The Regenerative Paradigm

Most education moves information from one place to another, and it is judged by how much of that information the learner retains afterward.

Developmental education works on something different. It builds the learner's capacity to think, to see, to design, to execute, and to reflect on what happened. The measure of it is not what a person knows at the end, but what they can now do that they could not do before, in situations no course could have anticipated.

This takes longer than a curriculum does, and it asks more of everyone involved. It is also the only form of education whose returns keep growing after the teaching stops.

A problem is defined by something that has already gone wrong. Solve it and the best you can achieve is returning the system to the condition it was in before, which was rarely good enough to begin with.

Working from potential begins somewhere else. It starts with what this particular business, market, institution, or person could uniquely become, given what it actually is and where it actually sits. Problems are generic, and two companies in the same sector can share the same one. Potential is singular, and no two companies or people have the same potential, which is why it can never be copied from somewhere else.

We teach nothing in the abstract. Every framework is worked against something the participant is actually responsible for — a business unit, a portfolio, a policy process, a supply chain, a negotiating position.

This is why we refer to our work as praxis, rather than practice. Theory that has not met a member's real work is not yet knowledge. Action that has not yet been reflected on has not yet resulted in learning.

Members bring their work into the room in all of our events. Their real work is the curriculum; our approach brings structure and method for tackling it.

Living systems do not produce categories. They produce singularities. No two forests are the same, and neither are any two businesses or any two people. This is the ultimate diversity.

Essence thinking works with an entity at that level, as its own core and true self, rather than as a member of whatever group it can be sorted into. It refuses the central habit of industrial thinking, which substitutes the standard for the particular and the average for the actual.

This is why we reject best practices and replicable models. Our members grow the ability to see what is essential and unrepeatable about the system in front of them, and to design and act from that understanding.

Businesses, economies, watersheds, families, and individual people are living systems, not machines. The difference is not a small one, and is not abstract - a great deal of well-intentioned change work goes wrong as a result of this misunderstanding.

Machines are assembled from parts, they improve when you optimize a component, and they have no direction of their own. Someone outside them has to supply the purpose. Living systems work the other way around. They differentiate from wholes rather than assembling from parts, they are often damaged by component optimization, and they are already going somewhere before anyone intervenes. A forest is moving toward a particular expression of itself, and so is a company, a market, a family. That trajectory is not a goal anyone set. It arises from what the system is and the conditions it sits in, and it continues whether or not anyone is paying attention to it. Work with the direction a system is already travelling and small interventions carry a long way. Work against it and the system will spend its energy resisting you. Treating a living system as a machine does more than fail, because it degrades the system's own capacity to regenerate itself.

Every living system sits inside a larger one and holds smaller ones. A business unit sits in a company, in an industry, in a global market, in an international trade policy regime. A person sits in a team, in an organization, in a sector, within a culture.

This is where leverage lives. Work on one element of a system in isolation, and the levels around it will absorb or reverse the change. Work on what that element can uniquely contribute to the systems that hold it, and those systems begin doing part of the work with you.

The question we practice with is not “how do I fix this?”. Instead, we might ask, “what does the next system out need from this one, that only this one can give?”

In any system, a few points carry influence far out of proportion to their size. We call these nodes, and they work something like acupuncture points.

Finding them is the core skill, and it is not the same thing as finding the biggest problem or the loudest stakeholder. Nodes tend to be structural, unglamorous, and invisible to the people standing closest to them. A node might be a procurement standard, a definition buried inside a disclosure regime, a single line in a trade agreement, one working relationship, or the way a category gets measured.

This is how a very small organization can move a very large system, and it is why we work on the capacity of a limited number of people rather than trying to reach a large number.