Regenerative storytelling Archives - Page 2 of 2

Courage to change

Animation from Alsco - A red heart with the text, "Led by Values".

Changing habits of a lifetime as an individual takes commitment. Whether it’s switching from a combustion engine car to who you bank with. Switching takes time — and investment.

These individual changes are important but when we do it as a collective and as a business, WOW. That’s when we can really make a difference.

But to do things differently – and regeneratively — that takes courage.

An animation from Alsco showing a map of Australia. — Alsco: part of the fabric of Australia (taken from the video animation)

Alsco: a company working to transform and lead their industry

Alsco, the Australian textile, first aid and hygiene company has been in business for 60 years. Recently, they’ve made many changes org-wide.

These include:

uplifting pay
improving safety across their entire business
launching their “2030 Successfully Sustainable Strategy”
switching to renewables
initiating national and local community partnerships
addressing their waste as one of the inaugural partners with BlockTexx which turns textile waste into a resource.

Individually each initiative is important. But combined, they reflect a change in thinking and require a shift in behaviour. From a regenerative perspective this means building capacity — and capability — over the long-term.

Taking a leap of faith

Just before Christmas, Alsco engaged my company Wordstruck to develop an end-to-end Storytelling program. Their initial goal: to articulate the changes they’ve been making in sustainability.

“As a company we were doing good things,” says CEO Mark Roberts. “But we didn’t have a clear way to articulate our story.”

From the get-go, we could see that their story was about more than sustainability. It needed to connect the dots to reflect the org-wide changes. More than that, it needed to unlock the passion and harness the motivation that Mark and his senior leadership team have “to make a difference”.

Working with Wordstruck, says Mark, “was a leap of faith. We use consultants strategically and don’t usually invest in this sort of program. But 12 weeks later, we not only had an impactful story, but a suite of assets including a graphic and video animation.”

The Wordstruck way

When we are working with a client, we are always looking for clues. While we start with desk-top research and pour over a company’s strategies, it’s in the interview phase that we start to understand what’s really going on.

Both myself and lead Strategic Storyteller, Sue White, have 50+ years of combined journalism experience (yup! I know).

We listen for what’s motivating the key influencers; what they care about; why they work as hard as they do.

This unlocks the emotion in the story. A powerful story requires head and heart.

A quote from Brené Brown, "stories are data with soul". It depicts a black labrador with piercing brown eyes. — One of my favourite quotes to explain storytelling.

Becoming values-led to transform thinking

With Alsco we identified that becoming values-led is integral to their story. This represents a paradigm shift. While they still want to make a profit (and be around for another 60 years), HOW they make profit is changing.

“This values-led story has transformed thinking in our senior leadership team,” says Mark. But, it’s fair to say, he wasn’t sure how it would land. “I’ll admit, a few members of our team need to be convinced about sustainability.”

Creating the right conditions

From a regenerative perspective, we are looking to create the optimum conditions for change.

We always co-create programs with our clients. In this case, one thing we did, when designing the storytelling workshop that Wordstruck delivered at Alsco’s national conference, was identify “storytelling champions”. These individuals shared their stories with the whole company. The response was electric. Hearing them seemed to trigger a palpable wave of possibility and motivation to do more.

A picture from the Alsco national conference. The image shows a room full of people sitting at tables in a conference room. — Alsco national conference, March 2023

Wordstruck "Aha" moments from the Alsco national conference. — Alsco national conference, March 2023

“The room was humming and people were engaged,” continues Mark. “There was real enthusiasm and I could see that the team are beginning to understand that Alsco needs to start behaving and acting differently in the marketplace because the world demands it.” He knows there’s a long way to go. “Sometimes, it feels like we are just getting started.”

But he’s committed for the long-term. He’s a grandfather now, and has another grand-child on the way. “We need to think about our legacy — and what we are leaving future generations. We’ve got to do the right thing.”

3 Regenerative Learnings

Shifting to a systemic way of thinking takes time, commitment and courage.
Identifying key individuals and co-designing a program helps create the optimal conditions for regeneration.
Motivation is key to both initiating change – while also maintaining the energy (and enthusiasm) required for the road ahead.

