A Crisis at the Top

Forty percent of stressed senior leaders are currently considering stepping down. That figure, drawn from research cited in this episode of The Responsible Edge, describes a leadership crisis arriving at precisely the moment organisations face their most complex operating environment in decades: climate risk, AI disruption, shifting employee expectations, and accelerating regulatory pressure.

The conventional response to leadership burnout is resilience training.

Adrian Ferraro’s argument is that resilience training, delivered in the same environments that produced the burnout, is insufficient.

The intervention has to be structural, physical, and away. His evidence is eleven years of taking people into places where it rains on everyone equally.

Formation

Adrian spent two decades building STC Expeditions, a specialist school expedition company he founded in 2006. Over eighteen years he oversaw more than 300 expeditions to 25 countries, taking over 8,000 teenagers to deserts, rainforests, and six-thousand-metre Himalayan peaks. He navigated the company through the 2010 ash cloud, the Arab Spring, multiple recessions, and the pandemic, before selling to his business partner in October 2024.

The Bioasis, which Adrian founded in 2020 as a pandemic pivot, was the domestic version of that logic. Working on a 5,000-acre private estate in South Devon, it delivered off-grid adventure and conservation programmes to school groups and corporate leadership teams across three self-sufficient base camps.

It planted 3,100 trees, removed two tonnes of plastic from the estuary, and won the Exeter Sustainability Awards in 2025.

The through-line from STC Expeditions to The Bioasis is consistent. Adrian has spent his career designing conditions under which people discover what they are capable of, first teenagers on six-thousand-metre peaks, then executives on three-day immersions in ancient woodland. The proposition in both cases is the same: remove the familiar environment, and people see things differently.

The Argument

Adrian’s case for nature-based leadership intervention is not therapeutic. It is operational.

His starting point is time. “I don’t think we have ten or fifteen years,” he said, describing the lag between educating young people about ecology and seeing that thinking affect boardroom decisions. Working with businesses, by contrast, produces immediate results.

“A business can come in, C-suite group on a retreat with us on a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. They can go back to the office on the Monday and go, right, we need to change things here, here and here.”

The off-grid environment does specific work. Hierarchy flattens.

“It doesn’t matter what your title is,” he said. “If it’s raining, it rains on everybody equally.”

Shared physical challenge builds team cohesion that a conference room cannot replicate. Conservation work creates a direct, embodied encounter with long-term consequence: decisions made now, outcomes visible in fifty years.

Adrian is careful about the proposition. The Bioasis was not Bear Grylls. “You don’t have to skin rabbits and sleep under a hedge to become more resilient,” he said. The design principle was type one fun rather than type two: uncomfortable enough to stretch people, comfortable enough to bring them back.

The Structural Problem

The leadership burnout article frames the crisis primarily as a stress problem. Adrian frames it differently. The leaders who are burning out are, in his reading, often the most capable ones: high-achieving, purpose-oriented, willing to take on complexity. They are not burning out because they are weak. They are burning out because the demands being placed on organisations have accelerated beyond what any individual can absorb.

“I don’t think resilience is completely the be all and end all,” he said.

The deeper problem is structural: organisations are being asked to respond to climate risk, changing workforce expectations, and technological disruption simultaneously, while operating models and leadership cultures remain largely unchanged.

He cites a Harvard Business Review finding that nine out of ten people would accept lower pay for more meaningful work. His claim is that purpose-driven organisations attract better people, retain them longer, and perform with more resilience over time. Leadership burnout, in this framing, is partly a symptom of organisations that have not yet made that transition.

The nature retreat is not the solution to that. It is, at best, the condition under which a leadership team might begin to see it clearly.

What Remains Open

The episode’s underlying question is whether organisations will create the conditions for their leaders to think differently before those leaders choose to leave.

Adrian’s answer is measured. The case for stepping away from the office is not intuitive for most executives.

“It feels like I’m stepping out of the office and therefore I’m not working,” he said.

The reframe he is proposing is precise: stepping out is not absence. It is the work.

Whether organisations accept that reframe quickly enough to retain the people making the forty percent calculation is, as of now, open. The structural pressures are not easing. The expectations on leadership are not narrowing. And the evidence, from ecology to organisational psychology, consistently points in the same direction.

“We’re all better humans when we spend time outside,” Adrian said. “We treat people better. We are more calm and relaxed. We make better decisions.”

That argument has not yet moved at the speed the problem requires.