The Regenerative Business

A regenerative organization focuses on developing its talent rather than buying it. It builds critical thinking and personal capacity within a culture of systems regeneration.

A business that adopts a systems regeneration approach moves the boundary of what it is taking into account. It begins to take responsibility not only for its own internal systems (such as accounting or production in our economy example) and the systems in which it is immediately embedded (such as markets or distribution networks), but also for the

work design that intentionally develops people’s capacities and capabilities.

one of the reasons people hang onto the machine mindset is that it has enabled us to build efficient systems for the creation and distribution of products. However, it has also generated dehumanized workplaces, damaged ecosystems, and loss of local cultures around the world. To paraphrase Albert Einstein, these problems cannot be solved with the sa

Human beings create systems in order to manage what would otherwise be a chaotic experience of the world. A system (for example, an economy) creates a pattern within which we can engage in a recurring process (such as economic exchange) toward a particular purpose (in this case, wealth creation). Once we have a system, we can examine its effects an

My aim is to grow a higher level of discernment and creative thinking into the practice of work design, and offering another book that simply tells people what to do would undermine this intention.

The core team learns how to pursue a direct and unmediated experience of what’s going on in the customers’ lives. What are they aspiring to do? What challenges do they face? What kind of help could the business provide that would actually make a difference for the customers? The concrete sense of what it’s like to stand in the customers’ shoes awak

A regenerative approach is not something that you just add on to everything you’re already doing. It requires a radical re-envisioning of what business is and how it works.

A regenerative business is created through an inherently systemic work design that grows the capacity for systemic thinking and action in the entire organization.

Human development builds a company’s capacity to generate the thinking that will evolve its operations, industry, society, and world. Designing work systems to grow this capability in every member of the organization is essential. This, I believe, is the only way to create a business that consistently produces enlightened, disruptive innovation in