Better systems create greater possibilities.

Businesses and organizations can do more than operate successfully within existing systems. They can help shape better ones.

The structures we create determine how resources are used, who participates, where value is created, and which opportunities are pursued or overlooked. Established practices are not necessarily effective practices. Familiarity alone is no reason to limit what we consider possible.

What more could be accomplished if we looked at the whole picture?

Consider how much more could be achieved when businesses, organizations, and individuals bring their efforts together around shared interests. The transition toward a regenerative economy depends on participation across every sector. Conservation organizations, environmental specialists, and policymakers bring essential expertise, but businesses, entrepreneurs, property owners, and individuals are equally important to making that transition possible, including those whose work may have little obvious connection to environmental causes. Their decisions about what they create, how they operate, and where they direct their efforts will have an enormous influence on what this economy becomes.

Reference establishes new ways for businesses and organizations to participate and contribute. By bringing different interests and capabilities together, new forms of enterprise can emerge that are commercially viable while contributing to wider environmental and social progress. For those possibilities to endure, good intentions must be supported by sound business design. The underlying model, responsibilities, resources, and relationships must support what an initiative is intended to accomplish. A well designed enterprise should have the capacity to sustain itself, adapt, and continue creating value beyond the people who first brought it into existence.

We should be as deliberate about the world our enterprises help create as we are about the enterprises themselves.

Genesis 2:15