Why we need systems change, not tinkering around the edges
At a time when sustainability seems to have gone off the boil, long-time business strategist John Elkington has been travelling a country a week, uttering words of encouragement wherever he goes.
John has a habit of seeing around corners. He created the Triple Bottom Line framework back in the 90s. This aimed to balance profit with people and planet. Thirty years later, he retracted it, causing a big fuss among legions of followers worldwide. Why? Too many companies were using it as a trade-off framework.
While he’s better known as the ‘godfather of sustainability’, these days he’s a big proponent of regenerative thinking. In my book Wild Hope, John is one of several voices who weave the thread of regeneration through the narrative.
Unlike sustainability, which is about improving things, regeneration requires whole-of-system change. As he told me recently in the conversation captured in this video, sustainability professionals have become ‘too comfortable’. It’s time for us to get out of our bubble.
How regenerative thinking is different to sustainability
So what does that shift actually look like in practice? Regeneration asks us to go deeper. To do the inner work. It’s cultural, philosophical and personal. It means being willing to make long-lasting changes, aligning our feelings and values with our actions and behaviours – even when that’s uncomfortable.
In Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism, Elkington recalls sharing the stage in 2019 with Nadya Zhexembayeva, the ‘Reinvention Guru’. She spoke of what she called the ‘Titanic Syndrome’. This is like a corporate disease where organisations facing disruption create their own downfall through arrogance, excessive attachment to the past, or an inability to recognise the new and emerging reality.
Zhexembayeva argued that the pace of change demands profound reinvention – not once a century, not once a decade, but roughly every three and a half years.
Elkington took the idea further in his book: ‘In short order, we must regenerate ourselves, our teams and organisations, our communities and societies, and our economies. All of this in the service of regenerating the natural world.’
A strange brand of ‘mutant optimism’
John likes to say he’s a mutant. The future, he believes, will come from mutants, mavericks and from the edges. He is oddly optimistic and deeply pessimistic: at the same time, between breaths and midway through lengthy sentences and elegantly told stories.
‘We’ve got massive tensions building,’ he told me in a previous interview, on the eve of President Trump’s second term. ‘In the US, Europe, and China ... fertility collapse is spreading across societies. We’re heading into 10–15 years of extreme volatility. At the end of it, we’ll be led by people we’ve never heard of.’ Then he caught himself. ‘It’s hard not to sound like an Old Testament prophet, but history shows the pattern. Weirdly, I’m looking forward to it. It’ll be painful but fascinating to see who rises to the challenge.’
Pattern-thinking is future thinking
This ability to see patterns, and act on them, has been there from the start. Maybe it’s because he has ‘the sort of brain that is not deeply logical, and therefore proceeds in fits and starts.’
One story I couldn’t include in my book because of lack of space is this one. It tells a lot about the sort of person he is, and how he thinks, as a young man, and still today.
It’s also a personal anecdote of wild hope. Of taking a risk, and going through with it.
In the early 70s, after studying urban regeneration at University College, London, John Elkington joined a small consultancy in Covent Garden. One of the major projects he was asked to lead was in Egypt for the United Nations Development Programme.
He managed a team of five environmental scientists. They were looking at the environmental impacts of a series of ‘master plan studies’ that were being done for a city in northeastern Egypt called Ismailia. ‘It was just after the Israeli invasion in 1973,’ he told me. ‘Many of the buildings looked like string vests with artillery holes through them.’
Taking a risk
While there, he also had a chance to look at other master plan studies for Lake Manzala, a vast lake and coastal wetland, covering an area of around 1,360 square kilometres. ‘I noticed something strange: each of the three master plans looked at a third of Lake Manzala. Each concluded that their part didn’t matter because the other two-thirds would remain untouched. One wanted to turn the lake into farmland, another into a water reservoir, another a motorway. When you put it all together, there was no lake left.’
That instinct to connect the dots didn’t stay theoretical. John could see that this large, shallow lake was in fact a massive ecosystem supporting communities and fisheries. Without intervention, it could be destroyed. Off his own back, he visited seventeen government ministries to press his case. All the ministries said the same thing. “‘Manzala is a ditch, fill it in.” No one cared.’
Back in London, he contacted New Scientist. He told the editor, Jon Tinker, ‘I’ve got a story.’ They gave him three pages and the front cover. ‘It should have been career suicide – I’d breached a non-disclosure agreement – but it led to setting up Environmental Data Services in 1978. Looking back, you can see the pattern: at the time, it wasn’t very clear at all.’
If you’re keen to know more about the patterns he’s seeing right now, watch this video. In it, he expands on the stories that are keeping him optimistic. We caught up on a particularly warm afternoon in London (it certainly shows on my face – excuse the garish lighting!)
And if you want to know more about why John thinks regeneration is the way forward: Wild Hope is available for pre-sale now.