In a quiet Bedouin tent in the heart of London, a circle formed between two nations. Academics, entrepreneurs and policy shapers from Japan and the UK came together at St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in Bishopsgate in October to explore one simple yet profound question: what does it mean to lead in a way that honours all life, not just profit?
The exchange was more than a meeting of minds – it was a meeting of languages, landscapes and legacies. As stories unfolded, it became clear that while our cultures may differ, the threads of regenerative leadership – relationship, reciprocity and reverence – are universal.
This October, Greenheart collaborated with Ecological Memes and Regenerative Leadership Japan to host the exchange. Here’s a short taster and we’ve captured the key learnings below.
Learning from ancient wisdom
For the Japanese delegation, the UK’s regenerative movement offered insight into how ancient ideas might be expressed in modern business and education. For the UK participants, Japan’s philosophical depth provided a mirror to re-examine what has been lost in Western culture’s pursuit of progress.
We discussed how, in Japan, ancient Shinto and Buddhist traditions fostered a worldview in which humans and nature are deeply entwined. The word “nature” itself – shizen – entered the Japanese lexicon only in the 19th century. It replaced the older concept of zinen, rooted in Buddhism, which emphasised the interdependent co-arising nature of relationships rather than separation. This linguistic shift carries profound meaning: where Western-born philosophies often divide humanity and the natural world, traditional Japanese language assumes interconnectedness as a given.
Both groups recognised that modern leadership often undervalues this wisdom. To regenerate, we must not only remember these principles but relearn how to live them – in our cultures, businesses, schools and systems.
The inner work of regeneration
Much of the conversation flowed at a deeply personal level. Participants reflected on regeneration not just as a systems challenge, but as an inner practice – a lifelong process of awareness, humility and self-transformation.
One reflection captured this beautifully: that regeneration begins with the “endless work in progress” of the self. Before we can rebuild the systems around us, we must attend to the relationships within us; between our values, choices and the world we touch each day.
This echoed the academic reading shared ahead of the session, which questioned whether regeneration should be seen as a new paradigm or simply as a set of guiding principles. Many felt the more important enquiry was not theoretical but practical: what are the core principles of regeneration, and how do we live them?
At the top of that list was the commitment to inner transformation – a thread that ran throughout our discussions and connected deeply with Japanese ideas of mindfulness and practice in silence that nurture a capacity to simultaneously embrace both self-awareness and systemic-awareness.
Participants also observed that in today’s Japanese culture, such reflections are often regarded as practices of personnel development, rather than practices of nurturing organisational capacity as a collective. This sparked an interesting tension: could more openness about inner experience strengthen collective practice, or would it shift something essential in how reflection is valued? Even that question revealed an important truth: that regeneration looks and feels different across cultures, yet is rooted in a shared human curiosity to grow.
The power of global perspectives
Our conversation reaffirmed that the polycrises we face – climate, inequality, biodiversity loss – are global in nature and demand global perspectives. Listening to one another, we realised that regenerative leadership is not a cultural export or a management trend, but an experiment in humility and connection.
Participants reflected that cross-cultural dialogues like this help reveal what’s invisible from within our own systems. The Japanese concept of machi-zukuri – loosely translated as “town building” – is not about top-down urban planning but about communities shaping their environments together. It stands as a model for participatory regeneration everywhere: bottom-up, relational and grounded in place.
Reconnecting with nature
Nature emerged as the unspoken teacher throughout the day. Stories of trees, fungi and dolphins reminded us that the natural world has already perfected the art of cooperation and resilience. A regenerative approach to leadership, then, is one that learns from life itself, valuing diversity, interdependence and continual adaptation.
Companies like Faith in Nature are already putting this into practice by giving nature a literal voice in governance. Yet as one participant observed, true regeneration begins when everyone in an organisation feels that same connection – when decisions made in boardrooms and factory floors alike honour the living systems that sustain them.
Education for regeneration
Education was a recurring theme. Participants described the need to move beyond rigid systems towards learning environments that nurture curiosity, connection and creativity. In Japan, many young people are disengaging from formal schooling, sparking experiments that treat entire towns as learning ecosystems. In the UK, educators are asking how to help children rediscover their innate relationship with nature and community.
If the next generation is to learn how to lead humanity into a prosperous future, education must teach more than knowledge – it must cultivate awareness and belonging.
The role of relationship
Across every story shared, one thread ran constantly: relationship. Regeneration is not a checklist or a framework – it is a practice of tending to relationships: with self, others and the living world.
One speaker described their work in Brazil as “a journey in well being well,” defining it as a sense of wellbeing with oneself and being well with others, and with nature.
The insight was clear: regenerative leadership begins with self-awareness, grows through connection and matures into collective practice. It is both deeply personal and inherently shared.
Language as bridge … and barrier
Language itself became a topic of reflection. Many Japanese words shared in the dialogue, describing connection to nature or community, have no direct English equivalent – for example, awai or aida, meaning ambiguous, non-dualistic, liminal space in-between. And yet, this difficulty in translation revealed something deeper: that our words shape our worldviews.
As one participant noted: “In Japanese, the subject of a sentence is often left out – perhaps because the individual is never fully separate from the collective or from nature.”
By paying attention to our language, we can begin to reshape the stories we tell about leadership, progress and what it means to thrive.
Regeneration as experiment
Several participants spoke of “the experiment”; the living process of making regenerative leadership real. Whether through reimagined governance models, educational reform or corporate transformation, the shared understanding was clear: there is no single blueprint.
Regeneration is learned through practice; by listening, by failing, by beginning again.
As the afternoon light faded through the tent’s woven fabric, one closing reflection lingered: perhaps regeneration is less about fixing the world and more about remembering how to belong to it.
In essence, the exchange was an act of relationship itself – an embodied experiment in the kind of leadership our times demand.
From Japan to London, from ancient wisdom to modern experiment, the lesson was the same: we are not separate. And that understanding, humbly held and bravely practiced, may just be the seed of a regenerative future.
