By Elyse Knudsen
When things are stuck and frustrating, sometimes the most efficient way to see what’s really going on and make the wisest leadership move, is embrace the unique power of non-action. Watch this video on the ancient Chinese philosophy of We-Wei for some inspiration.
Billy Afghan is the co-founder of Genii Earth, a consulting firm serving global businesses and non-profit leaders seeking to address the earth-sized challenges confronting their organizations. Billy has been designing and leading consulting engagements with enterprise-level organizations for over 30 years.
Billy is appreciated by her clients for her direct style and perceptive insights for revealing what’s not being seen or said. Billy galvanizes commitment and moves individuals and teams toward coordinated action for a common purpose. She welcomes big, bold challenges and delivers transformative outcomes for her clients and their organizations.
Billy was the managing director for the largest and most profitable region in a global consulting firm for 13 years. She assumed the role of CEO at Genii Earth in 2021, and has built a global community of dedicated and highly experienced coaches and consultants.
A Portland, Oregon native, she has traveled and worked in more than 50 countries and in many industries around the globe, including high-tech, energy, infrastructure, pharmaceutical, bio-tech, chemical, aviation and multi-stakeholder major and mega capital projects. Billy is valued for her skills in coaching executives, developing leadership capacities for cross functional teams, and enabling people-first cultures. Billy’s family is also global -- In addition to Americans, Billy’s family includes Iranians, Kenyans and Italians.
Billy graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from Western Oregon University and has a master’s degree in business administration from Portland State University. She holds certifications in Climate Change Leadership from Cornell University, the Leadership Circle Profile 360, the Enneagram Assessment and completed training at the London-based School of Coaching. Billy has served as an adjunct faculty member at Oregon State University, the University of Oregon, and the University of Texas, lecturing on leadership, organizational and project culture, and industrial ergonomic design.
Billy is committed to life-long learning for herself and for her clients. She is an avid reader of non-fiction and publishes monthly reviews on books and articles of current urgent interest in and for the world. She is also a Moth Storytelling GrandSlam Champion and can been seen telling personal stories on stage in various venues in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Billy also learns important lessons about the planet through tending to her garden.
PRACTICE FOCUS
· Executive Coaching
· Writing and Speaking
· Leadership Development
· Organizational Culture Transformation
· Design of Change Processes
Will Hewett, co-founder of Genii Earth LLC, is a creative and perceptive partner to those courageous leaders who are shifting the way business operates in the world.
Will has been a life-long observer of the subtle dimensions of human behavior and group dynamics, starting when he was a quiet middle child, always drawn to the questions “What’s really going on here?” and “What might shift what is stuck here, to awaken authenticity, creativity and flow?”
His fascination with human development led him to an innovative graduate program in leadership and whole-systems change, after which he began a decades-long path of working with leaders and teams to fundamentally shift their capacity to address their stickiest challenges and realize their greatest aspirations.
He has worked in advancing leadership capacity, safety culture and project performance with clients on five continents in Energy, Manufacturing, Construction, Engineering and Social Impact. Regardless of the industry or job title, Will works with his clients so they can become more:
Playful: Learning to sense and adapt to the complexity and dynamism of today’s working environments.
Sourceful: Knowing and continuously rekindling the source, the purpose of one’s life and work.
Skillful: Being on a continuous path of mastery in one’s chosen work.
His clients appreciate his deep listening, his insightful questions and his ability to help them reveal the heart of the matter and generate previously unseen futures.
Will is also an author, speaker and performer and brings his passion for mindful creativity and musical improvisation to his client work. His two upcoming books are A Field Guide to Breezes and As Safe as Life.
He co-founded Genii Earth following a sabbatical in Phnom Penh, Cambodia where he worked with an NGO dedicated to rekindling the joy of singing in Cambodia after the genocide there generationally silenced people’s voices.
Will is a cum laude graduate of Dartmouth College in English Literature and holds a master's degree from Antioch University in Leadership and Whole-Systems Change. In addition to English, he speaks Chinese, Spanish and a little Khmer.