Hi, I’m Claire. Through my business Wordstruck we help companies bring their sustainability strategy to life. As the Founder of Regenerative Storytelling, we’re helping leaders do more for their people, their community and the planet. I publish regular content about storytelling, regenerative leadership and reframing how to address our rapidly heating world. To see more of my content, please sign up – and join the conversation by sharing a comment below.

When Connection Breaks Down… Does Cruelty Follow?

Black mother swan and her cygnets swimming on the water.

The squawks are so loud that I wonder how Jen Abbott can concentrate. But she doesn’t pause for breath. After eight years running her home-grown sanctuary “Aussie Wildlife” on the Gold Coast, she’s used to the sound of birds. From a white-throated night jar to kookaburras, kingfishers, magpie geese, and, one of her favourites, black swans, she gives them all a second chance.

First, the nearby Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary checks any of the injured birds or abandoned chicks. Then, Jen painstakingly nurses them back to health. Every morning she is up at 4:00 am feeding, cleaning and (when needed) giving medication to the several dozen birds in her care. Then she gets back to her day job: operations support for small businesses.

“We are one of the few carers on the Gold Coast to care for swans. It costs about $500 per swan and it takes a lot of effort.” After six months raising a cygnet, Jen releases the vulnerable bird back into the wild. She stops, shakes her head in disbelief.

“It’s heartbreaking. There are young people out there who are deliberately running over swans in their boats and killing them. Why would you do that?”

We are all one integrated system

Since January the RSPCA have reported around ten incidents of deliberate cruelty against swans where people in boats have “tormented” and purposely driven at the birds. Gold Coast Water Police are now investigating.

What do you put that down to? I ask Jen.

“It’s a lack of connection. People don’t see these birds as wildlife. But they – and we – are all part of one integrated system.”

WHY THE SEPARATION FROM NATURE?

Take a moment to think about this. We are all part of one system.

So often – in the West, at least – that’s not how we are taught. Here… a short historical excursion will explain why.

Back in 1641, the French philosopher René Descartes famously separated humans from minerals, plants and animals. Humans, he declared, have a rational soul or intellect. I think therefore I am. This means that it’s only us who can feel and experience.

As David Abram says in The Spell of the Sensuous, all other organisms “are in truth nothing more than automatons… unable to feel pleasure or suffer pain. Hence, we humans need have no scruples about manipulating [or] exploiting… other animals.”

Abram pushes the argument further. Not only have humans used this “specialness” to justify exploitation of other organisms – but other humans as well: “other nations, other races, or simply the ‘other’ sex”.

It sounds horribly familiar… so how do we address this?

RETHINKING OUR PLACE IN NATURE

Regenerative thinking de-centralises the role of humans. Instead, we talk about the “more-than-human” or “other-than-human” beings that we inhabit our world with. These could be furry or feathered, scaled or many-legged. They could be from the plant or fungi or tree families.

None of this is new to First Nations cultures. For thousands of years they have recognised – and respected – the more-than-human.

In one of my previous blogs I introduced you to scientist Suzanne Simard, author of Finding the Mother Tree. Simard writes about her own transformation from an objective scientist, to someone who recognised that “trees and plants have agency.” When we acknowledge this, Simard continues, we can see that “all nonhuman species… deserve as much regard as we accord ourselves. Mistreatment of one species is mistreatment of all.”

Below, young channel-billed cuckoos – migrants from Papua New Guinea – being fed.

Giving back to the planet

Walking around the aviaries with Jen Abbott, and watching as she feeds her flock, is a real eye-opener. I have the precious experience of holding a white-throated nightjar (see photo above). This quiet, shy bird is rarely seen as they live in the undergrowth in forests. After a moment of uncertainty, the bird finds its spot and sits calmly on my arm.

Jen says she started her wildlife rehab because she “always wanted to give back to the planet… I felt that there was a need to improve the system. To create a sanctuary that cared for animals in a nurturing way. I didn’t even pick birds, the birds picked me.”

