Okay. Now you have a solid understanding of what a regenerative organisation means for you, why this transformation is important, what it entails in practice, and what the changes involve. It’s time to bring this transformation to life and create the best possible conditions for growth and development within the organisation.
You’re enthusiastic – enlightened even. This is where the first hurdle arises. While you’ve matured your thoughts, visions, and ambitions about the transformation, the rest of the organisation still needs to understand what it’s all about, what it demands from them, and to develop a renewed understanding of roles, responsibilities, mandates, and mutual expectations. Not everyone is like the octopus – curious, adaptable, and investigative by nature. Most of us also have some horseshoe crab tendencies, finding comfort and sense in what we do and how we do it.
Communication is the lubricant that should ideally help us navigate through this process smoothly.
To the core, there are five barriers you will encounter where communication plays a crucial role:
- What on earth does regenerative mean? I don’t understand it…
- Leaders keep doing what they always have – if I don’t make decisions, how do I lead?
- The horseshoe crabs’ old habits hinder the new culture.
- Old silos persist, and reconnections are lacking.
- We’re afraid to change direction and let go of what needs to die.
In the upcoming sections, we will delve deeper into each of these five barriers and provide examples of how you can address them through conscious communication to promote regenerative transformation.
What on earth does regenerative mean? I don’t understand it…
As long as regenerative organisational development is in its infancy and examples of successful transformations are relatively few, one challenge is to create a clear picture for employees and leaders of what it means to be regenerative. What’s different – if anything? What should I stop doing?
We have a fairly consistent understanding of what it means to be sustainable. Being regenerative, however, involves a deeper commitment to restoring and enhancing the ecosystem within and around the organisation, which can be challenging to grasp.
This requires that the leadership team, which creates the framework and sets the direction, agrees on – and can communicate consistently – what it means to work regeneratively. What are our roles and mandates in a regenerative organisation? And why is it relevant to implement this in the organisation?
If the leadership team isn’t aligned, wait. Hold off and work on your shared narrative so that all leaders have a reasonably clear picture of where you’re headed together, how you envision getting there, and what values will be the supporting pillars of your joint leadership. As Piet Hein said in a grook:
Remember the three T.T.T. Toil, But know: Things Take Time
Leadership is the guiding star in regenerative transformation. It is crucial that the communication coming from you is comparable. That you have a clear picture of your shared ambition, values, and motivations. And it’s important to be humble and present in meetings with all parts of the organisation. To understand the frustrations that come with changes and – especially – the uncertainty that naturally accompanies moving toward something new with few precedents.
Without this, the transformation can quickly lead to misunderstandings, feelings of not being seen or heard, and consequently, a lack of progress and action. It might even result in a partial paralysis, which everyone will find frustrating and may quickly lead to the conclusion that “leadership is completely crazy.”
Even those well-versed in the theories may struggle to explain concisely what it means in practice to “create conditions for life to thrive,” to reconnect or even rewild the organisation. And how do organisational structures look in a regenerative organisation when roles, responsibilities, and mandates change from what has been traditional throughout the industrial age? What most have been brought up with in their working lives.
There is no single formula. It’s up to you as a leader, or collectively as a leadership team with the rest of the organisation, to find the form – or formula – that best matches your organisation, customers, environment, and partners.
Communication to the organisation must naturally be clear that you will make adjustments along the way. That some initiatives may start and then close or change form. This is a natural part of being a regenerative organisation. What will guide the organisation forward will be continuous and can support healthy balances for people and nature’s ecosystems. Roles as we know them today will change, among other reasons because future organisations will consist of smaller ecosystems with significant decision-making power.
Leaders keep doing what they always have— if I don’t make decisions, how do I lead?
Now, about roles. Here is another hurdle communication needs to help overcome. How do I act and communicate as a leader if I no longer make professional decisions? If professionalism is set free, what becomes my role?
Besides the potential anxiety some leaders might feel about letting go and allowing employees to make professional decisions, it also leaves them with an important communication task. For both leaders and employees, it will be an adjustment process where continuous dialogue is crucial to find a form that suits the constellation of leaders and employees. Continuous follow-up and feedback are essential communication tools.
