Regenerative Leadership - A conversation with Giles Hutchins and Laura Storm

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

It's absolutely critical that we reclaim a reconnection of those four areas in a new paradigm, because otherwise we are not whole human beings. We are not able to create thriving, whole societies.

Hi, and welcome to another episode of the Future Learning Design Podcast. My name's Tim Logan, and this week it's a great pleasure to bring you my conversation with Laura Storm and Giles Hutchins. Giles is a pioneering practitioner and senior advisor at the forefront of the revolution in organizational and leadership consciousness. He's the author and co-author of the books The Nature of Business, The Illusion of Separation, Future Fit, Regenerative Leadership, and most recently Leading by Nature: The Process of Becoming a Regenerative Leader. Giles is also the chair of the Future Fit Leadership Academy and previously held corporate roles at KPMG and Atos. Laura is an international thought leader and an expert on sustainability leadership and has spent her entire career advising global leaders on sustainability and building impact and purpose-driven organizations and movements. In 2018, Laura founded Regenerators, which is a collective focused on teaching leaders from all walks of life about regenerative design, regenerative organizations, leadership, and regenerative living. She serves on multiple boards and on the World Economic Forum's expert network as an expert in sustainable development and climate change.

Thank you so much for joining us. I've got Giles Hutchins and Laura Storm, the authors of this wonderful new book, Regenerative Leadership: The DNA of Life-Affirming 21st Century Organizations. And I've been hugely enjoying reading the book, and I think it's very important new work building on some previous things. So I'm just excited to have this conversation with them today. So hi, hi Giles, hi Laura.

Hello, it's wonderful being here.

Great, thank you so much. Okay, so just to start with, you talk about in the book about these push and pull forces which have kind of initiated this journey of reconnection, in the way you phrase it, to bring this new leadership paradigm into being. So I just wondered if we could start off with you just saying what is it that has really come together now to make this such an urgent new way of thinking?

So Giles and I decided to co-create this piece of work and write this book together and create the frameworks and models because there's obviously a need for a new approach because the current design model of our societies and our production systems and our corporate culture is causing so much damage. It's causing damage to humans, to ecosystems upon which we rely for our survival. So we are passionate about delivering an alternative, an alternative that is life-affirming. So what we see at the moment, it's quite an interesting time, not just because of the coronavirus pandemic, but it was an interesting time also before that hit. We see more and more executives and leaders and employees and leaders of all walks of life really feeling pushed and pulled and feel that a new way has to be birthed, that the current model is dysfunctional. And that's what has brought Jaz and I together to offer an alternative to those people that are so many and more and more are joining kind of like the movement by the day, the movement of an alternative way that is based on principles conducive to life. So that's the push and pull energy that we have tried to serve. Giles, do you want to add to that?

Yeah, I can add a little bit. I mean, from a push perspective, I think what we're seeing, leaders are kind of being cajoled. It's almost like— it reminds me of the boiled frog syndrome, you know, the frog in water that is gently being boiled, and the frog gets to a point where it doesn't really realize it's been boiled alive, and it kind of then is in this situation of having to jump out of the pan. And that's, I think, I think what a lot of leaders are finding themselves, they've got the VUCA, you know, the volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. They've got this level of stress inside the organizations, but also outside the organizations in their wider business ecosystems. They've got the need for digitization, for increasing transparency, which exposes the organization to actually doing what it says it's doing. And they've got this sort of need to attract and retain talent, and that talent coming through and wanting more than just short-term profit. So there's a lot of push factors that are cajoling it, and there's also pull factors which are kind of less fear-based and more kind of, if you like, love-based, which is the fact that the organization— many leaders in their heart now know that there is a deeper way, there is a way that the organization can actually serve society and the wider world in which we operate, rather than just destroying or undermining society. So a lot of people, I think, in the conscious capitalism, inclusive capitalism, and other areas are now recognizing that. So there's a sort of deeper pull into, surely we can do better than this. So yeah, you've got this push and pull happening, which is creating a real dynamism for a new norm, and in a way this pandemic is also part of that new norm.

Yeah, interesting, and it is certainly a wider thing as well outside of organisations.

