(Adapted from an earlier post on LeighBaker in 2021)

“With a powerful lever, a strong fulcrum and a smarter place to stand, you can change your world.”

(apologies to Archimedes)

Here’s a selection of videos that set a framework for regenerative business.

A regenerative mindset – the most powerful place to intervene in the systems you’re part of.

“The most powerful place to intervene in a system is the paradigm out of which it arises”

Donella Meadows

We can’t fix our current degenerative economic system from it’s extract/exploit/emit mindset – so let’s start with a more satisfying mindset – regeneration.

Regeneration restores forests, lands, farms and oceans. It transforms cities, builds green affordable housing, reverses soil erosion, rejuvenates degraded lands, and power rural communities.

Planetary regeneration creates livelihoods – occupations that bring life to people and people to life, work that links us to one-another’s well-being. It offers paths out of poverty that provide people with meaning, worthy involvement with their community, al living wage, and a future of dignity and respect.”

Paul Hawken, REGENERATION: ENDING THE CLIMATE CRISIS IN ONE GENERATION

(What’s in it for business? A cleaner, safer, fairer economy opens up trillion-dollar innovation opportunity and new customer markets at the bottom of the pyramid.)

Project Regeneration

Paul Hawken’s been writing bout and catalysing regeneration for decades. He founded Project Drawdown in 2014, and more recently Project Regeneration in 2021 – to connect individuals, communities, SMEs and regions to action today. 

His latest bestseller is: REGENERATION: ENDING THE CLIMATE CRISIS IN ONE GENERATION.  Here he speaks on Regeneration in Regeneration: Climate, Consciousness, & Justice.

21st century “doughnut” economics

Renegade economist Kate Raworth’s (1 minute) Doughnut Economy that describes a smarter economy that is distributive and regenerative by design.

A slightly longer discussion (15 minutes) on using Doughnut thinking to shift your business from extractive to regenerative.

Brief introductions on regeneration and designing for good, not just less bad

Bill McDonough, co-author of Cradle to Cradle speaking on the way Design as Optimism opens up innovation. (56 minutes, but true awesomeness from 9:00 to 27:00)

Redesigning industrial systems that deliver products and services

The linear design thinking behind the industrial systems that deliver our goods and services probably goes back to when humans moved into cities. Fundamentally, it’s a mine/make/use/dump approach that treats nature as infinite. (Pliny the Elder was complaining about it in Rome in the 1st century AD.)

Circular Economy

In a Circular Economy, all materials are continuously recirculating, non-toxic “nutrients”. Dame Ellen Macarthur explaining the connections between Food, Health and the Circular Economy

Biomimicry – Nature’s design brilliance applied

Most of today’s production technologies developed from blacksmith shops and soap factories. Nature does her building at room temperature, using renewable materials, renewable energy, biology and physics instead of degenerative mechanical and chemical engineering.

Paul Hawken and Janine Benyus are inspiring individually. Here they’re together in Biomimicry as a Cooperative Inquiry

Good for the planet is BETTER for business

When you get strategic and innovative, 20th century “environment=expense” myths evaporate. Cleaner, smarter and safer is better for the bottom line.

Regeneration and radical industrialism at Interface

Global corporation Interface started their quest to become “the world’s first restorative business” by their founding CEO Ray Anderson in the mid 1990s, and is so close to succeeding in their Mission Zero that in 2017 they launched Climate Takeback. Some key video markers include:

• Ray Anderson’s spear-to-the-chest moment
• Ray Anderson reflecting on their first 14 years
• A story on their Pacific fishing net reclamation project – converting it into valuable raw material
• Their Climate Takeback initiative, to create a climate fit for life.

Project Drawdown – REVERSING global warming

Solving climate change offers trillion dollar innovation opportunities.

Paul Hawken introducing on how to reverse global warming with existing solutions.

Paul Hawken speaking further on reversing global warming as innovation.

Dr. Jonathan Foley, Executive Director of Project Drawdown, as he describes the 2020 Drawdown Climate Solution Framework in Drawdown 101

Change your mind – and keep the change

So if you want a better world, a safe climate, a just economy then these are the mindsets that will accelerate you past “reduction and efficiency” to meaningful, profitable, beneficial action.

The next question is who you’ll share this with and what else you’ll do. Do you know a smart entrepreneur stuck in 20th century paradigms?

Are you ready to explore your own opportunities?