Principle #4: Encourage life where it is pushing to emerge. If the previous principles were organised around the dying process, the following set of principles is instead organised around the idea of vitality, fertility and blossoming.
After the first cycle, in which one has freed oneself from mental models, prejudices, stereotypes, cynicism and resistance to change, a phase of openness and readiness to see where life is trying to emerge opens up, where our role is to encourage it to flourish.
Here are some concrete examples of such actions:
- Organise your workload so that you engage with where you feel the energy is for you at the moment, in alignment with both personal and organisational purpose
- Develop ideas/projects that you feel passionate about, for which you feel energy flowing, towards which you feel a strong call and a clear alignment between what makes you feel alive and what makes life flow in the collective (groups, organisations, societies);
- Facilitating/enabling collaboration and risk-taking within teams;
- In groupwork, whether you are a team leader or team member, concentrate on clarifying meaning and intention (the Purpose, why these objectives, these impacts, why this project, what contribution to the corporate Purpose…) while letting the What/How evolve according to changing circumstances. In particular this means not getting stuck on procedures, rules, regulations, but rather clarifying the basic principles, and then letting people move with their own energy and creativity in order to embody that Purpose;
- Prioritise, in your team or as an organisation, those products, services or actions that positively impact the company’s bottom line and are also life-giving for the ecosystems and social systems around it – evolving the organisational strategy so that, within X number of years, the products and services created are life-giving for the ecosystems and social systems. The organisational transition to a regenerative economy is in fact not only regenerative for external ecosystems but can also bring enormous benefits in terms of employee satisfaction, well-being and happiness, staff retention, and other climate variables.
These articles are a bit like our “Advent Calendar”. They will appear twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays on our blog, with the next one on 21 December.