I know, I mean, Laura, in the TEDx talk you gave, you talk a lot about the mental health issues and the stress that this whole system has created, and on both, obviously, both the planet and people. I mean, and I see that in our work with young people as well, so I definitely feel some urgency about it. So in terms of the separations and the dichotomies that you talk about in your book, and it feels like often we're very enamored by this idea of either/or, and I've spoken about this with many other people, is trying to reconcile and reconnect some of those things. So maybe could you talk a little bit about this idea of the separation that has been very characteristic of our system and how perhaps we're moving towards a more of a holistic or connected way of working?

Yes, so we believe that the root cause of our current crises are first and foremost interconnected, but they are also rooted in a separation, a separation of humans and nature. We have become so separate from our natural habitat. Really, we are one with nature and part of nature, yet we treat it as something we can just go visit on a Sunday afternoon. So that's one of the areas where this new path we need to rebuild or co-create has to be based on a reconnection of humans and nature. That's one of the areas. Another area is the kind of divide and the separation between the masculine and the feminine. And we don't necessarily mean men and women because both men and women have feminine attributes and we have masculine attributes.

Of course.

But the feminine has been very suppressed and dominated and shamed for a very long time.

Yeah.

And is missing from our corporate culture, is missing from our society, that more kind of holistic thinking, compassionate, energy of the feminine. Another area of separation that we need to reclaim and focus on bringing together, um, is the inner and the outer.

We've been very focused on outer success, of avoiding ourselves from going deep within.

All three of us are raised in a culture where it's not something we were taught. We were not taught to listen to our own intuition, to cater to our inner world, to explore our inner worlds. We've been taught to achieve external success. And that our value were dependent on achieving things in the outer world and not being truly happy inside. So that's another key area that we need to focus on bringing together, a constant focus on the inner and the outer. And we also use inner and outer sustainability as one example of the inner and outer worlds that need to come together.

We have both worked in with sustainability for a very, very long time.

And I have been used to seeing, and same for Giles, that the sustainability field is very focused on technologies, finance systems, the right kind of policies, the right kind of technological innovations that need to be scaled. And very little focus has been on the inner sustainability components. That's some of the elements that I talk about in that TEDx, you were refer to, that I gave a few years ago, about the importance of passionate changemakers and leaders of all walks of life focusing on the inner dimensions of sustainability, the well-being, the health, the thrivability, because that has to come together with the outer focus on technologies and solutions. And the fourth area that we dive into in the book is the importance of of focusing not just on the left hemisphere part of our brain, which is amazing and brilliant at logic and tuning in on things and seeing things in small parts instead of holistic systems. We need to reclaim and honor our right hemisphere brain, which is brilliant at thinking in interconnected systems, is brilliant at being creative, is brilliant at problem solving at a whole other level. But we have been again raised in a system that is valuing rigid matrixes and systems and rational logic. Intuition and creativity has again been seen as less important in our society. So those 4 areas are— we could talk about other areas as well, but we see these 4 areas as absolutely critical. It's absolutely critical that we reclaim a reconnection of those four areas in a new paradigm, and that we honor both, because otherwise we are not whole human beings and we are not able to create thriving, whole societies.

Just to build on what Laura was saying, that shift from what we call yesterday's logic, where we're splitting more focus on the left hemisphere rather than the right, more focus on the outer rather than the inner, more focus on the masculine rather than the feminine, and more focus on humanity rather than human and nature. And then shifting into what we call the logic of life, where there's that reintegration, the journey of regeneration from the journey of separation. And there's 3 levels of that, activating that logic of life with inside ourselves as leaders. And with inside our organisations. And the first level is really systems thinking, which has been around in business now for some years. It's becoming more and more well accepted, so that's a shift from a kind of mechanistic reductive perspective, which sees the parts, to recognising that things are interconnected. And so that systems thinking helps align the left and right brain hemispheres that Laura was talking about. And what relates to Otto Scharmer's work around Theory U is open mind. We open up our mind and we allow a rebalancing of our hemispheres. And then there's a deeper level, which is systemic awareness, which is where we help integrate that masculine and feminine and a more embodied participatory awareness, or what Otto Scharmer calls open heart, which is where we start sensing into the system as leaders, as systemic facilitators, we can tune into the system and see and sense the stuckness, the flows, the acupuncture points, the nodal connections in our organization as a living system, and enliven that living system's culture. And so that's very important, and systemic awareness is really becoming more and more recognized through systemic coaching, constellation work, social presencing, and so forth. And then there's the third level which is often overlooked but is really very important, it's the taproot that holds all of this together really, which is ecosystemic awareness, and it's in that ecosystemic awareness that we really open up beyond the anthropocentric, the human realm, into sensing the innate interconnectedness of life, which all adult developmental psychology research points to as a really important threshold for human beings, for leaders, to start sensing into that innate interconnectedness., and when we do that, we open up what Otto Scharmer calls open will, where we actually open up our small will into a deeper will. We're in service then. Our organisation starts becoming in service of life, of society, the wider stakeholder community, rather than getting caught up in how do we maximise ourselves at the expense of others. So all of those 3 levels enable us to activate the logic of life, to shift from yesterday's logic of imbalance to a more coherent logic that is in harmony with, with how life works.

