Designing Regenerative Organisations

An introduction to a research project and its process.

Why research Regenerative Organising?

In January 2024 Unearthodox and Greaterthan started a joint inquiry about what made a regenerative organisation.

The interest in this topic did not come out of nowhere or from an intention to jump on the increasing wave of publications and attention for regeneration. At Greaterthan, we have been working with power-with (instead of power-over) collaborative organising for as long as we have existed, since 2017, and way before that, as our legacy stems from two collaborative networks, Ouishare and Enspiral, both founded around 2011–2012. Since then, we’ve been learning and experimenting with what it means to bring to life and maintain health-centering systems. We know from experience how challenging it can be. All of it. From understanding and transmitting the need to change how we organise to actually making it happen gradually and, always, in continuous un-learning and re-learning loops. This is a journey for life.

In the regenerative organising space, we have found narratives, perspectives and tools that help us fill some of the gaps we’ve been feeling when you apply the “self-organising” lens only, which is what we have been using so far.

Unfortunately, self-organising has been used often enough as a strategy for efficiency, separate from its deep political and holistic roots of challenging dominating power systems that are endangering our societies and planet.

To me, the author of this blogpost, Alícia, this is a particularly relevant point. For the past decade, I have been working on how the micro practices of our everyday life are aligned and contribute to new macro narratives that can offer us alternatives to capitalism and, at the same time, how the potential socio-economic alternatives are grounded in practice. I have been doing this by participating in several alternative organisations and social movements, and, for the past three years, doing my PhD through the P2P lab.

At the beginning of 2024, Unearthodox launched its new programme, Regenerative Futures, which will run through 2026. This programme undertakes a thorough exploration of the concept of “regeneration,” aiming to understand its meanings from various stakeholder perspectives, its limitations compared to sustainability, and its potential to cultivate a society that actively regenerates nature. Unearthodox is committed to integrating diverse voices, values, and perspectives into this exploration, addressing issues of justice, empowerment, race, inclusivity, self-determination, and decolonisation. Additionally, as part of Regenerative Futures, Unearthodox is investigating the concept of ‘designing regenerative organisations,’ examining its implications for both the programme and the organisation itself.

It’s at this intersection of interests that this research on regenerative organising is taking place.

What are regenerative organisations?

Let’s have a look at the baseline of what is meant by regenerative organising. There are many definitions of the concept of regeneration, from rethinking how we see ourselves and our relationships to each other (Wahl, 2016), creating conditions conducive for life (Storm & Hutchins, 2019), a process that fosters evolving one’s capacity to fulfil their inherent potential (Sanford, 2022). More specifically, regenerative organising is defined by Muñoz and Branzei (2021) as “the process of sensing and embracing surrounding living ecosystems, aligning organisational knowledge, decision-making, and actions to these systems’ structures and dynamics and acting in conjunction, in a way that allows for ecosystems to regenerate, build resilience and sustain life” (Munoz, Branzei, 2021, p. 510).

All of the above definitions are based on western sources. This has been another of the challenges that has accompanied this inquiry from the beginning. There is a tension between the type of information supposed to feed this type of research (interviewees, literature reviewed) and the need to rethink organisations from another perspective than the one that created them. We did our best to include 30% of non-western interviewees, we wish it had been more, and we developed a whole sub-stream diving into non-western principles for regenerative organising thanks to our colleague Ashish, who is based in India. This would be another interesting follow-up article to this introduction. In general, we can say that non-western cultures hold many key principles to regeneration that are needed to build its foundation. It does not make sense to implement regenerative principles in our organisations if the underlying belief systems are still anchored in the current extractive paradigm. Ashish reminded us that even Laloux talked about this in his “reinventing organisations” and what he called the “underworld view”. The challenge our colleague faced is that in non-western sources, there is no mention or barely any mention of the word regeneration. What are some of these key underlying principles? Most people reading this post will even be familiar with some of them, think about the well-known “Ubuntu”, meaning “we are, therefore I am”. If this principle is well integrated, the more we realise we are interconnected, the more we become able to work in a system. We become willing to come out of our silos. Just as a simple example.

Learnings and tensions during the research

During this research project, we learned a lot about the topic itself, but even more about the process of collaborative regenerative research. We came across questions like “who is entitled to tell whose stories?” meaning:

are we as researchers entitled to tell the stories of people that have been focusing on the practice of regeneration for years and even decades?

We, at Greaterthan, know this challenge well: we do our best at self-organising and, sometimes, struggle with it, as it could only be the case with being an organisational experiment. But then, we are not the most popular kids on the block talking about self-organising, the storytellers of our field are usually “solo-experts/consultants”, who have great narrative-building skills and who do not have to invest their time with the “mess” of continuous experimentation when working in a group. We suffer from the same problem and, therefore, we do not want to replicate it in other fields.

The usual research process of getting knowledge from organisations and people, making sense of it and then publishing can be an extractive practice; even if it is shared openly and the contributors are acknowledged. How can we engage in research practices while fostering regenerative value flow among all parties involved? This becomes especially relevant in contexts in which the researchers come from the Global North, have means to finance their work and are engaging with non-privileged and / or Global South actors.

During the research process, we engaged with various people who experienced these tensions and we are glad and relieved that they trusted us enough to express them. Somewhere mid-way through the process we set up an internal fund to support Global South/ non-privileged group participation and we set-up a simple internal process to use it. By then, we were already in the convergent phase of the process, so we didn’t get to actually use the funds and our main action point was based in what we had been doing throughout the process: engage with tensions as they arose, have conversations and, whenever possible, offer other ways of support to our interviewees and participants. Some asked for contacts, others for knowledge sources on regeneration, others for the development of a collaboration agreement, etc etc. We tried to support all the needs in the best way we could, working on building relationships with everyone who participated or was contacted. In the end, this becomes a philosophical discussion about what value is and if we are able, in our society, to go beyond the common understanding of value as a transactional exchange of value. This is one of the big topics we have opened through this research and that we continue to work on.

A participatory process

A final point to highlight in this introductory blogpost, is that we did our best to hold a participatory approach for this research. Apart from applying the principles of honouring value flow and storytelling explained above, we also invited all interviewees to two online sessions: the first one as a get-to-know each other and dialogue on the topic of regeneration, and the second one a regenerative experience about personal storytelling. One of our colleagues, Anna, guided participants through a self-reflection process, an embodied experience that culminated in the writing of a personal letter. A collection of letters about regenerative experiences will be part of this exploration on regenerative organising, we call this project “Letters from the Sea”.

We hope to continue to be in touch with all participants of this research process to continue supporting each other on our regenerative journeys.

About the author — Alícia Trepat is a Greaterthan Partner and is currently researching self-organising and emotions in a PhD through the P2P Lab.

References

Muñoz, Pablo , Branzei, Oana (2021) Regenerative Organizations: Introduction to the Special Issue -Organization & Environment 2021, Vol. 34(4) 507–51 Sage publishing

Wahl, Christian, 2016 Designing Regenerative Cultures

Storm & Hutchins, 2019, Regenerative Leadership

Sanford, Carol, 2022, The Regenerative Life

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