Cascading’s Approach
Cascading’s approach comes from an openness and willingness to propose how Businesses can be a more conscious, thriving, and contributing participant on Earth.
Life at the Center
With Life at the center, our process starts by embedding in the Life of Place, and by revealing and appreciating the aliveness - the unique Life Force - that already exists within businesses. By aligning more to regenerative and thriving Living Systems and attuning to their flows and cycles, a business can extend that health through it, and become an enabler of health, abundance, and value.
Grounding Knowledge, Theories and Models
Our approach is based on Life-centered worldviews, and informed by the interdisciplinary scientific methodologies of Living Systems Thinking and Biomimicry, as well as by the Business Management and the Sustainable and Regenerative Finance fields of study.
We learn from Water´s elegant ways of creating health, abundance, and value, as it flows through our planet. As an element, philosophy, and Living System, Water informs our models, pathways, and strategies of least resistance. We also consider the business´ relationship to Water a key indicator of its health.
Our place-based work includes listening and expanding the mindset and actions of local biologists, ecologists, artists, native cultures, and other regenerative beings within the business context.
On the role and value of Business
Cascading has always come from a place of appreciation towards business, business leaders, and business stewards. We recognize their place in their bioregion and their role in the larger system's evolution towards regeneration as catalyzers. We see their potential to become a co-evolving contributor of Life, in other words, a force for Life.
We know business. We have worked in and with businesses in different industries and locations. We respect their design and essence, which is to provide value to society and to Life. We know that when businesses are healthy, aligned and conducive to Life, financial abundance follows.
On Scope of Work, and Practical & Experiential Design
We recognize there are diverse ways to be regenerative and to activate regeneration. Therefore, together with leaders and collaborators, we co-design personalized processes that, depending on the context, are embarked upon either individually or collectively.
Our scope of work emerges when bringing Life-centeredness to the Business context. We help bring more Life through Business at 3 core levels: Stewards, Strategy, and Business Model.
Through intentionally curated content - to apply knowledge -, and experiences - to heighten knowing -, we simultaneously work towards inspiration and execution.
Cascading also guides business leaders through appreciative inquiry, and provides top experience and expertise in local and global business matters.
From Leading to Stewarding and from Networking to Weaving
Our approach aims to transition the perspective of leading a business to stewarding the aliveness of a business, and from leading a business network to weaving business ecosystems.
The moment business leaders realize their organizations are, too, living organisms or ecosystems, they begin to relate to them in different ways. They become better at applying Living System´s intelligence to their business and allowing its health, abundance, and value creation potential to emerge.
Cascading invites those leaders who are ready to align and attune to Regenerative and Thriving Living Systems, extend that health, and elevate their business and themselves in the process.
About the Life-centered Models
The models allow for a systemic and holistic understanding of the business and the business ecosystem.
At a meso level, the model allows for a better understanding of the functions, leverage points, and relative importance of each business area to enhance the whole and vice versa. At a macro level, the model helps identify and integrate the leverage points, flows, and cycles of the larger systems it is part of, and develop a better understanding of its role within those systems.
The activation process of the model harnesses one of Life´s main natural cycles. In an up-spiraling and balancing way, the process is designed to increasingly deepen relations and amplify value.
Overall, the model makes it easy to visualize how regeneration can best be activated and embodied throughout the different business areas and levels, for the regenerative emergence of the whole.
*We acknowledge that any model is a reduction and abstraction of the richness, fullness, and wisdom of Natural Systems and of Life. They however, can be used as temporary tools to develop and practice Life-centered ways of thinking and stewarding a business.