Postcard from our Regenerative Leadership Journey: learning from the wisdom of life
By Laura Storm
This “postcard from the Journey” covers what happened in phase two of our year-long Regenerative Leadership Journey. If you’ve read part one you’ll know that the design of this Journey has been very emergent, and we spoke a little bit about this process in our last blog post.
This postcard covers the phase two of the Journey - From April to June – when we shifted into focusing on the key frameworks and principles of Regenerative Leadership. Using the tools of the Regenerative Leadership & Business DNA framework, and the principles of the logic of life (as captured with my colleague Giles Hutchins in our book), we started to get to grips with what it means to “learn from nature” in leadership and organizational development.
The beautiful visuals from our Journey (used throughout this blog) were inspired by the content of the course and the discussions it inspired in our community, and brought to life by artist Anna Denardin.
What does it mean to learn from life?
At this stage of the Journey, we started to get more familiar with biomimicry and engaged with questions like “how can we inhabit the role of the Regenerative Leader, regardless of the job title or position we may have?”, “are my behaviors and actions creating regenerative or degenerative ripples in my workplace and society at large?”, “how is a mechanistic worldview showing up in my life?” and “how could I align more with the ways of nature in my life and work?”. This is the work of a Regenerator, to not only understand the theories and the frameworks, but to live them, wholeheartedly!
Having the in-depth understanding of how life works is instrumental if we want to carve out new life-affirming ways of being and leading. We have to humbly study living systems wisdom and learn from biologists and ecologists. Understand how we can lend support and wisdom from how life have evolved and finetuned over the past billion years.
In brief, here are the 7 principles of the logic of life, as Giles Hutchins and I present them in the book Regenerative Leadership (and summarized in this blog post):
1) Life is life-affirming: This is the over-arching principle. Life creates conditions conducive to life. The Regenerative Leader seeks only life-affirming activities and outcomes, being watchful for anything that could be toxic, life-denying, degenerative.
2) Life is ever-changing and responsive: Change is an inevitable aspect of life we can embrace for the opportunity and leverage it offers us for learning, adaptation, resilience and evolution. Life learns and adapts through emergent, developmental and evolutionary dynamics.
3) Life is relational and collaborative: Everything in life consists of inter-relating, interconnected systems nested within each other. Understanding these interconnections frees our perception from seeing and thinking in silos and instead into systems. Life is full of relationships; systems nested within systems. From the cells in our body, to our neighbourhood, organization, society and economy, relationships abound. Sensing the relational nature of our organizations helps us notice stuckness, flow and nodal points for leveraging emergent change.
4) Life is synergistic and diverse: Life thrives on diversity – there wouldn’t be life without diversity! Monocultures of sameness or group-think undermine creativity, innovation, adaptability and resilience. Likewise tensions of difference act as crucibles for learning and development.
5) Life is cyclic and seasonal: Life unfolds through ebbs and flows of cycles and seasons. We are all cyclical beings in need of the processes that all seasons bring: The emergence of spring, the intensity of summer, the letting go in autumn, and the deep restoration and reflection of winter. Our inner and outer ecosystems need all phases to thrive.
6) Life is flows of energy and matter: Everything flows; bloodstreams, rivers, psychological energy, materials, transportation. Life depends on innate ecosystem flows and cycles that enable recycling, reuse and renewal. There are innate ecosystem processes that life depends upon, and as such everything flows in a cyclical interconnected way. Designing and operating with this understanding of energy flows enables us to recycle, reuse and renew in ways that do not undermine life’s ecosystems.
7) Life is pervaded by a Living Systems Field: Shamanic and scientific evidence points to an all-pervasive field, a ground-of-all-being that informs all form. We have been brought up in an age where the understanding of this field is largely absent from how we see the world. As we step-change into Regenerative Leadership Consciousness, we sense the interconnectedness of all life and recognize this field of interconnection.
