Sense Making: Regeneration, Sustainability and Innovation
In a previous article in 2019 I discussed my occasional discomfort with the rise of regeneration, and shared key lessons that have emerged as I’ve deep dived into regenerative innovation in the last 5 years.
Before exploring regeneration, including the key areas of particular significance - such as governance and finance models, collaborative tools and processes and design practices that enable far more productive collaboration, greater equity and inclusion and a felt sense of connection and belonging - this article will focus on orienting regeneration within the context of the sustainability and innovation movements, so that future articles can support a move towards increasingly aligned understanding of what regenerative design and practices look and feel like when implemented, and how they can support your work.
The space between sustainability, innovation and regeneration.
As regeneration gains traction globally, taking the spot previously held by sustainability as key jargon used to indicate forward-thinking and altruistically minded innovation, it often seems that we haven’t taken the time to articulate our understanding of sustainability and innovation, never mind the more recently adopted term regeneration.
Both sustainability and innovation seem like straightforward terms to many, so it may seem unnecessary to define them. The problem, however, is that without explicitly agreeing what we mean when we say sustainable and innovation there’s a good chance we’re taking aim at different targets from the beginning.
In the innovation scene this lack of clarity often shows up as a subtle, often unconscious, operating mode that sees innovation as useful for it’s own sake, and not because it (as originally intended) supports healthy responses to environmental and social challenges. Innovation without purpose, often increasing sales and consumption and worsening our social and environmental issues in the process, is frequently the result.
So, before we add regeneration into the mix and confuse things further, let’s define sustainability and innovation and their relationship to one another.
What is sustainability?
My preferred definition of sustainability is:
Sustainability: If you can do something indefinitely, it’s sustainable. If you can’t, it’s not.
That seems pretty straightforward. The adoption of that definition in practice is less so.
More so than at any other time in my career, businesses and built environment projects are waking up to the necessity of sustainability within their organisations as a basic requirement of a living entity (which all businesses are) to maintain relevance in the world. There is a process of broadening our shared understanding of sustainability from a limited term that relates primarily to environmental health (and usually a very small portion of the overall complexity of a living environment, like water or carbon), to something that means, more simply, the ability for their business or project to continue, or even thrive, in a changing economic, ecological and social context.
Put simply, sustainability is no longer understood by most as an term for the altruistic and environmentally minded. It is non-negotiable in any family, community, business, team or ecosystem, and integrates economic, social and environmental factors.
What is innovation?
The Oxford dictionary defines innovation as “the introduction of new things, ideas, or ways of doing something”, but it’s clear from this article, in which 15 people give their personal definition of innovation, that there is no standard definition.
This seems like as good a starting point as any:
Innovation: The application of ideas that are novel or useful. (definition from David Burkus, best selling author of the Myths of Creativity)
Taking the definition above, it’s clear in my mind that, whether they’d term it this way or not, businesses engage in a process of innovation (that is, applying new ideas that are novel or useful) because on some level they acknowledge the need to re-create themselves continually (usually in response to the economic environment).
In that sense, innovation is a process by which we engage in change, through the application of creativity.
How do sustainability and innovation interrelate?
Achieving sustainability in the Western world has been problematic for a number of reasons, most notably the reductionist approach taken to most of our work.
In the industry I’ve spent more time than any other - the built environment - innovation is rare.
As an industry, we tend to relate to the local environment (both social and ecological) as if it is a simplified bucket of information, something that we feel comfortable relating to: Soil types, water flows, local economic market conditions, etc. The problem with this approach is that it blinds us to any information that our typical information buckets deem irrelevant to the outcome. Given how our attempts at progressing towards sustainability in the built environment are going, it’s safe to say that we need radically new approaches to get where we need to go. It’s a big problem that we continue to rely on the information that we relied upon last time, when what we did last time isn’t good enough.
Put another way, we assume that our approaches and the information we’re paying attention to is sufficient to lead to the outcome we want, which is odd in many instances. Often when we actually look at the data, we can see that clearly isn’t the case. This is evidenced in the residential sector in New Zealand (as one example), where large volumes of homes continue to be built to inadequate standards, emitting far more carbon than necessary in the process, and leading to sub-par health outcomes for occupants.
It’s a classic case of what Einstein warned us of: attempting to solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
“I was adrift in the early going because the practitioners I worked with had gathered around them a hue of professional certainty that I couldn’t trace back to the outcomes of the work. It was a preemptive certainty, something they brought to the work, not something they really gained from it. It was rarely something they drew from how the work actually went.”
In that sense, innovation has a role to play in the built-environment (and many other industries) in engaging creative processes to enable us to adapt, and design responses that are far more appropriate to deliver the outcomes we seek.
Living innovation as a pathway to sustainability
Our world is not static. It is in a constant state of change, of flux. To be sustainable under those circumstances requires a reciprocal state of constant change; we must always be changing and adapting in an intricate dance with our living environment (which, again, integrated economic, social and environmental systems).