If the framework and overarching ambition we navigate within are not clear, we risk our work pointing in all directions. There will be no cohesive sense to our work, and cross-connections may not be sufficiently activated.
In this process, maintaining engagement over time becomes a challenge. It requires continuous follow-up and adjustment. The transformation of the organisation can lose momentum if you and your leadership colleagues do not continue to communicate and spotlight your regenerative progress and what still needs work.
Shaping and modeling a culture is a long-term process. It can be challenging to motivate employees to stay engaged over the long haul, especially when setbacks or obstacles arise. Not to mention you and your leadership colleagues. If you all do not have a clear picture of the core values of the regenerative organizational culture you are moving toward—if not all in the leadership feel ownership of the regenerative development—there is a high risk that old habits will creep back in and take over.
Challenges arise because regenerative organisational development is a complex process requiring a thorough understanding of how the organisation functions and interacts with its ecosystem. There aren’t many organisations yet to look to for inspiration. Added to this is the complexity that comes with organisations subject to a multitude of external laws and regulations. In these organisations, it is tempting to continue as usual rather than rewild and reconnect. What happens if a leader lets go of professional control? If tasks are rethought, new collaborations established, laws reinterpreted, and frameworks tested?
Effective communication plays a crucial role in addressing these challenges and creating an awareness and understanding throughout the organization that supports regenerative development as a necessary and positive direction for the future.
Train the organization through your communication to see possibilities rather than limitations. For example, by asking: How much of what we do today is necessary to meet requirements? Are there areas where we could do something else that would help professional freedom in task solving? Or the opposite: If we didn’t have to consider limitations, how could we best solve the task? Then: Is there anything we can implement despite the limitations?
As a leader, you must genuinely care in the ongoing daily dialogue. This is where you truly get a sense of what excites, worries, and concerns your leadership colleagues—and employees for that matter. It is in everyday life that the culture is shaped, nurtured, nuanced, and maintained. It is through your leaders that you help the organization move in small, persistent steps. They have the daily dialogue with your professionally strong employees. If your words and their actions do not align, it will be very difficult for employees to find their footing in an organization undergoing change.
Setting employees free professionally is not akin to a free fall from the ten-meter diving board, regardless of existing frameworks and rules. If the locked-in levels, competence, and maturity of the organisation are more suited to a jump from the one-meter board, tasks and the framework for freedom to solve them should be shaped accordingly—in dialogue with your employees. Your door is always open—yes—and you are often out of it. Moving around the organisation. Taking time to participate in casual dialogues that arise in spontaneous encounters—and not least to connect tasks, employees, and knowledge across the organisation.
If leaders in the organisation engage in dialogue with employees across the organisation in many encounters, you minimize confusion. And the risk of some teams or employees getting lost in their own tasks and forgetting to look up.
For many leaders today, this represents a significant change. And for some, it will feel difficult, intangible, uncomfortable, and more. Which brings us to the horseshoe crabs.
The horseshoe crabs’ old habits hinder the new culture
The easiest thing for everyone is to continue in the familiar path. It may not be the most effective in the long term, but here and now it is easy. With the speed culture that has become entrenched in many organisations, it becomes even more important to be communicatively clear that the transition the organisation is undergoing will mean we are less efficient for a while. That some things must be sorted out so that a new culture can grow and thrive. For the horseshoe crabs to get on board, it is crucial they see what it will bring—the organisation, users, themselves, and their colleagues.
In both central communication and ongoing communication moments (verbal and nonverbal), it must be clear that this will not just pass. This is not the same as saying decisions cannot change or some initiatives will not be adjusted or closed down. Being clear and rooted in the overarching ambition as the framework to navigate becomes the organisation’s GPS, and here you need to be communicatively clear, persistent, and supportive.
What is the ambition? How does it help you as an organisation? Why is it important right now? How are employees—and leaders—supported along the way? What is important—and what is less important? What are the frameworks of the regenerative culture—and what are the expectations? And are there existing structures that can be adjusted to make it harder to fall back into old habits?
