Sonja Amadae
Photo by Pixabay

It stayed with me because it mirrors something I see very clearly in Mauritius. We often justify our business behaviours with one simple sentence: “Mauritius is small.” And it’s true. The market is small, competition is real and not every business survives.

But from these facts, we seem to have drawn a deeper conclusion: that distrust is the safest strategy. Don’t talk too much about your plans, don’t share your contacts, don’t collaborate too openly. Someone might take your idea and run with it!

Over time, this has created an invisible ceiling. Not just on individual businesses, but on the entire economy. Because distrust is not neutral; it slows innovation, it increases costs, it keeps everyone smaller than they could be.

So what if the real issue is not market size, but the game we’ve decided to play?
We tend to see collaboration as: “Let’s share the pie.” Which, in a small market, feels dangerous. But what if collaboration actually meant: “We never baked a big enough pie because we’re baking alone.”

There are already examples of efficiency-driven collaboration in Mauritius. Oil companies co-chartering a fuel vessel because their individual volumes are too small. Export platforms exist. Industry associations represent common interests.
These forms of collaboration are real and useful. But they are mostly defensive or efficiency-driven. They protect existing markets or reduce costs.

What we see much less of is generative collaboration. The kind that creates new value, new capabilities, and new markets.

A form of generative collaboration that interests me deeply is the idea of pre-competitive knowledge. It is the idea behind something we are experimenting with locally through Food Heroes Moris.

Small sustainable farmers come together to:

  • Share soil practices
  • Exchange supplier contacts
  • Discuss pest solutions
  • Learn from each other’s mistakes.

We still sell our own products. We still have our own customers. We still compete in certain ways.
But we refuse to compete on knowledge that would make all of us stronger.
Because if one farm fails, the whole movement weakens. And if all farms improve, the market itself expands.

In conclusion, perhaps the biggest scarcity in small economies is not capital, nor land or even market size. It is trust.

When trust is low:

  • Everyone hoards information
  • Efforts are duplicated
  • Costs rise
  • Innovation slows

Maybe the true scarcity we face is not in our markets, but in our willingness to trust one another enough to grow them. Together.

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The Uncomfortable Truth

“Our addiction to comfort slowly erodes our capacity to grow, adapt, and thrive.”

— Inspired by Paul Taylor’s book – Death by Comfort
Photo by Cottonbro Studio

Comfort looks innocent. It feels deserved. Yet it may be one of the most powerful forces quietly undermining our values, our leadership, and our ability to build regenerative systems.

Most of us don’t walk away from what we believe in because we stop caring.
We walk away when living those values starts to cost us time, effort, patience or ease.

We see this dynamic clearly in the success of business models built entirely around convenience. Cheap. Fast. Effortless. They thrive not because people are unethical, but because comfort has been engineered, marketed, and normalised as the ultimate value proposition.

For years, entrepreneurs were told that “good business” means removing every possible friction for the customer. And we succeeded; perhaps too well. We have created markets where ease is rewarded more than ethics, speed more than substance, and price more than impact. Caring now requires effort, and effort has become the one thing our systems are designed to avoid.

This logic doesn’t stop with consumers. It seeps into leadership decisions, supply chains, governance models, and strategy choices.

In leadership and business, comfort rarely shows up as a conscious choice. It hides behind words like efficiency, convenience, and making things easier. It often sounds reasonable:

  • “We don’t have time for this right now.”
  • “The market isn’t ready.”
  • “Let’s not overcomplicate things.”
  • “We need quick wins.”

None of these are wrong on their own. But together, over time, they form an invisible operating system. It subtly prioritises ease over alignment, and short-term relief over long-term value.

The uncomfortable truth is this: many decisions that keep organisations stuck are not driven by bad intent, but by an unexamined preference for comfort.

I believe most leaders genuinely care about sustainability, wellbeing, fairness, or long-term impact. The issue is that those values often become conditional. We support them as long as they:

  • don’t slow us down,
  • don’t disrupt existing models,
  • don’t introduce friction,
  • don’t require us to sit with uncertainty or resistance.

The moment they do, we postpone, soften, or reframe them into something more manageable. Not because we don’t believe, but because full alignment asks more of us than we are willing to face.

Regenerative change — in organisations, food systems, or economies — inevitably introduces friction. It asks leaders to:

  • hold complexity instead of simplifying it away,
  • resist short-term incentives,
  • stay present when outcomes are uncertain,
  • engage with interests that don’t neatly align.