Most traditional approaches to innovation aren’t enough to support us to change in that way, without damaging critical functions of how that environment creates, in the words of Biomimicry Institute co-founder Janine Benyus, conditions conducive to life.
True sustainability in a living system (which all human systems are) results, in part, from two key traits that all living systems share:
They continually exchange information with their environment, thus maintaining an awareness of the patterning of the environment and how it changes through time.
They have the capacity for self-renewal, or autopoiesis - a term coined by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to define the self-maintaining chemistry of living cells. In effect, this is a living beings ability to continually re-create (re-generate) with subtle changes, in response to changes in it’s environment.
[To be clear, living systems share many other key patterns, such as a boundary that enables it to maintain a distinct identity and hold on to material and energy for productive purposes. These two are just particularly relevant here!]
Many forms of traditional innovation fail to open up pathways to increased exchange of information with our environment, and thus doesn’t enable us to come into more aligned relationship with that environment. More progressive forms that acknowledge the need to understand the system or field that a problem sits within enable this increased information exchange, and thus can help us to adapt to our environments in ways that nourish that environment.
In this sense, progressive forms of innovation (innovation that’s open continuously to being innovated) are processes by which we can collectively engage these two functions; to notice our environment as it changes in intricate detail, and then to re-create ourselves in response to it, in ways that nourish it and us.
What the vast majority of even progressive forms of innovation don’t do, however, is enable us to deeply understand the patterning of a living environment from it’s perspective. Deeply collaborative forms of innovation usually understand our economic, social and environmental systems as interrelated, but tend to start from a fragmented viewpoint. Often we lean heavily towards quantitative research, breaking each of these systems in to sub-systems for analysis from the beginning, which decreases our ability to understand the intricate nuance of the personality of a living environment. Alternatively, we often lean heavily towards qualitative research, ignoring or undervaluing (sometimes due to a personal preference towards storytelling, sometimes because our team is simply more experienced in that realm and so values it more) the key aspects of overall system health that data can provide insight into, if we start from the perspective that this data is telling us something about a whole system in a state of flow, transition and change - a state of becoming.
By guiding people to a felt understanding of the complexity of their place through story and narrative (informed by the Story of Place process developed by Regenesis Group), using data as an indicator of the underlying patterning and health of the system (informed by Nora Bateson’s concept of Warm Data), we can engage our places and each other in a far more comprehensive process of co-evolution.
In addition to relating to an over-simplified version of reality, I regularly see people taking a fundamentally humanist perspective, believing (subtly or otherwise) that the needs of humanity outweigh those of other aspects of our living world. Regardless of whether you believe that or not, that belief has (and will continue to) consistently undermined our ability to create conditions for humanity (and the rest of life) to thrive. Truly regenerative approaches help to address these deep-seated and problematic patterns.
[A quick clarification that I don’t believe that even progressive forms of innovation are enough to achieve this in isolation. Fundamentally, our living bodies are instruments that are in constant relationship and exchange with our environment, and much of our modern lifestyle reduces the bandwidth in the human body for information exchange with our environment. Increasing the bandwidth of our physical organism to be in deep relationship with the world around us is critical to innovation.]
Regeneration: Becoming and Designing as Nature
Regenerative practices, then, engage us in processes that allow us to feel the whole living system we are working with, so that we can design with it’s evolutionary needs in mind. These practices also appreciate the need for all of our work to develop our capability and awareness constantly, because Life is nested; We are nested within the unique system of life in our place, integrating economic, social and environmental systems, and for those systems to fulfill their potential, we must fulfill our potential to contribute to it’s health and success.
In biological terms, regeneration is the process that a living entity uses to remain sustainable. It involves a living entity monitoring and sensing it’s environment with enough care to truly notice, understand and feel it’s patterns, including subtle indicators of health or disease, and the capacity to re-create itself in response to those changes, ensuring that it continues to provide for the health of itself and it’s environment.
Regeneration: A process by which a living entity continually re-creates itself in response to the subtle and dynamic changes in it’s environment, continually edging into it’s unique role in enabling it’s environment to thrive.
In human psychology, we find the concept of intrinsic motivation. The research surrounding intrinsic motivation shows us that, in the long run, people are not motivated to be all they can be by a system of rewards and punishments (as many of our work, governance and collaborative systems still operate), but by seeing where we can uniquely contribute to enabling value-creation in something beyond ourselves. Our definition of regeneration captures this as core to the way that humans engage in regenerative innovation; by edging into our unique role in enabling our environment to thrive. Life is fractal, and it’s surprising how often the patterns and outcomes of research at one level (the level of human psychology, for example) show up at other levels of life’s functioning.
Integrating regenerative innovation
Innovation is a mechanism that businesses and communities (which are themselves living systems) use to engage in a process of change, though it is often disconnected from what those living systems actually require to thrive. The practices that I (and many others) are using to engage in regenerative innovation are mechanisms and tools to engage in a process of change that leads to sustainability on all fronts; economic, social and environmental. The practices that support regeneration also, conveniently, supports a systemic approach to sustainability, and develops our ability to see the interdependence between the various challenges we’re facing. By engaging in this way, we consistently develop our capability respond to future challenges in more systemic and more conscious ways.