For years she has self-funded the project — out of her own pocket. Now, she’s becoming a charity as a way to make it self-sustaining.

What’s your vision, I ask her? “I’d love to see more of these ‘rehab hubs’ in communities. Nothing beats experience. If a community can see the wildlife ambo [ambulance] driving down the street with a new rescue. Or families can show their kids, or people can volunteer to help… people will feel the connection that’s missing.”

She scoops a handful of raw mince and walks into the aviary towards a pair of REALLY noisy birds that are getting more insistent by the minute. These channel-billed cuckoos are migrants from Papua New Guinea (see video above). Jen needs them to gain weight so she can release them before winter.

“Aren’t they great,” she says, as the two fledglings, mouths agape, go crazy. “Such a precious world. We’ve got to protect it.”

Keen to Know more?

Keep an eye out for “more-than-human” or “other-than-human” terminology. Reflect how you look at your world – where do you see your place in it?
If you’re on Facebook, follow Jen’s progress at Aussie Wildlife. You can also donate via PayPal…
Reading your thing? The Spell of the Sensuous is dense and mysterious. It helps give language to what we are needing to find new words for… something I’ll be exploring in later posts.

Regenerative

Our kids can’t play in the front yard – Regenerative stories from the frontline of climate change

McRose Elu is one of those unstoppable aunties. A veteran climate change campaigner, social rights advocate, and 2021 Queensland Senior of the Year, she can’t imagine ever putting her feet up. “There’s so much to do,” says the 70-something-year-old.

Last week I had the privilege of meeting Aunty Rose – as she’s known – on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait. This archipelago of around 270 islands are located off the northern tip of the continent. They are the frontline of Australia’s climate emergency.

I don’t use that expression “climate emergency” lightly. It’s a phrase, if you hear it too much, becomes irrelevant. But when you’ve got saltwater lapping over your roads and your kids can no longer play in the front yard due to storm surges…. This is a real emergency.

Aunty Rose has experienced this first hand.

When sea walls cannot stop the storm surges

‘I’m from one of the outer low-lying islands of Saibai. Even back in the 1940s the salt water was coming. My father decided to move us all to the mainland. We grew up on Seisia – land given to my father and his brothers by the Aboriginal people of the Cape.”

Out of the seventeen inhabited islands of the Torres Strait, seven are becoming inundated as sea levels rise a shocking 6-8 mm per year. Soon, these seven islands will become uninhabitable.

“We often feel forgotten and alone,” Aunty Rose continues. “Australia feels so far away and the politics of Canberra and climate change feel so out of touch. The government thinks that just building a new sea wall will fix the problem. But I’ve told politicians — including Scott Morrison [the former Prime Minister of Australia] that’s not enough. People who think that climate change is not an issue need to see and understand what is happening to us.”

“We can’t grow veggies anymore. Too salty. We are losing our grave sites and the places of our ancestors.” She places her palm flat on her chest, her voice low and wistful. “But I still love that place, bub. That’s our home.”

Thursday Island - Connecting to country

On the first morning of my short trip to Thursday Island (TI), the administrative centre of the archipelago, we are given a tour of the island by a local, Uncle Frank Cook, in his mini-bus.

The first thing he says, “Where your placenta is, that’s where you are from. And I’m from this beautiful island of TI.”

Among First Nations peoples, the sense of belonging and of connection to country is so palpable, you can feel it. For Aunty Rose, this is what gives her strength and the will to keep campaigning.

In regenerative thinking, we often talk about “the story of place”.

This is where we start when designing a project. Each place is different, so we need to design any project according to the unique attributes of the place it is situated in. We sometimes talk about “place-sourced potential”. This is a fancy way of saying… what are the unique attributes of this place, this island and the community who lives there? What is the potential of this place to change, to heal, to regenerate?

By designing from the ground up, we have a better chance of finding solutions because we aren’t aiming for a one-size-fits-all. Instead, we are aiming for harmony with the locality around us.

Aunty Rose: meditation as her motivator

When Aunty Rose was presented with her Queensland Senior of the Year award, the Premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, said, “Since 1980 Aunty McRose Elu has been drawing attention to the impact of climate change in the Torres Strait, speaking at the United Nations and to business and political leaders.”

