Simone Cicero 

Hello everybody and welcome back to the Boundaryless Conversations podcast. On this podcast, we explore the future of business models, organizations, markets and society in our rapidly changing world. I’m joined today by a slightly unusual co-host, Lucia Hernandez. Hello Lucia. Thank you so much. And Lucia is not a new voice for the loyal listeners as she was already featured on our episode number nine of series three, where we spoke about regenerative platform models. 

 

So you can find the link in the notes if you want to pick in. 

 

But we are excited today to welcome our guest for the day, Kara Pecknold. Kara has pioneered design for regenerative change and is a leader in advancing regenerative approaches to innovation and transformation, work that has led her to become the VP of regenerative design at Frog.

 

As a long-standing executive of Frog, Kara helped shape the firm’s approach to regenerative design and pushed beyond conventional sustainability towards models that are systemically restorative, adaptive, future-facing, and more. And Kara will tell us more. It’s a pleasure to have you here with us today, Kara.

 

Kara Pecknold

Thank you so much. It’s great to be with you.

 

Simone Cicero 

Thank you. So Kara, when we spoke recently and you shared a lot of how you work with a range of projects and customers, basically leveraging on concepts such as biomimicry, circular thinking, multi-capital value creation. But at the same time, when we were starting this conversation, you also highlighted that it’s not always about or it’s not just about frameworks. It’s also a lot about personal choices and personal approaches.

 

So I would love for you to start from there, from your personal experience in being what you are and doing what you do with your customers and as a professional in this space. So thank you for starting from the personal side.

 

Kara Pecknold

Yeah, I’m happy to. think it’s interesting. When I was a little girl, I developed a little play school for my sister’s friends. And one of the highlights of that experience was to be able to take the kids on a nature walk. And I was 10 or 11 years old. And imagining that today seems a little bit maybe silly or maybe unexpected, but I use it as sort of a grounding moment of a personal choice to awaken folks towards the natural world, which is what I think is quite connected to regenerative. So I think for me, being in a regenerative space is a bit of a posture shift. It’s a bit of a change in how I view the role of design in the world, my role in the world, not even as a designer, just as a human.

 

And so I come to this conversation, hopefully with some humility, hopefully with some generosity. The word regenerative comes out of generative, which to generate is to be giving. And so I think I also come with a little bit of moral ambition.

 

I think that this is not just about a tactical approach to what we do in the world, but it’s a deep conviction in who we are as people and how we view the world. So a little bit of worldview as well. So maybe I’ll start with that as my premise, because there’s a lot to potentially unpack here and we probably won’t cover it all in one conversation, but I think it’s important to note where I’m starting from.

 

Simone Cicero

Right, right. I mean, that’s very interesting, you because you, you mentioned that you feel like this is not a tactical thing. It’s more like a strategic, deep, moral, even approach to work and business and development. But at the same time, we all have, I mean, not everybody maybe, but most of us that are interested to the topic have these same, let’s say, fire, burning into our souls. 

 

And at the same time, by the way, when you shared with me some of the work you do, you also mentioned that sometimes you have to wrap this deep message into more tactical elements. 

 

So for example, you mentioned companies have sometimes understand that becoming regenerative is a way to secure their supply chains or becoming more feature-proof. So what is the approach, the framework you use to create cracks through which you can pour this deeper message and see what happens on the other side?

 

Kara Pecknold

I mean, some of it depends on the maturity of the client that we’re working with. So there’s many clients who have a very solid ambition already in place. They’re trying to live into it. And so I don’t need to focus probably as much on those clients because they’re committed. But I think in the case where a client is starting new or maybe doesn’t yet have it all fully rolled out and connected in the whole business, I like to talk about it, a framework looking both at biosphere, which is the natural things, the livable carbon it’s often referenced to, which by the way we are part of, and then the more technical sphere and that’s where we talk a lot about circularity and how things that are durable carbon who can keep in motion. And so while that’s a technical conversation, if I take it a level up, at the end of the day, both of those things are at play when we’re talking about a circular economy. 

 

And to move a client into that space or that domain of understanding that isn’t about adding more technical terms necessarily. It’s more about how can we help a client to see their dependency on nature and the ability to repurpose, reuse materials that are already in the system to build their business. And that’s gonna take various shapes depending on the nature of their business. 

