Perspective is everything. The images above show a spiral from a side view and an overhead view. What we see depends upon positionality and our own unique perspective. This is one of the fundamental premises of regenerative practice. Examining a situation (or a project) from many different viewpoints and perspectives, or through multiple lenses, enables a more holistic understanding. Regenerative technology offers these multiple perspectives, enabling us to shift how we are thinking and thereby reveal what is not normally "seen".

‍"Agreeing on a framework to guide our thinking is agreeing to a perspective or a way of looking. It makes our thinking intentional rather than accidental." –Regenesis Institute, The Regenerative Practitioner course

“Regenerate” means to “bring forth again”, to reconstitute, to make over in a better way. This implies recognizing, re-learning, and re-membering our participatory role as a species in the larger living world. As such, regenerative practice calls upon each of us to observe carefully, think ecologically, design systemically, engage gratefully, and act humbly. To do so, we need to work not only on evolving our own capacity, but also to work on building the capacity of our communities to serve the larger whole systems of life within which we are entangled.

A regenerative approach to implementing Integrative process (IP) serves as a means for developing each project team’s and community’s capacity for imaging and actualizing the systemic transformations they seek by manifesting the potential that emerges from understanding and expressing the singular essence of each place. In other words, an effective regenerative IP aligns project teams and community members around how any given project can best realize the potential inherent in a specific place to ensure the continual viability and vitality of that place over time.

Regenerative practice employs several techniques and processes that are key aspects of this "seeing the unseen" technology.

Framework thinking

How we go about thinking typically goes unexamined. We just think, right? However, the easier our thought processes feel, the less actual thinking is occurring. When our thinking is easy, we may be "in the zone", channeling something beyond ourselves, or far more frequently, we are merely regurgitating thoughts we have had before without re-examining them. Most of us can't reply on being in the zone on a regular basis or generating it on demand.

According to Carol Sanford, the power to affect change resides upstream of what we think; rather, it emerges from examining how we think. This requires that we unlearn our cultural conditioning and training through the questioning of the assumptions and beliefs behind that conditioning. Frameworks help us do this. They are used to bring how we are thinking into full consciousness, instead of remaining largely unconscious; therefore, they help us order and organize our thoughts. Ordering allows us to raise the level of our thinking, and organizing allows us to see more clearly the way we are thinking.

Frameworks can also be viewed as a means to bring unique perspectives to the examination of how any situation or project can be used as an instrument for transformation. Each framework provides a different lens that we can apply to help us see collectively what none of us can see alone. In this way, frameworks are like perspective multipliers, as each person brings their own unique perspective to using them. Then, as these individual perspectives coalesce and reconcile, the perspective provided through the specific framework shifts, focusing our attention on the relationships between the elements of the framework or the “things” that are particular to any given circumstance or project thereby multiplying and layering perspectives even further and allowing us to see how these “things” are interconnected. In turn, seeing these interrelationships at work allows us to articulate the systemic and complex nature of the larger living systems in which these “things” are embedded.

In this way, regenerative frameworks serve to help us develop a deeper understanding of how complex interrelationships might optimally work in the particular system we are seeking to transform. Developing and imaging such deeper systemic understanding through these frameworks allows us to apply our collective thinking as change agents more fully, meaningfully, and effectively.

Dozens of evolving frameworks are available to help us see how these larger living systems work as a whole, instead of seeing just the individual fragments (or “things”) in isolation. Sometimes we may need to create our own frameworks to more clearly understand a particular circumstance or living whole system. The Generic Tetrad above is an example of an organizing framework that can used to help plan and more deeply understand the deeper intentions of any activity.