That’s forty years of campaigning. A long time for anyone.

Last year Aunty Rose travelled to Egypt to attend COP 27 (see photo at the top of the post). She’s just returned from delivering a paper on Food Sovereignty at the Social Anthropology in Oceania Symposium in Hawaii. Yet, she has such strong energy, warmth and – despite the knock backs – optimism. Her faith supports her (she’s a committed Anglican). Her daily 4:00 am meditation practice strengthens her.

“I always meditate at that time,” she says. “It is dark and peaceful.” Her hands turn over in front of her, as if she is running them through water. “Meditation renews my energy. It has always been a great help to me.”

Speaking to Aunty Rose reminded me, too, of another regenerative principle: to grow our inner capacity to face the challenges of our external environment. This is where you find balance and harmony.

The spiritual is as important as the physical… and she’s testament to that.

3 things you can do

Especially, if you live in Australia and don’t know much about the Torres Strait, make a point of learning more about this rich and varied culture.
This map here gives you its location, or click here to find out more.
Take a moment today to connect to your country. Walk barefoot, touch the earth, really notice where you are.

Aboriginal community Aunty Rose Australian government Climate change climate emergency COP 27 Country First Nations Hawaii kids McRose Elu Place-sourced potential Queensland Senior of the Year regenerate Regenerative Saibai Scott Morrison storm surges Storytelling the story of place Thursday Island Torres Strait

The wood-wide web: How forests can teach us about regeneration

Imagine if your industry was like this. Everyone is connected – not just digitally, but really connected in a way that they care about each other. Some of the big players do more than advise newbies or budding entrepreneurs, they actively help with resources, insight and energy.

In the neighbourhood where these workplaces are located, there’s a central hub. This is like the wellspring of wisdom, creativity and growth. Ideas are exchanged. Strategies are shared. This hub helps everyone in the system thrive. Instead of competition across your industry, there’s genuine co-operation. You’re all working to the same end: to create more life, more vitality. And this co-operation extends beyond the four walls of the office block. It supports the barista in the corner cafe, or the community garden in the central mall.

This isn't fiction

If this sounds like the latest Avatar movie, you aren’t far wrong. In fact, this scenario describes the “wood-wide web” — or how forests and trees communicate with each other.

Canadian scientist, Suzanne Simard, first floated this theory back in 1997. Her initial research headlined in Nature magazine. A fourth-generation forester from British Columbia, Simard had grown up hearing stories of how her grandparents had clear-felled ancient western red cedar forests by hand. The massive logs were hauled out by horses, and then launched down river to be milled as timber. “Grandpa taught me about the quiet and cohesive ways of the woods, and how my family was knit into it,” she says.

The giant stumps of these trees are still visible today in Canada, just like they are in old-growth forests in Australia. When I’m walking in places like Dorrigo National Park, I often think the cuts in the base of the stump are like two haunting eyes. These marks show where two men would stand on a plank of wood as they used axes to manually cut the tree down. It was a painstaking, slow and dangerous process for the men involved (we don’t know, of course, how it was for the trees…) Now, however, an entire forest can be bulldozed in a matter of hours.

Photos below: From Old Treasury Building, Reproduced courtesy of Museums Victoria.

like us - Trees are social and cooperative

I read Simard’s book, Finding the Mother Tree, over Christmas. Even if some of the science went over my head, her story is compelling. But what she shares is even more instructive.

When Simard started work as a forestry ecologist she became fascinated (to the point of obsession) about why some reforested plantations thrived, and others failed. Over decades, through hundreds of painstaking experiments, she helped uncover the existence of the mycorrhizal (fungi) network that connects forests. She also proved that the oldest “mother trees” are like “hubs” that share their excess carbon and nitrogen with understory seedlings. Trees, she says, are “social and cooperative”. They’re connected through underground networks… “with communal lives not that different from our own.”