 

So I think that it’s hard to always talk about this in such simple terms because it will change per industry and per type of client. Because every client has a different supply chain, every client has a different reality, every client is making a different product or offering a different service. But the thing that’s in common is the dependency on nature.

 

The thing that’s in common is the materials that we already have purposed that can be recycled or reused. It gets very nuanced though if you are, yeah, if we’re talking a client in aviation versus a client who’s in creating a customer level product. And that gets very different as it relates to systems. 

 

But at a basic level, I think, my reason even for having the title regenerative in my title is an ambitious one because I’ll be very straightforward. It’s not easy. It’s not easy to say we’re going to use less of what we’ve used before. But the real nut to crack as you, as you state is to how to build a business today that is realizing its dependency on nature and not only looking at full on raw extraction as an example for the next generation of product or service or what have you. So it’s two sides connected by a circular economy. And I want to talk in my work a little bit more about the nature side of it because we talk already quite a bit about the circular. And it’s not that these are easy things for companies to shift or change, but that is something that is well versed and well discussed.

 

But I think what we need to understand more about is this connection to nature as part of our existence, never mind our business.

 

Simone Cicero

I know Lucia has a question coming up, but I wanted to ask you a quick clarification, if you don’t mind. When you say, and it’s nice that you made this distinction between the biosphere and the technosphere, which is, think, something people passionate about regeneration have very clear in mind. 

 

I always mention the movie from Miyazaki, as you call it, the Princess Mononoke, where there is this kind of clash between nature and technology, which is, think, a topic that we have very clear since centuries. So when you appeal to this natural element, of course, the technological element, circularity, it sounds like business, performance, security, resilience, and whatever.

 

When you mention this natural element, this biosphere element, what do you mean exactly? So what are you referring to? Something that is un-tangible, something that is. How do you of describe it or perceive it in a custom?

 

Kara Pecknold 

I don’t always say it to a customer, to be quite honest, because sometimes when we talk about nature and business, it gets a little bit too ambiguous, potentially. So for some customers, I just talk about what are your dependencies. So I’m not trying to make it maybe sound more poetic by calling it nature or the biosphere. And I’ll give credit to Bill McDonough for sort of that narrative of the biosphere, the technosphere and the carbon economy connected by the circular economy.

 

But I think it’s really important that we see those images. We see that diagram. We know it’s a attention between two sides. And I think with my clients, what I’m talking to them about is what would it look like if we were protecting nature in whatever we built? And how would your ambition change? It’s not a forced conversation. It’s not something that I’m trying to require them to commit to, but I’m trying to make sure I have that conversation, which is why I come back to that difference between mindset and mastery in this space. 

 

My mindset is, I think that we should always be having a conversation about the dependencies. And some of those dependencies are human, right? So we talk about social sustainability. Some of those dependencies are environmental. 

 

And that environmental side is the trees, the oxygen that’s required, the water that’s needed. And I think every business can realize that they are dependent on those things, yes. How can they be more efficient, more protective? May I dare say more “honoring” of the dependency that they have on this, I think is part of the conversation. So I don’t often say, so what are we gonna do about the biosphere? I don’t often say so.

 

Let’s talk about nature in your business, but I do talk about what can we do to be better stewards of the materials and the resources that we have.

 

Lucía Hernández

Yeah, I am super interested in understanding when when companies approach or come to you, what are they? What they are more worried most worried about? I mean, because I don’t mean you talk about maturity of the company, right? So is there they that come to you asking you to be regenerative? Or is more about that they come? Yeah.

 

Kara Pecknold

No. Yeah, no one’s asking, no one’s coming knocking at the door, make me a regenerative company. I think there’s smaller companies that are doing it because the founders or the, or the leaders of that company are, that is their mission. But I would say again, it’s going to depend on the company and the size of the company. If the company is publicly or privately traded, I think all of these things are impacts.

 

But I can tell you in my whole history, I’ve never had a client say: “please make us a regenerative company”. I think, and I don’t think that isn’t an aspiration that’s living out there. It’s just not something I’ve witnessed personally. But I do know in other contexts with other conversations that I’m having, the way companies are talking about this is what it, “let’s talk about something like, the nature of biomimicry or the nature of biodiversity even”. 

