Is my business truly inclusive? Does it consider all essential stakeholders in my value chain? Do I lead with the awareness that my company is creating shared value, providing fair and equal opportunity, and is a vehicle for empathy?
According to the Thrive Canvas, the business tool developed by Good Life X, the integration of a regenerative mindset in the core activities of a business involves four key dynamics: Inclusivity, joy, abundance, and agility.
A regenerative mindset is one that welcomes the renewing, restoring and replenishing of our ecosystems. In business, it runs much deeper than simplified CSR or ESG practices and rather focuses on actively contributing towards “doing more good” than “doing less harm” to people and the planet.
Regeneration goes beyond merely collecting plastic from the beach, it focuses on preventing plastic from reaching the ocean in the first place.
Here, the cycle remains continuous, exemplifying the concept of closing the loop. A circular economy redefines waste by repurposing, reusing, and redesigning processes to extract the highest and longest possible value from products.
Both producers and consumers play crucial roles in this system. Consumers should prioritise repurposing, reusing, and sharing, while producers must focus on redesigning products, minimising resource use, and establishing recovery channels, such as accepting glass bottles for refills, to ensure materials remain in circulation.
Take the example of Signify, formerly Philips Lighting, providing light fixtures along with comprehensive maintenance, replacement, and upgrade services. Their business model is built around circular principles, shifting from linear economy, ensuring sustainability through product longevity, refurbishing, and recycling.
They are a prime example of an organisation that integrates circularity as a core component of its operations.
How does inclusivity make room in these concepts? Inclusivity, in the regenerative sense, emphasises how a business actively creates space for others to co-exist, contribute, and thrive within its ecosystem. It goes beyond quantified diversity counts and accessibility measures to foster deep collaboration, shared value creation, and mutual growth.
It invites people to take part in and share resources and opportunities, rather than being allocated a piece of the pie that has already been cut. For an organisation, it can look like providing upskilling and learning platforms to the local community who act as suppliers, whilst enabling fair and equal wages.
This allows the local community to benefit from the knowledge available from the organisation, while the company gains a reliable, skilled and loyal supply chain, demonstrating how inclusivity generates abundance for all involved.
The cycle of giving and receiving is evident in an inclusive organisation’s value chain, as each stakeholder derives benefit from each other. In short, they are doing good for all, in the best interests of everyone.
The Thrive Canvas provides a comprehensive framework for companies to identify where they can draw value from their core activities to access abundance, and thereby become inclusive. The Canvas frames the resources and opportunities which can be used as a vehicle for inclusive practices, such as hiring locally, training through skilled employees, providing areas for capacity building from unused assets, and so forth. Contact ‘connect@goodlifex.com’ for more information.
Examples of an inclusive organisation
Tony’s Chocolonely is an organisation that has taken to ending a global concern onto their hands through their business: Child labour. This is just one of their commitments to making the world a better place. The chocolate company brings in more than $ 150 million in revenue, and is in firm agreement that our planet has broken systems which need addressing, and have made tremendous strides in undertaking inclusive business approaches to aid them in their journey, whilst recognising that top-down approaches are not useful in achieving this objective.
A few practices which Tony’s have enabled are the “Child Labour Monitoring and Remediation System (CLMRS)”, which is their manual in eradicating the root causes of child labour. They undertake practical and impact-driven steps such as having trained community facilitators visit homes of their smallholder farmers to educate them and seek out cases of child labour.
If such a case is found, Tony’s takes steps to send the child to school or provide vocational training for older children. This is just one example of this organization’s stance on maintaining an ethical and integrity based supply chain. This information has been sourced from the International Institute for Environment and Development.
The DoitTung Development Project was initiated to aid the people in the Doi Tung region, formerly overrun by illicit drug production and trafficking centres. It is an example of how powerful an inclusive approach can be to resolve social and economic issues within an entire region.
Presently, the DTDP has enabled five business units from the region to aid its people and provide economic upliftment for their households: Food processing, handicrafts, café, tourism and agriculture.
In Sri Lanka, Serendipol is pioneering regenerative and inclusive measures in their business model. In fact, the organisation was the inspiration for Good Life X in co-creating the Thrive Canvas due to its vital place in the community it holds dear.
The company is the world’s first regenerative organic certified (ROC) coconut brand, and the world’s foremost producer of Fair-Trade certified, organic virgin coconut oil (VCO), and other regenerative products.
Serendipol has done extensive work in eliminating harmful and unethical practices in the coconut industry of Sri Lanka, and has paved a sufficient livelihood for many households who rely on coconut farming, such as their grant system, formalising their pay schemes through monthly wages and opening bank accounts, and so forth.
Through these examples, organisations showcase how they have become stewards of the environment and society, creating space for good and more good. By doing away with broken manners of thinking, and moving towards rebuilding our planet and the livelihood of its people, one person at a time, businesses have the potential to be conduits of positive change. Will you be part of it?