Thoughts On Thrivability
The Need for Practice Grounds (or: The Outer Work of Inner Development)
I've been in multiple conversations lately with people who have recently discovered the regenerative movement, with its worldview of greater alignment with life. They feel drawn to bring living systems principles into their work with organizations. They're dreaming of...
From Convincing to Convening
“But how can we convince the others?” It never fails. No matter what the sector, I can almost count down the seconds before this question comes up in any good-size gathering where we’re exploring the need to shift to more life-aligned, regenerative perspectives and...
Honoring the Stages of Regeneration
I speak and consult frequently about the practice of regeneration in contexts as wide-ranging as tourism, agriculture, community and business. And always, people want examples. Not only that, they want perfect, start-to-finish examples of best practices – a clear...
The Giving Field
I often see the emerging concept of regenerative tourism described as “leaving a place better than we found it.” In fact, the basic sentiment is widely shared even beyond tourism, in what Carol Sanford would call the “do good” paradigm. That’s nice, and necessary. But...
Regenerative Tourism: Elitist or Inclusive?
Tourism visionary Dianne Dredge, PhD and I were recently called out by name in an online opinion piece claiming that "regenerative tourism" is elitist. This is a common critique. Certainly, there are individual offerings and individual operators that are higher priced...
Alien Nation and the Need for Brave Spaces
I’ve been involved with three groups with varying approaches to inclusion recently. In two, there was a strong reluctance to engage in unconventional topics or to try new meeting formats for fear of alienating some members of the community. It was striking to me that...
Tourism, Regeneration and Seeing the Forest for the Trees
I’ve just come back from a wonderful week as a Researcher in Residence at Nova School of Business and Economics (pictured above) in Portugal. I was there at the invitation of Graham Miller, head of the Westmont Institute of Tourism and Hospitality and a thoroughly...
Beyond Fight or Flight
We all know about the "fight or flight" response to threat. Sometimes "freeze" gets added to the list. But rarely do we acknowledge that nature also offers the option to "flock." This came up at a gathering this weekend hosted by Amélie Chanda and her colleagues at...
The Annual Gener(ation)al Meeting
What if the legally required AGM becomes not an Annual General Meeting but an Annual Generational Meeting, considering generations past, present and future? What if it evolves to serve generations of humans and of all living beings, as kin within the living ecologies...