 

So biomimicry, “let’s say we create a factory that mimics nature and how it uses energy and how it restores it or how it makes the product that it’s making”. I’ll keep it very simple for this conversation:. But next door you have the land, the water, the resources, all of the trees, whatever that are nearby. If you’re thinking about how do we build this factory, what can you not tear down to build the factory…That’s a decision. 

 

That doesn’t have to be this big. We’re a regenerative company. It just means we are making very different decisions about the land that we build on, the land that we take resources from  to have this factory run. And so for me, we may never see somebody standing up and claiming regenerative because Lord knows it’s really hard to make any claims today about what we do or do not do.

 

But I think this deeper conviction of being aware of the land you’re on, the humanity around where you put that factory, those are new types of decisions that I think show mature leadership, show a CEO or a C-suite leader who is really thinking about legacy and longevity of their business over quick returns. And I get it, it’s not easy to do. So your question about, are they coming to us? No.

 

Not necessarily, are we asking them, as I said earlier, do you want to talk about how you could, how we could imagine you were a steward of this? I think is the posture that I’m choosing to take in having conversations with clients.

 

Lucía Hernández 

And when you talk about, for example, in the case when you are talking about strategies that take a long time, there is like this look of 15 years in order to see the impact, the positive impact of the actions, how they feel about that?

 

Kara Pecknold

Well, I think I try to show them not just the 15 year plan, right? I think I try to show them what are the immediate steps. No company will come to us and say, I would love a 15 year plan either, generally speaking. So I think it’s about what are the micro actions that can be taken to start creating the North Star vision, the higher objective. So we often are doing these sort of timed out.

You could talk about it, Horizon 1, Horizon 2, Horizon 3 strategies that enable a client to reimagine the steps they need to take today in order to envision the Horizon 3 opportunity or the commitment.

 

Lucía Hernández 

Super, super.

 

Kara Pecknold

But yeah, we like fast things. And I think that’s part of the tension in this work and tension and committing is when you see a world crumbling because resources are being taxed or overused or even abused, if I may say, it does take a minute to like reorient yourself as to what does business look like if we took this posture.

 

What does the product look like if we took this posture? Because it’s not always the fastest route to market. And I know that’s not always what people want to hear, but I think if we can show, as I said, of the quicker things that help you to achieve it without just showing the big, huge thing, I think it makes it much more accessible to organizations.

 

Lucía Hernández

For sure, for sure. Yeah, I’m just because with the same thinking about the indicators or KPIs that you are using, because yeah, we are talking in regeneration, there are like this controversy or tension between creating a standardization of indicators and or creating the ones contextualized or because of the activity of the company. 

 

How do you go through this tension?

 

Kara Pecknold 

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of times I will have a conversation with a client about what’s, as I said at the beginning, what’s already in place, right? Like what is the company already committing to as far as targets? They don’t need me to come in and recreate those targets, but we can have a conversation about which ones are achievable or not achievable as far as those KPIs. And you rightly point out there’s a lot of KPIs, right? 

 

So we can talk about a regulatory standard again, ranging various things that you are reporting on, emissions, all the scopes of emissions. Did we do that? Did we reduce what we said we would reduce? So KPIs for me have to fit the company on some level. They have to be something that they know that they can achieve or are committing to shifting the business in order to be able to achieve it. 

 

That being said, one of the ones that I find maybe interesting is a potential KPI – is the digital product passport. Let’s use that as an example, a new regulatory expectation that you would have a, you know, everything, the digital data about that product. And what it sort of insinuates in it and or suggests in it is that we would have an end of life plan for this product. And for me, a regenerative pivot, if I may say, would be to have something that says, what is the next use of this product? And it’s such a subtle thing, right? So that’s where I don’t want to make regenerative seem like it’s so impossible. It’s something that just says, we need to reframe our thinking that this isn’t going to go into an end of life story. It’s going to have a next use story. And where that gets interesting, I believe, and many others I’ve talked to believe, is that you start looking as a company, as all the assets you have are things that you would keep in your business for a longer time, as opposed to having systems of waste only, having systems of what parts of the materials that you already reuse can come back to you and still be something you’re not reinvesting in. And so, yeah, that takes a minute to reimagine and rethink what systems do we need to put in place in the business in order for that to be successful or even possible.

