In the autumn of 2018, Walter J. Thompson published a report entitled The
New Sustainability:
Regeneration.
Interest in regenerative development had been building for years and the
publication of Designing Regenerative Cultures
and Regenerative Development in
2016, The Regenerative Business in 2017 and
Regenerative Leadership in 2019 all
contributed to broadening the dialogue about its important contribution.
However, it was the W.J. Thompson report and John Elkington’s Green Swans
that indicated to me that the regenerative (r)evolution was now rapidly gaining
momentum.
Already, the legions of consultants who are running the pattern of ‘selling the
new’ are archiving their folders on ‘integral,’ ‘lean,’ ‘smart,’ ‘circular’ and
‘sustainable,’ while busily studying up on how to sell the new trend:
regenerative. In the process, the danger is that novices pretend to be seasoned
practitioners and the deeper transformative agency of the work gets lost. Also,
in ‘selling the new’ much useful and necessary work is in danger of being
devalued. In over 20 years as a professional in the field of sustainability, I
have met many practitioners who were working on sustainability in a regenerative
way.
Sustainability is an important bridge we have not yet crossed. Working
regeneratively will help us cross that bridge faster and move beyond avoiding
negative impacts to healing the damage done and building capacity for
place-sourced regeneration. Framed appropriately, the SDGs can serve as a
platform of conversation to introduce working regeneratively to more and more
people. So, let us not dismiss ‘sustainable’ — nor let us continue the old
pattern and just change the label to ‘regenerative!’
After decades of pioneering work by people such as Carol
Sanford, Pamela
Mang, Ben
Haggard, Joel
Glanzberg, Bill
Reed and others, the genie is now
out of the bottle of carefully curated communities of practice. The deep
practice of regeneration operating from a profoundly different and at the same
time ancient worldview is meeting the current mainstream accustomed to
dumbed-down soundbytes and demanding instant gratification and ‘sexy’ sales
pitches. It is our responsibility not to lose its essence and hence the unique
contribution in the process.
I celebrate that organizations such as Sustainable
Brands™
or the Spanish sustainability platform Quiero are
helping to take the dialogue about regenerative practice to many more companies.
And I enjoyed contributing to the curation of the Regenerative
Pathways platform developed
by Future Stewards “to accelerate a regenerative future.”
During a fascinating conversation with Lachlan
Feggans
— Asia Pacific director of sustainability at
Brambles — on "The Regenerative
Revolution" podcast, we
explored how to find a nuanced, ‘glocal’ approach to re-regionalising production
and consumption; and hence, decentralising supply chains. These are important
questions; and how we work with them depends on how we understand our
participatory agency within nested living
systems.
At the heart of regeneration is realignment with the developmental and
evolutionary impulse that has not just sustained life as a planetary process for
3.8 billion years, but has revealed life itself as a regenerative community
across scales generating and regenerating the abundance, diversity, and vitality
of a magnificent variety of places, bioregions and the planet as a whole.
Regenerative practice starts and continues with personal development. It is not
a tool but a practice of conscious participation and co-creation. Living in
right relationship and practicing the art of transformation, we are realigning
with life itself. Working regeneratively is working in an evolutionary way. In a
problem-solving and solution-scaling-oriented culture, it is revolutionary to
invite a more humble approach by catalysing and revealing the potential of
people as regenerative expressions of place.
Working regeneratively fore-grounds our collaborative journey of learning and
capacity building. Our projects, products, solutions and answers are stage posts
of a continuous apprenticeship, as we are practicing to manifest the inherent
potential in ourselves and in teams, businesses, communities and places. Working
regeneratively is about revealing potential, rather than disappearing down the
rabbit holes of solving problems in isolation.
The systemic and participatory worldview that informs regenerative practice
carries a central lesson: Helping to manifest the unique contribution of an
individual, team, community, business, bioregion or of humanity not only becomes
more possible but actually requires being in service to the ‘adjacent whole’ —
the industry, community, bioregion, ecosystem, and ultimately to humanity and
all life.
From this perspective, success is not measured in corporate internal ecological
balance and loss accounting, or scored against a regenerative certification
scheme; it is subtly reflected in the health and vitality of the communities,
ecosystems and bioregions the business operates in. Ultimately, the measure of
success is the improvement of local and regional capacity to face an uncertain
future creatively and be of healing influence in the nested contexts in which we
operate.
Maybe a good way to start the journey is by letting go off the habit of asking
‘what can regenerative do for my company’ and inviting a wider inquiry into how
can we as human beings orient this company towards a thriving future in service
to community and place?
Another useful way of describing what working in a regenerative way means is to
start with articulating first principles. Carol Sanford suggested seven
foundational principles of a regenerative approach: i) wholes, ii) potential,
iii) essence, iv) development, v) nested, vi) nodes, and vii) fields. I like the
way Bill Reed presents these in relationship and condenses them to four ways of
working, which I built on here:
-
Working with whole systems as conscious participants in and expressions of
those systems-created, co-evolutionary pathways into the future
-
Manifesting inherent potential invites place-sourced approaches informed by
the bio-cultural uniqueness of particular localities and their inhabitants,
-
Developing capability of people in place to become regenerative expressions
of that place enables long-term response-ability in the face of complexity and
uncertainty,
-
Building a field of collaboration through embracing diversity while sharing
meaning, purpose and practice enables individuals and the collective to express
their unique contribution in service to self and community, as well as, place
and planet.
So, if you really want to embark on the journey of working regeneratively, you
better be prepared that the learning never stops and both the practice and you
yourself will transform over time. Then again that is precisely the point. As my
friend Bill Reed once pointed out to me: “The delivery is capability.”
Beyond serving the project, the company, the industry, or the nation state is
being in right relationship with the dynamic living planet upon which all of
them depend. Being in right relationship is primarily about nurturing the
dynamic health and resilience (including the capacity to transform and the
capacity of anticipation) of the nested systems (or dynamic wholeness) in which
we participate. Working in a regenerative way is about appropriate
participation!
To me, this ‘capability’ Bill calls the deliverable is about the capacity and
lifelong practice to consciously participate in one of life’s core patterns:
regeneration. As Janine
Benyus
summed up the core lesson of biomimicry so expertly: “Life creates conditions
conducive to life.” The delivery is in living in right relationships. Such
relationships create shared abundance rather than competitive scarcity, and
improve the health and vitality of the whole.
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Daniel Christian Wahl works internationally as a consultant and educator in regenerative development, whole systems design and transformative innovation. He holds degrees in biology (Univ. of Edinburgh), and holistic science (Schumacher College), and his 2006 doctoral thesis (Univ. of Dundee) was on Design for Human and Planetary Health. (Read more ...)
Published Jul 8, 2021 8am EDT / 5am PDT / 1pm BST / 2pm CEST