MOVING FROM RESILIENCE TO REGENERATION Drawing on his experience of marine systems and their ability to recover and transform under pressure, Stuart Green contends that many business schools are focused on teaching resilience when they should be preparing leaders for the regeneration that will soon be required
A few years ago, I sat in a board meeting where a chief executive presented a strong scenario review. Stress tests had been run, reserves were adequate and succession was in train. The board members agreed the organisation was resilient and moved on. That meeting was the institutional version of a pattern I had spent 30 years watching in marine systems. A reef does not bounce back from compound stress. A kelp forest does not return after sea urchin barrens overrun it. A coastal economy does not recover the fishery it lost when the regulatory regime, the climate signal and the supply chain all move at once. The systems that survive are not restorations; they are reconfigurations. Some 18 months later, the organisation had not failed – it had been surpassed. A key donor segment had disappeared and the regulatory landscape had fundamentally changed. Yet the indicators we used to measure resilience still appeared healthy. Few of our peers had learned to distinguish between withstanding a disruption and adapting to a reality that no longer operated according to the disruption’s original terms. A TWO-TRADITION CONCEPT THAT STOPS SHORT Resilience entered management curricula via two intellectual traditions. Engineering resilience, developed in mechanics, defines
WHAT BUSINESS EDUCATION HAS ALREADY ACHIEVED The critique of business education is not new. Renowned Canadian management academic Henry Mintzberg argued in 2004 that MBA programmes train analysts rather than managers. The following year, US leadership scholars and authors Warren Bennis and James O’Toole posited that business schools had lost their way. The institutional response over the two decades since has been substantial. The UN initiative, Principles for Responsible Management Education and changing accreditation guidelines, alongside curricular work at the likes of INSEAD, IESE, the Indian Institutes of Management and schools in the Nordic countries have moved the conversation forward. What has happened is that the operating environment has shifted faster than the institutional response. A 2025 article in the International Journal of Management Reviews , led by Anastasia Kulichyova, covers 123 papers on digital transformation in large established organisations, identifying four restructuring dilemmas across performance, leadership, governance and structure. The persistent gap, in my reading, is not awareness of change. It is the structural capacity to absorb it across all four domains at once. Bain & Company’s most recent reorganisation research, surveying close to 1,000 executives and employees,
a system’s capacity to absorb disturbance and return to its prior state. Ecological resilience, developed by Crawford Holling at the University of British Columbia in 1973 and subsequently expanded by him in 2004, with Brian Walker, Stephen Carpenter and Ann Kinzig, now sits alongside the concepts of adaptability and – where the state that existed previously is no longer available – transformability. Both stop short of what ecologists studying fire-adapted and disturbance- driven systems have been describing for decades. Living systems under sustained compound pressure do not absorb it; they use it – see also Juli Pausas and Jon Keeley’s 2019 paper, Wildfires as an ecosystem service . The serotinous pinecone requires fire to release its seed. The kelp forest after a sea urchin collapse is not the same as the one that preceded it. The discipline these systems demonstrate is not resilience; it is regeneration. This is the version of the concept that the management education canon largely did not import. Translated into pedagogy in the 2010s, resilience became a leadership virtue: resilient leaders bounce back; resilient organisations weather storms. The grammar is restorative – crucially, it assumes a baseline worth defending. For the operating environment most of us were stepping into, that was a serviceable model. Disturbance was episodic, recovery defined, the prior state recognisable. However, that environment is no longer the one our successors will inherit.
36 Business Impact • ISSUE 4 • 2026
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