Becoming an ecosystem nurturer
Once we have studied the way nature works, we can start to apply it to our leadership and organizational development. We can start to practice becoming an ecosystem nurturer – a nurturer of the interconnectedness of life. This is someone who understands the interconnectedness of the organization, and is experienced in sensing and responding. An ecosystem nurturer applies all of their capacities; heart and mind, left-brain hemisphere, right-brain hemisphere and ability to sense into the quality of their living system, the organization, and community. As part of the pre-recorded lessons on the Regenerative Leadership Journey & Course there is an extensive module that takes a deep-dive into the role of the Regenerative Leader. In this module, I offer various “ecosystemic interventions”, and in our live sessions we are diving deeper into the HOW of this, learning from each other.
An ecosystem nurturer has their ear to the ground, yet can see from above like an eagle (what Anna and I have tried to capture in above collage). They are constantly sensing and responding, and are in tune with the health of the web of life within their organization. They can sense into stagnant energy, tension and potential, and into the next step which will bring health and vitality to the organization.
As leaders from all walks of life we can open up the potential within to see ourselves as ecosystem nurturers. We can open our eyes to the reciprocity between the living world and the living souls that co-inhabit this planet, and that are part of your organization. As a leader equipped for the 21st century you need to learn how to dance with the interconnectedness of life. The interdependence. An intervention in one place creates ripples far beyond what you can often imagine, and this is what we are learning to do on the Journey.
When I share these insights I always use the example of the brilliant late Jaime Lerner, the mayor of Curitiba who coined the term Urban Acupuncture. I was fortunate to be in a session with him during the Rio+20 summit 10 years ago, where he shared how all he wanted to do as a leader was to unleash the potential of his city by allowing each individual to step into theirs - by allowing more parks and green areas, more farmers markets, more music in the streets. His unconventional approach to strategy development was heavily criticized at first, but by now is an inspiration to many. What he did was spend time walking the streets of Curitiba, sensing into potential and challenges, talking to people and seeing how he could help to offer the conditions for life to thrive. THAT is the purpose and role of the Regenerative Leader – to become an ecosystem nurturer.
Using the DNA framework
The DNA framework is a model for helping Regenerative Leaders to establish an overview of their organization and gain insights about where they could start to apply interventions to shift the paradigm of their organisation. Starting the journey of shifting an organisation from a rigid, mechanistic hierarchy to a living system - where the whole has to thrive in order to be successful - can often be overwhelming. The foundation of the DNA framework are three main elements; living systems design, living systems culture and living systems being.
In the course module I talk through each of the DNA strands in detail, providing inquiry questions, cases and examples to start digging a little deeper. Within this model is the DNA diagnostics wheel, a business assessment tool that companies can use to generate feedback and establish which areas to focus on on their journey towards regeneration.
The Regenerative Leadership DNA, by Giles Hutchins and Laura Storm
Learning to dance, and surrendering to the unknown
To assess the so-called “performance” of the organization the ecosystem nurturer is constantly in tune with the health of the web of life and of their living system. Sensing into stagnated energy, tension, and new potential. Never alone. Never behind the corner office closed doors. Never a rigid five-year strategy with thousands KPI’s and quarterly goals that keep them from seeing the forest for the trees. Always sensing into the next needed step forward that will bring health and vitality or address a tension. A vision yes, a shared dream yes. But never soul-sapping rigid goals as they’re not fit for the complexity in our current leadership landscape.
I wish more leaders would dare let go of control. Dare to embrace the inner fears that prevent them from stepping to a new way of leading in reciprocity. I do see more and more leaders becoming ecosystem nurturers that understands how to create conditions conducive for life wherever they are, wherever they go. That listen and sets the potential of the organization free.
During the spring phase we also had fascinating sessions with brilliant thinkers like Michelle Holliday, Leen Gorissen and Daniel Christian Wahl. You can see snippets of their sessions on our YouTube channel.
The next postcard will focus on how we’re tapping into collective intelligence, getting exposed to a variety of cases and business examples and applying to our own life and projects before we start a cycle of deep integration and capacity building.
This has so far been one of my most exciting projects and I can’t wait to run a new journey in 2023.