The start of 2026 delivered a clear-eyed truth about the state of our world: the post-WWII global order has ruptured.
At a time when courage is in short supply from public and private sector leaders, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney had the conviction to state this reality plainly before the international community in Davos this January.
In Carney’s own words: “We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy. But we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just.”
This honest admission gave global stakeholders permission to exhale. Like the release phase of an ecosystem’s adaptive cycle, naming collapse brings a strange, collective relief - even as uncertainty grows.
That moment on the global stage also put language to a private truth many have quietly understood. The familiar systems and structures our lives have formed around and conformed to - however imperfect - can no longer be patched, extended, or sustained.
Multilateral agreements, supply chains, energy flows, trade, currency regimes, and diplomatic norms once operated as silent partners in our daily lives - easing everything from grocery runs to international travel, healthcare access, and secure communications.
Now we are forced to reconcile with their fragility, their political contingency, and the reality that what felt permanent was always provisional.
Enter nature.
The Renewal Phase: Reconfiguring not Returning
In nature, renewal isn’t about simply returning to what was. It’s about reconfiguring resources, testing new combinations, and creating conditions for unprecedented possibilities.
Stand in a recently burned forest, and you might expect to find only devastation. Instead, you’ll discover something remarkable: fireweed pushing through ash-darkened soil, nitrogen-fixing plants preparing the ground for what comes next, and seeds that have waited decades for this exact moment.
A forest doesn’t rebuild itself tree-by-tree in the same pattern; it experiments with new arrangements, species mixes, and relationships that may prove more resilient than what came before. This is the renewal phase of nature’s adaptive cycle, and it holds profound lessons for institutions, organizations and teams navigating the turbulent transitions of our time.
Reorganizing for the next cycle, that’s the question I’m asking about my own career in corporate sustainability, climate and nature work.
Decades of Feedback: Reimagining Corporate Sustainability Transformation
Years of toiling has not been as effective as practitioners hoped. Certainly not for me. The relentless pursuit of business cases, the conforming to inadequate budgets, the lobbying for board attention, the watering down of ambition to fit what feels acceptable - none of it has been enough. Don’t misunderstand, it’s not for a lack of trying. But it’s time to ask: what lessons have we learned, and what do we leave behind to move forward?
Corporate sustainability must evolve, at least twice, in the near term. First, from reputation management into genuine strategic integration: clear impact assessment, focused priorities, and governance that gives real weight to stakeholders. Second, it must move beyond incremental improvements and reporting rituals into fundamental system redesign that are core to a business.
The goal is regenerative capitalism in which the most sustainable companies are also the most successful - not because they complied with the minimum, but because markets, policy, and finance reward those who create “green swans,” as John Elkington describes them, capable of breakthroughs that shift entire systems rather than nudge them.
The basic logic is disarmingly simple: there is no business on a dead planet. David Brower first stated this in the 1980’s. Corporate strategy must extend beyond quarterly cycles to generational timescales. What does a livable planet look like in 2100? Leaders could draw from indigenous teachings that have guided communities for millennia: consider the impact of decisions on the seventh generation ahead, then work backward to understand what today’s choices must be.
On the surface, this may sound naïve and impractical. The barriers are real: political cycles, entrenched investor practices, tax codes that exacerbate inequity, and humans’ deep resistance to change. But difficulty does not negate the logic.
We now have decades of feedback highlighting lessons, if we can be clear-eyed and objective enough to see them. We also have, uncomfortably, the collapse phase of global systems creating conditions for reorganization.
Like a forest after fire, nutrients are being released, relationships are being reconfigured, and space is opening for something new. The more helpful question is no longer “How do we get back to normal?” but “How do we use this opening to reimagine our work and its impact?”
A Map for This Moment: Beyond the Old Normal
The adaptive cycle in nature offers a helpful map. It emerged from ecosystem science to explain why forests, lakes, and other complex systems don’t grow forever.
Biomimicry adds a key twist: it invites us to treat these phases as design patterns to learn from, not just descriptions. Through the work of Biomimicry for Social Innovation (BSI) and founder Toby Herzlich, as well as Biomimicry 3.8 Executive Director Nicole Miller, I’ve come to see this framework as a practical tool for organizational transformation.
The adaptive cycle describes four linked phases: growth and development, maturity and inflexibility, collapse and release, followed by reorganization and renewal. Crucially, the renewal phase is not a return, but a redesign.
Right now, many organizations are stuck trying to resurrect an “old normal”: pre-crisis supply chains, legacy business models, stagnant leadership, initiatives built for funding landscapes that have moved on.
A biomimicry-informed read of the adaptive cycle invites a different approach: if nature had our assets, constraints, and context, how would it reorganize for the next cycle?
