Regenerative leadership by Charlie Felgate

On January 20, we welcomed Charlie Felgate on the occasion of our winter 2023 campus. He told us about regenerative leadership and how he gradually integrated it into his professional and personal life.

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“I discovered the regenerative leadership only two years ago. I was on a vision exercise where we asked ourselves the following question: “Today, CSR just allows us to do less worse, finally? ”. I started looking for what was out there that could make a business have a positive impact on the planet and on people. We went looking for role models who have the virtue of being positive, and what we found was nature. In fact, the Regenerative Leadership, it puts living things at the center of the model and the company must then align itself with nature. I am convinced that there will be no Regenerative Business if we don't have regenerative leaders. We have to become, ourselves, aligned with nature.

Here you could think of a company called Interface. Interface is an American company that melts carpet tiles. Ray Anderson is the founder, and in 1994, he had this vision that his business would have no future if it did not align with nature. Today, 28 years later, Interface is perhaps the model that has the least impact on the planet, but also that replicates the actions of nature by biomimicry. Their last factory located in Amsterdam operates somewhere like a forest. Obviously, this is not perfect, to function exactly like nature, all stakeholders would have to work and work in symbiosis with nature, we are not there yet.

If we look at a business like permaculture, for example, or even permaculture in general, we're going to start talking about things that are countercultural in the business and counterbehavioral, like self-regulating and setting limits. It is not easy for companies today to set limits because they are oscillating in a growth environment, but nature does not do that. It self-regulates and therefore, we must learn to welcome this message, to set limits and to self-regulate in order to ask ourselves questions: “What is the right level of profit? How many dividends? How OK am I going to be in reinvesting the value created in the environment and in society fairly? ”.

In 2015, we discovered the 17 Sustainable Development Goals that we are all familiar with. In fact, it's a bit like mankind's business plan. There was a level of awareness that set in, but in the end, people weren't wired enough to deal with them, to solve them. We saw these goals as technical, cerebral challenges, and not as challenges of compassion and empathy.

Les Inner Development Goals, or Inner Development Goals, are 23 behavioral skills that will enormously help us visualize these problems in another way. It's not going to be easy or comfortable to change perspectives, because you have to ask yourself some pretty important questions that may put your own freedom in question, but you'll have to go for it.”

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