From Awareness to Evolution

How Regenerative Transition Actually Shows Up Inside a Business

This framework comes from listening to leaders mid-transition sensing the threshold moments they describe when everything starts to shift. Pattern recognition, not theory.

In Beyond Perfection, I argued that regeneration isn’t about achieving purity - perfectly circular systems, zero extraction, or some idealized end state. It’s about becoming conscious of your existing metabolism and evolving how you participate in the living systems you depend on.

This essay goes one step further.

Rather than defining regeneration again, I want to look at how regenerative transition actually unfolds inside a real organization - not as a checklist or a framework, but as a series of recognizable moments. Moments when leaders begin to sense that something deeper is at play. Moments when familiar assumptions no longer hold. Moments when a business starts redesigning itself.. not to look regenerative, but to operate differently.

If you’re leading a business through regenerative transition, or wondering whether to begin, this framework offers something different than a checklist or certification pathway. It maps the actual threshold moments leaders describe when their organizations start operating differently. Not five-year plans. Not impact reports. The quiet, consequential shifts that make everything else possible.

To explore this, I’ll loosely reflect on the journey of Yerba Madre, a company that has been working with regenerative principles long before the term became fashionable. Yerba Madre did not use Carom’s tools or practices. But by listening closely to how their leaders talk about decisions, incentives, supply chains, and learning, we can see patterns that many regenerative organizations move through whether they name them or not.

What follows is not an evaluation.

It’s a lens.

Sensing the Metabolism

Every regenerative journey begins with awareness. It’s not of impact metrics, but of participation.

At some point, a business begins to recognize that it isn’t a neutral machine producing value in isolation. It is embedded in flows of energy, materials, labor, culture, and capital. It takes in resources. It transforms them. It returns something to the world.

This is what it means to realize your business has a metabolism.

In Yerba Madre’s case, this awareness shows up in a consistent rejection of siloed sustainability thinking. Regeneration is not treated as a department, a certification strategy, or a communications layer. It’s described as how the business operates. That framing alone signals a shift from managing impacts to sensing participation, from operating on systems to operating within them.

This moment isn’t loud.

But it is absolutely consequential.

Before this moment: Sustainability is a department. Impact is a report. Regeneration is a marketing term.

After this moment: Every decision becomes a metabolism question. Every investment either builds or breaks cycles. Every relationship either extracts or participates.

This shift is irreversible.

And once a business senses its metabolism, it can’t fully unsee it.

Sitting with What That Awareness Reveals

Awareness alone doesn’t create change. What matters is what happens next.. whether a business rushes to optimize optics, or sits in the Heavy Chair long enough to metabolize what it’s now seeing.

This is often an uncomfortable moment.

It’s where companies realize that extraction doesn’t disappear just because intentions improve, paying a premium doesn’t always equal a livable wage, and efficiency can serve resilience or quietly deepen depletion.

For Yerba Madre, this posture shows up in how they talk about measurement and certification. Scores are not treated as trophies. Audits are not endpoints. External assessments are framed as mirrors uncovering opportunities to learn what others see when they look at your system, especially those who see many systems.

In living systems, not everything carries forward. Some assumptions, metrics, and practices have completed their cycle. Treating them as compost rather than failures allows what comes next to grow in richer soil.

This willingness to pause - to let certain ways of measuring, optimizing, or defining success decompose - is one of the clearest signals of a regenerative mindset. It’s a refusal of both denial and perfection.

Translating Awareness into Design Questions

As awareness deepens, a different kind of work begins.

Instead of asking, “Are we regenerative?” the questions shift toward:

• Where does extraction still live in our value chain?

• Which cycles are breaking, even when intentions are good?

• What are we optimizing for - and why?

This is the translation phase, where awareness becomes diagnostic.

In Yerba Madre’s case, this translation clearly extends beyond agriculture. Regeneration isn’t confined to farms; it’s treated as a value-chain question. Manufacturing, energy use, water efficiency, labor economics, logistics, governance, and incentives all become part of the inquiry.

Here, composting plays a quiet but essential role.

Regeneration doesn’t begin by adding new initiatives. It often begins by letting something old decompose - a metric that no longer measures what matters, a success story that no longer fits, a pattern that once worked but now extracts more than it renews.

The composting question becomes diagnostic:

• Which metrics completed their cycle years ago but still drive decisions?

