Systems Thinking
Systems thinking is not a buzzword — it is our working language. It is how we see, how we plan, and how we act.
Systems thinking gives us the tools to move beyond fragmented solutions and toward a deeper understanding of how human, natural, and technological systems interrelate. It’s how we design for resilience, regeneration, and belonging — not just emissions reductions.
What Is Systems Thinking?
Systems thinking is the art and science of understanding relationships. Rather than focusing on isolated problems, it reveals the patterns, structures, and feedback loops that shape our world.
Whether we're looking at energy use, transportation, housing, or health, systems thinking helps us see how each is part of a larger whole — interwoven through policies, behaviors, cultures, and ecosystems.
Exploring Ideas for Transforming our Connections to the Earth
Systems Thinking in Practice
Tools, methods and best practices
Dive into the practice of systems thinking and how it can help solve problems and build a new future.
Regenerative Futures
Visionary Design for the Future
Exploring how to move beyond sustainability toward regeneration—systems that restore, adapt, and evolve.
Community Innovation
Moving Communities forward
Grounded efforts in decarbonization, equity and built environment transformation
Community of Practice
Working together and moving forward
Connect with other practitioners of systems thinking and regenerative design
Why Systems Thinking Now?
The Meta-Problem: Designing Belonging, Not Just Infrastructure
We often speak of the energy transition as a technical problem—about decarbonizing grids, electrifying vehicles, and upgrading infrastructure. But this framing misses the deeper truth: the crisis we face is not simply about emissions. It is about disconnection—from place, from one another, and from the natural systems that sustain life.
We have built a civilization that treats nature as backdrop or resource, rather than as partner. Our homes, cities, and economies are designed as if we exist outside the biosphere—as if technology can insulate us from planetary limits. This is the silent rupture beneath our visible crises: we have forgotten how to belong.
Belonging is not sentiment—it is structure. It is embedded in how we plan neighborhoods, manage land, grow food, generate energy, and measure value. A regenerative future cannot emerge from infrastructure alone. It must be designed from a new logic: one that starts not with extraction, but with participation.
This means designing systems—transportation, housing, food, energy—not just for functionality, but for relationship. For reciprocity with the land. For cohesion across generations. For meaning, beauty, and shared stewardship.
To decarbonize is not enough. We must reimagine what we are decarbonizing for. Not a cleaner version of disconnection, but a fundamentally different pattern of belonging.
Regenerative design begins here—not with tools, but with a question: How do we want to belong to the living world again?
Principles of Regenerative Systems Thinking
To move from siloed solutions to systemic transformation, we must ground our work in a different set of principles—ones that reflect how life actually functions. Regenerative systems thinking draws not from the logic of machines, but from the wisdom of living systems. It reorients our work toward healing, co-evolution, and long-term thriving.
Living Systems over Mechanical Systems
Traditional systems thinking often borrows from engineering and mechanical models: inputs, outputs, control mechanisms. While useful for some forms of analysis, this framing can limit our imagination. Regenerative systems thinking instead takes its cues from ecology, biology, and indigenous knowledge systems. It sees the world not as a machine to optimize, but as a web of life to participate in.
Living systems are not static. They evolve, adapt, and respond. They thrive on diversity, redundancy, resilience, and relationships. This shift—from control to participation, from command to care—reframes how we design, govern, and innovate.
Nested Scales of Change
In regenerative systems thinking, change happens across scales—personal, local, systemic, planetary—and those scales are both layered and nested, not separate. The health of a neighborhood reflects the decisions of a city; the culture of a company mirrors the inner beliefs of its leaders.
These layers are not just hierarchical—they are fractal. That means the same patterns that sustain a healthy household also apply to healthy institutions and ecosystems. A regenerative pattern at one scale (care, resilience, reciprocity) can repeat and reinforce itself at others. When we understand this, our work becomes more coherent and more aligned with life.
When we design for regeneration, we work simultaneously at multiple levels and within multiple systems. We honor the local while staying mindful of global impacts. We attend to internal transformation while shaping external systems. This nested awareness helps prevent solutions that work at one scale but harm another.
Focus on Emergence, Feedback, and Long-Term Thriving
Regenerative systems are never finished—they are always becoming. They invite emergence: the unfolding of new patterns, relationships, and capacities that cannot be predicted in advance.
To work regeneratively means designing not just for fixed outcomes, but for conditions that support better outcomes over time. It is not about locking in a singular solution—it is about cultivating systems that evolve, adapt, and thrive through ongoing feedback.
This requires attentiveness to feedback—both reinforcing and balancing—and a willingness to iterate with humility. It demands that we extend our time horizon beyond quarterly returns or election cycles, and toward the well-being of future generations.
These principles are not abstract ideals. They offer concrete guidance for how we approach everything from urban planning to governance to entrepreneurship. We invite you to explore these ideas further in our Systems Thinking in Practice section and to see how they come to life in our Regenerative Futures and Community Innovation initiatives.
This is what it means to design with the grain of life—not against it.
Explore how these principles are put into practice below
Systems Thinking in Practice
Tools, methods and best practices
Dive into the practice of systems thinking and how it can help solve problems and build a new future.
Regenerative Futures
Visionary Design for the Future
Exploring how to move beyond sustainability toward regeneration—systems that restore, adapt, and evolve.
Community Innovation
Moving Communities forward
Grounded efforts in decarbonization, equity and built environment transformation
Community of Practice
Working together and moving forward
Connect with other practitioners of systems thinking and regenerative design