Yeah, yeah, very nice.

And I mean, I like the way that you framed it in terms of this kind of DNA model with the interwoven life and leadership dynamics, because I think, I mean, one of the things that I really like about the work is, is how courageous it is in, in a way to really go deep into this what you call in the Living Systems Being section, in the self-awareness of leaders become more in tune to themselves, or, you know, where the dominance has been so much on the rational, and this idea of sensing and trusting somehow. Something interesting, and certainly for us in our work with young people and leaders in education, we're really trying to look at the way that people self-lead in terms of understanding themselves, and that is a powerful part of your model. Maybe could you say a bit more about that section of it?

So a bit of, of context first for the living systems being part, just so the listener can kind of maybe visualize what this is, what this is all about, is Giles and I both felt a model, a holistic model of how to do organizational development and organizational design and leadership differently, that was valuing both the inner and the outer components, were missing. So what kind of framework could companies, organizations, politicians even use to rebuild societies and organizations in a way that is not just valuing the outer but also the inner? That we need to ensure that when we focus on, for example, a circular economy, that we do that in a way where we also dare focus on our inner thrivability. So the Regenerative Leadership DNA is put together in a way where the inner and outer components are valued equally. It's based on the logic of life, which means that everything we do has to be affirming of life, creating principle, creating the right conditions for more life to actually thrive. So the DNA model consists of 3 components: the Living Systems Design, which is focusing on how we produce our products and services. It has to be based on mimicking nature's principles, biomimicry, circular economy, regenerative materials, etc. Then we have living systems culture as the second component, which is focusing on what kind of culture we create for people to come alive, for people to collaborate as best as possible. How can we really create those life-affirming cultures where people thrive and can be their whole selves whole selves coming to work. And then the third component, which is living systems being, which is often missing from the sustainability debate in general. And living systems being is so incredibly important because it's how we thrive, how we start to shift our mindset from one of fear and scarcity to one of abundance and collaboration, one of impatient and a need for quick results to one of being patient and knowing that sometimes things take time. And instead of always acting out of basically actions rooted in fear and the head taking over and the need to respond very quickly, sometimes, and especially we see that now during the corona pandemic, I mean, it's incredibly important that we allow things to, to unfold instead of going immediately into reaction mode. We need to also just allow things to unfold and sense into what is actually the wise decision here. And sometimes the wise decision requires you to sleep on it, to meditate on it. We also value stillness and silence. So many leaders, so many students, so many people in general are very uncomfortable with silence and stillness. And that's also something we see big time these days. People are not comfortable with not being able to feed their bodies with all sorts of input all the time.

Of course.

What happens when I just have to sit with myself? I had to learn silence and stillness the hard way, and I'm immensely thankful for that. After a brain injury that happened 5 years ago that I won't go into details here, people can explore that elsewhere, but that importance of leaders being able to hold a space of silence and stillness and reflections to allow the wiser personality to come through. Allowing presence. Yaz and I always teach or learn our participants in our retreats and seminars the importance of being present with yourself but also with those around you. We facilitate what we call deep listening, that ability to actually listen carefully to who sits in front of you instead of immediately going to your head thinking about what you want to say next and how you feel about that or even interrupting interrupting the other person who is trying to explain how that person feels like. So those kind of abilities and qualities is so immensely important in leaders of a thriving tomorrow. And I'm sure, Jaaz, you can add on that in terms of what you experienced working with C-level executives on owning that ability.