 

And it won’t be everything perhaps, but maybe it could be some things. So starting to look at your business as something that has that ongoing longstanding inventory, I think might be a regenerative mindset in how you deal with business and how you deal with your products.

 

Lucía Hernández 

Super interesting.

 

Simone Cicero

I mean, have a couple of points that this conversation is bringing up. One thing is, I think it’s very interesting how you make these points of thinking about the long term, which is resonating with something that, for example, companies which are also not necessarily having such a huge circular ergonomy related footprint or at least indirectly. 

 

So for example, I was referring to Shopify. Shopify has this approach to KPIs that basically they ban the use of short term KPIs and they have this idea of looking at cohorts of users over the long term. So their KPIs are related to the lifetime value of you know, users. 

 

So, so they really try not to focus too much on the short term. And for example, favoring also churn of certain customers because they want to have a long-term vision of a relationship with a customer. So this brings me to another piece of the conversation that I wanted to have with you, which is, there really a major difference now between the customers that have a very strong customers? I mean, organizations that have a very strong physical footprint versus, I would say, mainly digital organizations in how they think regeneration. 

 

So I’m also interested in understanding if you feel like this topic is also a hot topic for companies which don’t have maybe a very strong footprint, actual resource-intensive footprint.

 

Kara Pecknold 

Physical stores you mean versus just e-commerce, if I’m understanding you.

 

Simone Cicero

Yeah, I mean, in general, I’m really interested in if in your work with digital companies, maybe, don’t know, companies that do services, which I mean, of course, they have an impact because everything has it, but it’s less clear that they have to think about circularity, for example, right?

 

So are there other, I would say dimensions that are part of the picture in the conversation about regeneration. Circularity is one. Maybe another one is how you manage people, how you manage relationships. 

 

So how does this framework expand besides the use of resources and sustainability?

 

Kara Pecknold

Yeah, I I think if I understand your question, I think there’s something about regenerative that’s about being a leader. There’s something about being regenerative that is, you know, the physical buildings in which you do your business. There’s the products that you provide. Digital or physical, you know, the digital world uses a lot. We don’t need to go down the AI conversation today, but you can imagine every time we’re using it, it’s using a lot of cooling requirements, which means a lot of water, as an example. 

 

So I think regenerative, back to the beginning, is for me about your mindset in a business. And that mindset has to do with how you treat your employees. That mindset has to do with how you treat your customers. It has to do with how you source. It has to do with how you follow and abide by regulation. It has to do with how you think. What do you do with the earnings that you make? Where do you reinvest your earnings as a business? Those types of things. 

 

So for some folks, it may sound like this sort of idealistic utopia of what a business could be. But I think what we can see is that business as usual is challenged today.

 

COVID gave us the first hint that we were going to be a little bit challenged with our supply chains. Then you toss in some wars, then you toss in a change in government…. so regenerative, What I like about a regenerative mindset in the case of building a business is that it actually helps you to get a little bit more localized. So when global challenges are faced as a business, what is your local network of support systems or local dependencies? And we’ve built quite a global base for everything. Everything is very global and it’s made the world very interesting, very diverse. So I’m not here to slam globality, but I do think that having an understanding of a more localized system in place, or at least in the parts of your business that can be more localized, then this is an initiative that could happen.

 

Now, if going to talk about Shopify, which is, would argue, a little bit more of a global story, right? Because I am buying from you for the long term, for wherever, whatever I want, my shop can be anywhere. So the curiosity about creating longer term customer, I think, is great. What does that mean? What does that actually look like in a perhaps one-off purchase type of moment in a shop?

 

I’d be curious to unpack. I’ve not really looked into Shopify’s story enough to know what their proposal is and how that gets lived out in the long term.

 

Simone Cicero 

Right, mean, Shopify was just a quick story to reflect beyond the tech, I would say typically resource-intensive businesses and more into the digital. But you made a great point when you said, you know, it’s also about energy, it’s also about resources, but also about leadership and workplace. 

