Optimized to the limit. What next? Learning from forests to regenerate.
You’ve optimized everything—and you’re performing. You’re also fragile. Here are five fundamental lessons to rethink a company like a forest: living, slow, diverse, rooted, and regenerative.
Vivre la forêt by Jacques Tassin (Odile Jacob 2025).
A forest isn’t a scenery to protect. It’s a living, complex, multi-temporal system—a master of resilience. Jacques Tassin invites us to change our perspective and rethink companies like forests: living, slow, diverse, rooted, and regenerative. The forest doesn’t need us—we need it. What if that were the future? Shift from a mechanical model to a forest model, from performance to cohabitation. From extraction to regeneration.
1. Leave monoculture behind: move beyond one size fits all models
1.1 Diversity: the real strengh of forests
Forests don’t do uniformity. They never rely on a single tree. Their strength comes from the coexistence of thousands of species, each with its own pace, function, and vulnerability. This diversity isn’t decorative—it’s structural. It helps adaptat to crises, share resources, and foster resilience to shocks.
Belief #1: drop the obsession with a single model. Tomorrow’s economy will be adaptive—or it won’t exist. Value plural, situated, evolving models.
For decades, we’ve worshipped business-model cloning: find “the right model,” scale it hard, optimize it endlessly… Like monoculture—profitable in the short term, vulnerable in the long term. Standardized, global one-size-fits-all models prove fragile as soon as one variable shifts. Living systems don’t run on benchmarks—they run on complementarities.
Belief #2: replace obsession with “scalable” with a connection-driven mindset. Diversify your sources of value creation. Get perspectives, cultures, and functions to meet. Encourage hybridization over duplication. Your robustness will come not from repeating a perfect model, but from multiplying productive connections.
1.2 Cooperation versus competition
Trees don’t fight each other—they ally, share, and negotiate through underground networks. A forest runs on a relational economy, not on competitive logic.
Belief #3: stop thinking in terms of market share to conquer—think in terms of ecosystems to coexist in. Break the silos in your strategy; open your value chains.
A forest isn’t a battlefield; it’s a network of alliances. Species don’t thrive by crushing others, but by finding their right place. Trees share nutrients, signals, and resources through underground networks.
Belief #4: the regenerative economy follows a logic of purposeful coexistence. Stop viewing competitors as enemies, partners as service providers, and customers as targets
Act as a dynamic link in a living system. Broaden your collaborations; connect value chains, functions, and regions. It’s no longer a race—it’s network-building.
1.3 Systemic interdependance
In a forest,when one insect disappears, it affects trees, soils, and fungi. Everything is connected. Life is radical interdependence. Each being depends on others: the tree on the soil, the soil on fungi, fungi on roots, and so on. Nothing exists alone. Everything is relation.
Companies are embedded in multiple interdependencies—often ignored. Every product draws on complex supply systems and ecosystems. Every service depends on land, water, labor, and climate. The myth of autonomy is strategic—but false: trying to internalize, secure, and control everything means overlooking the fact that your stability is based on countless external vulnerabilities.
Belief #5: map your invisible dependencies and list what you don’t control—but rely on. Does your profitability depend on fertile soils? On distant resources? On stable territories? If so, you’re already in a forest—without knowing it. That’s where regenerative intelligence begins.
2. Rethink time: adopt the long view
2.1 Tree time, not trader time
A tree takes decades to reach maturity. Its rhythm is shaped by soil, seasons, and other living beings. Nothing is urgent; everything is essential. It doesn’t rush growth; it grows roots before growing upwards. The goal isn’t speed, but endurance. A forest doesn’t report quarterly results; it builds stability over time.
By contrast, companies managed for immediate returns exhaust their foundations, their purpose, and their teams. Short-termism isn’t a tactical choice; it’s a slow path to destruction.
Belief #6 : stop sprinting. A regenerative model isn’t run from one quarter to the next. Like planting an oak tree, tt requires long-horizon investment—built to last, not to deliver quick wins. To shift to an endurance economy, prioritize long-term impact, restore patient investments, and choose grounded balance sheets over volatile growth spikes
2.2 Multitemporality over linearity
A forest combines short cycles (buds, pollen) and long cycles (canopy, soil). It layers time, while the economy picks just one: the instant. Not everything grows at the same pace: some plants live a season, others live centuries. The ecosystem runs on overlapping timelines.
Yet you still reason on a single horizon—the reporting cycle. Managing a living system like a company requires multiple time scales: the operational present, the 10-year impact, and the 100-year consequences.
Belief #7: introduce multi-timescale management. Align climate emergencies, present needs, and intergenerational responsibility. Decide as if your children will run the company after you
2.3 Memory and anticipation
Forest soils retain the traces of vanished civilizations. The forest forgets nothing: it regenerates with memory, not through disruption. Forest soils preserve the imprint of human activity even centuries later. Nothing truly disappears; the past fertilizes—or poisons—the future.
Your company leaves traces too—social, environmental, symbolic. At this point, repair isn’t enough: we must reconcile, transmit, and restore living continuities.
