On Regenerative Work

We’ve designed our working lives the way we’ve designed our industrial farms. We mono-work the way we mono-crop. But the indigenous wisdom of regenerative agriculture might have powerful applications in the workplace. Soil health, rotational grazing, and fallow fields are all metaphors for restoring health to the workplace and to ourselves. What might it look like to consider regenerative principles in how we structure our workweeks, our time-off, our sabbaticals? When we flatten the natural cycles, when we ignore the seasons, when we forget that compartmentalizing our lives and our fields is an illusion, then we can expect the same outcomes in the workplace as we expect in industrial farming: eroded soils and souls. What will it take to create organizational cultures of regenerative work?