More than fifteen years ago, I found myself in conversation with Libby Wagner in Seattle. Long before the corporate world began flirting with the idea that poetry might have something to offer its hardened landscapes. Yet even with all the time that has passed I can still feel the quiet recognition that we were circling the same truth from different starting points…

…that poetry isn’t an accessory to leadership but a deep interior technology that helps people see more honestly, speak more carefully, and stay awake to meaning in rooms that often rush past it.

Libby was already known as “the boardroom poet,” carrying that identity with the kind of grounded elegance that comes from years of living inside language, not academically but humanly, and while I wouldn’t pretend to remember every line of what we discussed, I remember the feeling of talking to someone who understood the emotional musculature required for real leadership… someone who believed, as I did, that organizations are hungry for: leaders who can:

• navigate nuance without collapsing into confusion
• sit inside ambiguity without reaching too quickly for resolution
• use language not as a blunt instrument but as a vessel capable of holding complexity without wounding anyone along the way.

Long after that conversation, Libby remembers me referencing something I shared with her, called the Poetry Bazaar. It’s a practice that had long existed in arts-based facilitation circles, a wandering method that I had refined in my own work with leaders, especially those who lived too much in their analytical minds and needed a way back to their intuitive selves.

During a working session, I would lay out a collection of poems, each with its own emotional temperature, its own texture, its own way of speaking to the hidden corners of a person’s life, and I would ask executives, managers, team members, to walk slowly around the poems until one of them “chose” them rather than the other way around.

The magic always lived in that moment of choosing

Most leaders would often say they didn’t know why a particular poem stood out until they began speaking about it, and then the layers would fall open:

• the buried worry
• the unspoken desire
• the hidden fatigue
• the quiet hope

What the Poetry Bazaar did better than any diagnostic instrument was bypass the intellectual defenses of people who had built whole careers on certainty and logic and invite them to encounter themselves more truthfully and more gently.

This was alignment before I ever used the word alignment

This was the early DNA of what would eventually become The Hudson Alignment Framework™, the idea that clarity requires space and that meaning needs time and that people access their deepest truths not when they are pressed for speed but when they are allowed to wander, reflect, feel, listen, and name what is real.

Poetry has always been the companion that makes this possible because poetry refuses to collapse complexity into neat sentences. It refuses to lie on behalf of convenience… to let leaders remain shallow or emotionally absent. Poetry insists that we learn to pay attention to what is not immediately obvious.

I sometimes think about how many boardrooms could transform overnight if leaders were required to spend twenty minutes choosing a poem before making a major decision, not because poetry provides answers but because:

• it sharpens perception
• slows breathing
• deepens listening
• and reminds people that leadership is not only a cognitive act but a human one

Perhaps that is why my early conversation with Libby stayed with me all these years later, because her work affirmed what I had been discovering in my own practice:

that poetry isn’t a retreat from business reality but a more honest way of meeting it.

A way of creating cultures where people can breathe, where trust is cultivated rather than extracted, where conversations are designed to reveal rather than conceal, and where alignment — real, embodied, sustainable alignment — becomes possible.

And so when I think now about the Poetry Bazaar, I realize it wasn’t just a workshop exercise but a philosophy of being with people. A way of saying slow down enough to hear yourself. A way of remembering that organizations are built on the invisible, the emotional, the intuitive, the unnamed, and that poetry has a way of coaxing all of that into the light so leaders can finally see what they have been missing.

STRATEGIC REFLECTION PROMPT

What poem — even a fragment you remember, a line you once loved, a phrase that refuses to leave you — might be “choosing” you today, and what truth is it quietly asking you to pay attention to in your leadership, your work, or your life?

About Giselle

I’m Giselle Hudson — Organization & People Development Sensemaker™, MCODE® Legacy Coach, writer and musician. I help leaders and independent professionals close the gap between strategy and execution by making invisible friction visible, so direction can finally translate into results.

If execution isn’t matching intent and you can’t quite see why, message me on WhatsApp. We’ll start with a brief Clarity Conversation to understand what you’re facing and decide together whether a focused Sensemaking Session is the right next step.