The current extractive business paradigm is no longer adaptive in the face of 21st-century challenges. Conventional business practices are often characterized by relentless resource exploitation, environmental degradation, and wealth concentration at the expense of broader societal well-being. Sticking with “business as usual” may seem the competitive norm, but it is undermining the long-term viability for organizations themselves, not to mention people and the planet.
Like all systems, organizations and economies must evolve with changing circumstances. Recent years have underscored this inconvenient truth. Organizations of every size and sector have faced global disruptions across diverse areas spanning geopolitics, environment, public health, supply chains, workforce, and beyond.
These shifts are prompting reevaluation of long-held assumptions and expectations, and are changing how we will define real business innovation in the coming years. Digital transformation and sustainability alone are insufficient. The question we now face is how to shift from extractive, harmful models that characterize businesses of the industrial age, go beyond “offsetting,” disclosures, or “doing less bad” models that characterize the sustainability market, to models that regenerate the health of the whole.
A regenerative business model prioritizes life-supporting practices. Its core purpose and operations are designed to enhance systemic well-being rather than deplete it. Regenerative business is about intentionally designing innovative models that actively contribute to the overall health of our systems.
While the term “regenerative” may be unknown to many readers, it is innate to us all. In nature, regeneration is the process of restoration and regrowth that makes genomes, cells, organisms, and ecosystems resilient to disturbance or damage. For example, our own cells are constantly regenerating. Forests are too, constantly exchanging nutrients and information through networks made up of mycelium fungi and forest ecology.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” — Charles Darwin
What does this have to do with business? The most innovative businesses are looking to the living world for design inspiration. After all, 3.8 billion years of evolution and adaptation offers us a vast design space to learn from, realign with, and build for resilience. Regenerative design is emerging across a wide field of disciplines, such as architecture, retail, tourism, medicine, finance, energy, business, and beyond.
Regenerative design develops processes that focus on creating structures and environments that renew and revitalize the surrounding energy, materials, stakeholders, and ecosystems. Its “first principles” are based on universal patterns of living systems, such as holism, interdependency, balance, energy and material circulation, and more.
The core idea is to design in harmony with natural systems, where the solution design adopts living systems principles to restore the overall well-being of both people and the planet.
Nature doesn’t operate in silos. One of the hallmarks of regenerative design is focusing systemically to create structures of environments with multiple cascading benefits, or co-benefits. Seeing the potential for co-benefits applies to the design of anything, and is reorienting how businesses approach innovation.
For example, architects and urban planners are designing materials and buildings that generate more energy than they consume, improve air quality, sequester carbon, incorporate natural light for heating and cooling, and even share surplus energy locally.
Enterprise tea producer, Guayaki, collaborates with local communities and works with indigenous farmers harnessing ancient practices to grow nutrient-rich Mate Yerba, supporting livelihoods, creating more nutrient-rich products, and revitalizing rainforest ecosystems in the process. A whole class of start-ups are converting waste streams and liabilities into valuable assets and feedstocks for circular supply chains. This doesn’t just introduce new business models from waste, but helps clean up waterways and air, while reducing the need for virgin materials and net new extraction.
What co-benefits, or cascading benefits can your organization incorporate as a function of their doing business?
Intentional Futures has long partnered with organizations across sectors to design meaningful visions, holistic strategies, and practical solutions. We’re dedicated to taking this work even further by supporting regenerative design for organizations. Because any innovation or new business model rests on the fertile soil of human ingenuity, we have developed a Regenerative Design card deck to support leaders in ideation and implementation.
If you or your team are interested in trying out the card deck or learning more about our work in regenerative design, get in touch with someone on our team: jessicag@intentionalfutures.com, samanthab@intenttionalfutures.com, debi@intentionalfutures.com or mitchr@intentionalfutures.com.
Join us on our journey of helping organizations move from good intentions to positive impact by embracing regenerative design.
