Postcard from our Regenerative Leadership Journey

When I give talks and workshops about regenerative leadership and business I’m often asked: “Where do I go to learn more? Where do I meet kindred spirits who also long for this? Do they exist?”. Oh yes, they do, and thankfully they are gathering in numbers by the day and forming many great new initiatives and projects. The Regenerative Leadership Journey is one of many out there.

We are nearly halfway through our year-long journey now, and I wanted to offer you an insight into our journey so far.

Setting sail

We set sail in January this year. When we started out we were 180 people who had committed to join a year-long learning journey, diving deeply into Regenerative Leadership. At the beginning I thought of it as a community that would grow and evolve over time as new people joined in throughout the year, but over the winter break it felt best to close the group and let it be a year-long process for those who could commit to it. To allow relationships to grow deeper and create a safe container without constantly letting new people in that hadn’t been part of the previous discussions.

By February we were 305 people from 34 countries, ranging from 21-82 in age, who had all committed to this year-long emergent process. In our community are farmers, teachers, consultants, CEOs, business owners, artists, designers, students, start-ups and government officials. In many ways we are a very diverse bunch, although we are also aware that the group could be much more diverse in other ways.

These are the fixed elements of the journey. For more detail, you can also take a look at the journey website here.

Six video modules on the regenerative leadership knowledge pillars, including a workbook to help with the integration of that content.
Eight live guest sessions on Zoom with pioneers in this field giving us their angle and perspective on regenerative leadership.
One to two LIVE emergent sessions with me (Laura) each month with things to study and prepare for ahead of each session.
A community forum (not on Facebook) where the community shares articles, videos and reflections.

The Process

The journey so far has been a rich treasure chest of learnings about how to facilitate an emerging process with 300+ people. It’s not a responsibility I take lightly, and we would be lying if I said it hasn’t been intimidating at times! Rather than turning the journey into a machine where participants would go through a rigid training course to be popped out as reformed regenerative leaders with a certificate at the end, I wanted to approach this as an emergent evolutionary learning journey-in-process.

This means being responsive to the emerging needs of the group, checking in regularly along the way to get a sense of where we can make adjustments, and tuning in from session to session to see what should be the theme for the next LIVE gathering. This approach has been challenging at times, because it increases complexity and because it potentially invites in the ideas and reflections of 300 people. The community manager Tarn and I knew that if we asked for feedback, we should be ready to course-correct and adapt. We should be ready to embody the very principles conveyed on this journey of sense-and-respond, deep listening, compassion and emergence. It can be a little uncomfortable at times because you don't have any kind of control when you invite that energy in, but I must say it’s the most exciting process I’ve been a part of, as it feels co-created, emergent and exciting that we don’t know where we will be in three months’ time. The intention is to open the space for members of the community to step in with their own competencies and become co-creators of the journey, rather than passive observers or consumers. In chaos comes creativity. This has resulted in at least five self-organized discussion channels and extra sessions organized between members, to deepen their own practice and understanding of how regenerative practices can be applied to the fields of tourism, education and so on. There have been self-organised physical meet-ups and Zoom meditation sessions and all of this is outside the “official” community platform. We as the organizers don’t have any ownership or control over it (nor should we!).

It makes me personally excited that this journey is able to run wild and free and take us where it wants to take us all individually and together as a collective. It’s a co-created environment where I, as the facilitator and spaceholder, can't hide behind the safety of a rigid designed pre-recorded structure. I honestly love this, however I know it’s not for everyone. For some, it can be triggering that the learning journey is evolving. There is no recipe, so we’re figuring it out together as we go along. Currently the community is buzzing with reflections around the radical honesty needed as a regenerative practitioner, how to engage in client relationships without being the instrument that enables their greenwashing, and how to initiate collaborative efforts that don’t fall into the old traps of competition and destruction caused by big egos. We don’t have all the answers, these are questions that I hold myself to daily, yet it’s comforting and exciting to explore them together.

The LIVE sessions

One of the main intentions of the journey is to cultivate in all of us the knowledge that regenerative leadership is not about a “10-step process”, a formula, or an assessment scheme, but it is a new way of attending to life that requires us all to look deep within as the inner informs the outer in everything we do in life.

In each of our monthly LIVE sessions we have gathered in smaller groups to discuss questions; “what might your future ancestors wish you had done better for them?”, and “where have you noticed that you contribute to the story of separation?” Speaking about these questions from the heart in small breakout groups has generated some powerful discussions around ancestrality, the feelings of being “orphaned” through a lack of elders and wisdom keepers to look towards, the difficulty some of us have to connect with nature, and the pain, guilt and shame that comes with the story of separation.

In session three on the story of separation, Konkankoh - a wise elder from Cameroon that has spent years building permaculture villages in Cameroon who is also a participant in the course - facilitated an opening ceremony. He shared his wisdom on the “magic of the village”, where rites of passage initiate adolescents into the community. “If the elders do not invite the youth to build the community, the circle will not be complete, they will not feel that love and solidarity, and in their separation they will burn down a village just to feel its warmth.”

Illustrations from our Live Sessions

Illustrations from the Regenerative Leadership Journey by Anna DeNardin in collaboration with Laura Storm

Learnings so far, and next steps

I have learned so much from the journey travelers already that I’m deeply grateful for. There’s no teacher/student relationship here – we are co-travelers on a similar journey, although I am of course aware of the responsibility I have as the main space holder.

At the beginning of our journey I was asked, with compassion and not judgment, why the course wasn’t more available to people with disabilities or people who weren’t fluent in English. I hadn’t even thought of offering transcripts of the approx. 10 hours of pre-recorded course materials, and there wasn’t the option of subtitles on any of the pre-recorded videos. This is an example of a major blind spot that, in my eagerness to get this out into the world, I hadn’t thought about. Me and our community manager Tarn went to work so that we could start to offer this to everyone as soon as possible, and now English subtitles and transcripts are available for all of the pre-recorded modules. One day I hope to offer subtitles in other languages, too.

Now, with the turn of the wheel and the movement into the bright and heady days of summer (autumn for some of our journey travelers in the Southern Hemisphere), we have shifted gears slightly. We are all tuning into a specific project or challenge on which we would like to apply regenerative principles. We are moving from preparing our soil and our own contribution to the root causes, into seed planting. Activating our inner potential by starting to test out new ways in our projects, organizations and communities.

What do you long to dream into being this year? When the year ends, what do you hope to have achieved? How could your project apply the wisdom and logic of nature’s design principles? Where are your potential acupuncture points in your ecosystem to unleash potential?

These are some of the questions we are bringing forward into this next chapter of the journey, as we identify a project or challenge to apply a regenerative approach to. They are also pertinent questions to all of us that dream of a more regenerative way of working and being.

Our next LIVE session is about ecosystem facilitation, and we have some interesting sessions coming up with businesses on the path to transitioning to a more regenerative model. We are also fortunate to have a session with the Founder and CEO of Buurtzorg Jos de Blok, an organization we all admire for its sense-and-response capacity, its way of seemingly effortlessly self-organizing 15.000 people and tapping into human potential bringing heart back into healthcare.

It’s an honor to be part of this emergent process and I promise to send another update when we move into the energy of autumn, integration and preparing for another cycle of wintering.

Lastly, I’ve also decided that I would love to hold space for a 2023 journey. If you are interested in joining the next journey, you can pre-register your interest here and we will send you more information when we are ready for signup.

Thank you to everyone that has been involved so far.

xx

Laura