Regenerative Leadership

Journeying towards regenerative leadership

Everyone’s talking about regenerative leadership lately and there’s every reason. This is a necessary story for our times, of resisting, repairing and rebuilding within and beyond extractive systems. Folk across the PG Collective ecosystem and beyond have shared that, for them, regenerative leadership is rooted in relationality, interdependence and collective thriving. It is leadership that is not only adaptive but also restorative, grounded in equity and ecological awareness.

Instinctively, we feel that it’s something that the folk who make up PG Collective bring – however imperfectly – combining their lived and learnt experience of what it means to lead in ways that restore and replenish us as individuals, teams, organisations, ecosystems and ecologies.

So now we’re more intentionally embarking on a line of enquiry that asks, simply, what is needed in and for ourselves and those we work with for us all to lead in ways that are indeed truly regenerative?

Reciprocity in action

We want to lead in a way which enables power to be shared, supports collective action, and disrupts extractive consultancy models in favour of a more reciprocal model that cultivates shared benefits across our ecosystems. We see reciprocity as an antidote to the competitive and individualist behaviour patterns that thrive in our current economic system.

Over the course of two Away Days last year, which sparked some of our recent writing, we came together with four of our wonderful partners and collaborators, Hastings Commons, Partisan, Knowle West Media Centre and Rising Arts, to explore this further.

We explored the habits and practices that keep us locked in unhelpful scarcity cycles and challenged ourselves to discard the myths that keep us in holding patterns.

  • How do we create new habits, in order to break old habits (knowing this can be painful)?
  • Why do we default to thinking we have no power?
  • What would shift if we saw ourselves as a part of the system we live in rather than as observers of it?
  • How can we make space for feeling as well as thinking, shifting from intellectual conversation to more holistic practice – sharing heaviness and finding lightness together?
  • What practices will enable us to draw on both the wisdom of the past as well as dreaming into the future?

What’s emerging for us, in its simplest form, is that regenerative leadership means letting go of control. It means centring relationships (with ourselves, with others and with our ecology) and building with fierce care and joy from what we have in the here and now. It means channeling both the wisdom of our ancestors and the foresight of future generations.

But we’ve found there is no widely shared understanding of what building a field of practice around regenerative leadership could or should look like. There is also limited practical support infrastructure to enable leaders to rehearse, and eventually embody, regenerative forms of leadership.

We recognise when we are leading regeneratively – whether playing the role of consultant or organisational leader – we feel nourished and energised to come together to do difficult things in difficult times. It feels creative and fills not only our cup but those in our ecosystems. It connects us beyond ourselves and other beings to the planet that holds us.

Yet to arrive at this point, we need to overcome the noise of ego, competition and scarcity. We know that this requires a different relationship with time, community, agency and reciprocity.

Discovering the next steps together

We are now actively exploring and beginning to articulate what we think regenerative leadership is for us as a collective ourselves, the core elements that shape how we work internally and with our partners and clients. We already know that our deepest and most impactful work happens when we work alongside organisations over a period of time, and we’re seeking to lean into the way that this enables trust, relationships and mutuality to thrive through shared missions.

We also want to really explicitly bring to the surface how our values show up in our relationships with each other, informing our work to nurture and nourish the leadership that is needed in these times of complexity, uncertainty, mistrust and ecological breakdown.

This isn’t something that we can explore alone. We’re grateful to many thinking partners – including those within Dark Matter Labs, Many to Many collaboration Healing Justice London, the Really Regenerative Centre, the Transformational Governance Community, BRAP, Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Lankelly Chase Foundation, School for System Change and many more – who are openly sharing their learning and resources. Many of you have inspired and contributed to our thinking so far. And our exploration will take on deeper meaning as we gently expand our conversations throughout the year ahead, at the speed of trust.

We’re ending this blog with a call to action: we’d love you to signpost us to any thinking, resources, courses or projects working in the regenerative leadership space that you would recommend. One small way that we can live our regenerative leadership values is by amplifying each others’ work, coming together around shared projects, and offering new forms of support, accompaniment, mentorship and community across the ecosystem.

We think that finding ways to walk alongside those yearning to step into or deepen their regenerative leadership practices will be core to our practice in the years to come. Does this resonate with your hopes for the year ahead? We’d love you to hear from you.

By Julia Beart, Kate Swade and Lisa Clarke

Part 2 of 4-part series