When Sven first mentioned the Commodore role, I did not immediately say yes. Not because I was uncertain about Naora, which I was not. But because a title without a clear understanding of what it actually asks of you is just a word, and I have spent enough of my professional life around words to know the difference between a word and a commitment.
So I asked what it meant. Not what the role was called or what it looked like from the outside, but what it actually required. What would be asked of the person who holds it. What the community would need from the Commodore that it could not produce for itself. And once I understood the answers to those questions, saying yes was not difficult at all. It was simply the honest response to a question I had been answering in practice for a long time already.
What the Role Actually Is
The Commodore of the Naora Circle is not a figurehead. The role exists in the founding documents of the Circle as an active one: representing the spirit of the community, helping to shape its direction, connecting members across the journey and across the distances that separate them when they are not aboard. It is a role of continuity in a community that is by definition in motion, always somewhere different, always changing in its composition as members join and leave at different ports.
What that requires, practically, is the ability to hold a community together without holding it still. To provide a consistent point of reference without becoming the point around which everything else must orbit. To be present enough that people feel the community has a centre, and light enough in that presence that the centre does not become a constraint. This is a specific kind of leadership and it is one that I have been thinking about and practising in different forms for most of my working life.
I have spent years building connections across cultures, industries, and contexts that do not naturally overlap. I have sat in boardrooms in four continents and at dinner tables in a dozen countries and at the helm of a sailing boat in the Mediterranean with Sven, and what I have learned across all of those contexts is that the quality of a connection has very little to do with the formal relationship that frames it and everything to do with the genuine attention that both people bring to it.
The Commodore role, as I understand it, is fundamentally about that quality of attention: making sure that the people in the Naora Circle feel genuinely seen and genuinely connected, not to an organisation, but to each other and to the journey they are sharing.
What I Am Not
I want to be direct about what the Commodore role is not, because the word carries associations that do not fit what the Naora Circle is trying to be.
I am not the most important person in the community. The Circle does not have a most important person, and any community that places too much of its identity in a single individual is building something fragile. The Commodore role rotates every two years precisely because a community that depends too heavily on any one person is not a community yet: it is a following. What we are building is a circle, which by definition has no top.
I am not the decision-maker for the community’s direction. The direction of the Naora Circle emerges from the people within it, from the conversations at the Long Table, from what members bring back from their time at sea and what they want to build on. My role is to hold the space in which that direction can emerge clearly, not to determine it in advance.
And I am not permanent. The two-year term is not a limitation I accept reluctantly. It is a design feature I believe in completely. The energy that a community needs to stay alive comes from new voices, new perspectives, new people stepping into positions of responsibility and bringing what they carry. My job is to build something solid enough to hand over confidently when the time comes, and to hand it over as a gift rather than a burden.
The Sailing That Made It Clear
The decision to say yes to the Commodore role was made easier by the sailing I had already done with Sven. Not the day-sailing in sheltered waters, which is pleasant but not particularly instructive about character. The offshore passages: several days at sea, real conditions, the specific intimacy of a small boat a long way from shore with a small number of people who have nowhere to be except where they are.
Offshore sailing reveals things about people that most social and professional contexts conceal. How someone responds when the conditions are difficult and the options are limited. Whether their kindness is available only when it costs nothing or whether it extends to the three o’clock watch when nobody is watching. Whether they are honest about what they do not know, which on a boat is a safety matter as much as a character one.
What I understood from those passages with Sven, and later with the wider group that became the Naora founders, was that the community we were building would attract people who had already survived their own version of the offshore test: in business, in life, in the accumulated decisions that determine what a person actually is rather than what they present themselves as being. The Commodore of a community like that is not a supervisor. It is a fellow traveller who happens to be carrying the compass for this particular leg of the journey.
What I Hope the Role Becomes
I hope that in two years, when the Circle selects the next Commodore, the role will be something that people want to hold because they have seen what it produced rather than what it is called. That the person who takes it from me will receive it as evidence of what the community has already become, rather than as a blank slate that needs to be filled.
I hope that the members of the Naora Circle, the people who sail with us and who stay connected between passages and who gather at the Long Table when the route brings us to the same place, will feel that the Commodore role served them rather than represented them. There is a difference. Representation is a formal relationship. Service is a human one. I am in this for the human one.
And I hope that when the boat is far offshore and the community is spread across different ports and different time zones and different chapters of their lives, the Circle holds together not because the Commodore is holding it, but because the foundation was built solidly enough in the early years that it does not need to be held. That is the work. That is why I said yes.