FLIPPING THE SCRIPT

For decades, Simard was excluded and dismissed by the male-dominated forestry industry. Her research contradicted their exterminate-all-weeds clear-cutting policy. Over time, Simard proved that different species of tree actually support each other – rather than compete. Her work, like that of other scientists, questions the Darwinian theory of evolution and survival of the fittest: which is what capitalism and modern economics is built around. (In an interesting aside she also mentions that Darwin developed his theories at the same time as Adam Smith penned The Wealth of Nations which is still the basis of liberal economics today.)

Inevitably, she does have her detractors. Kathryn Flinn in Scientific American, questions Simard’s anthropomorphism and use of “culturally weighted words” like ‘mother’ to describe the older trees. Flinn also makes the good point that “plants are fundamentally unlike us” and we need to respect those differences.

REGENERATION CARES - LIKE TREES DO

But, ultimately Simard is working to change centuries of Western colonial thinking that views forests (and everything in them) as resources to plunder. She flips the script. Instead of us saving the forests, she suggests that the forests can save us.

Simply put, she wants us to care. And that’s what regenerative businesses do – in fact, that’s the principle that regeneration is based upon – CARE.

Thoughts? Can you imagine your workplace or industry transforming like this over time?

Photos below: Dorrigo National Park – my arms are stretched around a 1000-year old eucalypt tree.

Adam Mills Avatar community Darwin industry Mother Tree mycorrhizal (fungi) network regenerate regeneration Suzanne Simard wood-wide web workplace

How 45 minutes can change everything

Outside my office-studio is a mango tree. She’s pretty old and craggy limbed. Fourteen months ago, her branches were stripped bare.

It was a warm October afternoon. We’d had a few warnings about freak storms. Then a supercell hailstorm hit our beachside suburb on the mid-north coast of NSW. It got so loud I hid under my desk – until I realised water was pouring through the roof in three places. Our nearby shopping centre roof also collapsed as golf ball sized hail pelted down (see 7News below).

It’s the first time I’ve been in an area declared a disaster. And the weirdest thing? When I stepped outside of my studio, I didn’t recognise where I was. In 45 minutes, everything had changed.’

Our suburban street had become a snowfield. A neighbour’s son, shirtless and in board shorts, was using a shovel to dig out his dad’s pickup truck from thick ice. The leaves on the trees were shredded. The poor birds. My vege patch was a bunch of sticks. My husband’s car, a right-off. I remember looking around me, and thinking, I don’t know where I am. The locals and shoppers in this 7NEWS report clearly felt something similar. (Although in Aussie style, surfers were soon snowboarding on the nearby Sawtell Beach!)

Welcome to my new newsletter: The Regenerative Leader.

Stories about people + business doing things differently.

It’s taken over a year for everything to get replaced and fixed. Both our roofs have been replaced. And we’re lucky, we were insured. I’ve heard that people sheltering during cyclones feel a similar sort of dislocation – obviously on a more acute, terrifying and catastrophic scale. Those 45 minutes were so disruptive that something shifted inside of me. I’d been making changes in my life and work for at least three years. But this was a catalyst.

In storytelling terms, a lived experience is what I call a “shift moment“. It changes our narrative and how we make meaning of our lives. This is what Regenerative Storytelling can offer. A new language to understand what’s happening and a new way to respond.

I wish it was as easy as flicking a switch.

But it’s not, of course. It’s about incremental changes, internally and externally. In slightly laborious language (which I promise I will limit), it’s about “building capacity”.

This is what you can expect from my Regenerative storytelling newsletter:

Stories that illustrate the small steps (and the occasional leap) to help us all adapt to our rapidly heating world. Stories of leadership in likely and unlikely places. Some might alarm you, others will entertain, inspire and encourage. Together, we are finding a new language for this time.

A couple of weeks ago, a year after the hailstorm, our mango tree suddenly grew leaves. It was almost as if they were sprouting before our eyes. The birds have come back. Birds that we never saw before.

While nature (and us) can regenerate fast… can we do it fast enough?

Join me - it's going to be a wild ride.

7News birds cuilding capacity Hailstorm heating world language leadership mango tree meaning nature newsletter regenerate Regenerative leadership Regenerative storytelling shift moment stories