“Regeneration goes beyond resilience or sustainability. Whatever is resilient, restored, robust, or sustainable resists or recovers from shocks and stays the same. Shocks make a regenerative business better. It rebounds by building the capacity to do and be more than it was before.” Carol Sandford
It is an inescapable fact that the tech race is progressing full speed ahead and generative AI is gaining ground, but is the increased need for intentional human connection equally evident? Relationships are the currency of systems, and as we move into a more networked world, this is key. Most transformation efforts begin with strategies and plans, but the true leverage lies elsewhere – in the human field. Your transformation will rise or fall not on the quality of your roadmap, but on the quality of your relationships. What happens when an ecosystem’s relationships are not strong? An ecosystem with fewer or weaker relationships is effectively an ecosystem with silos. We can particularly see this in organisations where silos are already very present as individual kingdoms, often with strong interconnectivity between them and loosely connected to other parts of the organisational system. What keeps the flow in these silos is the quality of relationships between the people in the system. Relationships are the connections that can ‘glue’ the system together to allow flexibility and innovation. Building meaningful relationships is the difference between a snake shedding its skin and a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly. In a world defined by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA), innovation and transformation have become more than strategic imperatives – they are existential necessities.
Yet amid the race toward digital disruption, agile operating models, and AI-led change, one element remains the most powerful catalyst for reinvention: the human story. Since the beginning of time, humans have connected and lived through stories; indeed, this is how much of our ancestral knowledge was handed down from generation to generation. Storytelling is not a soft skill; it’s a strategic capability that is run by emotional connection. In this domain, you don’t need massive structural change to create huge impact. Small relational shifts can lead to systemic ripple effects. I often see and hear this when teams move from a centralised to a decentralised decision-making structure. If process, accountability and empowerment are clear, shared decision-making rituals can melt silos and increase collaboration – without large-scale organisational structural change.
We hear a lot about the benefits of regenerative practice, but what does this actually mean, and how does it translate into today’s organisational constructs? How can we enable this? As leaders, we need to be intentional about where we have personal agency to create and use these levers for scaling behavioural change. We must shift our focus from change management to meaning-making – crafting a compelling and relatable narrative becomes indispensable to onboarding both your team and your peers. A well-crafted narrative can bring disparate teams together around a shared sense of purpose, anchor transformation initiatives in meaning and reality, translate abstract strategies into tangible human experiences, and create emotional resonance in the system as it grows. This is often overlooked in the scaling of high growth teams, where speed and sense-making are of the essence. At its core, storytelling bridges the what and the why, aligning logic with emotion and systems with soul. Yet, our brains tend to create shortcuts very quickly – to get things done. As we move into mental overload, these shortcuts become more and more prevalent. But are we sure that we are outsourcing the right things to tech? Are we being intentional with our delegating to really step into our value proposition to the organisation, or are we just looking to get things off our plates to move on and reduce overwhelm? To function optimally, we need to be thinking intentionally about our cerebral gymnastics, and which muscles we need to work out to nourish what’s important for us and for the business to effectively scale in today’s hyper-connected and busy world.
The good news is that we have more and more data at our fingertips to decipher behaviour and trends and manage analytics. The bad news is that this data gives us hard truths and unquestionable evidence about the speed of change and what works and what doesn’t. We know, for example, that 85% of business models will be out of date in five years (Gartner Future of Business Survey) and that AI is constantly rewriting what value means. As Rita McGrath, one of the world’s top experts on strategy and innovation, tells us, the unit of value in organisations is no longer at department level, but in small teams, and even sometimes in the individual. We also know that 76% of executives admit that their teams resist change, even when survival is on the line (McKinsey 2023 The State of Organisations Report).
Therefore, we are leading strategy from a reactive and not a proactive place. Transformation efforts stumble because of this, and also because they ignore the lived experiences, emotional and relational realities, and cultural undercurrents of the people expected to deploy and drive these strategies. Technology evolves at break-neck speed, but human systems need meaning, connection, and trust to move forward. Restorative rest needs to be built into these systems nestling in a world of ‘busyness’ and data overload. Success today depends on bridging and anticipating the gaps between strategy, innovation, technology and human change.
Regeneration: from change to renewal
True transformation is not extractive, it is regenerative. This means moving beyond solving problems to cultivating the conditions and space for people and systems to thrive. Intentionally creating a culture of care and regenerative practice helps organisations reconnect with what gives them life: purpose, relationships, creativity, and adaptability. This in turn leads to improved business results and competitive advantage. It is not about ‘what the system allows you to do’, but about how you intentionally design and redesign the system to allow people and the culture to evolve.
When we integrate storytelling with a regenerative lens, we begin to:
- Notice what is already working and worth amplifying.
- Honour cycles of rest, reflection, and emergence, not just productivity.
- Invite diverse voices, particularly those at the edges, to join in the centralised narrative and bring their ideas to the mix.
- Hold space for new possibilities to unfold, rather than rushing toward premature solutions.
- Get curious about how to turn relational feedback into design input.
