A regenerative organisational design primer

A life-giving thistle, captured in Devon, May 2024

This post is an update of my organisational design primer from 2020. Last updated October 2024.

Organisational design is a jumble of disciplines and capabilities, which, depending on who you talk to, includes some of the following: organisational development, learning and development, systems design, user-centred design, Employee Experience, agile working, digital transformation, culture design, community management, internal comms, organisational psychology, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Justice, leadership and team coaching, HR, and Operations.

The sources below reflect the jumble above and my own opinions about how organisations should organise (regeneratively), covering more the how (practice) and the why (beliefs) rather than the what (artefacts, such as operating models, which I’m not keen on). I’m also not much of a viewer or listener, so my resources bias towards written.

My definition of regenerative organisational design

Regenerative organisations heal and improve their ecosystems, rather than simply mitigating harms. Their users, partners, employees, communities (and the planet) are healthier for them existing. Truly regenerative organisations are difficult to create in our current extractive systems and I believe it’s a North Star worth aiming for.

Life pushes back against a story that excludes it — Meg Wheatley

Regenerative organisational design puts life and liberation at the centre of organisational change efforts:

• Creating the conditions for organisational health and enticing life-giving patterns to emerge
• Fostering communities that can repair and self-heal
• Developing entities that are able to end with grace, improving the health of their ecosystems.

For a deeper dive on regenerative organisational design (than a primer can provide) I’ve not found anything better than Regenerative Leadership.

Exploring what regenerative organisations could look like

• In search of a practical framework for Org Design by Stephanie Gioia of either/org and the OS Canvas by The Ready
• The Ecological Organisations Framework by Anna-Marie Swan
• Living Systems Theory and the Practice of Stewarding Change by Michelle Holliday and Michael Jones. See more of Michelle’s work on Thrivability here
• Regenerative Organizations: Introduction to the Special Issue by Pablo Muñoz and Oana Branzei. Their definition of regenerative organising: “the process of sensing and embracing surrounding living ecosystems, aligning organizational knowledge, decision-making, and actions to these systems’ structures and dynamics and acting in conjunction, in a way that allows for ecosystems to regenerate, build resilience and sustain life”.
• The Regenerative Organization Canvas by Victor Lopes Mascarenhas
• Some great links and examples in this post by New Constellations, including weaving seasonality into organisational rhythms and this library of regenerative business models
• 7 patterns for radically better organisational development in the UK nonprofit sector by The Patterns for Change Team
• The dimmensions of resilient organisations are structural, ideological, strategic and emotional, by Maurice Mitchell. Written about the non-profit sector in the US, but just as relevant to the UK
• 10 questions that contain the mindsets and practices of your future organisation: psychologically safe, decentralised, equitable, agile, complexity-informed, ecologically-minded.

Designing better processes and patterns

• either/org: an inspiration library for common organsiational patterns or designs, with a liberatory lens
• Beyond The Rules: organising and governance for an economy designed for life, including practical toolkits and templates for re-orienting organisational processes (such as employment contracting) towards equity and regeneration. Convened by Dark Matter
• An example of a regenerative process: returning to work after a period of furlough, illness or caring responsibilities
• An example of using user-centred design and horizontal organising to re-design an internal process (in this instance, appraisals).

Concepts that I wish were org design memes

• Organisations are complex systems: 7 implications of seeing organisations as complex systems by Sonja Blignaut
• Organisations can be regenerative, not extractive: The Pluriverse of Regeneration by Sahana Chattopadhyay and The Ecological Organisations Framework. A big leap forward would be for organisations to learn how to end well, which The Decelerator can guide us towards. Or perhaps we can apply permaculture principles to organisations?
• Aim for organisation healing (not organisational resilience, coping or recovery) through empathy, relationships, collective effort and leadership
• Chronic illness-informed organising is regenerative: taking inspiration from seasons and cycles; adopting “continuous handover” communication; from jobs to roles and tasks; underpinned by trust and radical acceptance
• Build imaginative capacity with future generations, nature and ancestors if you want leadership that’s fit for the 21st century (by Moral Imaginations)
• White supremacy culture gives organisations these characteristics: fear, one right way, either/or and the binary, denial and defensiveness, right to comfort and fear of conflict, individualism, progress is more and quantity over quality, worship of the written word, urgency
• Horizontal organising over hierarchical organising. See also Outlandish’s Playbook for how to organise as a sociocratic cooperative, Sociocracy 3.0’s resources, and Greaterthan and The Hum, who both offer brilliant trainings around self-management
• Build developmental capability if you want cultures of trust and safety (by Darananda)
• Strategy is memory by Little Futures (by Tom Critchlow and Brian Dell). This short blog post doesn’t really relate to regenerative practice, but it’s my favourite thing ever written about strategy, and I’ve read a lot of strategy books, so I couldn’t leave it out of a post about org design.

Unusual organisational design-related thinking that I love

• Sahana Chattopadhyay’s newsletter, Pluriversal Planet: “my way of inviting us to step into a world that is counter-hegemonic, abundant, diverse, and inter-related”, centring voices from the Global South
• Microsolidarity by Richard D. Bartlett: “Microsolidarity is a community-building practice. We’re weaving the social fabric that underpins shared infrastructure”
• Edges & Echoes, a newsletter about what Earth-centred holistic organisations could look like by Kate Swade and Lynne Davis
• Corporate Bodies, a newletter exploring how and why organisations are so weird by Kate Swade and Mark Walton
• Group Hug, a newsletter about facilitation, community and organising
• Kool-Aid Factory: a series of zines about the ways organizations coordinate
• OD for Life: a network of Organisational Development practitioners, mostly based in Europe
• Millennial management science by Venkatesh Rao: exploring “the centrality of lore, as in folklore, the lore of a fictional extended universe, or more pertinently, the water-cooler lore of an organization, in the framing of the traditional concerns of management and organizational theory”.

What resources would you like to see on this primer?