In ecosystems, the renewal phase is where the most creative work happens. What survives collapse is recombined into something new, often more diverse and more resilient than what came before.
From that starting point, several lessons emerge.
Lessons from the Burn: How Nature’s Adaptive Cycle Points the Way Forward
Lesson One: Collapse frees trapped resources. In mature forests, most resources are locked into a few dominant trees and established relationships. When fire or pests trigger release, those locked resources suddenly become available to many species. Renewal redistributes possibility. The same is true for organizations. Ending a product line, sunsetting a grant, new leadership, or collapsed regulations can free up budgets, talent, data, relationships, and time through redistribution.
The practical questions become: What resources have we just released, and how might we redeploy them differently? If an ecosystem were organizing our assets, where would they flow next? Who should be at the table deciding that reallocation? Reframing restructuring as generative can help turn endings into nutrients for the next chapter.
Lesson Two: Start small, diverse, and exploratory. After disturbance, ecosystems do not rebuild with one big bet. They sprout mosaics of experiments - pioneer species, shifting soils, new symbioses. Most experiments fail, but the system learns quickly. By contrast, organizations often respond to crisis with massive, top‑down “transformations” that leave little room for adaptation.
A biomimetic renewal favors portfolios of small, time‑bound experiments spread across different regions or units, each with clear learning goals. In the corporate context, that might mean piloting different nature‑positive approaches with a handful of suppliers or markets: regenerative agriculture in one region, integrate nature protection into sourcing, zero waste manufacturing in a third. The key question becomes: How can we favor safe-to-fail experiments over fail-safe plans?
Lesson Three: Use nested scales to stabilize innovation. In nature, adaptive cycles stack across scales: slow, large systems like regional climates or old‑growth stands provide memory and stability, while small, fast systems like patches or species populations generate novelty. Organizations have a similar nesting: corporate strategy holds purpose and boundaries; business units manage portfolios; project teams run experiments.
In a renewal phase, leadership’s job is to let the smaller, faster levels drive experimentation while the larger, slower levels hold non‑negotiables—science‑based targets, human‑rights commitments, and long‑term purpose. A company, for example, might fix a commitment to nature‑positive value chains and just transitions, yet give each business line latitude to find different pathways and partnerships to get there. The vital question: what needs to be held steady so everything else can change safely?
Lesson Four: Design for resilience, not just efficiency. Mature ecosystems are highly efficient - and therefore vulnerable. Renewal phases trade some efficiency for adaptability, adding redundancy, diversity, and modular structure. Our recent history of climate shocks, pandemics, and geopolitical tensions has exposed how brittle lean supply chains and single‑source dependencies can be.
Biomimetic renewal invites leaders to privilege resilience: multiple suppliers for critical low‑carbon materials, diversified revenue streams for conservation work, varied partner types from Indigenous organizations to startups, and modular programs that can be reconfigured without collapsing the whole portfolio. In other words: if this system were a forest expecting future fires, what redundancies and varieties would it build in now?
Lesson Five: Let place and partners co‑author renewal. Nature’s renewal strategies are context-specific, or place-based. A coral reef reorganizes differently from a savanna or a peatland. In human systems, that means renewal cannot be copy‑and‑paste. It must be co‑created with the people and places most affected.
For our work, this looks like co‑designing initiatives with local communities, especially those harmed or sidelined by past activities; treating Indigenous and local knowledge as co‑equal with scientific and financial models; and aligning with regional plans - watershed strategies, Indigenous land‑use visions - rather than imposing global templates. The most generative question: if this landscape had a voice in our restructuring, what would it ask us to do?
Renewal as an ongoing practice, not a one‑time fix
Taken together, these lessons point to a deeper shift.
To return to Carney’s observation, the old order is not coming back. In living systems, that is not a tragedy; it is simply how life continues. Ecosystems do not bounce back to what they were. They reorganize into what fits now. Renewal is not an emergency exception; it is a recurring practice.
Bringing this lens into corporate sustainability, climate and nature work changes our role. Our job is not to stabilize existing systems at all costs, but to guide them through cycles of creative reconfiguration - anchored in long‑term purpose and planetary boundaries.
In that frame, the renewal phase is not the scary aftermath of failure, but the most powerful opportunity we have to align our institutions with the living systems they ultimately depend on.
*Special thanks again to Toby Hertlich and the team at Biomimicry for Social Innovation + Nicole Miller at Biomimicry 3.8 for helping me apply and understand the Adaptive Cycle in nature!
Wow. Lara, you’ve taken nature’s whispers, the quiet and constant unfurling of Life within her cycles of resilience, and amplified her voice with the potency, passion, and smarts it takes to be heard in the C-Suite. This article itself feels like a disruptive spark that could kindle this moment’s redesign mandate in necessary and Nature Positive ways. Thank you for putting your/her call forward so beautifully!