Regenerative
Business
What is ‘Regenerative’?
Regeneration begins with the recognition that the economy, business and society don’t sit apart from nature, but within it.
All living systems self-organize around the patterns of regeneration which are inherently self-sustaining, resilient, and evolving. Regenerative approaches treat organizations and stakeholders as living systems, applying principles of natural systems to realize the same kinds of outcomes.
Why Regenerative?
Across the globe, our social, environmental and economic systems are converging into a critical tipping point for the planet’s health, and all those inhabiting it. To continue to earn a social license to operate, business is being forced to evolve. Profits must come not from creating the world's problems, but by solving them.
To do this, businesses must become responsible for all of their material impacts across people and planet, and align with the natural systems which they are nested within and draw upon as the basis for their value creation.
What is the difference between
Sustainability/ESG/CSR and Regenerative?
Conventional ‘sustainable’ business practices are focused on doing "less bad". That’s no longer good enough.
Sustainability or maintaining the status quo of a depleted biosphere, an increasingly unequal, unjust, and polarized society with a widespread mental health crisis is not an acceptable aim for our economy and life’s efforts.
It’s time for business and leadership to evolve. As a starting point, we need to create regenerative conditions for life, society, and the planet to be restored and to flourish.
What is a ‘Regenerative Business’?
This is much more than an iteration on business as usual. It is a shift in the way we perceive our purpose, life’s work, and approaches to business and economic development.
A regenerative business creates net-positive system value for a wide range of stakeholders, enabling outcomes that are environmentally restorative, socially just, and economically inclusive.
Regenerative businesses harness the true potential of market systems (entrepreneurship, innovation, collaboration) and move beyond its failures (greed, consolidation, inequality). This evolves economies from humans as consumers, shareholders, suppliers, and earth as a resource…towards people as interdependent citizens in the wider social, economic and living systems of nature.
Credit: Fullerton, Capital Institute.
Regenerative Leadership
“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”
~ Einstein
Regenerative leaders evolve the capacity of people and organizations to serve the larger living systems within which they are nested.
Leaders sincere in their desire to make a regenerative impact must address both “inner” and “outer” dimensions of their efforts. Inner relates to helping self and others recognize and realize innate potential that can be expressed as a contribution to something larger than ourselves.
Outer relates to value propositions we create (products, services, stakeholder-relations, product design and supply chains). Leaders create systems and opportunities that enable employees, stakeholders, wider society and the more-than-human environment to thrive.
Credit: A compass for Just and Regenerative Business, Forum for the Future
Regenerative leadership synchronizes inner and outer work, ensuring that as they develop they grow the health of surrounding human and ecological systems, conscious of the fact that these systems are the source of present and future wealth.