Will lives in Rhode Island in the U.S. with his partner, Fae, and their dog, Cady. He can be frequently found singing, hiking, cycling and playing tennis.
PRACTICE FOCUS
• Executive Coaching
• Executive Team Development
• Leadership Development
• Organizational Culture Transformation
• Coach and Consultant Training
Genii Earth co-founder, Joseph Friedman, has dedicated his career to mastering applied transformational education – the art of enabling people to see the world in new ways so that they can think, imagine and act as never before, causing measurable step changes in performance.
For over forty years, he has applied this method in consulting and coaching individuals and organizations in Africa, the Caribbean, Japan, India, Canada and across the United States. Joseph’s work enabled his clients to develop high-integrity operations and achieve breakthroughs in communication effectiveness, executive leadership, and teamwork resulting in measurable and meaningful performance improvement.
In addition to Genii Earth, Joseph has been a founding partner in three other successful consultancies, learning first-hand the reality of the maxim, “relationship is the foundation for accomplishment”. His experiences range from advising small businesses to developing executive teams in large organizations ; from leading organizational transformation projects in the American healthcare industry to co-developing and leading an international development program for transformative global “evolutionaries.” These experiences have left him with a lasting appreciation of the remarkable results that can happen when people’s natural genius is unleashed.
In service of a thriving global community, Joseph worked for five years co-designing and then facilitating leadership development programs for the United Nations Development Program. His work enabled men and women in Africa to mobilize individuals and organizations to respond to the growing AIDS epidemic.
Returning to the consulting industry, Joseph applied his deep knowledge of Ken Wilber's Integral Approach to lead the development of a safety culture assessment for JMJ Associates, a company he had co-founded. The Integral Safety Assessment was used primarily for energy companies and their major capital projects. The design of this unique tool enabled organizations and their project leaders to assess and address both the subjective and objective elements of safety culture and performance. He also created the company’s consultant training and development function and managed a global team of consultants to deliver its programs.
Prior to his consulting career, Joseph studied and taught history at the University of California, Berkeley and in secondary schools in the San Francisco area. As a volunteer for an international leader in human development, he lead hundreds of communication and personal growth seminars. He volunteered and then served on staff for a global NGO, The Hunger Project, where he learned and practiced the arts of rigorous management, influencing without authority and transformational fundraising.
Joseph is certified in using The Leadership Circle 360 assessment and Hellinger Constellation work. He graduated cum laude from Oberlin College and holds a Masters in Arts and Candidate in Philosophy in European History from the University of California, Berkeley. He has studied many transformational and spiritual disciplines and is an associate author of The Resonance Code;: Empowering Leaders to Evolve Toward Wholeness .
Joseph is married and lives in Santa Fe, NM with his wife, Marilyn, where he is often visited by his three grown children.
PRACTICE FOCUS
• Visioning & Transitioning
• Cross-Sector Collaborations
• High-Stakes Conversations
• Cultural and Social Change
• Leadership Development
Susan Harycki is a Genii Earth co-founder with a path of mastery that includes evoking, designing, and facilitating conversations that matter. Susan enables people to articulate a desired future, act in shared purpose, and generate multi-stakeholder benefit across belief systems, languages, cultures, and organizations. She has coached, consulted, and convened conversations on four continents, as well as being a leader responsible for the development of others and the delivery of transformational business results.
Susan’s work has been one of ever-increasing significance and scale.
The foundational work in her early career included: teaching behavioral science at the secondary level, serving as program director for a 16-county health-education program, delivering life planning seminars, and being a program director for a state-wide non-profit working to strengthen families and stop child abuse. She also provided coaching and consulting to professionals, small businesses, and city government agencies. Her volunteer work included suicide prevention/crisis intervention hotlines and life skills development in Texas prisons.
It was during this formative part of her work life that she discovered in a very felt way that we are each victim and perpetrator, vulnerable and strong, problem and solution—and that we need each other to break the cycles of harm present in our society and create what’s needed in the world.