All living systems (which, again, all human systems are) depend upon the health of their environment for their own health. We can deny this, but there is no escaping it: If we do not provide what our environment needs to nourish it’s own capacity to self-sustain, it’s vitality will diminish and, sooner or later, we’ll pay the price. That could manifest as a failing business that fails to meet the changing landscape of the economic and social landscape, to whole failing societies that fail to meet the changing environmental landscape (evidenced by the tragic Australian bushfire crisis).
In typical Western governance approaches, we sometimes rely too heavily one (Project Owner, CEO, Presidents, etc) or a small number of individuals (Project Team, Boards of Governance or Trustee, Parliaments, etc) and perspectives to define what is useful. In the process, we regularly fail to include in our definition of useful the key factors that enable the broader living system we’re nested within (integrating economic, social and environmental factors) to re-generate itself. Sooner or later, this approach is destined to fail as we act in ways that we believe are useful that, in fact, deplete the health of our communities, our businesses, our people and our ecosystems.
Regeneration is, in effect, the process that a living entity uses to remain sustainable. It involves a living entity monitoring and sensing it’s environment with enough care to truly notice, understand and feel it’s patterns, including subtle indicators of health or dis-ease, and having the capacity to re-create itself in response to those changes, ensuring that it continues to provide for the health of it’s environment.
The practices that support this also, conveniently, supports a systemic approach to sustainability, and develops our ability to see the interdependence between the various challenges we’re facing.
Regeneration: A process of becoming
Fundamental to the process of regeneration in living systems is a move towards greater wholeness in increasingly complex living entities. As noted, living systems are always in a state of flow and transition, becoming something more than they are today. Regeneration enables us to make engage in that change in ways that create conditions for us and our environments to thrive.
Traditional approaches to sustainability in most industrialised countries simplify that living complexity into what we perceive to be “manageable chunks”, in so doing stripping away and ignoring many vital aspects of the functioning of that complexity, resulting in unpredictable, unintended consequences. Rather than simplifying our world to the point of abstraction, regeneration demands that we alter our approach to work with that complexity.
When we’re used to working in a reductionist way - assuming that the best (or only) way to a positive outcome is to reduce our environments and communities to minute sub-systems, then managing each of those sub-systems rigorously - that sounds like a scary prospect. After all, how can we possibly monitor, manage and engage with the entire complexity of the economic, environmental and social systems around us?
The short answer is that we don’t have to.
Our job is not to manage life into a shape that we’re comfortable with. Rather than planning for how we’re going to force the systems around us to change, we need to acknowledge that they have their own natural means of self-regenerating. All we need to do is understand their patterning deeply enough that we can be genuinely supportive.
Just as individual humans have the capacity to self-correct and guide their own evolution (if the conditions are right to enable them to do so), whole living places have their own unique set of underlying processes that enable them to self-correct.
“I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity; but I would give my life for the simplicity the other side of complexity.”
Rather than managing every aspect of the system, we simply need to understand the system well enough as a whole, monitor those key aspects that best represent overall system health.
This is the simplicity at the other side of complexity.
Regeneration works with complexity, simply
Those attempting to wrestle with change, innovation, or sustainability through a traditional, reductionist lens may have achieved some success, but ultimately their attempts at managing the complex process of change in their business, community or ecosystem will come up against their own individual and collective limitation in monitoring and responding to so much data, without excluding other, critical data.
At best, they’ll achieve some success in the short-term (as defined by whichever metrics they’ve determined are best suited, which, unless they’re based on a genuine understanding of how the system operates as a whole, is likely to miss key health indicators for the system and jeopardise the project). It’s likely that they’ll get caught in a loop of reacting to whatever data seems most urgent at the time which, as that data doesn’t necessarily correlate to a healthy system or beneficial outcome.
Most problematically, this approach - based on an underlying assumption that that complexity can be successfully simplified and managed - has led (in the built environment and many, many other industries) to a dependence on the use of standardised metrics to determine the success of the outcomes on our unique project.
The underlying assumption becomes: Our (standardised) metrics - be it Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or anything else - show that we’re doing okay, so we must be doing okay. Often that’s far removed from the reality.
As these metrics rarely have a tangible connection to the factors that indicate health in the economic, environmental and social systems around us, we aren’t doing okay at all.
Practices of Regeneration
Over the course of coming articles, I will begin to explore the web of practices that I use to support people to engage with that living complexity in useful, functional ways, to move towards regenerative innovation as communities, projects and businesses. This will include, for example, how to assess the suitability of our collaborative and governance tools to re-create ourselves consistently in response to our changing environment, without giving up the need for structure and boundary (another critical feature of all living systems). One of the core services I offer, Design Facilitation, is one example of a practical way of applying this.
Please feel free to get in touch or comment with your thoughts. Sharing this journey can only benefit us all.