This is where comfort quietly becomes a liability, because meaningful change rarely happens in its presence. What we often call “resistance to change” is, at its core, resistance to discomfort.

Perhaps the real leadership challenge of our time is not a lack of vision or ambition, but an honest look at the role comfort plays in our decisions. Because the moment comfort consistently outweighs conviction, values slowly turn into slogans, and transformation remains just out of reach.

So here’s a question worth asking:
Where, in your leadership or organisation, are decisions shaped more by comfort than by what you truly believe matters, and what might change if you chose alignment even when it’s uncomfortable?

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Why the future of food depends on the future of leadership

“Our food system will not regenerate unless the people within it do.”

Nathalie Venis-Randabel
Photo from World Health Day campaign (source unknown)

At first glance, farming and inner development seem worlds apart.
Farming is physical, practical, rooted in soil and seasons.
Inner development is mental and emotional, rooted in awareness and mindsets.

Yet the irony is this: our food system will not regenerate unless the people within it do.

We already know that conventional agriculture contributes significantly to climate change. We also know that nutritional value is declining, and food security is becoming a growing concern. Globally, Mauritius included.
Natural farming (regenerative agriculture, agroforestry, permaculture) offers proven solutions. But in Mauritius these practices remain confined to small pockets of land, small communities, and small-scale farmers.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth:
We will not fix food security or soil health through techniques alone.
We need different farmers — and different leaders shaping the system around them.

Because even if we doubled the number of regenerative farmers tomorrow, the food system would still struggle. Why?

  • the farming population is aging
  • new farmers lack mentorship, capital, and training
  • consumers lack awareness and resist price shifts
  • institutions default to short-term planning
  • policymaking is fragmented and reactive
  • the entire supply chain is designed for volume, not nutrient density

Food systems are not agricultural problems.
They are human systems and human systems behave according to the mindsets, fears, blind spots, and values of the people inside them.

This is why complex challenges (“wicked problems”) overwhelm us.
We respond with roadmaps, committees, think tanks, five-year plans.
These feel productive, but they often tackle symptoms rather than root causes. The cycle continues at every new government mandate or annual budget exercise.

So what’s the real bottleneck?
Not a lack of knowledge.
Not a lack of technology.
Not even a lack of land.

The bottleneck is inner capacity.

  • the courage to rethink entrenched models
  • the humility to learn from nature rather than dominate it
  • the empathy to consider farmers, consumers, ecosystems together
  • the systems thinking required to see beyond silos
  • the resilience to stay committed when results take seasons, not quarters

These are exactly the capacities described in the Inner Development Goals (IDG) and they’re precisely what our food systems lack.

Inner development is not a luxury.
It is the missing ingredient in sustainable agriculture.

If we want Mauritius to move from extractive farming to conscious land stewardship, we need to cultivate not just soil health, but human capacity: farmers who think regeneratively, policymakers who understand complexity, consumers who see value beyond price, and leaders who prioritise long-term resilience over short-term optics.

The land can regenerate.
The question is: can we?

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Why the SDGs are stuck and why the IDGs might be the missing structural lever

Saying “SDGs require systems, not individuals” is like saying: 
“We need architecture, not architects.”

Nathalie Venis-Randabel
www.mannaz.com

We’re nowhere close to reaching most of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Not because we lack frameworks, funding, or commitment, but because we still underestimate the human capabilities needed to drive complex change.

A common criticism says the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) focus too much on individuals, while corporations and governments hold the real power. It sounds logical, but I think it’s also strategically flawed.

Here’s why I think the IDGs are anything but soft.

Systems don’t act; people do

Corporations and governments are not abstract machines. They’re collections of human decisions. Every policy, strategy, and investment is shaped by a person’s mindset, fears, clarity, or blind spots.

If decision-makers lack the inner capacity to navigate complexity, no SDG tool will work. No matter how well designed.

Where the SDGs fail, human capability is usually the missing link

Most SDG roadblocks trace back to psychological and relational bottlenecks:

  • Short-termism
  • Defensive leadership
  • Poor collaboration
  • Resistance to complexity
  • Fear of disruption

Exactly the areas the IDGs strengthen. The SDGs define what must change. The IDGs build the humans capable of changing it.

Strategy doesn’t fail; leaders do

History is full of brilliant policies, bold sustainability plans, and well-funded initiatives that collapsed for one reason: the people tasked with executing them couldn’t adapt, cooperate, or stay centered under pressure.

