What is Regeneration?
There is much written about ‘regeneration’ as a step beyond sustainability, even as a judgment of sustainability.
It’s probably important to say that regeneration is not an incremental step. It’s a big step. Backwards and forwards.
Backwards, because we are rediscovering the wisdom of indigenous peoples who have thrived in close relationship with one other and with Nature over millennia1.
Forwards, because regeneration asks us to include into our modern economic and social relations a consciousness of the world that has always been with us, which we may have experienced more intensely during lockdowns but in any case will have felt many times when we give ourselves the gift of stepping outdoors into open green space.
Regeneration is a new discipline that stretches our thinking and our quality of being to appreciate anew how Nature organises itself, and invites us to surrender to what it teaches about how life thrives2.
To do this we first need to recognise just how pervasive, and deeply embedded are our our machine-based metaphors for how the world and organisations work. We hear them every day: ‘inputs', ‘outputs’, ‘leverage’, ‘rewiring’, ‘driving change’, ‘reprogramming’, ‘competency frameworks’ ‘metrics’, ‘tools’ and so on.
Nature’s regenerative paradigm is very different and uses correspondingly different metaphors. Bring to mind the world you already know: it’s alive, dynamic, and constantly unfolding - and unpredictable. Every living thing is infused with vital expression and an innate capacity for growing and evolving this expression. Each being is also nested in wider more complex systems with which they are interdependent, and to which they bring the capability for doing higher-order work3.
Think of your heart within the circulatory system, within your whole body, or you as one member of a team, within the whole organisation. Notice what changes in your perception as your mind images an organisation as a living thing in constant motion, some patterns repeating, others falling away, still others just emerging, entirely new.
And then what does it mean to look beyond a single entity, one organisation, one building development, even one city and ask what are the wider systems each is an integral part of, that it nourishes, and is in turn is nourished by? So that we can understand and be guided by the deeper roots and dynamics of thriving and integrate them into a value offering that brings flourishing to all levels of the system?
Case studies using regenerative frameworks teach us again and again that this is how vitality, health and prosperity can keep re-appearing. The road is running out for merely extracting our wealth from the world around us.
What Nature does effortlessly, we must learn to do too. But rather than seeing this as a problem to be solved, agreeing actions and a clear pathway to a desired outcome, we start by immersing ourselves in who we are.
Deep down what do I really care about that makes life meaningful? What’s the unique role and contribution I can make through my work to the world or to my organisation’s beneficiaries?
And here’s the extra step: how does what I offer, or the products we offer help them bring value and meaning to their own systems? And keep evolving this value adding process?
As an organisational leader or entrepreneur you therefore begin the journey into this new paradigm by unfolding or revealing more of yourself to yourself, and how your ‘essence’ finds a fit and a focus in the context of your organisation, and the wider systems you’re nested in. Potential sourced from essence is unrealised value, value which will keep on renewing.
It’s the root from which your flourishing, and so the world’s flourishing will regenerate. Nature is us after all.
Watson, J. (2020). Lo-Tek: design by radical indigenism. Taschen1.
Mang, P., & Haggard, B. (2016). Regenerative development and design: a framework for evolving sustainability. Wiley2.
Capra, F., & Jakobsen, O. D. (2017). A conceptual framework for ecological economics based on systemic principles of life. International Journal of Social Economics3 .