What is a 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.
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.
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 regeneration and sustainability, ESG, and CSR?
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 flourish.
Resources we love
Regenesis Institute
Biomimicry Institute
Book: Doughnut Economics
Book: Net Positive
Book: Flourish
Book: Let My People Go Surfing
Book: Cradle 2 Cradle
Book: Biomimicry
Book: Designing Regenerative Cultures
Book: The Regenerative Business