What can organizations learn to deeper embrace regenerative business? What are the “muscles to strengthen”?

Navigating the transition towards more regenerative business is an open process with unclear outcomes. It takes clear agenda setting on the top level and active navigation in a field of shifting demands from customers, regulations, reporting standards and stakeholders. And it requires developing the organization so that it can continuously adapt to such shifts, as well as building both flexibility and resilience.

In our last article, these six challenges on the path to deeper sustainability have been identified.

Six Challenges on the Path to Deeper Sustainability: Navigating in shifting paradigms; setting the ambition, moving boldly; developing new ways of cooperation; dealing with complexity; re-shaping governance; steering transformation.

So what are Organizational Development Goals, then? And how could they help?

The Organizational Development Goals (ODGs) aim to provide a framework to structure and navigate along this development path. They provide a “middle layer” in a field that could be structured in three levels

🛰 starting from the Challenges that organizations face in their transition to regenerative business

🛩️ on to Organizational Development Goals that provide guidance and context on capabilities that organizations need to successfully master the challenges

🚊 down to specific theories, methods and tools that make working towards an ODG actionable – in the context provided by the ODG and your company’s specific situation

The three layers: Challenges – Organizational Development Goals – Theories, Methods, Tools.

The ODGs can therefore be understood as a navigator with

📚 Dimensions to guide the organizational learning: What have we already achieved? Where could others learn from us? Where are we getting ahead? Where are we stuck? Where are we facing structures, knowledge gaps, behavioral autopilots, or cultural resistance? Where can we learn from others?

🗺 A Map to better understand the territory around us and ahead: Is there something we have not considered yet? Are we facing “invisible forces” – something that is implicit but highly powerful in the organization?

🧭 Context for theories and methods: what can we read, what have others tried, who should we talk to in order to keep things moving? Of the many new ideas, books and workshops that authors and consultants are putting out: which ones are relevant to our situation?

This makes the ODGs a valuable resource for future-readiness, even beyond the regenerative challenges: building these organizational capabilities will in any case strengthen an organization’s capacity to respond dynamically, adapt and innovate, thrive and build resilience.

So how about an example? Since we started by exploring the “Dealing with Complexity” challenge, let’s use that as a first example. Not with the ambition that this be a perfect wording that covers everything, forever, but as a first draft to illustrate the “architecture” introduced above.

“Dealing with Complexity” is about the capabilities that organizations will need to operate in the uncertainty, ambiguity and complexity of emerging, or even multiple, economic paradigms.

In the ODG Framework, we’re putting out the hypothesis that these challenges can be summed up in two Organizational Development Goals addressing the following organizational skills:

The two ODGs related to Dealing with Complexity: Navigating Contradictory Demands and Co-Creating New Societal Autopilots.

💬🧭💬 ODG – Navigating Contradictory Demands

Capacity to navigate in a field of contradictory demands – to be comfortable with being uncomfortable – and still remain operable.

By contradictory demands, we refer to the often conflicting requirements that organizations must balance. These conflicts often stem from economic, environmental and social dimensions, where achieving one objective can hinder another. Among others, these could be: economic growth vs. environmental conservation; short-term profitability vs. long-term sustainability; or globalization vs. support of local economies, … .

This balancing requires the general capacity to hold some level of “messiness”. It also means to draw “healthy boundaries” for what is and what is not within an organization’s circle of influence. It requires organizations to live with ambiguity, contradictions, to hold questions rather than jump to answers, and to allow emergence.

🚧🚗🧑🏼✈️ ODG – Co-Creating New Societal Autopilots

Capacity to become aware of societal autopilots, consciously soften and finally dismantle them, and learn to intentionally operate within the “new normal.”

Part of this journey is to unlearn and re-pattern organizational “autopilots” built in decades of doing business in a successful yet degenerative way. Autopilots occur both on individual, organizational and societal levels. Individually, our brains use patterns to navigate a naturally messy world, often relying on stereotypes and assumptions. With organizations, the relevant framework for daily decisions (the autopilot mode) emerges along their life path from values, standards, and patterns.

Underlying these patterns are societal autopilots––such as systemic biases, patriarchy, racism, dependency on fossil fuels–– that “shine through” in organizational patterns and unconsciously guide decision-making.

It requires the capacity to realize that deep-rooted societal patterns exist and find out how they influence the organization. Questioning, softening and finally dismantling these autopilots helps to shape a new normal and enable a just transition.

Building on these goals, the ODG framework will aim to provide context for resources, tools, methods and theories for organizations to utilize on their transformation journey.

We want to point our three caveats (and there might be more we have not yet mapped out):

🔗 Clearly, the ODGs are inter-connected. Just like the challenges, the ODGs are related and simultaneous. We’re talking systemic issues: non-linear, multi-dimensional. One big plate of spaghetti 🍝, not a dango stick 🍡. Still, we can distinguish different parts of the plate.

💪🏼🦵🏼 As our contributors have already pointed out: organizational capacity alone is not enough. It also takes willingness, commitment, permission and resources. However, mobilizing these is an organizational capability on its own (as part of “Steering Transformation”).

➰ We believe that the ODGs will continue to evolve. They are not cast in stone, but will change to reflect the learning paths of those contributing to it. In fact, they are meant to adapt as we map out more of our territory while exploring further into as of yet unchartered domains.

There are Key Questions Related to the Challenges.

We propose that the other challenges are the capacities needed to navigate in shifting and changing paradigms, which will involve handling multiple paradigms simultaneously. We need to set bold ambitions and move towards them with conviction. We will develop new ways of cooperating and collaborating beyond organizational boundaries. Finally, governance needs to be reshaped into a form that supports continuous transformation. All of these are in addition to and based on general transformative capacities to drive change and evolve with changing demands.

(The avid reader will notice that we have added a Challenge related to "Steering Transformation". This is to take care of all capabilities needed in any transformation – be it digital, new work, ... )

Returning to our initial image of “muscles to strengthen” – remember situations after a workout or a hike when you felt muscles that you didn’t even know they existed? The ODGs aim to make you aware of your organization’s muscle groups. They aim to map out the whole body—in its parts and interconnectedness—visible to the eye or not. And they aim to provide a basis for deliberate practice and a possible training plan: understand which muscles an organization has already developed well, which ones invite awareness, and which are next to focus on, and which muscles it first might need to learn to feel at all.

—

We want to thank our authors Steffen Frischat, Ebby Anahita Shirazi 🌍, and Jonas Gebauer, as well as all our wonderful contributors via (peer)-reviewing, co-creating, supporting, commenting, sharing, or asking us questions we might not yet know the answers to: Matthias Lang, Sebastian Daume, Friederike Strub, Tobias Bantzhaff, Eva Maria Wolf.