Regenerative Leadership - An Outline

Regenerative leadership is less a discipline and more an interdisciplinary field of practice. It is a developing field. Its aim is to create conditions where an organisation and the people within it thrive. To leave the world better than you found it.

What is it reacting against?

It is reacting against viewing a business as a machine. If you look at Frederick Winslow Taylor's approach of 'scientific management' - where he would time workers in order to make a production process faster - it is the opposite of this 'business as a machine' philosophy.

Management was to be viewed as a set of practices that could be studied and improved. It was to be rooted in economics... (it) meant achieving maximum efficiency with the resources provided. (Kiechel, 2012)

A business as a machine approach involves standardisation, hierarchical structure, detailed instruction, supervision, division of labour. You could say that the focus was on extraction. A Newtonian type model where all the movements of the planets can be calculated. 

A different model would be looking at business as a complex organism, a living system. And three things which get better results from such a system are:

Systems thinking 

Looking at how things interconnect, rather than looking at elements in isolation. I presume this means that systems thinking would be more prevalent in an organisation across all levels, as there is already presumably a layer of this in a hierarchical structure as well - but it is concentrated at the top.

In a 2018 McKinsey paper, The Five Trademarks of an Agile Organization,  they argue that the 'organisation as machine' is a stable structure, but that it isn't able to evolve as quickly in a fast-changing environment. It's fair to say that at the moment, we are in a fast-changing environment.

Self-organisation & distributed decision-making.

Instead of top down control, people are involved in organising their work more. An example given by Laloux (2016, p. 47), is of a Dutch company in the health space called Buurtzog. The company structure is made up of groups of no more than twelve nurses, who self-organise all their own work. The company has nine thousand employees and has a headquarters comprising of twenty eight people.

Becoming a learning organisation

McKinsey (2028) contrast standardised tasks and learning tasks. With a standardised task, you know the steps you need to take for a desired outcome. A learning task is a piece of work where you don't know the end outcome. You create it as you go along. 

Peter Senge wrote about this in his book The Fifth Discipline. In the introduction Amy C. Edmondson (Harvard Business School) said:

Peter's book encouraged me to think more broadly about learning - not as something that happens only in classrooms or training programs, but as something that lives in the daily interactions between people at work. I was especially struck by his idea that the fundamental unit of learning in organizations is the team.

Learning is central to the health and development of the organisation. Senge argues that it shouldn't just take the form of formal training, that it should be embedded in the work - in everyday interactions and collective reflection.

A strong sense of purpose

This can include moving from a focus on shareholder value to a wider stakeholder and ecological perspective. There are businesses which show that this approach can be very successful. Patagonia is one example of this.

We started with our products, using materials that caused less harm to the environment. We gave away 1% of sales each year. We became a certified B Corp and a California benefit corporation, writing our values into our corporate charter so they would be preserved. More recently, in 2018, we changed the company’s purpose to: We’re in business to save our home planet. (Chouinard, 2022) 

Points of friction

Because Regenerative Leadership is a developing field, some of the writing can rest on assumptions which are disputed. For example, in Hutchens & Storm's book entitled 'Regenerative Leadership' they reference aspects of the work of archaeologist Marija Gimbutas which is strongly disputed. However, their work is useful in pointing towards many useful framing resources for this developing field of practice.

Looking further at how the Dutch company Buurtzog is organised - does this work because the majority of staff are involved in delivering the same service. Could a company be at the risk of silos if they had a broader offer?

On hbr.org, there are a lot of articles on areas which articulate with regenerative leadership, mainly organisation focussed - sustainability, business as a force for good etc. But the lack of articles using the term 'regenerative leadership' would suggest that it is still finding a shape. 

Dyllick & Muff (2016) provide a useful typology to analyse a business and its place on the scale from 'business as usual' to what they call "true business sustainability."

SOURCES

Aghina, W., Ahlback, K., De Smet, A., Lackey, G., Lurie, M., Murarka, M. and Handscomb, C. (2018) The five trademarks of agile organizations. McKinsey & Company. Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-five-trademarks-of-agile-organizations

Chouinard, Y. (2022) Earth is now our only shareholder. Patagonia. Available at: https://eu.patagonia.com/gb/en/ownership/ 

Dyllick, T. and Muff, K. (2016) ‘Clarifying the Meaning of Sustainable Business’, Organization & Environment, 29(2), pp. 156–174. Available at: https://www.bsl-lausanne.ch/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Dyllick-Muff-Clarifying-Publ-Online.full_.pdf

Garvin, D. A. (1993) ‘Building a Learning Organization’, Harvard Business Review, 71(4), pp. 78–91. Available at: https://hbr.org/1993/07/building-a-learning-organization (Accessed: 24 February 2026).

Hutchins, G. and Storm, L. (2019) Regenerative Leadership: The DNA of life-affirming 21st century organizations. London: Wordzworth Publishing.

Laloux, F. (2014) Reinventing Organizations. Brussels: Nelson Parker. (Note: Check your 2016 date; the original was 2014, but there was a 2016 'Illustrated' or 'Re-release' version).

Kiechel III, W. (2012) ‘The Management Century’, Harvard Business Review, 90(11), pp. 62–75. Available at: https://hbr.org/2012/11/the-management-century