• What success story served its purpose but now prevents new growth?

• Which operating assumption worked in extraction but breaks in regeneration?

This isn’t failure analysis. It’s recognizing that healthy systems require both building and letting go.

Only then does translation become design rather than optimization.

Seeding Regenerative Pathways

Translation alone doesn’t change systems. It has to be followed by choices.. small, specific, and often imperfect ones.

This is where organizations begin to seed new pathways.

At Yerba Madre, this shows up in tangible design decisions:

• Co-investing with manufacturing partners in renewable energy, water reduction, and waste efficiency even when the infrastructure isn’t theirs and benefits others as well.

• Tying leadership incentives and bonuses not just to financial performance, but to impact outcomes.

• Paying well above market rates to farming partners, and then going further when those rates still don’t meet livable-wage realities.

• Supporting agroforestry and shade-grown systems that rebuild biodiversity rather than strip it away.

None of these choices are framed as heroic. They’re framed as how the business chooses to operate.

That distinction matters.

These aren’t grand gestures. They’re redesigned defaults:

• A purchasing decision that factors in watershed health alongside unit cost

• An incentive structure that rewards soil regeneration, not just yield maximization

• A supplier contract that shares transition costs rather than externalizing them

• A board metric that tracks biodiversity alongside EBITDA

Regeneration doesn’t scale through exceptional acts.

It scales through redesigned defaults, planted in soil enriched by what has already decomposed.

Regenerating as an Operating Condition

Over time, something subtle begins to change.

Regeneration stops feeling like a set of initiatives and starts functioning as an operating condition - a way decisions get made when tradeoffs appear. It becomes embedded in governance, incentives, supplier relationships, and learning loops.

Crucially, this stage does not come with declarations of completion.

Yerba Madre openly acknowledges that expanding regenerative practices may temporarily reduce certification status. That bringing more partners into transition may complicate metrics. That progress introduces new tensions.

This is not failure.

It’s aliveness.

A regenerative metabolism is not static. It requires constant attention, feedback, and adjustment. Composting remains part of the work as renewal, not as retreat.

Continuing to Evolve Onward

Perhaps the most important signal of regeneration is what doesn’t happen: complacency.

Organizations that are genuinely transforming don’t treat regeneration as a destination. They treat it as an ongoing responsibility. Growth introduces new questions. Scale creates new risks. Learning never stops.

This is where evolution becomes the work - not scaling impact claims, but scaling capacity to learn, adapt, and release what no longer serves.

Yerba Madre’s posture suggests an understanding that regeneration must keep pace with complexity. That governance, incentives, and relationships must evolve alongside markets. That conscious participation in living systems is never finished.

Why These Moments Need Witnessing

Most organizations move through these phases unconsciously, or get stuck between them. They sense metabolism but rush to solutions. They pause but can’t compost. They seed initiatives but never shift operating conditions.

This is where outside perspective becomes essential. Not consultants optimizing systems. Pattern weavers who help organizations see which threshold they’re at, what wants to compost, and what’s trying to seed.

This is Carom’s work: holding the mirror, asking the metabolic questions, and helping translate awareness into regenerative design.

Why This Matters

The regenerative conversation is still dominated by an all-or-nothing frame: either a business is regenerative, or it isn’t. Either it’s pure, or it’s part of the problem.

But that frame doesn’t reflect how living systems work. And it doesn’t reflect how real businesses actually change.

This matters because executives often ask the wrong question.

They ask: “How do we become regenerative?”

The better question: “Where are we in this arc.. and what wants to happen next?”

Sensing without pausing becomes performance theater.
Pausing without composting becomes paralysis.
Composting without seeding changes nothing.
Seeding without regenerating as practice creates initiatives, not transformation.
And stopping at any stage mistakes a threshold for a destination.

What we see instead - in Yerba Madre and many other transforming organizations - is a series of threshold moments:

• sensing participation

• pausing in discomfort

• composting what’s finished

• translating awareness into design

• seeding new pathways

• regenerating as a practice

• and continuing to evolve

These moments don’t guarantee regeneration.

But without them, regeneration never becomes possible.

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Regeneration doesn’t begin with a perfect business model.

It begins when a business recognizes it is already alive. It’s already participating in flows, already extracting and giving back. And then? Then it chooses to become conscious of how it does so.

That is the work.