In 2005, Susan joined a global transformational consultancy and expanded her work to include development of leaders and their teams in large global organizations and major capital projects. Whether in boots or boardrooms, Susan experienced firsthand the power of conversations to bring businesses with this kind of reach into the upstream work for systems change and a world that works. The leadership capacities, cultures, and systems businesses develop enable them to deliver unprecedented business results while also changing lives and contributing to the world around them.
For Susan, like many others, the stakes have never been higher for people and our planet. The co-founding of Genii Earth in 2021 is a call for leaders across all sectors to expand the context and conversation in their places of work to include generating business results in ways that serve life and bring solutions to the Earth-sized challenges we face today. Under Susan’s leadership, Genii’s Futuring conversations enable people to get to the heart of the matter, expand their capacity to hold what appear to be competing truths or commitments, engage in shared meaning-making, gain lines of sight to highest possibilities, and give rise to collective wisdom and action.
Susan holds certifications in Executive Coaching from Corporate Coach U & Myles Downey School of Coaching, and she is a certified Leadership Circle 360 Assessments coach. Susan graduated Magna cum Laude from the University of Nebraska at Omaha with a BS degree and has completed graduate studies in organizational psychology. She has published parenting, life skills, sexuality education, and stress management curricula.
Susan lives on the shores of Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin with her husband, Dave. She delights in being in nature, stewarding the land, and sharing their home and access to the Apostle Islands National Seashore with their children, grandchildren, and friends.
PRACTICE FOCUS
· Safety Culture Transformation
· Learning Teams
· Risk Management
· Future Leaders Practice
· Project Management
As the Operations Manager, Elyse oversees the coordination of both internal projects and external client engagement to ensure the organization runs smoothly in service of Genii Earth’s mission and strategy. She manages these projects to ensure organizational attention is focused on the right things at the right time, and with the appropriate velocity given the current times. She collaborates with Genii Earth’s consulting teams, clients, and creative partners to deliver high-performance engagements on time and within budget.
Before joining Genii Earth, Elyse spent four years as the Risk Manager for Whitefish Mountain Resort in Montana. In this role, the National Ski Area Association awarded her work at the resort with the Best Overall Safety Program Award two years in a row. Specializing in building cohesive teams to prevent and mitigate high-consequence injuries, her work has been recognized in articles published by the National Ski Area Association Journal.
Prior to entering the ski industry, she spent six years working globally for Chevron as a safety professional. Her responsibilities included supporting offshore drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico, overseeing hook-up and commissioning work in Angola, Africa, and coordinating operations in Bulgaria for Chevron’s Future Growth Project in Kazakhstan. She built and led processes in incident investigation, contractor safety program management, and occupational hygiene. In recognition of her safety engagement work, Elyse received the 2018 GRIT Award from ALLY Energy.
In addition to being a Certified Safety Professional from BCSP, Elyse is also a retired professional figure skater and choreographer.
When not at home in Montana, Elyse works remotely, traveling the world with her husband, Filip, as they share the majesty of the world with their 4-year-old daughter, Ebba.
PRACTICE FOCUS
• Customer Relations
• Communications
• Market & Business Planning
“My greatest joy is building relationships and helping people and organizations find encouragement and impact. I love being a part of Genii’s purpose-driven work in the world, communicating all that is and all that can be for people and our planet.”
Laurie leads Genii’s marketing and communications. She has spent her career in business development and marketing for global professional services firms. Her work has included developing strategic growth plans, creating brand messaging, and designing sales and communications initiatives focused on the customer experience.
Developing long-term, trusted relationships with customers, partners, suppliers, and team members has been integral to her success. Over the years, she has supported global energy, construction, and manufacturing organizations, as well as mid-sized mission-driven companies seeking triple bottom-line growth – prioritizing people, planet, and profit.
Laurie also owns a small consulting firm, advising early-stage businesses. In prior roles, Laurie served as the Chief Marketing Officer for a global consulting firm, the President of a privately-held firm specializing in the turnaround of distressed organizations, and the Senior Vice President of Global Client Services at ESI International (now KornFerry), where she was responsible for client sales and operations. She began her career at AT&T as a District Manager for mid-market commercial clients in Washington, DC.