Yeah, well, thanks, Laura. Just to add to what you were saying really is how the living systems being underpins this living systems design and culture. So the whole real shift here into regenerative leadership ways, recognizing that the organization isn't a machine that we're trying to optimize and sweat assets, it's actually a living, agile, purposeful, developmental culture. And the way that we as leaders help that, cultivate the conditions for that living, purposeful, developmental culture is through the living systems being. So that's why the living systems being really is the nutritious soil that enables the organization to create a psychologically safe environment for people to journey towards wholeness, for people to be open to truly self-organize, to work in ways that actually bring more of themselves into the workplace. And Tools like deep listening that Laura mentioned, and dialogue, calling upon other ways of knowing— these are things that we, we explore in the book. Carl Jung's work, for instance, the famous psychotherapist, really explored in his life work how we have these different ways of knowing: the rational, the intuitive, the emotional, and also the somatic ways of knowing. And now modern science is now showing us What an immense value that emotional intelligence and that physical quotient and somatic intelligence is to the way in which we create the conditions in our organisations for people to show up more effectively and for the organisation to come alive. And so again, how do we bring those different ways of knowing together in ourselves and in the teams and organisation that we are looking after? And that's through the living systems being dynamic. So those living systems being dynamic underpin the living systems culture.

Fantastic. But you do say in— at the beginning of the section in the book that this will be a controversial read for some in the world of business. I mean, you recognize that this is taking it that necessary next step further, or deeper, I would say, into making it making the rest of the culture and the design work, but you recognize that many people will find this difficult to adapt to at the beginning. Have you found that in your work?

I think again it's about the courage of— the courage to question everything that we were taught in school. Both Giles and I have studied in business school and we were for sure not taught about how to be present, how to embrace silence, how to be compassionate. We were taught a reductionist mechanistic mindset of how to optimize both your employees and natural resources. And that kind of logic is what has gotten us to where we are today.

Yeah, I would hazard that that education didn't start in business school. It probably started quite a few years before that.

Yeah, exactly. But just to mention or just to stress that in business schools that influences the mindset of business leaders all over the planet, that that is the way to be successful. So therefore, yes, the regenerative leadership work and our book is for sure not mainstream yet, because it asks of the individual to step into, step up to what we're really called to do as a collective. If we, and I have to be brutally honest here, if we want to be here 100 years from now, maybe even shorter, it depends on what scientists you ask. We are called upon, we are demanded to embark on an entirely new path for mankind.. And that path has to be based and rooted in ultimately love, as Giles were also stressing. But it's love towards ourselves, next of kin, the natural world which we are a part of. And that's the kind of mindset that we know has to be front and center for all business leaders if they want to create thriving organizations 5, 10, 15 years from now.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it does require a mindset shift. And, you know, I've a lot of discussion with many people about that idea of shifting mindsets, because it's not, not an easy thing to do. And especially if you're talking about such fundamental paradigm shifts, for example, as you say, from scarcity to abundance.

I mean, yeah, exactly. And I would like to give a concrete example that is playing out in, in Denmark right now. One of the richest One of the richest men in Denmark became rich out of different fast fashion companies. And he has been scrutinized by the public these weeks because he was the first to let go of a lot of people. He did not pay his bills to poor factory workers in Bangladesh and Pakistan. He did what we have been taught in business school to just focus on the machine and let go of everything that seems unnecessary focus on the thrival of the company, but in a way where the company is seen as an independent island. And what we see now is that everything is interconnected and is creating huge ripple effects. So what the decisions made in the headquarters in Denmark create huge ripple effects all over the world. And he is now being shamed for not leading with his heart first and with compassion in the driver's seat. That for him to be sustainable and regenerative in the long run, First of all, we can question the whole fast fashion destructive business model, but let's not go there in this conversation. But that is basically a business model based on degenerative principles. And so right now he is one of the companies who is suffering the most because that business model is not resilient, it's not regenerative, it's not rooted in compassion for his wider ecosystem. So I think that we will see a lot of similar examples playing out over the weeks and months to come. And hopefully this can be a turning point for some business leaders to realize that in a Woke world of today, we need an entirely new mindset for us to be resilient and thriving in the longer run. And we need to put compassion in the driver's seat.