 

So I think that’s a good overview of the dimensions. 

 

One thing that we were talking about with Lucia in the background is that you seem to mention this idea of localism or relocalization, re-embedding business into context. This is a hot topic, right? And it’s also a very controversial topic, right? 

 

Because we have been, I would say, drinking the cool head of globalization for 25 years. And now suddenly it’s done, it’s finished. One of the major players in the global system, the US, are at least voicing a very strong stance towards re-regionalization of their economy, basically. And Trump is not typically seen as a regenerative person, Especially in our, maybe in our typically regenerative context. 

 

So this speaks a lot about the controversy that we are facing as designers, right? 

 

But nevertheless, bioregionalism, relocalization, you you said something very strong and clear, which we also agree, at least the pieces of your business that can be really regionalized should be, and this is also very connected with the cosmolocalism, you know, conversation that has been running for many years in the peer-to-peer space, open source space. 

 

So I’m curious if you have stories or stronger, clearer paths to unpack this question of bio-regionalism and business and relocalization or re-regionalization of businesses, also from the perspective of customers that work with you, which are typically, I guess, global. 

 

So maybe you can have a company that has a global brand but can also re-embed some pieces of their production in a regional space.

 

Kara Pecknold

Yeah, I can’t say the name of the client, but I can tell a story around it. I think an example would be looking at how we might build a solar energy product for the home. And so we had the opportunity to build and test one. And we built and tested one in Europe. So all the supplies were European sourced, and we did the same in India.

 

And so to show that this could be in two locations and what would it look like to obtain and acquire these things in order to be able to, you know, build a product that could be localized. And I know enough about the company that what they would do is localize the materials for that same product, obviously, for some shipping requirements and distribution requirements that it would become available in India as much as it could have become available in Europe based on that.

 

Now pricing could be different. Obviously there’s a whole thing to unpack there. But I think what we did was to test how the product performed in both of those locations. We tested the materials that would be required in both locations. We used design principles that would be meaningful to the location that was actually targeted to, which was India.

 

So I think that’s an example of how you can begin to localize the production of something. Every piece in part going to be that local, local? Perhaps not, but I think that’s a conversation that every business has to have as to how close. So it might not be totally local, but it might be closer than what has typically been perceived the easier option for access.

 

Simone Cicero

Right. Do you have any suggestion in terms of if you look at a brand and organization, right, as a value chain, you have the brand, you have the customer needs, you have the capabilities of the organization, you have the resources and whatever. What seems to be holding its global, unique, characterizing piece as we are this organization and what instead typically gets transformed into this real localization process. 

 

I guess that you don’t have so many projects to pick from. But if not you, who else? 

 

As a leader of a global design firm, regenerative leader. So in a few words, what in this process of rethinking a brand as a regenerative and therefore bioregionally embedded piece – What resists as a, let’s say, unique brand related piece and global piece and what is instead gets fragmented into regions, right? 

 

I guess it’s not just the products and the sources and the resources. It can be also the customer expectations, the go-to-market strategies, whatever. So if you can make this radiography and try to give us an idea.

 

Kara Pecknold

Yeah, and I almost wonder if this is not even just being about regenerative. This is the nature of large global organizations. And so yeah, you get cultural nuance. So we did work on a project where we had to try to localize, let’s just say services within different markets. And to do that meant we looked at smaller markets versus larger markets. Smaller markets had smaller budgets, had smaller teams, had different rituals and requirements that were completely

 

not suited to what was the larger mega market. so some of that nuance you could talk is about the size of the market, as I’ve just indicated. Some of that is the cultural nuance within that market. But the global overarching narrative was the one that they all came together to realize. And the talk was around employee experience. So we aligned on

 

know, experience principles that we were going to share across all markets. And then those markets broke it down into what does this mean in our market? How would this change what we do as far as our customers in this market, as far as our size of market, as far as what products we were delivering in this market, as far as what our employees were expecting in this market?

 

So I think there is a way to have an overarching shared vision and shared commitment. But then I think the way it works best is not to cookie cutter and make it the same for all. It has helped to make it a little bit more bespoke and enable the markets to kind of have their freedom to create it in a way that makes sense for that market.