Belief #8: your traces matter. Clean up liabilities, regenerate ecosystems, and build a memory that serves the future. Turn your history into regenerative capital—not a burden others will pay for
3. Think in terms of living systems: move beyond extractive logic
3.1 The economics of decomposition
In a forest, nothing is wasted. One tree’s death sustains another’s life. What is residue here becomes a resource there; there is neither loss nor surplus. What falls becomes germination; every death feeds another form of life. Residue is a resource, waste a link in the chain.
By contrast, the linear economy extracts, consumes, and discards—and in doing so, worsens its own vulnerability.
Belief #9: instead of “waste,” think cycles, feedback loops, and circular value chains. Close the loops, extend use-lives, and create value where you once saw only scrap. Model your approach on living systems: nothing leaves the system—make that your accounting principle..
3.2 Living systems don’t produce; they maintain
A forest doesn’t “manufacture” anything: it receives, transforms, and redistributes. It doesn’t optimize; it stabilizes. It doesn’t overproduce; it maintains and safeguards water, air, and soil. Its effectiveness lies in its restraint.
A company seeking to regenerate its impact can’t settle for “less bad” production. It must become an organism that supports the life around it.
Belief #10: shift from producing more to caring. Regeneration isn’t a CSR add-on; it’s an operating model. Care becomes a strategic act—not a cost to contain, but a lever for resilience, desirability, and grounding.
3.3 From finance to the maintenance of the living world
Life isn’t governed by profit, but by system health. Not by margins, but by stable equilibria. In a forest, what matters isn’t growth numbers, but the system’s capacity to endure.
How many companies can measure the health of their markets, their partners’ well-being, and the quality of the human interactions they generate?
Belief #11: adopt ecosystem-health indicators—environmental impact, level of local cooperation, social footprint. Give care strategic value, change your dashboards, and replace dominance KPIs with vitality metrics.
4. Live with, not against: build a fertile coexistence
4.1 From domination to coexistence
Amazonian societies lived in the forest without ravaging it or uprooting it. They built invisible, organic, temporary cities there. It wasn’t nature or culture—it was an integrated world. Habitat didn’t erase living systems; it blended into them.
Belief #12: stop settling like colonizers. Become guests of the territories and weave relationships before building walls. Opening a factory, warehouse, or headquarters must cease to be an act of conquest and become an act of relationship.
Before you build, listen. Your impact starts upstream—in the soil, in memories, in voices that are hard to hear.
4.2 Trees as urban infrastructure
In cities, trees capture water, reduce heat, and ease tensions. They’re far more than “decorative elements”: they are public agents of the living world. Beyond cosmetic greening, urban forests infiltrate soils, cool the air, and absorb noise. They heal.
What are you choosing to coexist in your workplaces? Plants—or living systems? People—or production flows?
Belief #13: it’s time to move beyond decoration and design work environments as ecosystems—people, plant life, materials, and time must co-adapt. Are your workplaces livable—or merely exploitable?
4.3 Restoration also means listening
You don’t restore a forest by decree—you learn from it, slowly. You don’t restore a forest with a budget, but with attention. It takes time, dialogue, repair, and care.
The same principle applies to relationships with local communities, nearby residents, suppliers, and non-human life
Belief #14: co-build with your living stakeholders. Don’t restore a company’s image—restore relationships with the living around you. Repair damaged ties not for image, but for durability. Reputation is worthless without roots
5 : Rewrite our narratives: reshape our collective imagination
5.1 The forest is not a scenery
We’ve reduced the forest to a postcard or a carbon sink. We’ve forgotten it is a political, historical, social entity.
On that model, we’ve built too many narratives as domination fictions: leader, conqueror, disrupter. But who today wants one more empire, one more lone hero of growth? The forest teaches another story: coexistence, humility, connection. That story isn’t weaker—it’s truer.
Belief #15: change your narrative—tell your interdependencies, not your autonomy. Speak about the world you inhabit, not the market you attack. Is your story a sales tool or an invitation to live together? Change the imagination, and alliances will follow.
5.2 Decolonize the ecological imagination
When the West tells the Global South to preserve its forests (while importing cheap soy, cocoa, or timber), it sustains a fiction of separation: a “clean” North and a South to be “protected”—without shared governance.
That model no longer holds: global value chains are also chains of responsibility. If you benefit from the forest, you are its custodian. And if you exploit a territory, you must listen to its inhabitants—human and non-human.
Belief #16: stop externalizing your impacts. Integrate the voices of territories into your decisions. Share power, wealth, and responsibilities.
5.3 Rethinking progress
Progress isn’t necessarily technical. It can be relational, regenerative, and quiet—a steady recovery. What if we’ve misunderstood progress? What if it were not about endless innovation, but about weaving durable balances? Forests advance too—without conquest, artificialization, or uprooting.
A regenerative company doesn’t grow against the world, but with it. Put this to your strategy committee: whom does your growth harm? And what would it mean to make progress—without destruction?
Belief #17: measure your performance by your capacity to sustain life. Progress isn’t about going faster—it’s about being more just.
What the forest teaches is an architecture for the world—a way to coexist, produce, and inhabit without depletion. Choosing to turn a company into a living organization means rejecting a mere profit machine and becoming a regenerative system—connected, place-based, humble and strong at once. It isn’t the forest that needs saving; we are the ones who must create roots again..
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