Session Description:
Sustainability. Resilience. Regeneration. Net positive. Circular economy. Triple bottom line. Thriving. Nature positive. And more — the vocabulary of responsible business and systems change has been growing for decades, and so has the confusion around it. Organizations continue to treat these terms as competing priorities, siloed frameworks, or interchangeable buzzwords, draining resources and energy into debate rather than into action. This workshop, co-led by Jessica Morgenthal, founder and director of Resilience Gone Wild, who translates nature's wisdom into resilience tools for the people, organizations, and systems building a better world, and Helen Sahi, Group Sustainability Officer at Bic, brings together two distinct yet deeply complementary lenses. Drawing on the thinking of John Elkington, Paul Polman, and others who have long championed integrated approaches, the session makes the case that these concepts are not rivals — they are layers of the same essential architecture.
The real opportunity is not to pick a winner among competing frameworks, rather to understand how these ideas build on and reinforce one another — and to design organizations, strategies, and cultures around that interconnection. Through participatory exercises and honest conversation, attendees will explore where misalignment hides in their own teams: in expectations, purpose, accountability, and shared language. The goal is a mental model that stops pulling resources in opposing directions and channels them into a coherent, layered approach — one that genuinely delivers for people, planet, and profit, the win-win-win that remains both the enduring promise and the unfinished work of our field.