 

Simone Cicero

Right, I know Lucia has a question coming up. One thing that I wanted to ask you for a deeper reflection, you have it, what does it mean for the organizational operating model of the company? So if you need to have this capability to re-embed, to play according to the regional specificities, both in terms of customer needs, work cultures.

 

What does it mean for the organization? How you see this tension for the organization? What we see on our side is that in general, this strong pressure for unbundling the organization into something more modular and something that you can adapt to the context and give also more responsibility to the edge of the organization is something that is coming up. 

 

How do you see that resonant if you see that resonant with the regeneration topic?

 

Kara Pecknold

Yeah, I I think, I think there’s a lot of efforts where it, the aim is to have it unified, of course. And so areas of, of that unification have to come from the top and from the bottom. So if I see the top, it’s a commitment to structures around what, again, organizationally, it’s a commitment to what are we going to do about nature regeneration? What is our commitment to the nature that we’re, what’s our commitment to the social? 

 

Oftentimes, and I can go on like our responsible sourcing, we can talk about the health and well being of our employees. So fair wages, etc. Like there’s this to me is a whole story that is nature based and human based and business based and those things are intertwined together. I think where it is challenging is oftentimes this is sequestered to somebody who’s in CSR, corporate social responsibility.

 

And so for me, where it works is when the CEO is completely bought in and they have people throughout the organizations who are empowered in their different disciplines or in their different roles to be able to execute on that. But if it’s housed within one department, it becomes a little bit more difficult to have it infiltrate through the whole organization. So it may be that is a modular as you use in your wording, more of a modularity approach.

 

But I think it’s a bit of top down and bottom up, enabling grassroots initiatives versus giving top commitments and top statements from the leadership, if that answers your question.

 

Simone Cicero 

Yes, yes.

 

Lucía Hernández

Yeah, I was thinking because you were talking about the social impact, nature and so on. So what is the role of public administration, local governments and governments in general in this sense? Because how regeneration is important for them to approach regeneration from this point of view?

 

Kara Pecknold

Well, I think the city as a platform for regeneration is an amazing one, to be really honest. I think it has so many dynamics because a city, let’s just use a city, a city is connected to your parks, your recreation, its business, its humans, its citizens who, you know, live and dwell. So it’s a great, I don’t even want to call it a microcosm. It’s a bit more macro in a way, because it actually shows those interdependencies and when those interdependencies break down. 

 

And so. I do think governments and public systems are part of the story and the narrative of regenerative. We can look a lot at folks like Kate Raworth and the Doughnut Economics Movement and making your city a doughnut city, if you will, by looking at all of the things that could be potentially accounted for when it comes to things like planetary boundaries and a safe space for people to live and dwell and exist. 

 

And so it doesn’t just talk about the environmental impact. So I think cities and public spheres are really critical because that’s the narrative of the citizen, not just the consumer. And I think when we just look at regenerative as a consumer business thing or challenge or conversation, we miss actually the other side of it. Both can be true.

 

I love the idea that two things can be true at the same time. I’m a consumer and I am a citizen. I can be both of those things, but to not have them comprehensively sort of intersecting or connected misses the whole and talks about us just as parts.

 

Lucía Hernández

How do you define regeneration?

 

Kara Pecknold 

In simplest terms, it’s giving back more than I take or the ability for me to continually and perpetually not extract and, you know, to keep thriving and keep healthy thriving. So regeneration for me is those things at a very simple level or a very condensed level, maybe let’s put it that way. So I often speak of it to my clients is what if you could give back more than you take?

 

What would that look like? What kinds of things could we be doing with your employees? What kinds of things would we be doing with your customers to keep it at a very maybe accessible level for the conversation?

 

Simone Cicero 

I have maybe a segue into the last question before we move into the breadcrumbs and the closing. Because I like this point that you make, and everybody makes this point about regeneration being given more than what you take. 

 

At the same time, I feel like this is a way to, I would say, not approach the key question. What do I mean with that? It gives you the possibility to not have any limit, because it gives you this perspective that you can create more value than you consume. So you still can consume as much as you want, as long as you create more value and more resources than you consume.

