McKinsey research across more than 3,000 organisations found that approximately 70% of change programmes fail to meet their objectives.
A better relationship between business, people, and nature is possible.
We bring research on regenerative practices to the decisions that shape our organisations and institutions, in order to shift what leadership can mean.
A different relationship between business and the living world is possible. The Center for Regenerative Change works with practitioners of change who recognize that the old extractive models are reaching its limits, and leaders who want to build something that actually improves people, profit, and planet. We bring research on regenerative practice to the decisions leaders make every day.
McKinsey research across more than 3,000 executives found that roughly 70% of organisational change programmes fail to achieve their objectives. Gallup's global workplace data shows that 77% of employees are not engaged with work. Google's two-year study of 180 teams — Project Aristotle — found that the single strongest predictor of team performance is not more talent, or better strategy, or more resources.
It’s psychological safety.
These findings point to a structural problem where the dominant approach to change keeps treating organisations as machines, resistance as a defect, and implementation as the measure of success.
The framing is wrong. Creating sustainable change is not simply about defining structural outcomes and then strategising and pushing forward. It’s not that linear. Creating sustainable change looks at the organisation as a living system. An eco-system where the culture, feelings, emotions, safety, the capacity of its people, who are the foundation of the change.
Why do people resist change?
Most change efforts focus on systems, structure and stability, yet real change comes from culture, from people.
Most organisations still approach change as something to implement from above. A new strategy. A new model. A new framework. A new way of working.
But change is not only structural. It is emotional, cultural, and meaning-based.
Neuroscience has confirmed what most people already sense: when people feel unsafe, the brain's threat response overrides the capacity for learning, creativity, and openness to the unfamiliar. Antonio Damasio's research on somatic markers showed that emotion is not an obstacle to rational decision-making — it is a prerequisite. Lisa Feldman Barrett's work on constructed emotion demonstrates that emotional responses are shaped by context and prediction: disrupt someone's model of the world, and their nervous system responds before their intellect can engage.
People do not resist change simply because they are unwilling. They resist when change threatens their sense of safety, belonging, identity, or coherence.
Amy Edmondson's 25 years of research at Harvard has shown that psychological safety — the felt sense that one can speak, fail, and learn without punishment — consistently predicts team learning, performance, and innovation across industries and cultures. Daniel Coyle's research into high-performing cultures found that what distinguishes them is not talent but belonging cues: repeated signals that people are safe, connected, and valued.
When this is ignored, change becomes force. When it is understood, change can become transformation.
Why Change So Often Fails
What we believe
The deepest obstacle to change is not a lack of intelligence, effort, or urgency.
It is that people often cling to familiar systems because the familiar offers certainty, belonging, and a felt sense of safety — even when those systems are exhausted, extractive, or no longer working.
This is why facts alone rarely change people.
This is why crisis does not automatically lead to renewal.
And this is why top-down implementation so often deepens the very resistance it tries to overcome.
As Brené Brown has observed: leaders must either invest a reasonable amount of time attending to fears and feelings, or squander an unreasonable amount of time trying to manage ineffective and unproductive behaviour.
Real change requires more than strategy. It requires the conditions in which people can bear uncertainty, make meaning, and move through the unknown without fragmentation.
The alternative
Regenerative Change
In living systems, regenerative processes do more than reduce harm — they restore the conditions that allow life to renew itself. In organisational life, this means change that increases vitality rather than merely preserving viability. Change that cultivates the capacities of people rather than extracting them. Change that strengthens relationships with community and place rather than externalising costs elsewhere.
Most change work still operates from one of two frames. The first treats change as an engineering problem — plan it, implement it, manage resistance. The second treats it as a values problem — lead with purpose, build conscious culture, do less harm. Both are genuine contributions. But both still assume change is something people design and deliver from above.
Regenerative Change works at a different level. It understands organisations as living systems with their own dynamics, cycles, and potential. The work is not to direct change but to create the conditions in which transformation becomes possible from within — by working with culture rather than overriding it, by supporting inner and outer transformation together, and by helping people move through change with meaning, capacity, and trust.
We do not believe sustainable change can be driven by pressure alone. It must be cultivated, resourced, and lived into.
With the right conditions, change becomes a genuine passage — not a disruption to survive but a threshold to move through.
From force to nourishment
Too often, change is rushed before trust is built. Rolled out before culture is ready. Measured by compliance instead of renewal.
This pattern is visible in startups that pursue scale before culture has matured, and in larger organisations that introduce structural change without tending to the deeper life of the system. In both cases, change is pushed instead of nourished.
Regenerative Change works differently.
It helps organisations shift from:
• implementation to transformation
• urgency to readiness
• control to participation
• pressure to capacity
• fragmented interventions to living-system change
What the Center does
Our work
The Center for Regenerative Change supports organisations and communities who know that something deeper is required.
We help you:
Navigate transition when old models are no longer working and the future is not yet clear
Strengthen culture by working with trust, meaning, emotion, and relational life — not just process
Develop regenerative leadership that can hold uncertainty without collapsing into control
Design change differently so transformation is rooted in the realities of people, place, and system life
Build the conditions for emergence so change becomes lasting, embodied, and life-affirming
Change can deplete a system.
Or it can restore it.
Without the right conditions, change becomes overwhelming. With the right conditions, change becomes initiatory.
The Center for Regenerative Change exists to help people, organisations, and communities move through change in ways that are psychologically resourcing, culturally grounded, and rooted in living systems.
Because the future will not be built through force alone. It will be built by learning how to change in ways that bring life back.
"Profit-maximisation functions as an invisible environmental designer: it structures the spatial, temporal, and institutional conditions through which people live, work, learn, and relate."
— Adina-Iuliana Deacu, When Business Shapes Minds and Cities (RIFS, 2026)
The Soul of Change
THE FRAMEWORK
Most people navigate change without knowing what change really is.
At the heart of the Center's work is the Soul of Change — a cyclical framework for understanding how genuine transformation unfolds: the crisis or calling that interrupts the old pattern, the descent that cannot be strategised, the rebirth that requires patience, and the return that brings what was discovered back into the world.
This is not theory. It is a map of something people move through whether they have language for it or not. The Center works with this map at every scale — with individuals, with organisations, and with communities navigating threshold and renewal.
LEARN ABOUT THE SOUL OF CHANGE ➔
"Regenerative Change is not just about restoring systems. It is about restoring our capacity to move through change."
— David Hoogland, founder of the Center for Regenerative Change
Who is this for
This work is for people who are serious about change that goes to the root.
Not cosmetic improvement. Not the next iteration of approaches that have already been tried. The work of the Center is demanding — of the people and organisations who undertake it, and of us. It asks something genuine. In return, it offers something most frameworks do not: a way of understanding and navigating transformation that leaves capacity, not depletion, in its wake.
The Center works with founders and leaders navigating periods of threshold and redesign. With organisations that want to become genuine places of development for their people, their communities, and the places they inhabit. With practitioners who need a deeper framework than standard consulting or coaching can provide. And with communities working to regenerate the life of a specific place.
SEE HOW WE WORK ➔