Outer transformation requires inner maturity. This is not idealism; it’s operational reality.

Change begins in people and scales through systems

Every major shift starts with someone noticing a pattern, questioning a norm, imagining a better alternative, or having the courage to push against inertia.

Systems then amplify the innovation. But the spark always begins at the individual level. IDGs develop more of those sparks and the people able to sustain them.

Without inner development, the SDGs become branding

Most organisations don’t lack sustainability goals. They lack the emotional and cognitive capacity to:

  • sit with uncomfortable truths
  • rethink entrenched models
  • collaborate across boundaries
  • balance long-term value with short-term pressure

Without IDG-oriented capacities, the SDGs risk becoming marketing narratives rather than strategic levers.

The Real Point

Saying “SDGs require systems, not individuals” is like saying: “We need architecture, not architects.”

Systems are only as effective as the humans designing, governing, and evolving them. The IDGs aren’t a soft alternative to the SDGs. They’re the inner infrastructure that makes the SDGs executable.

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Lessons from my farm you won’t find in any corporate leadership book

“Most organisations chase stability by trying to control.
Nature knows she cannot control everything. She therefore focusses on adaptation.“

Nathalie Venis-Randabel

Running a regenerative farm for the past years has taught me more about long-term value than any corporate leadership book. Here’s what nature shows us when we stop admiring it and start learning from it.

1. The power of connectivity: nothing thrives alone

On our farm, mycorrhizal networks — the underground fungal webs — connect plants, share nutrients, signal stress, and stabilise the whole system.

Corporate version:
Your organisation’s equivalent is the informal knowledge network. Not the org chart. The actual network. When leaders suppress cross-team connections or create competitive silos, they take away the system’s ability to share resources and respond early to stress.

Connectivity is not “nice culture”. It’s infrastructure.

2. Adaptation beats prediction

Rainfall used to be pretty predictable, but thanks to climate change we have witnessed erratic rainfall over the past two years. It pushed us to review our water management, redesign irrigation, add swales and retention ponds. We stopped wasting time scrutinising weather forecasts and praying for the best. We adapted before the stress accumulated.

Corporate version:
Most companies still think resilience comes from better forecasting. It doesn’t.
It comes from adaptive capacity: flexible teams, decentralised decisions, smaller experiments, faster learning loops.

The organisation that adapts quickest, wins.

3. Waste is a design flaw, not an inevitability

On the farm, nothing is “waste”. Every leftover becomes compost, feed, or mulch. The system gets richer each season because energy circulates instead of leaking.

Corporate version:
Companies leak value everywhere — talent, attention, knowledge, customer insights — and call it “cost of doing business”.

A preventable waste by closing the loops:

  • employee turnover becomes retention
  • burnout becomes redesign
  • siloed learning becomes shared capability

Every leak you ignore becomes a future crisis you fund.

4. Growth comes in seasons: push at the wrong time and you damage the system

In nature, growth is cyclical: germination, expansion, consolidation, rest. A repeating pattern where each cycle is building upon the last.
On the farm, forcing a crop to grow out of season produces weak plants and disappointing harvests.

Corporate version:
Always-on growth is a fantasy. And a costly one at it. Teams need periods of high energy and periods of consolidation to integrate learning and rebuild capacity.

If you push performance during a natural “winter”, you don’t get more output. You get extraction, which looks productive until the collapse comes.

Timing is strategy.

5. Pay attention to small signals; they predict big outcomes

On the farm, the first sign of soil fatigue appears weeks before a visible problem. Micro-signals like a slight change of leaf colour or a shift in insect patterns.

Corporate version:
The equivalent signs are subtle: strained communication, small errors, rising defensiveness, declining curiosity. Most leaders notice problems only when the KPI dashboard turns red. By then, the damage is already in motion.

Paying attention early is what makes crises preventable instead of inevitable.

Conclusion
What nature teaches better than any MBA program is simple:
Long-term value isn’t created by controlling outputs, but by cultivating the conditions.

When you optimise for the health of the system — people, relationships, core conditions, knowledge, timing — value compounds.

When you optimise for outputs alone, value eventually collapses.

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The Economy of Enough in practice

Most organisations swear by “growth”. Few ever ask the more mature question: growth towards what?

Nathalie Venis-Randabel

The Economy of Enough isn’t anti-growth. It’s anti-nonsense. It asks leaders to stop confusing more with meaningful.