‍"Frameworks shape what we pay attention to and how we act. They enable our minds to give form to our intuition." –Regenesis Institute, The Regenerative Practitioner course

Focusing on Potential

Many projects, plans and programs begin by creating a design intended to solve a particular problem(s). Stating this way automatically narrows the field of possibilities. We spend a great deal of time at the beginning of each project focused on uncovering and aligning around its potential. Dwelling in potential requires us to view the particular and unique circumstances of each situation from many different perspectives, as discussed above. This is the key to unleashing the discovery of creative and transformational solutions. This exploration is about sensing, exploring, imaging, and expressing the vision of the place’s fullest, most healthy, alive, and evolving state. The work here is aimed first at “imaging” (or calling forth dynamic visual images in our minds) of what is possible and profoundly important to manifest in this place, then aligning the project team and stakeholders around the potential those images reveal. Articulating and co-creating the collective potential we see ensures that the project team are on the same page relative to the project’s intentions. The project then becomes an instrument for manifesting that potential into existence.

"The concept of "potential" is significant. It has to do with what doesn't yet exist but could. As an approach, cultivating potential is very different from solving problems." –ANSI Standard on Integrative Process

Sourcing from Place

Each place on Earth is unique.  That uniqueness (or essence) influences everything within that particular place. Rather than imposing something onto a place (making it place-based), place-sourced projects and initiatives work with the place as the wellspring for sourcing ideas, inspirations and aliveness. Places are dynamic living systems, and their essence serves as the source for the formation of cultures, communities, and ecosystems. As such, deep understanding of each particular place is required. By building a project (or initiating an activity) in any place, you are asking to come into deeper relationship with that place. Healthy relationships require clear two-way communication, so we need to “ listen” to the place in order to see how our endeavor (and  the essence of the entity engaged in that endeavor) can be in service to expressing the essence of the place, and vice versa. In other words, regenerative practice looks beyond the building (or program) to see how the project fits into and can contribute to the continual vitality of the place it inhabits; it looks at the living systems in that place (both ecological and socio-economic) and considers the project’s role in serving the health of the larger ecosystem in which it is embedded. And reciprocally, how that larger living whole can in turn support and add value to the endeavor and its purpose.

Recognizing Energy Fields

Living systems are made up of largely unseen energies. Regenerative practice brings conscious attention to seeing these energies at work. It consistently cultivates and monitors energy fields created when groups of people (design professionals, communities, etc.) come together to work on a project (or endeavor). Regenerative practice invites us to co-create, see, and experience these collective energy fields and how they influence us, while simultaneously inviting us to become more conscious of the how our individual being states contribute to creating the nature of those fields.

As ever-deepening understanding of a project’s place and potential develops, regenerative practice aligns and nurtures a network of people and organizations interested in working together in support of their place. The ongoing task of this network aims at curating and tending community interactions that generate continual learning and synergies. This opportunity also invites and encourages people to think and engage outside their normal disciplines, so that collectively, team members can cross-fertilize thinking and actions in service of the health of their whole community, economy, and ecosystem. In this way, each project team actively partners with community members to develop the architecture necessary for building capacity to re-vitalize community spirit and ecosystem health.

These collaborative initiatives ultimately generate an energetic field of excitement, energy, and relationships that attracts others to the effort by expanding meaningful opportunities for active participation and effective progress, generating a motivated community of practice, entrepreneurship, learning, and change agency.

"Everything is energy and that's all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics." –Albert Einstein

Co-Creating Everything

None of us know individually as much as we know collectively. Sharing each of our perspectives at the start of the project, coupled with working together to identify a common purpose, aim, and aspirations, generates a co-creative field of discovery. This way of engaging a co-creative process is grounded in what people authentically care about, hence it induces personal agency and a sense of ownership (beyond mere “buy-in”) for each stakeholder and team member. In turn, this co-creative process leads to alignment around the project’s larger purpose and the specific outcomes being sought, It also generates will to actively participate in co-developing design solutions that will accomplish these outcomes.