 

At the same time, the idea of limits is very much about, it’s very important in this conversation we are having. I can find this idea of limit into frameworks, like you mentioned, Kate Raworth’s Doughnut economy. But I can also see that into, for example, when you speak about biomimicry.

 

Biomimicry essentially is a way to deal with a problem at least for me, that you don’t understand. Since you don’t understand the problem, you try to mimic nature. Because in an abductive approach, you say, maybe we can mimic nature. Nature has sorted these out in billions of years. So maybe if we mimic nature and we accept that we don’t understand something, so we accept a certain limit in our thinking, we can move forward. 

 

So how much is this idea of limits present in the conversation you’re having with brands or even in your office, How much can we, how do you feel like we can, can we really deal with this idea of limits in how we think about our future and future as an organization, products and so on?

 

Kara Pecknold

It’s a big question and one I love because I think it is something that we have to ask ourselves. We, I have had many workshop design workshops for things like decoupling, you know, and how do we extract sort of this value versus how many do we need people to buy more and more and more? Can we decouple some of this expectation around consumption? I don’t know that I’ll solve it today to be really honest, but because I think there are limits.

 

It’s maybe an unpopular statement in a world of business, but I do, if I talk personally, Kara, I do believe there are limits. So in reframing, a lot of the things we’re trying to do is reframe around behavior science, right? What is the actual trigger that you want your customer to have? Are we just going to talk about consuming more as the proof point that your business has been successful? Is it just this transactional moment is the only place where monetary exchange can occur. 

 

And so, you know, I think that in regenerative, the reason we keep it vast enough is because yeah, I think we are not and maybe I’ll clarify, I’m not saying that to be regenerative is to give back more – giving back more than you take doesn’t preclude that I’m saying there are no limits.

 

I think there should be some limits. I think that this is my mission, my passion, if I may say, as I grow and mature in my own design practice. It may not always be popular. It may be about five years down the road where it actually comes to life and is real. But I think I have a strong conviction that if we’re only looking at business the way it is today, we don’t have enough, we actually don’t have enough resources to carry it forward.

 

And this is why I think we’re fascinated with the development of technologies and new technologies look at the quick fix or the thing that will help us to make us more efficient. And for me, regenerative is also looking at how do we actually protect what is already here and we don’t have to make something that new. And some of those things are intention all the time. I totally get it. 

 

But I believe that this limit conversation is one that’s just begun. And so you can see folks, again, we don’t have time today, post-growth, de-growth, green growth. There’s lots of views on this. But as a designer, I want to use the tools of my trade to help a client or a customer, a business, to reimagine their future, thinking more in long-term, thinking more in giving back more than you take asking about new business model structures. Why do we think everything the way we’ve always done it is the only way to do it? It’s comfortable, it’s known, it’s reliable, so we say, but at the end of the day, things are disrupted enough that we’re having to really scramble to figure out, so what now? And as much as we don’t want to be in crisis mode, crisis mode gets us to be very creative.

 

And that’s what I think the creative disciplines bring to this conversation about regeneration is that business as usual is not as usual. It is as unusual as you can imagine right now. And so I think it’s a prime opportunity to apply new ways of thinking, which are different than what we’ve been using so far.

 

Simone Cicero

Because at the end of the day, this conversation about limits is a bit about, it’s the conversation about growth, right? As a brand, if you only seek for more, more revenues, more products, more customers, more sales, more value for shareholders, I don’t think there is really a way to crack the hard question of regeneration, right? So I’m wondering maybe as a last bit.

 

And you spoke about that. You said we need to push design outside of the classical realm of design. So have you been questioned or have you been involved in conversations that go beyond the product, the go-to-market, the experience of the customers into, for example, new financial models, right? Or new capital structures, right? Or new governance structures that may create the space for a company, for example, to think about maybe a new product that doesn’t need to grow forever or maybe a way to approach a customer in a way that we can maybe push the customer to consume a little bit less, not more, right? 

 

How do you see that happening?

 

Is this conversation happening as well?

 

Kara Pecknold

Absolutely, absolutely it’s happening. And we have a whole sort of organizational design practice that really is mostly focused on these types of things where we get questions about new business models, which arguably is what you’re suggesting in your question. I think maybe, so yes, we do, it’s happening.

