Copyright International Business Times
Leaders who steer capital and institutions sometimes find themselves at a crossroads. When familiar tools and routines no longer produce the results expected, the typical response is to change course rather than repeat old habits. Those shifts are thoughtful redirections that come from close observation and a willingness to listen to signals the system itself is sending. Given this context, Peta Milan reframed her work, guiding Henmil Group Family Office toward a methodology that treats assets as a living system. Milan's career spans finance, governance, communication, and somatic practices. With formal training in international finance, philosophy, spiritual and body-based disciplines, she approaches investing with a perspective that integrates cultural, social, and environmental patterns. Her background includes advanced study in areas such as competitive and blockchain strategy, as well as years spent contributing to international initiatives addressing climate, governance, and security. Those experiences exposed her to the limits of problem and solution approaches to intractable global challenges and macro risks. Moreover, they helped refine a distinct perspective: capital can be directed in ways that enliven ecological vitality, social well-being, and longer-term resilience whilst delivering returns to investors. The Henmil Group Family Office, founded and led by Milan, reflects that viewpoint in practice. Based in Dubai, the single-family office concentrates on equity positions in ventures and real estate that can demonstrate systemic impact alongside financial return. The office also contains a business development arm that steps into management roles when needed to help investments develop regenerative capabilities, and it offers education and matches investors with regenerative assets so other family offices may better understand the frameworks inherent in the methodology. In short, Henmil Group Family Office functions as an investor, builder, and translator, seeking to make systemically impactful and place-sensitive investment approaches accessible and feasible for capital allocators. A pivotal moment came for Milan in 2017, an inflection that nudged her thinking from conventional impact investing toward systemic reimagining. Through her work on various projects and policy discussions, she observed that even with significant funding directed toward impact, the outcomes were ineffective in impacting systemic climate or social data. This prompted reflection on how capital could work with the dynamics of the systems it engages. "I came to see that good intentions were just one part of the picture," she says. "We needed a way of seeing that pays attention to how life actually works." That realization led her to explore new approaches that understand the social, environmental, and cultural patterns and the unique potential of a place before determining how capital might contribute. The Henmil Group Family Office, therefore, champions the regenerative methodology. "Instead of treating value as a single metric, it considers how investments can serve to change the quality of relationships among all participants of a living system, human and non-human alike, and how this shapes our design and development of assets, funds, portfolios, and places," explains Milan. "The focus is on asking effectiveness questions, like what is this system calling for, and what is the potential that is alive here but not yet expressed? How can capital be of service to bringing new life to a system?" That ethos also informed the development of the Embodied Regenerative Leaders Certification, a program Milan created to nurture leaders who can apply these methodologies across business, finance, and public administration. The certification brings cognitive, bodily, and intuitive learning together. Participants engage in online work directly related to their assets, governance, and portfolio design, and rewilding immersions, experiences that reconnect people to their sense of being part of wider living systems that they can practically apply to their work. Essentially, the program aims to equip leaders with both practical tools and inner capacities, from systemic approaches to core strategy development and generating value multiples, and derisking their assets from macro volatility. Across Henmil Group Family Office's portfolio and learning offerings, the thread is consistent: design for the vitality, viability, and coevolution of the whole. Its work includes venture building in areas such as education, technology, and place-based transitions, and the office offers hands-on support to ensure regenerative intent translates into operational practice. The company also provides a matching service to other capital stewards, helping translate regenerative design and development into investment-ready terms so that more actors can make informed choices. Milan's story is part professional evolution and part personal practice. Her path weaves through finance, film, writing, venture building, and embodied disciplines; each strand contributes to a worldview where human flourishing and ecological health are mutually reinforcing outcomes. "When we understand systems as living, our assets serve to create the conditions for life to thrive," she says. "Capital then becomes a tool to cultivate untapped potential rather than simply a tally of transactions." The transition she advocates is an invitation to broaden the questions investors ask. By understanding the dynamics of relationships, listening to place, and building the inner capacities of leaders, Henmil Group Family Office presents a way to align capital with the vitality it seeks to protect and enhance. Whether through certification programs, active stewardship of portfolio companies, or mentorship to peers, the goal is to create practices that endure because they are rooted in the dynamics of living systems.