Here’s what “enough” looks like in practice. Not as a slogan, but as a discipline:

1. Enough profit to stay healthy. Not so much that you sacrifice people or integrity.
If margins depend on burnout or supplier pressure, you’re not building value. You’re cannibalising it.

2. Enough productivity to deliver good work. Not so much that humans become performance dashboards.
Over-optimisation kills the creativity that generates real innovation.

3. Enough ambition to improve. Not so much that you chase shiny projects while your foundations crack.
Most “transformation failures” are root-level failures. The soil was ignored.

4. Enough speed to stay relevant. Not so much that decisions are rushed and called agility.
Most corporate crises come from fast, shallow thinking. Not slow thinking.

5. Enough data to be informed. Not so much that dashboards replace conversations.
Blind spots are overwhelmingly relational, not technical.

6. Last but not least, the argument no one wants to touch: shareholder value
The obsession with endless growth is always defended with the same line: “shareholder value”. But here’s the uncomfortable truth:

The pursuit of endless growth is now a risk multiplier, not a value creator.

Growth at all costs produces:

  • over-leveraged business models
  • fragile supply chains
  • exhausted teams
  • costly rebranding cycles of “transformation” that never transform anything

Shareholders don’t need more of that. What they actually need (though few will admit it) is capital efficiency, resilience, and longevity.

The Economy of Enough delivers all three.

It may reduce short-term dividend highs, yes. But in return, it gives shareholders something far more valuable: a business that stays alive, adaptable, and compounding over decades.

Long-term value comes from companies that endure — not those that sprint into collapse.

Sophisticated investors know this. The rest are still addicted to quarterly dopamine.

Why this matters now? Every systemic crisis we face — ecological, organisational, human — is fuelled by excess, not scarcity. The path forward isn’t about reducing ambition. It’s about redirecting it.

Enough is not mediocrity. Enough is discernment. Enough is the line between sustainable leadership and self-destructive ambition.

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When fishermen cannot go to sea, they repair nets

“When the sea is too rough to sail, the smart ones don’t wait – they get to work. They mend their nets, sharpen their tools, and prepare for the moment the storm breaks. Because even in stillness, there’s progress. It’s not about sitting idle; it’s about building what’s next.”

[source unknown]
Photo by Simone Dinoia on Unsplash

Our world is in turmoil. Profit and self-centred interest have taken the front seat while our humanity is pushed into the back seat. A time of increased polarization, creating a tense atmosphere that presents only two sides: us versus them, black and white, good and evil. 

This climate is the perfect breeding ground for a phenomenon like Trumpism whose ideology appears to be taking the world by storm. A situation that, to many, feels overwhelming, frustrating, and even frightening. 

In such situation, some feel compelled to confront the storm by becoming keyboard warriors, passionately proclaiming their version of the “truth” to the opposing side, firmly believing that their perspective is the only legitimate one. Others choose to shut themselves off by simply closing their eyes.

But there is a third option: the one of coming together, listening, showing empathy, and striving to understand the root of the anger and frustration that leads to polarization or, even worse, radicalization. In other words: mending nets, sharpening tools, and preparing for the moment when the storm breaks.

I find great solace (and joy!) in meeting up on a monthly basis with a group of people to playfully engage with the Inner Development Goals (IDG). The IDG framework consists of 5 dimensions and 23 skills of human inner growth to catalyse outer change. The 5 dimensions are Being, Thinking, Relating, Collaborating and Acting.

Recently, we delved deeply into the dimension of Relating, which was divided into three segments: 1) relating to oneself, 2) relating to those around us, and 3) relating to the wider world.

One of the exercises we participated in was quite revealing. We were asked to list at least three superheroes, whether they were real or fictional. Beneath each name, we noted the qualities or skills we admired in them. After a few minutes of reflection, came the surprising twist! We were instructed to cross out the superhero’s name and replace it with our own. Initially, seeing my name in place of those heroes felt strange. However, it made me realize that I too possess the potential to inspire and create an impact. In fact, many of the qualities I admired were traits I already had!

So, what did this exercise teach me? The qualities I admire in others are often reflections of my own. Conversely, it also implies that when I perceive “flaws” in others, I may be recognizing my own shortcomings (it takes one, to know one)!

Self-awareness is the key to transformation. When we embrace both our strengths and weaknesses, we empower ourselves to approach relationships with greater empathy and understanding, recognizing that we are all mirrors to one another. This shift in perspective not only leads to personal growth but also fosters a sense of unity, connectedness, allowing our humanity to take the front seat again.