"Regenerative operations" might sound like a wishy-washy, kumbaya concept with no bearing on serious people doing serious business. But plenty of organizations already run what I'd call regenerative processes, and the systems-thinking behind them, without ever using the word.
For the next several weeks I'll share business cases where a company applied these ideas in its operations without knowing it, or where a more regenerative approach would have saved it real pain. Caveat: these cases are based on publicly available information, and I haven't worked with or spoken to anyone at these organizations. If you have, I'd love to hear from you!
Case 1: Mutualism, not mush
In a working ecosystem, a decomposer isn't a pollinator. A mycorrhizal network trades phosphorus for carbon on exact terms, and the trade is fair because it's enforced: the plant feeds the fungi delivering the most phosphorus and starves the ones that don't. Mutualism works because the roles are distinct and freeloading gets checked.
Assigning discrete tasks to specific people is a core project management concept, yet a lot of the operational dysfunction I've witnessed comes from ignoring it (looking at you, nonprofit networks). Everyone's "aligned." Everyone's "collaborating." But nothing moves, because the same task belongs to three people at once, and when it goes sideways nobody actually owns it. Strip out that enforcement and the dependency tilts one way: the reliable few keep absorbing the work nobody claimed until mutualism has curdled into parasitism.
Let's take Gumroad as a counterexample. On paper it should be chaos: a couple dozen contractors, no full-time staff to speak of, no meetings, no standups. What makes it work is that every person owns a distinct patch outright, and the handoffs happen in writing (GitHub, Notion, Slack) instead of in an endless fog of syncs. Founder Sahil Lavingia has a name for the fog: the "Alignment Tax," all those meetings-to-schedule-meetings that stand in for anyone being genuinely on the hook.
Alignment rituals feel like collaboration while often doing the opposite, letting ownership stay comfortably vague.
Mutualism doesn't mean everyone does a little of everything. It means the seams between distinct roles are clean. The fungus doesn't try to photosynthesize; the tree doesn't try to mine phosphorus. Each holds its function, and the trade happens at the boundary.
So here's the test for any shared process: can each person name their function, the input they take in, and the output they hand off? If they can't, it's mush, not mutualism.