An immersive journey
Over the past decades, the way we’ve been doing business has pushed our planet—our very foundation of life—to the edge of its limits. The human-caused climate catastrophe is already in full swing. Life on our planet is becoming increasingly inhospitable, and the social injustice of our globalized world is worsening alongside it.
It’s already clear to an overwhelming majority of society that we need to act. Yet far too little is changing. Why is that? What is holding us back? What does it take for economic actors to find the courage to roll up their sleeves and shape the transformation?
Since we started working with sustainable and regenerative business models, we’ve noticed that even the “what”—“What do we want to achieve? What is our goal?”—is a paralyzing hurdle for most people. And for good reason: we don’t know what the future will look like. Tackling climate change brings challenges and transformations humanity has never faced before. We’re navigating by sight into a completely uncertain time.
At the same time, we keep encountering organizations that are already living a new economic practice with tireless pioneering spirit—organizations that not only inspire us but also provide orientation and teach us a lot.
That’s why, with our InterStellar Learning Journey, we bring people together on a three-day virtual journey who are striving for economic transformation within their organizations. We give them the opportunity to meet organizations and changemakers who are already driving the transformation today.
One of the participants in the last InterStellar Learning Journey was (link: https://www.linkedin.com/in/svenja-weing%C3%A4rtner-she-her-ba99939a/?originalSubdomain=de text: Svenja Weingärtner, Corporate Development Manager at Digitas Pixelpark Digitas Pixelpark, where her work focuses on strategic internal organizational development and employee experience.
Like many people, she often feels a gap in her daily work between what she would love to do for our planet and what can realistically be implemented in day-to-day corporate life. Although she is currently experiencing and helping shape the shift toward sustainability within her work environment, she believes the bigger vision is still missing. In the network her agency belongs to, this topic needs to be integrated holistically so that it can achieve all the goals set for the next 5–10 years.
“What do regenerative ways of doing business look like? What do organizations look like that follow holistic business models? What obstacles do they face? What principles guide them? And what can I do myself to take on such a big challenge within my own sphere of influence?”
The InterStellar Learning Journey was meant to answer exactly these questions for her and connect her with people who can support her in this challenge.
Many astronauts who have had the chance to see Earth as a whole report a kind of shift in consciousness and perspective after their trips into space. Our planet is perceived as a tiny, fragile ball moving unprotected through a black void, while at the same time embodying everything that forms the foundation of life for us humans. On our journey, we want to try to adopt this perspective—and that’s why we fly into space with the participants.
We lift off together and dedicate the first day to the first two of our four regenerative principles vier regenerativen Prinzipien “Embeddedness and Inclusivity.” Our goal is—warning, this might sound a bit strange at first—to let participants feel the magnitude of the task ahead and the emotions that come with it, like humility and hopelessness. But of course not without reason: in the spirit of Theorie U we create a space through shared experience of the urgency of our collective crisis where something new can later emerge. Regenerative thinking requires us to unlearn what we’ve learned and recognize our inner resistance in order to open ourselves.
"The evening of the first day can be described in one word: world-weariness. We have all now understood together that we cannot continue as we have been. Nevertheless—or precisely because of that—I was all the more curious to explore the possibilities that could turn my despair into constructive drive."
On the second day, it is of course time to counteract the hopelessness: we now float in the weightless space of solutions. The focus of this day is the principle of circularity, which we experience, test, and explore together through expert inputs, exercises, and exchange. Our thirst for knowledge is gradually being satisfied, and the space for new things opens up more and more.
The third and final day brings us back to Earth, where we turn our attention to the principle of long-term thinking and the concretization of future scenarios. Together, we look forward to what is allowed to come. Hope has returned by now—stronger than ever—because at the end of this journey, participants leave enriched with diverse inspirations, concrete solution mechanisms, allies, self-confidence, and drive.
“The learning journey awakened hope and a sense of constructiveness in me and made it clear that my sphere of influence can be much larger than I previously thought. Since then, the four principles of regenerative economics have become part of my daily thinking and actions. I have learned that even with relatively small impulses and prompts, I can make a meaningful difference.”
We offer the InterStellar Learning Journey both as an open format and as an in-house format for teams and organizations.
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