 

Some of it is spin-off businesses. You can think a lot about still the world of venture and venture capital. Those things still are existing and happening in the world. Doesn’t mean we’re necessarily directly involved in every aspect of those pivots that businesses are making, but we might be taking a new technology and creating something out of that new technology. But I want to just say, maybe this is important and a slight pivot from your question. 

 

Imagine if we did take business like nature’s cycles. There is a time when nature goes dormant and it isn’t wasting energy, it isn’t wasting its resources. But in the winter, again, it’ll vary where winter is depending on where you live, there is a moment to refuel itself. What does the future look like if there’s hibernation for your business?

 

What does it look like when you plant seeds as a business before, know, in whatever season that is best for where you live? What does it look like when you harvest? And, and I think these sort of seasonal views of business – it may sound like something super poetic and I’m okay with that because I think there is something to be said about nature, understanding how much it can tolerate and take before the business breaks down.

 

Simone Cicero 

I mean, maybe some businesses have to compost to be part of…

 

Lucía Hernández

Yeah. And you know what? That at the end is super painful when we are inside a society or a way of doing business that don’t allow us to let go and let the things that are not working anymore side apart because we need to keep something integrate this idea of no, because there is a cycle, there is a beginning and an end, and you can let go and start another theme. And it would be much better for everyone, right?

 

Kara Pecknold 

Yeah.

 

Simone Cicero

All right.

 

Kara Pecknold 

Right, and I’ll give a quick example so that it gets really practical: businesses who let their employees take holiday days off together. It’s not a radical shift. It doesn’t mean, I was sent a message because I needed to order something and I was sent a message, our factories will be closed these days. We apologize for any delay. You’ll have it as soon as they reopen. And it was two days of closure. That is not.

 

Honestly, generally speaking, that’s not the end of the world. For some people, I get it. It might be a crisis. But I think this kind of business has a role to play to say what growth can and cannot look like. And we think it’s the way it’s always been. We accept the way it’s always been as the only possible way. And I think there’s room for some disruption in this, in a healthy disruption. And this is just a simple, small act that says we’re going to shut down for a couple of days to give our employees a rest.

 

Simone Cicero

Right, right. So as we approach the end of the conversation, as you may recall, we are to ask you for your breadcrumbs. So suggestions you want to share with your, with our audience to go deeper into the space that we have been discussing.

 

Kara Pecknold

Well, first off, tell them all to go outside. That’s what I would tell you to do. Go witness nature, take it in, be near it and understand it, watch it closely. I think that’s the best bit of breadcrumb I can give. 

 

But things to read, I am a big fan of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I love her artistic and scientific marriage. I think that’s really powerful. And I think that’s what business is about. We have some artistic and some science, and some business.

 

And I think that marriage is really amazing. Since we’re talking about growth and limits to growth, I can’t recommend The Limits to Growth by Donella H. Meadows as a key read in my opinion. I do appreciate the Patagonia story, albeit one that maybe is spoken about a lot, but there’s a book called The Future of the Responsible Company, which I think is a really interesting read for folks by Vincent Stanley and Yvon Chouinard. 

Biomimicry by Janine Benyus innovation inspired by nature. And then the last one would be The Future We Choose by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac. I’m probably butchering their names, but I think this idea of sort of what is the future we are going to choose, not one that is imposed upon us. And I’m a big believer that we are citizens of the world and businesses are made up of citizens of the world. And we have a choice in how that gets shaped.

 

Simone Cicero

Thank you so much. There’s a lot to read for our listeners. Right. So if you go outside and read outside, you can merge two of the breadcrumbs and you can save some time. Thank you so much. I I appreciate you have engaged in this frank and funky conversation around regeneration. So thank you so much.

 

And thank you, Lucia, thank you, Lucia, for your questions and joining us as a special co-host.

 

Lucía Hernández

It was a pleasure. Thank you, Kara. It was super interesting.

 

Kara Pecknold 

Thank you.

 

Simone Cicero 

Thank you both. For our listeners, I hope you also enjoyed. As always, can head to boundaryless.io/resources/podcast. You will find this conversation with Kara with all the notes, the breadcrumbs she mentioned. As always, until we speak again, remember to think Boundaryless.