Regenerative Organisations

I believe that beautiful, regenerative organisations  

• are purpose-led, serving a purpose aligned with life-friendliness
• cultivate a healthy culture and care. Unleashing life force by empathising with the needs of the team, the customer and the surrounding ecosystem. Contributing to aliveness and joy
• empower people on all levels to see themselves as stewards through organisational structure and governance 
  
• understand strategy in a collaborative and systemic way. Regenerative organisations understand their own role and key relationships in the ecosystem. This enables them to create win-win relationships with other collaborative actors (symbioses). This benefits them as well as the overall ecosystem. To thrive in an environment of extractive business practices, it is key to test the motives of others through low-commitment experiments and to identify trustworthy and collaborative partners. Equally important for strategy in the regenerative paradigm is thinking and acting in systems as well as cycles 
  
• create and circulate (financial) value. Regenerative organisations create financial abundance by providing a valuable service to the ecosystem - free from an extractive paradigm and the ambition of ‘infinite growth’ for its own sake. Rather than creating lock-ins for customers and extracting as much as possible or applying shady sales tactics, the beauty and value of services lead to naturally returning customers and word-of-mouth recommendations. The focus is on income from (actively) contributing rather than income from (passively) possessing land, organisations, etc. Innovation and a healthy culture are key ingredients of sustained value creation, in contrast to focusing on control, exploitation and scarcity (for example represented by the traditional VRIO framework). 
• embrace circular principles in the product design and material/physical dimension of their activities: Typically they prioritise the bio-cycle¹ and a small range of monomaterials that are compatible with the local ecosystem and infrastructure
• self-moderated: Finding an appropriate role and size in the ecosystem ​(no cancer-like growth, ambition to do it all & have it all, or single-mindedness on ‘taking’)
  
• soulful - authentically adding their own spirit and essence to the bouquet of the ecosystem.

What is regeneration? 

• creating the conditions conducive to the thriving of life
• place-based: Finding our place & ecosystem where we plant ourselves and can contribute
  
• building on all layers of knowing. It is about deep sensing the (local) ecosystem beyond the intellectual and cerebral. It is about depth, embodiment and quality (e.g. Theory U) rather than jumping quickly to solutionism and reactivity (the ‘solutions’ of today might be the problems of tomorrow)
• about generosity
  
• starting with me and you

Therefore we derived five principles of regeneration²:

• Interconnectedness
• Place-based. Ortsspezifische Verwurzelung
• Co-evolution. (Ko-)Evolution
• Salutogenese. Förderung von Gesundheit
• Circularity. Zirkularität

Inspiring resources

• Designing Regenerative Cultures, a book by Daniel Christian Wahl
• Sustainability is not enough: We need regenerative cultures, an article by Daniel Christian Wahl
  
• Regenerative Futures - from sustaining to thriving together, a report by Josie Warden and the RSA
  
• Talk by Ellen, Janine and Kate on how regeneration is about generosity
• Shifting from sustainability to regeneration, an article by Bill Reed
  
• Flourish, a book by Sarah Ichioka and Michael Pawlyn
  
• Leading by Nature, a book by Giles Hutchins
  
• Regenerative Development and Design: A Framework for Evolving Sustainability, a book by Regenesis Group, Pamela Mang, Ben Haggard
  
• 8 Principles of a Regenerative Economy, a book by John Fullerton
• Towards a Regenerative Civilization: Reconnecting our Economics with Harmony Principles Capital Institute, a book by John Fullerton
  
• The Regenerative Business, a book by Carol Sanford
• Der Stellar Approach, a book by Simon Berkler and Ella Lagé
• Your2040: A blog post and the 2023 gathering report about regeneration
  
• Braiding Sweetgrass, a book by Robin Wall Kimmerer
  
• Regenerative Triangulation, by John Willshire, Smithery
• Finding the Mother Tree, by Suzanne Simard

Honorable harvest in the book ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Regeneration and qualitative growth

• “Regenerative thinking requires a very radical shift when it comes to growth, moving away from thinking about quantitative growth to thinking about qualitative growth”
• “What’s qualitative Growth? In their 2008 piece Outside insights — qualitative growth Fritjof Capra and Hazel Henderson explain that “qualitative economic growth, by contrast, can be sustainable if it involves a dynamic balance between growth, decline, and recycling, and if it also includes development in terms of learning and maturing.”
• “buying less but buying better”
• “Having a regenerative mindset means seeing the world as a living system, built around reciprocal and co-evolutionary relationships and wholes, where humans, other living beings and ecosystems rely on one another for health”, building on the RSA’s report by Josie Warden
• “First, let’s clarify what degenerative stands for. Ethan Soloviev suggests that these are “processes, practices and protocols that decrease the health and wellbeing of a place, person or entity.” “Ecological and social degradation results from fragmentation, over-simplification, homogeneity, and destructive reactivity. There is a loss of possibility, opportunity, and individual agency,” he writes. Similarly, Lüdeke-Freund points out that degenerative business behavior concerns “decreasing values of economic, social and natural capital stocks.”
  

‘Plant Path Initiation‘ and indigenous cosmovision 

Footnotes