Old silos persist, and reconnections are lacking
When you succeed with the transformation and have an organization with more professional freedom, less control, and more focus on experimenting with teams of the right people, with the right skills for the right task, space is created to play. The movement there must dance a bit with the prevailing culture and task distribution.
For medium and larger organisations, this means breaking up prevailing silos. Communication between leaders and the art of connecting professional skills, knowledge, and communication anew for the organisation’s, task’s, and culture’s best interest, requires you as a leader to continuously be in touch with what is happening across professional teams and help create connections. You are present and available—the coffee machine talk becomes your friend. Many ritual meetings are replaced by establishing more natural hubs where employees naturally meet. Where dialogues arise and new opportunity spaces are discovered across teams, professional skills, and organisational belonging (if it even exists in your new regenerative organisation).
For life to thrive and conditions for life to be nurtured, it must also be set free in a culture where cultivation is limited, and self-organising microcosms and organizational macrocosms emerge. As with promoting biodiversity, sometimes the best thing to do is…nothing! Stay out of it and let doubt benefit employees’ decisions and professional priorities. Initiate loose dialogues yourself, inquire curiously, and encourage pursuing adjustments, tasks, and more that are life-giving for the individual. Where engagement shines. Engaged employees and teams who fundamentally trust each other and train their professional skills and relationships across the board are not only life-giving to work in—they also spot solutions that might otherwise go unnoticed.
The art of communication here—besides helping connect employees, tasks, etc., across the organization—is to gather and share ongoing new knowledge and experiences so that the organization generally benefits. This can happen through more formal and classic communication channels like meetings, intranets, internet updates, news from management, updating templates, and so on. It also happens through ongoing interactions where you as a leader become a hub for knowledge across the board because in the daily dialogues, you get the best overview of what’s happening across the organization.
It is you and your leadership colleagues who largely carry knowledge across the organization. And you must be generous with that knowledge. Keep it in mind in all the dialogues and collaborations you become part of and communicate with it and the overall framework and vision in mind.
We’re afraid to change direction and let go of what needs to die
On this journey, something must die for something else to emerge. One such thing is the idea that we can say with certainty that the change we make now will also be long-lasting. The idea of having certainty about what happens when—and that the decision we have now made is unchangeable—becomes an illusion in the regenerative organisation. There MUST be room for adjustments—even when we talk about organisational structures, projects initiated, team compositions, and so on.
In the regenerative organization, you as a leader say more “yes, and…” than “no, because…”. Your task is to open the space of possibilities. Let employees test things within the framework of the overall ambition. And then close it down if the fertility proves limited. Let what is viable live—and let die what proves unfruitful within the overarching vision and core values.
This will—especially in the transformation—be easier for some to handle than others. Not least for yourself, if you are a “leader of your word,” meaning once something is said, it must be followed through. For some, it will seem as if what you initially communicated wasn’t correct. That you might be indecisive, uncertain in your leadership, or something else entirely.
However, this is not the case. See it as a way of trial and error. A kind of prototyping of ideas, driving energies (some are passionate about something that adds value to the shared vision within the given framework), and professional development. Here, it’s okay to fail. Better to let what isn’t viable die than to hold on and try to patch up a sinking boat. It takes courage—from everyone!
You as a leader must also communicate clearly when you have made a mistake. When something you initiated must sink so that something else can set sail. You must lead the way. Both in action and communication until it is so ingrained in the culture that it is natural for others to do the same. Your task is to create a strong community based on psychological safety, a clear framework to navigate freely within, and a liberated professionalism that moves professional decisions out to where they should reside: with those who have the expertise. If you are a leader who thrives as the expert, the one others go to for professional advice, then the question is whether this role is the right one for you in the regenerative organisation. Could you benefit from shifting from a leadership role to an expert role? Is moving people, cultures, and societies more your league? And are you good at communicating clearly, openly, and attentively? Then a leadership role in a regenerative organisation is the right place for you.
Put on your work gloves, courage, and clear, attentive communication.