Changemakers spend a lot of time thinking about the systems we want to transform. We critique economies built around endless growth, workplaces that treat people as resources, cultures of overconsumption, and institutions that extract more from people and the planet than they give back.
But there is an uncomfortable question worth asking: how often do we reproduce those same patterns in the way we approach changemaking itself?
We can oppose an economic system built around endless growth while expecting endless growth from ourselves. We can criticise extractive workplaces while extracting every last ounce of energy from our bodies. We can advocate for healthier communities while treating rest as something we have to earn. And we can become so consumed by the urgency of changing the world that we lose our capacity to be fully present within it.
This tension was at the heart of my conversation with Lucy Richards, Co-Founder of The Regenerative Leader. Drawing on two decades of experience across mental health, social enterprise, communications and social change, Lucy’s work asks what becomes possible when we apply regenerative principles not only to ecosystems and organisations, but to ourselves and the way we lead.
Her theory of change can be summed up in a simple phrase: Inner Work for Outer Action.
It offers an important challenge to changemakers. Perhaps creating regenerative systems requires more than developing better strategies for changing the world around us. Perhaps it also requires cultivating different ways of knowing, relating, leading and being within it.
What Does It Mean to Be Regenerative?
Regeneration is often associated with agriculture and ecology. Unlike approaches that simply aim to reduce harm or sustain current conditions, regenerative practices seek to restore the capacity of living systems to continually renew themselves.
Lucy invites us to apply this same logic to leadership.
Much of contemporary culture remains organised around a narrow conception of growth. Organisations should become bigger. Careers should continually advance. Productivity should increase. Individuals should constantly improve themselves. Even the self-development industry can reinforce the idea that we should always be optimising, achieving and becoming better versions of ourselves.
But living systems don’t grow endlessly in one direction.
They move through cycles. There are periods of expansion and contraction, activity and rest, emergence and decline. Autumn and winter are not failures of spring and summer; they are necessary parts of the same regenerative process.
For changemakers, this provides a radically different way to think about progress. Growth doesn’t always mean doing more. Sometimes growth means deepening. Sometimes it means resting, letting go, changing direction or allowing something that has served its purpose to end.
Regenerative leadership asks us to become more attentive to these cycles rather than continually forcing ourselves, our organisations and our movements towards expansion.
We Need to Get Better at Letting Things Die
One of the most interesting ideas Lucy explores is the importance of life–death–life cycles.
Our dominant culture tends to celebrate beginnings. We like new projects, new organisations, new strategies and new initiatives. We are considerably less comfortable with endings.
When something we’ve created stops working, our instinct is often to keep it alive. We invest more resources, work harder, restructure, rebrand or simply refuse to acknowledge that its time may have passed. The same can happen with identities, careers, relationships and ways of understanding the world.
Yet regeneration requires death as much as life.
In nature, decomposition creates the conditions for new growth. The end of one form becomes nourishment for another. If nothing were allowed to die, ecosystems could not regenerate.
This offers changemakers an important question to ask alongside What do we need to create?
What do we need to let go of?
That might be an organisational structure that no longer serves its community, a strategy that once worked but no longer fits the context, an assumption we’ve outgrown, or even an identity we’ve become attached to. Knowing when to stop can be as important a leadership capacity as knowing when to begin.
Holding Complexity Requires More Than the Mind
Changemakers routinely encounter complexity. The problems we’re trying to address involve interconnected systems, competing perspectives, incomplete information, uncertainty and unintended consequences. Yet our dominant approaches to decision-making often privilege one particular way of understanding that complexity: analytical thinking.
Lucy describes regenerative leadership through five different forms of wisdom: Mind, Heart, Body, Earth and Collective.
Mind wisdom matters. We need evidence, analysis, critical thinking and the ability to understand complex information. But intellectual knowledge is only one way human beings make sense of the world.
Heart wisdom asks us to pay attention to compassion, values and relationships. Body wisdom recognises that our physical and emotional responses can contain information that isn’t always captured through rational analysis. Earth wisdom asks us to learn from our relationship with the living world and recognise ourselves as participants within nature rather than observers standing outside it. Collective wisdom reminds us that no individual, regardless of their expertise, can see an entire complex system alone.
