“The regenerative economy: its greatest strength is its greatest weakness: it’s everything!”
Today, change is driven by business leaders who are no longer separating their business hat from their human heart.
Through a panel discussion moderated by BRODIE’s Nigel Salter, BRODIE’s first event explored whether regenerative economics and mainstream business can mix and whether regenerative principles can be applied to the realities of mainstream business.
Insights from leading regenerative thinkers and business voices, including Guy Morgan, Mike Barry, Giles Hutchins, Louise Kjellerup Roper, Daniel Christian Wahl, and BRODIE’s Georgie Erangey provided food for thought about the importance of adopting a regenerative approach, what it will take to deliver and how businesses can start to embrace it.
Three key takeaways from the morning:
1. Becoming less unsustainable is not enough
On November the 5th, 11,000 scientists endorsed research stating that the world is facing a climate warming. Based on 40 years of research, the study makes clear that we are now at a point where we have to do the impossible because the probable has become unthinkable. As agents in the system, we need to contribute to the change, but what does it mean to practice regeneration? Is it even possible to build a regenerative business within a degenerative economy? General consensus was that we need to not only mitigate our negative impact but also create conditions conducive to life and reflective of the bio-local. Re-regionalising and re-localising became clear drivers of the shift to regenerative practices. Instead of scaling up, companies should look to scale out and bake resilience into their fragile supply chains by investing in holistic, long-term solutions and focussing on the local through a global lens.
2. Humans vs technology
The greatest breakthroughs of 21st century won’t be the result of technological advancements, but instead will come from our expanding understanding of who we are as humans. Increasingly, business leaders are combining their business brain and human heart, applying a more holistic lens when designing their company strategy, creating products and propositions that enhance the human world we live in. One of the greatest challenges facing leaders today is the need to shift from a mechanistic (control-based, reductive, militarised mind) logic to the understanding that organisations are living systems. An expanding capability to realize the living systems logic is at the heart of regenerative leadership.
3. The business case
In the degenerative system we have created, no company is too large to fail. Becoming a regenerative business in an age of hyper transparency, requires companies to have a committed leader championing the regenerative strategy. Transformation has to cascade throughout the enterprise, from leadership to production. Where luxury is often seen as excessive, elitist and not inclusive, its reliance on high-quality materials has forced high-end brands to consider their impact on the fragile ecosystems they rely on, and in turn take steps to protect them. When adopting a regenerative approach, we become hospice workers to old system and midwives to new system – we need to ask ourselves if we can apply program obsolescence to our own existence? Can businesses evolve to exist in a globally connected, local system? And for companies, is creativity the bridge between sustainability and regeneration?
While several attendees remarked that the questions surrounding the relationship between regenerative economics and mainstream business have been around for at least two decades, all agreed that there has been a considerable shift in business in recent years. Today, change is driven by business leaders who are no longer separating their business hat from their human heart. And while change is not linear, the Age of Enlightenment took a century and many technologies are evolutionary dead ends, there are opportunities to create positive regenerative change globally with the aid of technological advancements and thoughtful leaders.
SHARE THIS