This requires a leadership posture grounded in humility and curiosity, and a commitment to asking what I like to call spacious questions. I often say that collaboration is about the quality of your relationships, and competitive advantage is about the quality of your questions. We spend a lot of time asking closed and almost rhetorical questions to move on and ‘get things done’. This is a false sense of delivery because we are meaninglessly ‘going through the motions’, at speed, without direction and without strategic intention. Regenerative practices integrate slower, more open forums where we can stop, listen, observe, think and then speak (SLOTS). This is an acronym that came from feedback I received from one of my mentors. He advised me essentially to ‘shut up and slow down’, if I put my words on it! And it has been some of the most useful advice for scaling my leadership effectiveness and for building meaningful relationships to enable collaboration. Spacious questions don’t seek quick answers, they open up awareness, enquiry, empathy and potential.
Here are a few that can catalyse reinvention and intentionally design for a different type of thinking and being, and therefore for different results:
· What is looking to emerge in our system right now?
· What old stories (patterns) are running our system?
· Who isn’t being heard?
· What truths do people whisper but not say aloud?
· How can we host better conversations?
· What patterns do we see over the last six months/since the last annual team day?
· Where is life already regenerating itself within the team/organisation?
· What if we designed from a place of interdependence, not control?
· What would it look like to lead with less certainty and more presence?
· What is our minimum viable audience?
These are the kinds of questions that invite people to take a step back, sense, and reconnect – with themselves, each other, and the system at large. Such questions can of course also be declined at different operational levels. A recent example is a legacy manufacturing company I worked with who were looking at digital transformation. They were well on their way: the executive committee had invested in new systems, reorganised teams, and redefined KPIs. However, there was resistance and a lack of clarity in terms of operations and accountability. The breakthrough came not from another town hall or dashboard, but from a story.
We facilitated a session where frontline employees shared what “transformation” meant to them in their daily lives – fears of being replaced, pride in adapting, new tools and ways of working, silent resilience, new ways of looking at things. We then introduced a ‘regenerative’ structure for quarterly team meetings: honouring past contributions, pausing to sense what was alive in the present, and exploring spacious questions about future purpose. Who are we building this product for? What do our customers want and need? What is the agile loop needed to constantly test our assumptions? What challenges lie ahead (according to the data)? The senior leadership team embraced this not as a campaign, but as a living process, and this was important for the energy to shift and for permission to be granted to work differently. We also set up innovation labs and shared learning structures that were embedded into existing rituals to give everyone a secure platform from which to take the step from the known to the emerging unknown, and from silent resistance to healthy challenge.
The SHIFT of reinvention: a systemic lens
Reinvention is not a linear journey, but a shift in identity – individual, collective, and organisational. We need to listen to what is being said, what people joining have brought, what people leaving have left, and how we are creating resonance for and with those who remain. SHIFT means:
Sense into the system: Notice not just data and performance, but subtle energies, unspoken dynamics and emotions. Look constantly for the bigger reason for this transformation.
Harness collective intelligence: Create spaces for shared meaning-making. Invite storytelling, but also deep listening. Surface the wisdom of the whole system.
Identify new patterns: Use storytelling rituals and regenerative practices (like learning circles, walking dialogues, GEMBA listening tours, communities of practice) to identify existing patterns and anticipate new ones. Embed new ways of being and working.
Formalise the learning loops: Capture evolving narratives and reflect on them regularly. What spacious questions are surfacing? What are we learning about ourselves?
Transform the identity: Enable the organisation to see itself not as a machine to optimise, but as a living human system capable of renewal, connection, and evolution.
The system becomes the story it tells about itself. Regenerative models ask: Who are we becoming? What future do our relationships embody? What do we need to remain “future fit” as an organisation? Innovation is not just about being first to market, it’s about being first to matter.
Transformation is not just about change; it’s about conscious and constant renewal. Effective culture is not about control, but about humanity and care. Upskilling is not about training, but about the cycle of unlearning and relearning. The process of reinvention is not about abandoning who we were, it’s about remembering who we are becoming and embracing the messy middle. We need to constantly bridge the gaps: from digital to human, from old to new systems, from project to mindset and from past to present. What does our system need now to anticipate what it needs for tomorrow? How can we craft the S curve and take people with us, building capacity and competitive advantage as we go? It is not about fighting old patterns but replacing them with ones that serve you better.
We must harvest stories and combine narrative-sharing with reflective questions that cultivate wholeness, curiosity, and emergence. Moving beyond the individual personas to explore collective identities and create space for questions is a great way to craft stories that matter through slower, more deliberate team focus.
I am also a big believer in the power of visuals, and visually mapping the ecosystem helps to predict and create – connections are made, energy flows, and invisible dynamics that influence the transformation journey become visible.
Shifting systems through relationships is part of the hidden code of regenerative transformation. When we bring together storytelling, regenerative practice, a culture of care and the wisdom of spacious questions, we move from driving change as a project to nurturing transformation as a sustainable practice. Because ultimately, every transformation is a human and ever-evolving story. Shifting the system means shifting hearts and minds collectively for better business results. As leaders, we must stop managing change and start participating in emergence with trust, humility, and deep relational commitment. Because in the end, it’s not about what we build, it’s about what we become as we build it.
Thank you for reading.
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