Meaningfulness: The Heart Of Ethical Leadership

By Daniel Goodenough, co-founder of The HuPerson Project

Regenerative leadership is crucial for our times.  We know the challenges: the planet is struggling. Sustainability, useful as a first step, is no longer adequate in our approach to our planet or our businesses. In fact, most of the solutions being put forward are not up to the complexity of the problems.  Fortunately, by increasing our awareness of the wholeness of the regenerative approach, we can redesign ethical leadership, which in turn will help us address the urgent challenges we face.

Wicked Problems

The designers Rittel and Webber put forward the term, “wicked problem,” to indicate the complex, systems nature of the problems themselves, unable to be solved by simple, rational solutions. Taken together, these wicked problems merge into a meta-crisis. Journalist Jesse Damiani elaborates: “The important thing to note is that it is not merely that these crises are all occurring simultaneously, but that they exacerbate each other in complex and often unexpected ways; the whole is ‘greater’ than the sum of the parts.”

Given our understanding of how wicked problems work, it is now possible to address them through the systems approach of regeneration, giving a new sense of purpose to leadership.

Regenerative Agriculture as a Model

Regenerative agriculture can provide a key for a new kind of leadership. In Rodale’s thoughtful white paper, “Regenerative Agriculture and the Soil-Carbon Solution,” written in 2020, the authors point to regenerative agriculture to address climate change.

“The solution is farming. Not just business-as-usual industrial farming, but farming like the Earth matters. Farming in a way that restores the quality of soil, water, air, ecosystems, animals, and ultimately humanity. Farming that improves our soil’s natural ability to function so the planet and all of its life can also function. This kind of farming is called regenerative agriculture.”

Regenerative agriculture can serve as a powerful metaphor for cultivating regenerative leadership, serving as a model for a non-exploitative and profitable approach to leadership in business.

How Can this Model Apply to our Business?

It helps us to understand that regenerative agriculture is holistic by nature.  The health of each part in the system affects the health of the whole system.  In regenerative agriculture, for example, carbon is sequestered underground, topsoil is rejuvenated, and organic, drought resistant seeds are selected—all of these individual measures contributing to the health of the whole ecosystem.

When we extrapolate from these findings, we can look at business differently.  In his work on regenerative finance, for example, John Fullerton asks us to respond to wealth not only as profit. We see wealth in the vibrancy of our communities, in satisfying relationships, and in the prosperity of our world. We also find wealth in a deep sense of meaningfulness, which has become a key, for example, in employee retention.

Likewise, in her book The Regenerative Business, thought leader Carol Sanford has written about a new way of looking at business. She addresses a company’s singularity as it is interwoven with care for the health of our communities.  Sanford emphasises the necessity of conscious work design to change the way business does business.  “Work design,” she writes, “addresses everything from decision-making processes to reporting relationship to pay and promotion to how people get hired and managed.” Without understanding how a company works together, she writes, “it’s almost impossible for them to evolve the ability to perform sophisticated actions requiring the integration of multiple skills and disciplines.” At a high level of skill, work design allows for an integrated, healthy business environment across the company, as well as healthy communities, creating stewardship for company and community.

Meaningfulness is Central to Stewardship

Meaning is the driver in regenerative leaders.  By attending to meaningfulness, leaders can shepherd both the company’s mission, and the employee’s sense of life mission. Orchestrating the two is the key to life-affirming, holistic business practices.

Cultivating meaningfulness begins in inquiry, where each employee, including leadership, reflects on these key questions: Why am I here, What does that call me to do, and Who does that call me to become? The ‘why’ includes all aspects of our life – family, community, work, and our relationship to our ideals. A further reflection addresses, What am I going to do about that? This includes inquiry into the possibilities of how to make what we are called to do align with the ground of our being, including reflection on the way in which we embody our life mission. The manner in which we express our life mission is important, so that our life mission becomes artfully, beautifully, sacredly and skillfully integrated.

The same process of inquiry can be developed to understand the company’s mission. The art of leadership is to help harmonise these two levels of inquiry—the individual and the company—and at the same time find profitability in maintaining the health of our communities.  The business-as-usual mindset, with its emphasis on seeing problems as discrete and solvable in the short term, is far from equal to the task of addressing wicked problems. We have to fundamentally change our way of thinking, creating a whole new awareness for business leadership.

Conclusion

Once we accept the complexity of our problems and their interconnectedness, it’s clear that we need a cross-discipline, cross-functional, cross-cultural mind set.  For this, we need to uplevel our skill set, to develop our awareness so that we have access to realms of our mind that are more extensive than the limitations imposed by the rational mind. Consistent practices of meaning will enable us to be present to the future that wants to happen. That’s not a future where the earth and its people are experiencing a failure to thrive.  Rather, we seek to regenerate our world through our awareness. We seek a new ethical leadership, willing to overturn outmoded assumptions and replace them with stewardship, overriding competition, fragmentation and denigration. This new leadership will skillfully work across the aisle of intrenched divisions, working toward integration and wholeness.

Daniel Goodenough

Co-Founder, The HuPerson Project

https://thehupersonproject.com

Dedicated to science, art and spirit, Daniel inspires individuals, teams and enterprises to live their unique vision in the way the world most needs it. Co-founder of The Way of the Heart with Kimberly Herkert, Daniel designs processes for people to live more fulfilled, purposeful, and intentional lives. He recently published The Caravan of Remembering, a powerful self-directed inquiry for discovering our deepest calling. Together with Jill Taylor and Shelly Cooper, in 2023, Daniel co-founded the HuPerson Project to help leaders develop a deep awareness and presence, opening new structures of thinking so that corporate and entrepreneurial enterprises are able to embody their vision and become a remedy for the needs of the world today.