Regenerative Leadership: Approaching change differently.
December 2025
A recent article published in Business Strategy & the Environment highlights a growing divide in today’s leadership mindset — one that deeply influences how organizations navigate complexity, resilience, and long-term change.
Many organizations still operate within a cognitive lens shaped by linear, compliance-oriented thinking.
What Regenerative Leadership Does Differently
Regenerative leadership reverses this orientation.
Instead of pushing from the outside or polishing an image, it strengthens the inside of the system first. It cultivates:
durability
resilience
mutual benefit
long-term viability
It moves leaders from:
compliance → stewardship
performance-only metrics → shared value
competition → co-creation
For boards and executive teams, this is not a philosophical preference.
It’s a strategic mindset shift.
What the Wiley Research Reveals
The Wiley article — Leading Regenerative Transformation: Cognitive Frame Characteristics Shaping Leadership Practice — identifies key differences in how regenerative leaders think, operate, and respond to change.
Instead of treating sustainability as a compliance requirement, regenerative leaders:
integrate systems thinking into daily decision-making
prioritize long-term reciprocity over short-term wins
build cultures that support generative outcomes
recognize resilience as a relational practice, not just a technical fix
This research confirms what many practitioners intuitively feel:
Transformation without alignment creates chaos.
Transformation with clarity can regenerate possibility.
A regenerative mindset begins with awareness — of values, of energy, and of the patterns that shape our decisions. Leaders who shift the frame can shift the future.
- Tania Hotmer, Author of The Regeneration Canvas™
A framework for values-aligned leadership
Read the Full Article
Wiley (2025):
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bse.70153
