As the year begins, I’ve been thinking about the decision-making criteria we need to add to our organizational strategies to help us transition into more sustainable and regenerative systems.
Currently, we focus our attention mostly on profit and short-term, quarterly results. We’ve baked these profit-based criteria deeply into our business models! As a result, it’s challenging for organizations to transition into a more regenerative mindset, where expanded criteria might include things like 2030 sustainability goals or a shift toward carbon-free living, for example.
Let’s face it. We are practiced and familiar with profit as the primary measure of success. Leaders may have added KPIs like customer experience, brand reputation, or employee engagement. But these metrics are all measured by how they affect profit.
The problem is most of these defaults consider the organization as the “whole” to focus on. One aspect of a regenerative mindset is that it considers the system holistically. Regenerative mindsets take a long-term view while expanding the size and scope of the system to include our communities and our planet. The world outside of our organizations, if you will.
New questions from a regenerative mindset
Some days, it seems like our traditional approaches to success and achievement are setting us in a race to the bottom. The implications and ramifications of using profit as the primary definition of success have brought us to a world driven by consumerism and unending appetites. We’re extracting resources at a pace that can’t be regenerated for future generations. This short-term view of measurable success has created a world that is losing its vitality, disrupting our climate and making parts of our world unlivable.
We need to ask better questions of ourselves when we make decisions to see if we can bring more of a regenerative mindset and impact to how our organizations interface with today’s world and our collective future. By the way, do you wonder how Nature defines profit? Read about it here.
Below are a few shifts to help our organizations move toward a more regenerative decision-making process. These shifts offer as a starting point, not the perfect answer. Nature experiments all the time but only replicates what works. Let’s start experimenting with our decision-making criteria:
At the core of these questions lies two deeper insights we need to individually and collectively ask:
- How should we define success?
- Will this definition create conditions conducive to the life of future generations?
If the answer to the second is “no,” we need to start asking how to shape better decisions to serve our future – not just our present!
I’m assuming you are familiar with the B Corp movement https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/
We, your audience, have been asking these types of questions for a long time. The bigger challenge is how to expand this type of thinking – across the capitalist economy – up to profit seeking corporation leaders, and down to the lower levels of the capitalism ladder (subsistence level workers), and all the in-betweens.
Change is seen by our actions. We act according to our beliefs. Changing beliefs requires a new way of being in the world.