How the REGENERATE method operates inside a multi-country programme
A first-hand account of applying RAZE, ENRICH and GROW inside a complex multi-country programme where political cycles, climate events and institutional pressures keep changing the conditions.
The short answer: the REGENERATE method is not a theory of leadership under pressure. It is an operating system currently being applied inside a multi-country programme.
The question I hear most after people read the book is simple: what does this actually look like in practice?
The answer here is a multi-year initiative in the ocean economy, designed to transform how nations manage ocean resources for sustainable development.
This is not a neat, controlled environment. It is a complex adaptive system involving multiple governments, international agencies, private sector partners, coastal communities, and competing priorities that shift with political cycles, climate events, and global economic pressures.
RAZE: confront the inherited model
The RAZE phase required confronting inherited assumptions about how development programmes should be structured. The traditional model of top-down planning, linear implementation and periodic evaluation was not designed for the level of complexity and uncertainty involved. Those assumptions had to be systematically dismantled.
ENRICH: build the operating capacity
The ENRICH phase meant building new cognitive and organisational architecture. This included creating feedback systems that could surface emerging challenges from different national contexts, developing decision-making frameworks that could operate under radical uncertainty, and equipping teams with tools for navigating political and institutional resistance.
GROW: design for capability that lasts
The GROW phase focuses on designing systems that are inherently regenerative. The aim is not only to deliver outputs, but to build the capacity of nations and communities to continue transforming after the programme ends. The measure of success is not programme completion; it is whether the ecosystem of stakeholders is stronger, more adaptive, and more capable than it was before.
This is what regeneration looks like at scale: not recovery from disruption, but the systematic use of complexity and challenge as the raw material for building something that could not have existed before the disruption occurred.