From intent to action: the regenerative pivot
The regenerative transition requires moving beyond short-term performance management towards a systemic vision. Here are six steps to get the ball rolling—without claiming to solve everything.
Jacques Tassin, Vivre la Forêt (2025), Carol Sanford, The Regenerative Business (2017), Daniel Wahl, Designing Regenerative Cultures (2016), Rapport Shift Project (2022), Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics (2017).
1 – Go back to your company’s core function
Pivot question: What are you fundamentally meant to contribute to life? Too many companies define their purpose by their product (we sell clothing), their market (we are in retail), or their performance (we generate returns). A regenerative company doesn’t define itself by what it extracts or sells; it defines itself by what it regenerates, supports, or enables.
- Run an immersive strategy workshop with your executive team and a few external stakeholders (life scientist, farmer, frontline employee, younger voice). Ask this unfiltered question: “If we disappeared tomorrow, what would the living world—human and non-human—truly lose?”
- Then craft a collective reformulation of your living contribution: which systems do we actively want to restore to health? Soil? Dignity? Food autonomy? Territorial cohesion?
Suggested tool: Business Contribution Canvas (inspired by the “raison d’être,” extended to the living world)
Don’t leave with a slogan—leave with a compass.
2 – Map your systemic impacts and dependencies
Pivot question: What does our business model truly depend on—and what does it endanger? We talk a lot about environmental impact. Regeneration requires going further: recognizing that you’re embedded in complex living systems—and that your stability depends on their health. That includes climate, soils, water, precarious workers in your value chain, and invisible knowledge
Build a dynamic three-column map:
- What we extract (resources, energy, human time, biodiversity, culture, attention…)
- What we destabilize (social balances, natural environments, local community, mental health, meaning…)
- What we could actively regenerate (through compensation, co-construction, systemic contribution) Involve frontline employees, suppliers, and local actors. Goal: surface blind spots and dormant regenerative potential
Tools: ecosystem dependency analysis, extended LCA, multi-capital matrix..
3 – Redefine your success metrics
Pivot question: What counts as success if the living world around us is collapsing? Traditional metrics (EBITDA, ROI, growth, market share) say nothing about your role in the world’s health. Regeneration requires new markers: fertility, resilience capacity, repaired social ties, ecosystem stability.
Hold a working session with your finance, sustainability, HR, and supply-chain managers plus stakeholders to co-create a living dashboard.
- Add field-based ecological indicators (e.g. soil infiltration rate, plant-species diversity, tree-canopy shade, earthworm presence)
- Add relational indicators: number of durable collaborations, local trust, pride of belonging, fair redistribution.
- Involve living stakeholders in periodic reviews of these indicators (citizens, researchers, neighbors, NGOs).
Tools: Doughnut Economics, Impact-Weighted Accounts, TerraVitae indicators.
4 – Redesign your offering and your value chain
Pivot question: How could our offering restore more than it takes? As long as your products are merely “less bad,” you’re still in an extractive framework. Regeneration requires a break: design offerings, services, and value chains that actively contribute to restoring living systems
Select a strategic product, supply chain, or service. Run a four-question diagnosis:
- What natural or human resources does it draw on?
- What does it contribute to—or harm—in its end use?
- What could it repair or maintain at each stage (production, use, end of life)?
- How can we flip its logic to return more living value than it takes?
Mobilize your partners to design a regenerative pilot offering: local, lean, cooperative, biodegradable, useful. Make it a mobilizing narrative—not a PR stunt.
Approach: regenerative ecodesign, design for circularity, plus repair of impacted ecosystems.
5 – Reconfigure your governance and decision loops
Pivot question: Who actually has a say in strategic decisions?You can’t regenerate life if it’s absent from your decision-making bodies. That means opening your governance circles to other forms of intelligence—farmers, scientists, youth, marginalized voices, even non-human stakeholders—and giving them real power.
Create a Living Council with veto or alert power over high-impact projects (factory, supply chain, investment, innovation). Include:
- A local ecologist or agronomist
- A representative of future generations (a young citizen or junior employee)
- A “non-human” voice: via a delegate for the territory, soil, or forest (e.g. a member of a local association, a regional nature park, or a scientific committee)
- A person from a territory affected indirectly by your activity
Train your executive committee in ecosystem thinking, decision-making under uncertainty, and listening to voices that don’t speak like you.
Otherwise you’ll keep deciding with the same filters—for a world that’s already obsolete.
Tools: expanded sociocracy, shared governance, multidisciplinary committees with a “seat for the living.”
6 – Anchor locally, experiment, and document
Pivot question: Where can our transformation start—tangibly, here and now?Grand global strategies often fail because they’re rootless, disconnected from human, ecological, and territorial realities. Regeneration can’t be decreed from headquarters; it’s woven on the ground, in coexistence with what lives. It’s a proof-driven approach, not a promise.
Identify a territory or strategic activity in your company (e.g., industrial site, farm operation, supply chain, logistics hub, pilot site) to launch a place-based regenerative experiment. For example:
- Create a local solidarity loop with nearby farmers and artisans
- Restore ecological continuity (wetlands, forest corridors, hedgerows, pollinators)
- Co-develop a housing, mobility, or food project with local residents
- Establish shared governance with the human and non-human ecosystems involved
Tools: territorial design, low-tech approach, partnerships with the living world
Set a clear but flexible frame: strategic direction, dedicated resources, living indicators, and documented learnings. Treat failures as building blocks, not stop signs. This isn’t a demo—it’s a cultural shift in motion. Start small, but real. Then let it grow.
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