This doesn’t mean abandoning evidence or rational thought. It means expanding the sources of information we consider valuable.
For changemakers dealing with genuinely complex problems, this matters enormously. The challenge is rarely simply finding enough information. Often, it is learning how to bring different forms of knowledge and experience into relationship with one another.
Collective Wisdom Is More Than Getting Everyone in a Room
The idea of collective wisdom is particularly important for social change.
We often assume that bringing more people into a conversation automatically makes something participatory. But genuine collective wisdom requires more than assembling a group and asking everyone for their opinion.
It requires creating conditions in which different forms of knowledge can actually be heard.
That means paying attention to power. Who feels comfortable speaking? Whose expertise is treated as legitimate? Who tends to dominate conversations? Whose knowledge comes from formal education and whose comes from lived experience? What happens when perspectives contradict one another?
Holding complexity means resisting the temptation to resolve those differences too quickly. Sometimes apparently contradictory perspectives each reveal something important about the system.
For leaders, this requires a different relationship with expertise. Leadership becomes less about being the person with the answer and more about cultivating the conditions through which better answers can emerge collectively.
That shift is particularly relevant to changemakers because the communities closest to a problem often possess forms of knowledge that institutions and professional experts do not. If we genuinely want systems change, we need ways of working that allow those different forms of wisdom to shape what happens next.
Urgency Doesn’t Always Require Speed
Perhaps one of the hardest ideas for changemakers to accept is that slowing down can sometimes be the most appropriate response to urgency.
The problems we face are undeniably urgent. Climate change is accelerating. Inequality is deepening. Democratic institutions are under pressure. Communities are experiencing conflict, displacement and ecological breakdown. When the stakes are this high, slowing down can feel irresponsible.
But urgency can also narrow our thinking.
When we’re constantly reacting, we have less capacity to notice patterns, question assumptions, listen deeply or consider unintended consequences. We become more likely to reach for familiar solutions simply because they’re available.
This is where Lucy’s emphasis on awareness, compassion and rest becomes more than a wellbeing intervention. These capacities affect how we perceive and respond to complexity.
Rest isn’t simply about recovering enough energy to return to productivity. Slowing down can create the space required to notice what we couldn’t see while rushing.
For changemakers, the question therefore isn’t whether the problems are urgent. They are. The more useful question may be: what quality of attention does this urgency require from us?
Sometimes immediate action is necessary. At other times, moving too quickly can reproduce the problem we’re trying to solve.
From Self-Help to Us-Help
Perhaps the idea from Lucy’s work that resonates most strongly with me is the shift from self-help to us-help.
There is nothing inherently wrong with personal development. Becoming more self-aware, emotionally regulated, resilient and compassionate can profoundly improve our lives. But personal growth loses some of its transformative potential when the self becomes its final destination.
What if we developed ourselves not only so that we could flourish, but so that we became more capable of contributing to the flourishing of others?
Inner work can help us recognise when ego is shaping our leadership. It can make us more aware of how we respond to conflict and uncertainty. It can increase our capacity to listen, hold competing perspectives, relinquish control and remain present when there are no easy answers.
In that sense, inner work is not separate from systems change. The capacities we cultivate within ourselves shape the organisations, relationships and movements we participate in.
If we carry an extractive relationship with ourselves into our changemaking, we shouldn’t be surprised when extraction appears in the systems we create.
Becoming a Regenerative Changemaker
Regenerative leadership doesn’t offer a neat formula for creating change. If anything, it asks us to become more comfortable without one.
It asks us to recognise cycles rather than assuming progress is linear, to make room for endings as well as beginnings, and to draw upon multiple forms of wisdom rather than privileging intellect alone. It asks us to slow down enough to listen, recognise that no individual can hold the whole picture, and understand our own development as inseparable from the communities and systems to which we belong.
Most importantly, it invites us to consider whether the way we create change reflects the future we’re trying to build.
We cannot control exactly what emerges from complex systems. But we can cultivate the capacities that help us engage with them differently: awareness, compassion, curiosity, rest, humility and the ability to hold complexity without immediately trying to reduce it.
Perhaps that is what Inner Work for Outer Action ultimately asks of us. Not to retreat from the world into ourselves, but to recognise that who we become affects how we participate in the world—and therefore what kinds of worlds become possible through our participation.
