A Living Systems Approach to People-Centred Adaptive Change
By Constance de Wavrin, Founder of In|Flow, and with thanks to the With Life course on Regenerative Leadership
In the face of the accelerating sustainability crisis—ranging from climate breakdown and biodiversity loss to social fragmentation and economic instability—organisations are increasingly recognising the need for profound transformation. Not just in what they do, but how they think, relate, and evolve. A growing body of thought suggests that traditional top-down, mechanistic structures are ill-equipped to handle the complexity and unpredictability of our world. What is needed instead is a shift towards organisational cultures that are deeply human-centred, adaptive, and guided by the principles of living systems.
This article explores how organisations can evolve toward such cultures by adopting a living systems approach to leadership and change—an approach that mirrors the regenerative processes of nature, honours human uniqueness, and embraces shared responsibility and emergence.
Why Living Systems?
Living systems—ecosystems, organisms, communities—do not rely on rigid control or static hierarchies. Instead, they thrive on diversity, interdependence, dynamic equilibrium, and continuous adaptation. They are guided by cycles of energy and information, fluid identities, and an ability to regenerate from disruption.
If organisations are to survive and thrive in an age of volatility and ecological urgency, they must become more like living systems: resilient, responsive, and life-affirming.
From Control to Co-Creation
Traditional organisations tend to operate like machines: controlled, predictable, and optimized for efficiency. But in a sustainability context, control often stifles creativity and suppresses the very conditions needed for innovation.
A living systems perspective instead invites us to create the conditions for emergence and adaptation. This means letting go of the illusion that leaders can—or should—plan and manage every outcome. Instead, leadership becomes a practice of inviting, sensing, responding, and evolving, in co-creation with others.
“The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener.” — Bill O’Brien
Effective change, then, begins not with strategy, but with presence, humility, and relational intelligence. It asks leaders to be attuned to both their own beliefs and the patterns of life within their organisations.
People Are the Energy. Information Is the Nutrient
A regenerative organisation recognises that its people are its energy and its information is its nutrient. Like the soil in an ecosystem, the flow of information must be rich, multidirectional, and alive.
In thriving teams, information flows through trust, feedback, multiple communication modalities, and genuine listening. Feedback is not extracted for control, but integrated for evolution. Communication becomes a tool not of compliance, but of nourishment.
This shift requires questioning: are our structures designed to transform information, or to control it? Do our communication loops close and regenerate, or do they fragment and stagnate?
In regenerative cultures, even decay has a place. Like compost, the end of one idea or structure is the fertile ground for something new. As such, disruption is not feared—it is welcomed as a pathway to renewal.
Designing for Shared Responsibility
A cornerstone of regenerative leadership is shared responsibility—a shift from hierarchical accountability towards distributed agency. This doesn't mean lack of structure. Rather, it means enabling each individual to express their unique genius in service of a shared purpose, while being attuned to the health of the whole system.
Where traditional structures may rely on command-and-control or rigid chains of accountability, a regenerative approach might use sociocracy, agile frameworks, or self-organising circles that maintain coherence while enabling autonomy. Such frameworks allow people to contribute from their strengths, make local decisions, and evolve their roles dynamically.
This is not slower. On the contrary, teams working at the speed of trust are often far more agile than those bogged down by bureaucracy or siloed approvals.
Managing Order and Disorder
Living systems thrive on a dynamic interplay of order and disorder. In natural ecosystems, no state is permanent. Disruptions—storms, fires, migrations—are part of life’s regenerative processes. Similarly, organisations must learn to surf the wave of constant change.
Trying to eliminate disorder or uncertainty often leads to rigidity and fragility. Instead, regenerative organisations work with the dynamics of change, recognising that creative tension can give rise to innovation. They use what the living systems lens calls intentional disturbance—purposeful disruptions designed to break stagnation and invite new possibilities.
In practice, this means becoming less reactive to change and more curious about it. What is this disruption asking of us? What needs to die so something new can be born?
Nestedness, Context, and Emergence
One of the key insights from living systems theory is that life is nested. Cells are part of organs, which are part of bodies; people are part of teams, which are part of organisations, which are part of ecosystems. Each level of scale has its own needs, intelligence, and vantage point.
Organisations that recognise this nestedness understand that decisions cannot be made in isolation. A disturbance in one part of the system (say, employee wellbeing) affects the whole. Conversely, health at one level can nourish all others.
To lead regeneratively is to work with the system, not over it. It is to recognise that emergence—solutions that arise unpredictably through interaction—is more powerful than any top-down plan. And that means designing not for control, but for conditions: psychological safety, shared purpose, autonomy, and feedback-rich environments.
From Hiring to Inviting
Another powerful shift is from a transactional HR model (Hire | Manage | Fire) to an Invite | Develop | Evolve framework. Instead of fitting people into predefined boxes, this approach invites individuals into purpose-aligned roleswhere their genius can flourish and evolve over time.
This is especially relevant in sustainability contexts, where passion, adaptability, and systems thinking are often more critical than conventional credentials. By inviting people into evolving roles and supporting their development, organisations can cultivate deeply engaged teams that self-renew and adapt.
Monitoring for Health, Not Just Productivity
Regenerative organisations measure health, not just efficiency. They ask: How resilient is our system? How adaptable are our teams? How responsive is our communication? Are we flourishing?
Tools like the Organisational Health Assessment (OHA) reflect this shift. Rather than tracking only KPIs or outputs, they offer insight into energy flows, purpose alignment, information exchange, and collective wellbeing.
Leaders become gardeners of health rather than enforcers of metrics. They understand that when the underlying system is alive and well, results will follow.
Leadership as Stewardship
Ultimately, the living systems approach redefines leadership itself—not as command or expertise, but as stewardship. The leader’s role is to:
Hold the operational identity—the boundary of purpose and shared values.
Create conditions for trust, creativity, and learning.
Invite disruption and feedback as sources of renewal.
Recognise the subjective interior condition as key to impact.
Lead from a stance of humility, not certainty.
To respond to the sustainability challenge with integrity, organisations must move beyond technical fixes and cosmetic ESG layers. They must undergo a deeper shift: from seeing themselves as machines to embodying themselves as living systems.
This is not just an organisational change—it is a cultural and consciousness shift. It requires new metaphors, new mental models, and new ways of relating.
As the systems theorist Fritjof Capra reminds us, "In the living world, order and disorder are always created simultaneously."
By embracing this dance—between structure and spontaneity, control and surrender—organisations can become not just sustainable, but regenerative: places where people flourish, ideas emerge, and purpose flows.
And in doing so, they won’t just survive the sustainability crisis—they will help lead us through it.