Co-creation is not a linear progression. It is an iterative process of approximation that seeks to include, integrate, and harmonize as many pertinent perspectives as possible early in the project's development. Co-creating a set of project principles, or “guides to action”, helps us navigate more effectively the developmental processes being engaged as the project moves forward. These principles are used as touchstones throughout the process to guide and direct our behavior, actions, and decision-making while regularly reexamining our assumptions. Consequently, teams align around solutions that emerge from a process of assessing how well they align with these co-created principles, instead of arguing over opinions. In other words, co-creative decision-making is guided by a principle-based regenerative paradigm, rather than a control structure that is driven by whoever has the loudest voice, most money, or most power.

Having High Aspirations

We find that over and over again projects setting high aspirations and falling short achieve better results than projects setting low aspirations and exceeding them. Creating a comprehensive set of project goals aimed at systemic transformational outcomes beyond the project itself is crucial to a project's ultimate success. The creation of aspirational goals early in the project's development creates clear direction and gives the project team specific targets to design toward.

Achieving such high aspirations unleashes greater creative potential and necessitates an integrative process of working closely together to achieve them. This helps redefine what we mean by failure. Rather than not achieving the project goals, failure means setting expectations lower than what is needed to generate the will for affecting real transformation.

Interrogating Worldviews

Regenerative practice ultimately seeks to shift our thinking to align with the way nature works. It is a living system focused view of the world. An indigenous way of being and interacting with the living world lies at the core of the historical evolution of all peoples and cultures. As "civilization" "progressed", a new story emerged, one that focused on separation of the individual self from nature and each other. Instead of understanding humans as an integral part of nature, we began to drift apart from Mother Earth. This story of separation lies at the core of the dominant modern worldview; therefore, regenerative thinking and practice calls us to examine the beliefs and assumptions that underlie and originate your worldview. This often requires us to unlearn our cultural conditioning and discover new ways of being in right relationship with the living world.

Semantic Languaging

The English language consists of about 70% nouns. Many indigenous languages are composed of 70% verbs. Our language influences the way we see the world. A world of nouns has us looking at the world as a collection of things. A world of verbs invites us to see the world as systems of interrelationships. Integrative design and regenerative practice are all about uncovering these unseen relationships between systems and how they work – the connections between building systems, between the project and its place, between the people involved in creating, implementing, and actualizing any planning process. Semantic language seeks to explore the meaning of our words and thinking at a deeper level. It is often a bit awkward at first (such as using “languaging” as a verb), since it uses words in a way that requires a pause to understand meaning. It is the pause that allows for new thoughts and insights to come into and emerge from our circles.

Socratic Dialoguing

The etymology of the word education tells us that its root meaning is “to draw out". Socratic dialogue is an ancient educational method of questioning and dialogue as a means for creating new insights among the participants, a process guided by frameworks to structure and source questions. These methods lead to deeper understanding and innovative solutions. They require us to engage in reflection rather than responding with quick, off-the-cuff, automatic answers that we have repeated many times before. Regenerative practice utilizes such a methodology called “resourcing”, which is a type of dialogue that helps develop our capacity to go deeper in search of truly creative ideas and transformations. This type of dialogue revolves around inquiring what each of us finds deeply meaningful, or “reconnecting with our source”. This is also a form of disruption that can help shift us out of the automatic and mechanical thinking patterns that block access to regenerative thinking. The intention behind this form of dialogue is to work in a developmental way aimed at increasing our capacity and capability for holding the higher orders of complexity necessary for seeing the interrelationships that comprise living systems.

". . . grow the capability to hold multiple ideas, relationships and possibilities in the mind, elevating and integrating them in order to produce increasingly rich and systemic outcomes. This is a capability that is core to regenerative thinking." –Regenesis Institute, The Regenerative Practitioner course

Summing

Regenerative technology is a means for aligning how we think with the way nature works. This requires us to continually re-examine our thinking and work together in service of developing the capacity of our places to continually evolve toward higher and higher orders of health and vitality. Regenerative technology helps us to evolve our own capabilities to serve in unique roles that enhance and further enliven that evolutionary direction.

"The world is complex. We need to stop dumbing it down." –Regenesis Group