It was eight in the morning on a sharp Wednesday in northern Scotland. Robin Alfred walked into the conference auditorium an hour early, as he always does, to prepare the space before four hundred people arrived. The previous evening, he and his co-facilitator had covered an entire wall with Post-It notes, each one carrying a time, a venue, a topic. A full day of Open Space sessions, meticulously arranged. A plan that worked.
Except someone had been there before him.
Every Post-It had been moved. Not scattered. Deliberately repositioned. Whoever had done it had taken the entire day’s agenda and used it to spell three enormous words across the wall: WE DON’T KNOW.
Robin stood in the empty auditorium and looked at it. He was not outraged. He was not scrambling for a fix. He felt something closer to curiosity, and underneath that, a recognition he had spent thirty years learning to trust.
The Executive Who Brings Mysticism to Organisations
Robin Alfred is the Executive Director of Open Circle Consulting Ltd, a global consultancy delivering executive coaching, facilitation, and leadership development across corporate, public, and NGO sectors. While most corporate advisors arrive at a crisis with frameworks and formulas, Robin brings something the business world rarely encounters: applied mysticism. He is one of the very few people in his field able to use that word and watch the room lean in rather than shut down.
Oxford, Cambridge, and the Education That Wasn’t Enough
He arrived at Oxford in 1975 to study Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. The degree was rigorous, analytical, built for people who intended to run things. Some years later, he followed it with a Master’s in Criminology at Cambridge, a discipline that trains you to look at systems, at patterns of behavior, at what breaks down and why. By every conventional measure, Robin Alfred was prepared for a life of structured thinking and applied expertise.
What those years gave him was a foundation. What they couldn’t give him was the rest.
The rest came through decades of work that took him far outside the seminar rooms of elite universities. His long association with the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland, where he eventually became Chair of Trustees, placed him inside conversations about consciousness, collective intelligence, and the deeper forces that shape human behavior. His role as Senior Program Director at Olivier Mythodrama taught him that the most powerful truths about leadership are rarely found in a management textbook but more often encoded in the wisdom of Shakespeare, the archetypes of Carl Jung and in our embodiment of the things we talk about..
He discovered that intellectual brilliance alone cannot resolve chronic burnout, polarized teams, or the kind of entrenched conflicts that plague modern organizations. The rational mind, however sharp, has limits. The challenges facing today’s leaders require something deeper than spreadsheets and strategic frameworks. They require presence, the ability to sit with uncertainty, and access to what Robin calls “real inspiration and innovation.”
Building Fields That Transform
By the time he co-founded Open Circle Consulting Ltd in 2014, Robin had developed a practice that most consultancies would struggle to categorize. He was not offering a framework. He was offering something harder to sell and, for the right client, far more valuable: the capacity to see and sense what is actually happening in a room, not just what the agenda says should be happening.
A PwC engagement illustrates this perfectly. What appeared on paper was a standard leadership development program for HR managers across Eastern Europe. A series of three-day workshops covering negotiation skills and complex facilitation. The kind of content that fills a proposal document and satisfies a procurement process.
But Robin was doing something else entirely.
“We were building a field of care and connection between them and us and between all the participants,” he explains. “That, in itself, unblocked a lot of stuckness and released a lot of energy into the circle, which allowed for much more generative conversation, ideas, and innovation.”
Over two years, something shifted in that group. These were highly intelligent people, trained to perform and deliver. What they were less trained in was the kind of attention that allows a room to actually breathe. Robin and his team worked at that level, quietly, consistently, without announcing it as the methodology.
When the PwC managers were later asked why they had chosen to keep working with Open Circle, their answer had nothing to do with the curriculum. You are the only consultancy we’ve worked with, they said, that genuinely seems to care for each and every one of us.
That sentence, for Robin, is not a testimonial. It is a diagnosis. It tells him exactly what was missing before he arrived, and exactly what made the difference.
Today, Robin’s work centers on three interconnected areas that define his approach. First, what he calls Leading from the Future. Not forecasting or scenario planning, but noticing the difference between thinking about the future and allowing it to arise. “We are often just recycling the past into tomorrow and calling it the future,” he says. “The work is to become gardeners of space, allowing inspiration to arise and making room for the part of us that is attuned to what lies beyond the rational mind.”
Second, trauma-informed leadership at individual, collective, and even ancestral levels. Organizations call him when they see burnout that will not shift, conflicts that never resolve, or teams stuck in repeating patterns. Robin resists any temptation to apply a standard formula. “There is no one-size-fits-all answer,” he insists. “The biggest part of the art is to be fully present and awake, and allow the group field to speak to us.”
Third, the art of facilitating what he calls transformational fields. “Culture change starts with small movements,” he notes. “Opening a meeting with a moment of silence in order to allow everyone to become more present. Check-ins where people share how they are doing on a physical, emotional, mental and creative level.”
These are not soft additions to a leadership program. In Robin’s work, they are the program itself.
Back in that Scottish auditorium, his co-facilitator had been called away to a medical emergency, leaving him alone on the floor with four hundred people whose reactions split immediately. Some saw the overnight intervention as an act of leadership. Others felt it as sabotage.
Robin had no plan. He did not try to build one quickly.
“I literally had no idea what to do,” he recalls. “My brain could not simply devise a new structure or process that would meet the circumstances of the moment. I sought to stay as present as possible, grounding myself and at the same time opening to allow inspiration and insight to land in me.”
He let people speak. He called for silence when silence was needed. He brought in a poem. He held the chaos without collapsing it prematurely into order. By the end of the morning, the group had moved through something profound, and a structure for the afternoon had emerged from the group itself.
Two men approached him afterward with tears in their eyes. Not because the day had been rescued, but because something in the room had been real. “My sense was that they were moved by the presence of spirit,” Robin reflects. “Being in the presence of creation is profoundly moving.”
The Courage to Not Know
Behind the calm delivery and reflective tone, there is a hard edge to what Robin Alfred is saying to today’s leaders. If your culture has no room for not knowing, if your systems have no patience for silence, if your meetings never begin with the simple act of arriving together, you will keep reproducing the very problems you claim to want to solve.
In that Scottish auditorium, three words erased a perfect plan and revealed the deeper work of Robin Alfred’s life. Some problems do not need a better answer. They need a leader willing to sit with the question long enough for something true to arrive.
Robin Alfred is the Executive Director of Open Circle Consulting Ltd, based in Findhonr, Scotland. He works with leaders and organizations across sectors, helping them build the depth of presence and collective coherence that conventional consulting rarely reaches. To connect with Robin or learn more, visit https://www.linkedin.com/in/robinalfred/ or https://opencircle.live/
