We know that businesses across the world need to urgently shift their aims and practices to contribute towards a regenerative economy. In this economy, the interests of business, society and the environment are viewed and met as a whole, as part of a living systems approach.

Many businesses are on this journey and are already aspiring to be purpose-led and perform against environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria. Yet, aligning business aims and practices with sustainability and social impact targets is challenging.
It requires new kinds of:

• Decision-making.
• Problem-solving.
• Innovation.

While the focus often turns to governance structures, key performance indicators and incentive structures, these are necessary but not sufficient.
In November 2022, we set out our enquiry by asking:

What will our enquiry achieve?

Our regenerative business enquiry will collectively surface these capabilities and test what they mean for how we shape the future business workforce to implement transformative action through their organisations to deliver a regenerative economy.

Progress to date

We are currently distilling our initial insights and accompanying research into a green (discussion) paper to share what we see as the current state of the ecosystem, and what learning shifts are needed to move us towards a regenerative economy. This paper will form the provocation for the ongoing enquiry.

A collective journey to a shared vision

Our enquiry aims to explore how we nurture these capabilities in business through:

1. Business partnerships: partnering with three to five business champions to test the framework by conducting a capabilities diagnosis and identifying recommendations for improvement.
2. Co-creation workshops: bringing together global stakeholders across businesses and the education and learning system to refine the capabilities framework and define a shared vision of how to achieve next practice.
3. Community building: highlighting, celebrating and connecting the breadth of existing and ongoing work across the system of capabilities and capacity development around the world.

Our approach

• Bring a participative approach across all our work, bringing the system ‘into the room’. In our experience, the process is often as important as the outputs.
• Prioritise engaging underrepresented groups, recognising the importance of rebalancing the conversation to achieve social impact.
• Use thoughtful process design and futures approaches to help groups step out of the current day reality and explore the future with imagination.