Mod. 3.1 - Reflections on Regenerative Sustainability

Spend an hour reflecting on the content you’ve engaged with this week using the journal prompts listed below.

• What was most inspiring, most resonating? What do you feel most compelled to share with others? Why?

• How does this align with and/or build on your own current thinking, values, and approach to leadership?

• What content are you struggling with? Why?

• What new questions are coming up for you, particularly around “leading”, “regenerative”, and “sustainability”?

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Throughout the entire MACL program, I’ve been both surprised and adapted to incorporate a framework or systems understanding into how I both learn and describe the concepts we’ve been introduced to. I share this because frameworks and systems existed in my previous educational experiences, but they were not named as such. As a result, I would introduce a systematic way of organizing a project, an idea, or a conversation, and people would look at me very confused because I was bringing intentionality into almost every situation. Systems thinking, as it's defined and framed in these assignments, resonates greatly for me because it validates my approach and amplifies it by providing a model I can share with others in a way I couldn’t articulate or share previously. Perhaps the most valuable element of the MACL program has been the number of frameworks, models, and systems we’ve been exposed to as a reference we can apply in myriad areas of our personal and professional lives.

The blend of how systems thinking can be applied to so many areas aligns completely with my thinking and values around leadership. Leadership is such a dynamic word and can manifest in so many different ways. I’ve seen countless examples of where someone is a dynamic professional leader, but their personal life is a disaster because they’ve separated the idea of leadership as only applicable in the workplace. I’ve been challenged to think of myself as a leader in the traditional sense because I don’t separate my understanding of leadership between my personal and professional life. Systems thinking, mapping and feedback loops are perhaps best applied to the professional landscape, but it also has tremendous application in the personal landscape as well. It also correlates to how we can apply biomimicry to our personal lives by seeing ourselves as being a part of nature and not above it.

I’m not really struggling with any of the content in the sense that I don’t have any kind of critique of the proposed ways of thinking. I would say that my largest struggle with the content is that it aligns so closely with my own ways of thinking and is completely out of left field for the vast majority of people with whom I engage both personally and professionally. There’s a deep-seeded “old school” approach that so many people I know refuse to let go of. It makes it challenging because it results in me sticking out and drawing attention to myself in areas and places where it feels like these concepts are so needed, but have no entrypoint to gain a foothold. I think this is probably the result of “old school” ideologies still dominating many industries and sectors and so the millions of people benefitting from those ideologies are incentivized to retain them. Where regenerative thinking in leadership is being applied in the marketplace is in the product side as demonstrated by the examples of B-Corps shared in the assigned readings. The new questions that are emerging for me are around how we can get regenerative thinking to gain a foothold in sectors like finance, energy, tech, real estate, and other major exploitative sectors who are actively destroying the planet for personal and financial gain.