An alumna of The George Washington University, Laurie earned a Master of Business Administration in Marketing and a Master's Certificate in Project Management. She graduated from The University of the South with a Bachelor of Science in Forestry & Geology. She completed Executive Education in leadership at Yale University.
Laurie cares deeply for our global community and serves as a Board member, fundraiser, and volunteer. She is on the Board of Advisors for International Renewable Energy Systems (IRES), bringing clean energy innovation to remote communities. Laurie is also on the Board of Directors of the National Presbyterian Fund for Charitable Giving and leads its development efforts. She served for over 10 years on the Washington Area Board of Advisors of ChildHelp. Laurie is a member of the Board of Directors of the ROSE Women’s Foundation, where she actively participates in building a faith-based community of women entrepreneurs in the slums of Nairobi.
Laurie lives in the Washington, DC area with her husband enjoying time spent with her two sons, and daughter-in-law. She is an avid golfer, DC sports enthusiast, and lover of the great outdoors.
Outcomes
- Understand why the leadership approaches of the past are insufficient for today and tomorrow
- Learn about the new leadership capabilities needed to bring to life net-positive ways of doing business
- Take away practices you can begin using immediately
Agenda
- What are you committed to shifting, creating, reimagining in your work?
- Why Leadership Must Evolve
- Essential skills for Next Way leaders
- Getting into Action
Why Attend
Enliven your important and challenging work with approaches that meet these complex times. And get more return on the energy you expend.
Perfect For
Leaders and teams who are committed to a major shift in the way they work such that it works for the world.
Outcomes
- Complete a risk snapshot of your team’s norms around stepping out of their comfort zone.
- Learn about why we play it safe and why your purpose needs you to begin taking risks.
- Put into action practices to build a culture of supported risk on your team.
Agenda
What are you committed to shifting, creating, reimagining in your work?
The importance of safety and risk and how they get out of balance.
What type of risks could benefit your work?
How to get started.
Why Attend
Leverage the genius, ideas and innovation that may be currently sitting dormant in your team.
Perfect For
Leaders and teams who are committed to a major shift in the way their buisness works in the world … and who are currently playing it too safe.
Overview
Sometimes our most important work slows down or gets stuck for reasons we can’t readily see. It’s part of working in organizations. Learn the reasons why this can happen and ways to get unstuck and regain the energy and moment that your purpose-led work deserves.
Outcomes
- Gain a “balcony view” of what’s going on with your project.
- Learn the helpful lenses to look through when determining why you are stuck.
- Empower your path forward with a few key moves that will get things flowing.
Agenda
Why we get stuck in projects.
Gaining a fresh perspective on our current challenges.
What getting stuck can teach us about getting things done.
First steps to getting back on track.
Why Attend
Because the work you are up to is too important, and the potential on your team(s) is too great to stay stuck.
Perfect For
Leadership and project teams who are frustrated with how effective and productive they are.
Outcomes
- Generate a shared snapshot of your organization’s current culture.
- Learn about the power of culture to affect everything.
- Explore how your culture is supporting your purpose and how it may not be.
- Learn key principles about how to shape culture so it starts working for you.
Agenda
What is culture and why is it essential that leaders understand it?
Creating a snapshot of your culture.
What are the cultural qualities that would most support your work?
How to shape culture every day.
Why Attend
To begin making your culture one of your greatest allies to your purpose.
Perfect For
Leadership teams (early-stage to the well established) who want to start addressing cultural barriers and creating cultural norms in line with purpose and values.
Outcomes
- Learn about the importance of consciously choosing who you are being when you work on compliance.
- Assess how much your organization's purpose is alive in your compliance work.
- Understand the benefits of infusing compliance with purpose.
- Gain practical ways to elevate your compliance work every day.
Agenda
Why the way you think about compliance matters.
A look at your culture norms around compliance.
Imagining a new way to hold your compliance efforts.
How to begin leading compliance efforts with purpose.
Why Attend
To upgrade your compliance efforts to be just as impactful, rewarding and strategic as other organizational priorities.
Perfect For
Compliance leaders who are committed to elevating their work from reactive to purposeful and reaping the rewards in quality and engagement.