People often ask what I mean by "operational systems for regenerative organizations" — and honestly, "What the hell is a regenerative organization?" is a fair place to start.
A regenerative organization actively restores the health, diversity, and resilience of the people, communities, and ecosystems it's part of — rather than merely sustaining or extracting from them. Some imperfect but recognizable examples: Patagonia and Dr. Bronner's.
Most operations consulting is extractive-efficient: come in, optimize for throughput or cost, deliver documentation, leave.
The operating system gets tighter but more brittle, and the client is more dependent on you (or the next consultant) next time something breaks.
A regenerative operations practice inverts that. My aim isn't merely to optimize a system, but to develop the client's capacity to run, evolve, and self-correct their own operations over time. I think of myself more as a process steward than a consultant.
Think of every "living document" in your organization as a plant you bought at the store. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and those color-coded fields gave you joy. But a plant doesn't exist in isolation — it has to work in the soil you have, survive the light conditions in your space, and coexist with everything else around it.
Documents are the same. Six months later, the ones that didn't fit the ecosystem are either dead or a sprawling mess that only one person knows how to keep alive.
Before I create an operational system with a client, I like to sit with a few questions:
- 🌱 Does this even need to exist in the first place?
- 🪴 Does it work for the people in this organization, or are we engineering people to conform to it?
- 🌵 How does it relate to the ecosystem of assets and processes around it?
- 🍃 What happens to it when the weather of your organization changes — a reorg, a funding shift, a key person leaving?
A perfect operational system is never the goal. The goal is an organization that outlasts the consultant who built it.