Taking a regenerative approach to business/leadership is not a "checkbox" activity. How you "get there" and what it "looks like" is unique depending on the company. In fact, the exercise of enforcing a standard checklist of activities that must be completed to be regenerative is NOT regenerative in itself. The article Cordell Jacks refers to below is brilliant - it really describes the desired approach we are trying to model at Regenerative Capital Group.
If there is one common question we get at Regenerative Capital Group from impact investors it is this: “Can you give us specificity around what the ‘Regenerative impact metrics’ at your planned SME acquisitions will look like?” A very fair question. And a hard one to answer. Hard to answer because (trigger warning) traditional #impactmetrics are at the root of why our wider 'business impact' efforts are not catalyzing the systemic and transformative change we need. In this excellent article (5 min. read) by #Regenerative practitioner and colleague Beatrice Ungard, Ph.D., she lays out a compelling case for why we need a massive shift in our thinking around 'Impact' to support healthy economies, society, and environment. “The focus on defining functional industry-driven goals as opposed to engaging in place-sourced ‘end-state thinking’ is a reason why, despite all their good intentions to evolve business practices toward addressing climate change and other societal challenges, purpose-driven industry standards and metrics cannot be used as a starting point toward engaging organizations in a regenerative approach. Because they are being developed independently of an understanding of the uniqueness of the specific social, ecological, and economic systems within which an organization’s activities take place, these standards and metrics are generic, abstract, disconnected, and only offer a fragmented view of reality. They are poor indicators of the systemic effects generated by an organization on its environment and stakeholder ecosystem.” Evolving systems (or #SMEs in our case) towards creating wider, more regenerative value creation (healthy profits, societal relations, and environmental stewardship) requires catalyzing context-specific strategies across people, place, and purpose. The imposition of predetermined, standardized impact metrics ultimately becomes a colonial and prescriptive process that winds up as a compliance tick-box exercise, rather than a driving force towards flourishing ecosystems. At Regenerative Capital Group we are extremely excited to be on a journey of innovation and emergence with our CEOs in Residence in determining how their SME acquisitions can become great platforms for evolving wider impact and value creation. https://lnkd.in/gN3vq3Jq