Yeah. It's interesting though that we're actually more and more finding examples of evidence of the fact that not only is it, is it a life-affirming and, and let's say, you know, positive way to be and, and do and work, it's also actually working. It's proving to be the more effective and resilient model in these kinds of contexts. Are there other, I mean, other examples where this is going really well that people could look to for, you know, inspiration and example?

Yeah, I— can I just build on what was just being shared there? Because I want to ensure we give the right impression here that this isn't a shift from just one way into another way. It's kind of a rebalancing. So we still need to have that focus on the business. It's also, as well as having the relentless focus on the business, it's opening up that sphere of understanding of also being able to hold the interrelational. So companies that are doing well at focusing on their business and their vitality of their business whilst then also understanding the interconnectedness of their culture and their wider ecosystem are ones that are able not just to survive but to actually thrive. So it's a kind of shift from survival into thrival, if you like, and with that comes this widening, this opening up of the sphere of compassion, if you like, and yet it's not compassion in a kind of way that then suddenly starts losing a grip on the business. So, you know, there's an energy company, Iberdrola, multibillion-dollar, which has done very well in moving towards a low-carbon future, and embracing the Sustainable Development Goals whilst also enriching its culture and actually growing as a business. There is the company Interface, the carpets company, which has long been embedding sustainability and living systems principles into its organization through a very challenging and competitive landscape. There's companies, B Corps like Pukka Herbs, that have really thrived in challenging times in a consumer market by sticking to their values and valuing all of their suppliers in their supply chain and ecosystem and keeping that strong sense of purpose. There's fast food companies like Leon, um, are operating in really low margin areas which again need to be so focused on the business and yet are bringing in a different quality of value, and a different way in which people are working and are treated in their, not just their operations, but the whole of their ecosystem, and the way in which they educate their people coming into their shop about how to eat and live healthy in these challenging times. So there's plenty of examples in all sectors now that we can draw upon.

That's great.

Yeah, and I think it's important, as, as Giles said, to stress that regenerative businesses are— it's not philanthropy, it's not that having a successful financial result is not important suddenly, but it's about how you achieve those financial results. And we have in the Living Systems Culture component survival and thrival is our first kind of DNA strand because it's so immensely important that we are still allowed to focus on how we can create a healthy business. But the whole point is that for organizations to be healthy in the times that we are living in, you need to make sure that the whole system that you are a part of is thriving as well. You can't thrive as an individual island. That's just not possible.

Yeah, I mean, certainly for me, it's bringing together, you know, what you've done in the book is bringing together so many different aspect. You know, I was totally inspired by Fred Laloux's book when I read that in 2016, and, you know, there's certainly a pull-through from his work, but you're making it much more, kind of, much more realizable and practical in the way that we can actually putting it into practice. So, I mean, if you've got people inspired by this idea, what would be your recommendations in terms of, other than obviously reading the book, good ways that they can actually just take the first steps towards living this new way of leading?

We put in Part 3 of the book, we actually have some tools and techniques and also a coaching guide, because through the work that both Laura and I have done out in the field, we've had people asking certain questions that seem to pop up, certain resistances that we all have when we're sort of crossing a threshold into a new way. And so we've specifically focused on that in the whole of Part 3 to provide tools and responses to those immediate questions that we all have. Laura?

I think— thank you for mentioning the work of Laloux, and for us it's important, and that's also a point we put across in the book, that this work is building on many other pioneers and thought leaders out there that have created brilliant new frameworks. What we wanted to do with the— with regenerative leadership and regenerative leadership DNA is to bring together the pieces of the greater puzzle. And so as Diane said, part 3, and the final part of the book, is dedicated to making this very accessible. So we recommend starting slow, eat the elephant in bites. In the book, we have one of the tools and frameworks we offer is the DNA diagnosis wheel. Okay, let's start with figuring out how we actually perform according to the regenerative leadership DNA as we are right now. So start by doing that simple analysis, and that will give you an overview of where to start. And then further into the Part 3 chapter, you can read a rich pool of examples of how to get started depending on where you are not performing according to the regenerative leadership DNA. So we have tried to make it very, very simple, very accessible, and constantly stress that although it can seem daunting to embark on a new kind of way of doing business, We have all just started by taking the first step, and that's what we want to encourage.

That's great.

Thank you so much.

Great.

Good luck.

We hope you've enjoyed this episode.

Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.